Cost Of Remote Control Warfare

A British Reaper drone taxis across a runway in southern Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is about the size of a light aircraft. Circling thousands of feet above the ground for hours at a time, armed with deadly hellfire missiles, it feeds live pictures to the soldiers below. But while those on the ground might have just started the evening shift in Kandahar, the drone’s two-man pilot team will be watching dawn rise 7,000 miles to the west, in an air-conditioned room on Creech Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Britain bought its first Reaper drones under an “urgent operational requirement” in October 2007, shipping the machines to Afghanistan, while dispatching a 50-strong RAF contingent of pilots and support staff to the US. But Britain’s small UAV fleet is dwarfed by America’s. The US now spends $0.5bn annually on drone development, and its fleet has grown from 300 to nearly 7,000 since 2002. In the last year the US military doubled the number of combat hour flown by its drone army.

In his book,Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution argues that this new generation of warrior—both human and machine—raises troubling legal and ethical questions about the nature of wars. But it is the human dimension that is most challenging.

Reliance on drones technology is creating an unusual new generation of soldier, such as Private Joel Clark, a teenager who flunked out of high school but became one of the best drone pilots in the US navy. In turn he became a senior drone instructor at the equivalent of the US air force “top gun” academy, made famous by the 1986 Tom Cruise film.

In a 2005 interview in Wired magazine, Clark said he had planned to join the army as a Blackhawk helicopter mechanic. But his “F” in English kept him from graduating, and forced him to reapply. This time he was told to try out as a drone operator. The job, he discovered, suited him well, not least because the joystick and keypad operation of a Shadow UAV—a drone used by army and Marine Corps—worked in much the same way as the video games he had enjoyed as a teenager. He went on to become a brilliant pilot.

Both the British and US military have used drones since the mid-1960s, primarily for spying and intelligence gathering. But it was the addition of missiles to the now famous Predators that made unorthodox UAV pilots like Clark an even more important part of modern military strategy.

Since then drones have seen increasing action in Iraq and Afghanistan, lately attracting controversy for their role in hunting missions deep inside the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. Over two dozen such attacks since August 2008 (including four during the first month of the Obama presidency) have killed an estimated 300 people, among them women and children. The US military sees them as effective counterinsurgency tools; critics claim that civilian casualties play into the hands of local militias.

Beyond their ability to target militant Islamists, drones change the way war is fought in other ways. Each is equipped with advanced cameras capable of streaming live video back to an operations centre. To authorise a strike, British pilots in Nevada can speak, in real time, to senior commanders based at military headquarters in Northwood and military lawyers in London. During the first Iraq war the decision to attack a target could take hours, even days. But now what the military refer to as the “kill chain”—the decisions needed between finding a target and destroying it—has been radically shortened, sometimes to a matter of minutes.

Such fast-paced drama has not been lost on Hollywood. Ridley Scott’s film Body of Lies (2008), for instance, shows a CIA chief ordering strikes from his mobile phone while taking his children to school. Such portrayals may exaggerate both the military capability and the drama of drone operations, but they do highlight an issue that increasingly worries military strategists.

Drone pilots, and the sensor operators who work alongside them, often operate thousands of miles away from the battlefront. Nonetheless, many show signs of psychological stress. The mental strain of operating in the killing zone one minute and driving home to be with their families or watch their children play football the next, requires them to make huge adjustments to their lives. A Reaper mission in which you have watched an enemy combatant die in a horrific explosion is certainly not a topic of conversation for the dinner table. It been reported that US air force commanders have had to call in chaplains, psychologists and psychiatrists to help ease the mental strain on these remote-control warriors.

Such strains are only likely to grow in the future. Singer claims that the number of pilots training to fly drones now outstrips those planning to get into a cockpit. For now, only experienced pilots can take control of drones mounted with weapons, although teenage soldiers are already trained on smaller models, such as the Desert Hawk III. But as more and more UAVs come into service it seems certain that younger, less experienced pilots will have to take the controls. And as drone technology becomes more complex, and more lethal, so the likelihood increases that they will be controlled by the hands of young soldiers, operating a joystick and keypad much like the PlayStation or Xbox they own at home.

At approximately £12m a piece, drones don’t come cheap. But, in the end, the military’s remote control revolution may be undermined more by the human cost on its new generation of young pilots.

