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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (29080)	1/21/1999 11:58:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 67261

Right, but the reinterpretation is based on real data, not the false "history" generated by the "integrity" front at the time of the battle. You won't read about this in Drudge or the Washington Times, of course. Here's an article: cjr.org Americans watching Operation Desert Storm on television thought they saw the brilliant success of Patriot missiles with their own eyes. Yet that very news footage has been used in a congressional hearing to portray the missile as a dismal failure. The Patriot debate has raised questions about media coverage of defense issues that are especially relevant as Congress hammers out its first post-cold-war defense budget. Desert Storm provided gripping images of Patriots arcing across the night skies over Israel and Saudi Arabia to intercept Iraqi Scuds, and U.S. officials quickly claimed that the Patriot (originally designed to shoot down airplanes and slow-flying cruise missiles) was effective against ballistic missiles. Military briefers in Saudi Arabia and Washington gave running "box scores" of Scuds fired and intercepted, and in a February speech at Raytheon's Andover, Massachusetts, Patriot plant, President Bush said, "Patriot is proof positive that missile defense works." A March 1991 Army report to Congress stated that Patriot missiles had intercepted forty-five of the forty-seven Scuds at which they were fired. Later in the spring and summer of 1991, scattered reports in the defense press and in several newspapers began to question the Patriot's effectiveness, pointing out contradictions between U.S. and Israeli assessments of the missile's success rate, for example. Still, backers of the Strategic Defense Initiative used the Patriot as Exhibit A in their argument that the idea of missiles killing missiles was feasible. In November, Congress endorsed that conclusion by passing a defense bill that boosted funds for the Strategic Defense Initiative from $ 3.1 billion in fiscal 1991 to $ 4.15 billion in 1992, and making it a U.S. policy goal to develop a defensive antiballistic missile system for deployment. Debating the bill, members repeatedly cited television images of Scuds and Patriots and asked why their constituents deserved less protection from missile attack than soldiers or Israeli citizens. Meanwhile, the Army's official analysis, released in December, claimed that Patriots had successfully intercepted more than 50 percent of the Scuds engaged over Israel and more than 80 percent over Saudi Arabia. Then, in the winter issue of International Security, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and former Navy nuclear weapons analyst Theodore Postol wrote that, based on available public data, Patriot performance in Desert Storm "may have been an almost total failure to intercept quite primitive attacking missiles," and clearly did not prove that strategic missile defenses could work. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the House Government Operations Committee and its legislation and national security subcommittee, challenged the Army's findings this spring after a five-month investigation. At an April 7 hearing, investigators from the General Accounting Office testified that the Army's Patriot performance data were incomplete, inconsistent, and did not substantiate even a revised Army claim -- released at the hearing -- of a 40 percent success rate over Israel and 70 percent over Saudi Arabia. Questioned by Conyers, Army witnesses said they had high confidence in only about ten Scud kills during Desert Storm. A Congressional Research Service analyst testified that, based on the Army's own criteria and data, he could only confirm that one Scud warhead had been destroyed. The Army has refused to declassify the full analysis of the Patriot's performance, despite Conyer's repeated requests. Ok, it wasn't exactly 0% effective. Unfortunately, the good gray Times didn't have its coverage of this online, I don't think this is the best article on the subject.