Russian Bomber Interception Over Canada

Canadian fighter jets intercepted a Russian bomber near its airspace in the Arctic three days before U.S. President Barack Obama visited Ottawa last week, officials said Friday.

Defense Minister Peter MacKay said the bomber never entered Canadian airspace.

“Canadian pilots sent a strong signal they should back off and stay out of our airspace,” MacKay said at a press conference with the chief of the defense staff and the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The CF-18s took off from their base in Alberta on Feb.16 after NORAD detected the bomber headed toward Canadian airspace, the officials said.

The incident was sensitive as it happened as Canada was preparing to host Obama on his first international trip after weeks of preparation that included some of the tightest security ever.

Airspace over Canada’s capital was closed to all planes but Obama’s own Air Force One during the president’s visit, MacKay said.

MacKay said he was not accusing Russia of deliberately timing the flight to coincide with the visit, but it was a “strong coincidence.”

“It was a strong coincidence which we met with … CF-18 fighter planes and world-class pilots that know their business,” he said.

He also said Canada has recently seen “increased activity” of this kind.

Russian aircraft regularly probed into North American airspace during the Cold War. Such flights resumed in recent years as Russia pushed its claim on the Arctic and its oil wealth, according to Canadian media reports.

Last summer, then Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson said recent actions of Russia were of “great concern” to the government.

CIA: Secret Operations, Drug Money

By Farzana Shah

Monday, 23 February 2009.

WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

In Afghanistan, U.S./NATO have put the blame on Taliban for poppy cultivation to finance their resistance to allied forces. Ironically, it was only in Taliban era when the world had seen a sharp decline in opium crop in Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban had banned opium cultivation nationwide, probably for the first time in Afghan history. A more important question is how and when this business of drug production and trafficking started in region? CIA has been using drug money since long to generate money to support its operations all over the world. It did not start in Afghanistan it was brought here after experimenting somewhere else. This is something which is not a lead story in international media for obvious reasons despite the fact it is harming millions of lives around the globe.

1. CIA’s secret Operations

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on of the most active and dynamic intelligence setups in the world needs massive amount of money to carry on its clandestine operations all over the world. It has happened when CIA used local sources to conduct a coups, assassinations, regime change, etc. As U.S. has a long history to support democracy by hook and crook until and unless a dictator is ready to serve U.S. interests to prolong its rule.

Operations like the one completed in Iran in 1953 to remove Prime Minister Mussadaq and backing Shah’s regime by using assets in civil society, or in Iraq in 1975 to arm Iraqi Kurds to destabilize Pre-Saddam Iraq or more recently using its assets in Pakistan to pave the way of direct U.S. intervention in Pakistan under pretext of hunting Al-Qaeda.

These kinds of operations need a lot of financial input. Usually CIA arranges revenue from its own means for this kind of operations where expenses can’t be predicted by any measure. Funds from Whitehouse always need a complete audit and detailed reports about usage of these funds. There are numerous occasions when CIA never shared details of operations with its own analytical wing nor with any other public office in Washington. Most of the time it is drug money that compensates these expenses.

CIA operations are not only single expenditure fulfilled by drugs there are also other deficiencies which are compensated with this money like financial institutes and banks in current financial crisis. UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa based in Vienna revealed that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiraled out of control last year.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that “inter bank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” Costa was quoted as saying. There were “signs that some banks were rescued in that way.”

It is not only CIA anymore in trade for using it as gold mine to finance its illegal operations all over the world but U.S. economy also need some liquidity in its banks, it doesn’t matter if it is coming by drug trade.

2. Drug Production & Consumption

Afghanistan is largest producer of heroin’s main ingredient; opium and opium is nothing new in this part of the world. In Afghanistan and FATA, Pakistan it is being produced since centuries; used as remedy for various diseases. Commercial production of opium began just during the Russian invasion in Afghanistan where it is estimated to produce some 8250 metric tons (Source: AmericanFreePress.net, November 24, 2008) of opium per year which makes 85% to 90%

of the world’s supply of opium. This also contributes towards Afghan warlords’ wealth directly. This is what CIA brought to the region: Opium production without a brand name obviously. Today’s world opium production map is as under;

Left: Demand and trafficking of drugs globally. U.S. is one of very high concentration drug trafficking territory thanks to Regan’s National Security Council who turned a blind eye towards South American cocaine socking into U.S. in 1980 when CIA was backing all the drug traffickers of Contra movements in Nicaragua.

Markets for these drugs stretched world over from Western Europe to Far East, From Canada to Latin America and From China to Morocco, Africa. Profits related to this business also vary along with market’s location.

This business enriches not only the United States-friendly Afghan warlords but also elements of the Northern Alliance, the U.S. key ally in the country. More disturbing is fact that this money also contributes in CIA’s operations against Pakistan as well.

3. Contra Movements (1980)

In Asia demand for heroin is more than any other drug but it is not the case world over. Cocaine is favourite drug which is consumed the most. Cocaine was nothing new in South American countries but it was only during Nicaraguan contra movements against the then dictator it got shoot up. It was again CIA’s regime change operation to bring “democracy” in Nicaragua. It was during this period when the whole region saw an unprecedented surge in cocaine trafficking in 1980. This has been investigated none other than but by CIA’s inspector general in later years.

Was CIA a part of this?

Answer is not only CIA was aiding these cocaine traffickers and money-launderers but Ronald Reagon’s National Security Council also turned a blind eye towards these drug trades despite the fact that later these very drug traffickers brought cocaine to mainland U.S.. According to CIA’s inspector general report, published in online magazine The Consortium magazine, Oct. 15, 1998, it was Reagan’s National Security Council which cleared proven drug traffickers and CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz confirmed long standing allegations of cocaine traffickers. The NSC’s covert airline was the main transportation mean to do this trade in safest possible way.
Figure 1: Armed men of Nicaragua insurgency during 1980s, armed with CIA weapons bought with drug money.

Most stunning part of all this contra movements and CIA involvement is methods these movements used to dismantle the then Nicaraguan government including bombing and killing of civilians and CIA withheld all evidence of contra crimes from Justice Department, the Congress and even its own analytical division just to conceal its connection with drug traffickers.

4. Afghanistan

As it is mentioned earlier that Afghanistan was not a hub of drug supply to world before Russian invasion in 1979. It was CIA once again to implement what it successfully implemented in Nicaragua in 1980. Now, Afghanistan is biggest contributor in drug production with its massive opium production.

Russian Afghan War (1979-1989)

CIA was not fully done with contra movements when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 threatening the region with her expansionist design to gain control over Afghanistan and Baluchistan province of Pakistan to reach Arabian Sea. Pakistan decided to confront Russia inside Afghanistan to thwart communist designs. CIA found an opportunity in Afghanistan to settle its long standing duel with Russian for global dominion, after initial successes by Afghan fighters. CIA once again brought tested formula of drug to finance this war which it used in South America with only difference in prescription where cocaine was replaced with heroin. Poppy cultivation was nothing new to Afghan but it was level of production and demand created by international traffickers in the world which shocked many in vicinity of these poppy fields.

Profit gained by these drugs was main driving force behind all this trade and with heroin it was much more than what it was with cocaine. Ironically U.S. and Europe became biggest markets of heroin prepared produced in Afghanistan.

Regan’s administration is also a common factor in both Afghan heroin trade and contra cocaine traffickers. Role of CIA in first Afghan war was not overt as it could provoke Russians in more direct retaliation albeit Cuban missile crisis of 1960s. To avoid that kind of hostility it was more suitable for CIA to have silent links with Afghan warlords and providing sources to grow poppy. “By the end of Russian invasion in 1989 Afghanistan was second largest opium production spot with 1350 Metric ton after notorious Golden Triangle including countries like Laos, Thailand, Burma and Vietnam which was producing 2645 Metric ton at that time leaving Latin America way behind with just 112 Metric ton”, as per U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Pre and Post Taliban Era (1994-2001)

In 1994 unrest and lawlessness in Afghanistan gave rise to Taliban. Motivated with their strict religious background and education they put ban on all kinds of drugs in territory under their control but this was not the cure for chronically infected Afghan economy and society. Non availability of any job market and strong hold of Northern Alliance of Northern part of country remained biggest challenge to these efforts to cut down poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. But despite all the challenges Talibans were able to put a serious cut on opium production in Afghanistan by start of 2001 when they were about to capture Northern Alliance’s strong hold Mazar-e-Sharif but post 9/11 scenario not only changed the geopolitical dynamics of the whole world but also destroyed the efforts of Taliban to control opium production.

Figure 2: Afghan opium sells in cheap at home, worth a fortune in U.S. market

Left: In year 2001, just before U.S./NATO invasion into Afghanistan, Taliban were able to cut down opium production by a decisive margin. This was also one of core reasons against Taliban along with other excuses. After year 2002, when Taliban were removed from power there is a historical increase in opium production in Afghanistan, money is going to pentagon to carry on Afghan and Iraq war despite a historical recession in U.S..

Recent Afghan Conflict (2002 – To date)

Afghanistan is leading opium production in world today but after the invasion of U.S. in 2002 Afghanistan is also attributed to have largest heroin production in the world as well.

Without active support of Pentagon and CIA it is not possible to export drug prepared with more than 8000 metric tons of opium. U.S. relations with Northern Alliance in Afghanistan after Taliban have given a free license to drug producers, traffickers. CIA and Pentagon both have their links to all these criminals in order to get supplies of the drugs and export it in U.S. Army planes. It has been reported that CIA used U.S. Army planes leaving Afghanistan carrying coffins which were filled with drugs instead of bodies.

To make sure undisturbed trade U.S. appointed all Northern Alliance drug lords at key posts in Afghanistan and most prominent appointment was none other than President Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s brother, head of Kandahar’s provincial council is proven drug trafficker facilitating the transportation of heroin from Kandahar eastward through Helmand and out across the Iranian border.

There is no reason to believe that CIA is not aware of this but as it is all one big enterprise where Karzai is also a partner so no danger to his brother.

Bush administration pushed the level of poppy cultivation to next level in Afghanistan just to keep Wall Streets alive in crisis. Many top Bush administration’s officials were worried about growing influence of countries in Golden Triangle (Loas, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma) in Russian and Chinese drug markets. Like Oil in Iraq this was just another opportunity for the Bush administration to have some quick bucks.

Blames for using drugs to fight with NATO and U.S. forces is always put on Taliban. But looking at areas of Taliban’s active zones one can easily understand where all this poppy cultivation is taking place. Taliban put ban on poppy when they were incharge of majority of Afghan territories and Kabul, the capital. Afghanistan was suffering worst economic crisis at that time but Taliban never went to build their economy with heroin trade. Now it is just ridiculous to blame Taliban to have vast fields of poppy and having enough peace and time to grow and process it into heroin and then trade it in Pakistan and Iran to dens it to destinations in Eastern Europe. Below is map of Afghanistan indicating high poppy cultivation provinces and it is quite evident that Taliban dominant

Left: Ahmed Wali Karzai, appointed by his brother, President Hamid Karzai, to represent Kandahar province in Kabul. According to media reports he is main player in exporting heroin and opium to European countries through Turkmenistan.

Provinces like Kunar, Pektika,Paktya has low poppy cultivation and other provinces where all U.S./CIA supported warlords are holding key positions are growing most of opium crop. It was only after U.S. invasion there was a 4400% increase in opium production.

U.S. role in Afghan social debacle will go in history as described The Huffington Post on October 15, 2008 “When the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is written, Washington’s sordid involvement in the heroin trade and its alliance with drug lords and war criminals of the Afghan Communist Party will be one of the most shameful chapters.”

5. Pakistan: Indirect Victim of the CIA’s Drug business

Almost the whole world is affected by this drug trade but countries which lie in routes of drug traffickers are worst effected after the original drug markets. Countries like Pakistan are paying a very high price for U.S./CIA drug trade as there is a constant increase in drug addiction in Pakistan. Iran is another country which happens to be in route of international drug traffickers so it is also facing problem of smuggling of heroin and morphine from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Turkey and Europe. After U.S. invasion of Afghanistan this route has become active manifold then it was previously.

Effects of this trade are not limited to drug usage only but it destroys the social fabric in a society and gives rise to street crimes in order to get some cash to buy drugs from street market. A more horrible outcome is spread of HIV virus among addicted persons when they share the injection syringes. This threat is increasing with each passing day as number of HIV positive is increasing.

Another disastrous effect it brought to Pakistan and Afghanistan other neighbors is serious law and order situation in bordering area of each country with Afghanistan. Combating this evil trade is not possible until a holistic effort is made by international community in this regards but its chances are bleak as this trade is needed by global imperialism (Israel, U.S., UK) more than ever before to give some support to their dying economies.

Above: Pakistan has become main artery in heroin trafficking route and it has a lot of implication on Pakistani security. Level of drug addicted also increased over the year due to high availability of drugs in street market. Afghanistan is main producer but Pakistan us where most of drugs are seized.

6. Conclusion

Under current situation it is very important for countries like Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Russia to think about how to put jinni of drug back to the bottle before international drug mafia takes over these countries by destroying their social norms and values.

CIA not only has a long history of having links with traffickers but also encouraging the drug trade to get its own interests served. CIA always encourages this trade even if it affected its own citizens like in Contra movements of 1980.

Afghanistan became leader in opium production and main hub for providing heroin and its main ingredient to whole world. All this happened under the control of champion of human rights U.S. and its intelligence setup mainly CIA.

Situation is becoming more and bleaker unless Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan governments start thinking about this trade and its far reaching affects on U.S. economy and CIA’s funding. It is time when the whole region should become equivocal against this trade and ask U.S. to leave the region for greater good of the billions of people in region.

Farzana Shah is a Pakistani researcher and journalist based in Peshawar. She can be reached at janashah_1@yahoo.com

http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/cia-secret-operations-drug-money/

Military Called to Control Mexican Drug Cartels

Here again we see the uselessness and cost of the war on drugs, it basically causes it’s own problems because of the illegality of drugs themselves, it is a vicious circle that will just continue to go round and round until or if drugs are legalized.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that authorities had arrested more than 730 people across the country in a 21-month investigation targeting Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel and its infiltration into U.S. cities.
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The arrests, including 50 on Wednesday in California, Minnesota, Maryland and the nation’s capital, come amid growing concern in Washington that Mexican crime organizations are out of control and threaten the stability of parts of Mexico and the safety of U.S. citizens.

The Homeland Security Department has developed a plan to send more agents and other resources, and possibly military support, to the U.S.-Mexico border if the drug violence continues to spill over and overwhelm the agents stationed there, a department official confirmed.

The Pentagon is looking into a larger role in bolstering counter-narcotics efforts. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, told Congress on Wednesday that the corruptive influence and increasing violence of the cartels had undermined the Mexican government’s ability to govern parts of its country.

A recent State Department travel advisory warned U.S. citizens about the perils of travel in Mexico, likening the shootouts between authorities and the cartels to “small-unit combat.” The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center believes that Mexican cartels maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in as many as 195 U.S. cities.

And on Wednesday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the recent surge in drug-related violence on the Southwest border “has turned some American communities and neighborhoods into the Wild West.”

“A battle is building on the border, and U.S. citizens are getting caught in the crossfire,” Smith said, calling on House Democrats to hold a hearing on drug-related violence on the border. “Congress must address the violence before more lives are lost.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., in his first news conference since taking over as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, offered this as proof of the creeping spread of the Sinaloa cartel in the United States: the seizure of more than $59 million in illegal drug proceeds and large amounts of narcotics, including more than 24,000 pounds of cocaine, 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine and 1.3 million ecstasy pills.

Authorities also seized more than $6.5 million in other assets, 149 vehicles, three aircraft, three maritime vessels and 169 weapons.

“The dimensions of what we are breaking up today had nationwide implications here” in the United States, Holder said.

Special Agent Michele Leonhart, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the crackdown had denied at least $1 billion in drug revenue for the Sinaloa cartel, one of several syndicates fighting the Mexican government in a war that claimed the lives of more than 5,000 people in Mexico last year.

About 20 suspects have been arrested in Mexico as part of the crackdown, which has been coordinated by the DEA’s Special Operations Division in close cooperation with Mexico and dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Holder and top DEA officials said most, if not all, of the senior members of the cartel remained at large.

Mexican authorities Wednesday extradited the former leader of a separate cartel accused of smuggling tons of marijuana and cocaine into the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.

The suspect, Miguel Caro Quintero, headed the so-called Sonora cartel and faces federal drug-trafficking charges in Arizona and Colorado. He is the brother of Rafael Caro Quintero, a kingpin who was convicted and sentenced in Mexico for the 1985 killing of a U.S. drug agent, Enrique Camarena.

Holder said he had met with Mexican Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora on Tuesday to discuss how the two countries could cooperate to dismantle drug-trafficking organizations and root out corrupt government officials on both sides of the border.

“International drug-trafficking organizations pose a sustained, serious threat. They are national security threats,” Holder said. “They are lucrative, they are violent and they are operated with stunning planning and precision.”

Some federal law enforcement officials said the results of the investigation were being announced, at least in part, to address growing accusations that some senior elements of the Mexican government are aiding Sinaloa drug dealers or selectively going after competitors, allowing factions of the Sinaloa cartel to grow. Major corruption arrests in Mexico recently showed that a Sinaloa faction had paid senior officials in the Mexican attorney general’s office to notify it about impending enforcement actions.

A senior DEA official said top Mexican authorities were working closely with Washington to assess the damage from potential leaks from law enforcement officials, and to prevent them from happening.

Holder said the crackdown was considered one of the biggest binational successes against the Mexican cartels, but acknowledged that “this problem is one that will continue. This is an ongoing effort.”

The investigation started with the arrests of some alleged Sinaloa cartel members in California’s Imperial Valley and snowballed into as many as 160 inquiries in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, one senior DEA Special Operations official said.

One of its initial successes was the indictment of Victor Emilio Cazarez-Salazar, believed to be a leader in the Sinaloa cartel, DEA officials said. Cazarez-Salazar remains at large.

Holder and other officials said Wednesday that the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for bringing tons of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States through a sophisticated network of distribution and logistics cells in the country. It is also laundering millions of dollars in criminal proceeds, they said.

Those indicted in the cases have been charged with a variety of crimes, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise by violating various felony provisions of the federal Controlled Substances Act; conspiracy to import controlled substances; money laundering; and possession of an unregistered firearm.

Many of those in the United States were low-level operatives; some were illegal immigrants. At least several mid-level managers were believe to be in direct contact with leaders in Sinaloa, who also have been arrested, said the senior DEA Special Operations official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Thomas A. Schweich, deputy assistant secretary of State for international law enforcement in the Bush administration, said he saw good news and bad news in the Justice Department’s announcement.

“The bad news is that it shows that the cartels are everywhere, they are dangerous, and they are trafficking in everything,” he said. “The good news is that it shows that there are now cooperative, cross-border efforts to fight them. The cartels know no borders in what they do, and it is important that we know no borders in order to defeat them.”

U.S. Nuclear Materials Gone Missing

Isn’t it funny how this report of missing nuclear material is not treated as “major” news being plastered all over our TV screens? Well, isn’t it?…can someone tell me why?
UNBELIEVABLE!

WASHINGTON — A number of U.S. institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported to the Energy Department in 2004 that the amount of material they held was less than agency records indicated. But rather than investigating the discrepancies, Energy officials wrote off significant quantities of nuclear material from the department’s inventory records.

That’s just one of the findings of a report released yesterday by Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman that concluded “the department cannot properly account for and effectively manage its nuclear materials maintained by domestic licensees and may be unable to detect lost or stolen material.”

Auditors found that the dept. of Energy could not accurately account for the quantities and locations of nuclear material at 15 out of 40, or 37 percent, of facilities reviewed. The materials written off included 20,580 grams of enriched uranium, 45 grams of plutonium, 5,001 kilograms of normal uranium and 189,139 kilograms of depleted uranium.

“Considering the potential health risks associated with these materials and the potential for misuse should they fall into the wrong hands, the quantities written off were significant,” the report says. “Even in small quantities normally held by individual domestic licensees, special nuclear materials such as enriched uranium and plutonium, if not properly handled, potentially pose serious health hazards.”

Auditors also found that waste processing facilities could not locate or explain the whereabouts of significant quantities of uranium and other nuclear material that Energy Department records showed they held. In another case, Energy officials had no record of the fact that one academic institution had loaned a 32-gram plutonium-beryllium source to another institution.

The audit was a follow-up to a 2001 probe that found similar record-keeping problems. “Key commitments made by the department were not completed nearly eight years after our earlier audit,” Friedman reported.

More than 100 academic and commercial institutions and government agencies lease nuclear materials that are owned by Energy. The department, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is supposed to track these materials through the centralized accounting system known as the Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguards System, or NMMSS.

“Due to the inconsistencies documented in our report, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the department to accurately identify the type and quantity of its nuclear materials affected if an incident occurred at one of the sites whose NMMSS inventory we could not verify,” the inspector general stated in Monday’s report.

In a written response to the report, Glenn Podonsky, the chief health, safety and security officer at Energy, largely concurred with the findings and recommendations for improving inventory records.