A KNIGHT RIDDER INVESTIGATION
Air Force let Boeing rewrite terms of tanker contract
BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Air Force gave the Boeing Co. five months to rewrite the official specifications for 100 aerial refueling tankers so that the company's 767 aircraft would win a $23.5 billion deal, according to e-mails and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.
In the process, Boeing eliminated 19 of the 26 capabilities the Air Force originally wanted, and the Air Force acquiesced in order to keep the price down.
The Air Force then gave Boeing competitor Airbus 12 days to bid on the project and awarded the contract to Boeing even though Airbus met more than 20 of the original 26 specifications and offered a price that was $10 billion less than Boeing's.
The Boeing tanker deal has been under investigation since it became public two and a half years ago and has been suspended pending the outcome of the probes.
But the e-mails and other documents show just how intent the Air Force was on steering the deal to Boeing, even though Airbus' tankers were more capable and cost less.
In one document, Bob Gower, Boeing's vice president for tankers, noted that one objective in rewriting the specifications was to "prevent an AoA from being conducted." "AoA" stands for "analysis of alternatives" or, in essence, a look at serious competitors.
Among the original Air Force requirements Boeing eliminated was that the new tanker be equipped to refuel all the military services' aircraft, refuel multiple aircraft simultaneously, and carry passengers, wounded troops and cargo. Boeing also eliminated an Air Force requirement that the new tankers be at least as effective and efficient as the 40-year-old KC-135 tankers they would replace.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., demanded the Boeing documents in his role as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Senate investigators made the Boeing documents available to Knight Ridder.
Air Force Undersecretary for Acquisitions Marvin Sambur defended the Boeing deal. "This was not a competitive bid process," he said. "The Air Force was ordered by Congress to work with Boeing on the new tanker program."
Sambur was referring to a line item inserted into the appropriations bill in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, which said the Air Force should lease 100 767s from Boeing to be used as tankers.
The bill passed the Senate over the objections of McCain and other senators. After the bill became law, McCain, in a committee hearing where Air Force Secretary James Roche was testifying, criticized Roche for an uncompetitive deal, and Roche agreed to conduct a competitive bidding.
The Air Force then put out a request for information to Boeing and Airbus, but by then Boeing and the Air Force had made arrangements that ensured Boeing would win.
Sambur also confirmed that the first 100 Boeing planes would be able to refuel only one plane at a time and would be able to refuel only Air Force planes.
The Boeing deal provides for a refueling capability for Navy, Marine and Special Operations aircraft "in the second spiral of development," Sambur said. Retrofitting the first 100 planes to do so would be at additional cost to the Air Force, he said.
But Doug Kennett, a Boeing spokesman in Washington, said that the first 100 tankers would be able to refuel Navy, Marine and allied aircraft one at a time.
He also said the Air Force turned Airbus down on failure to meet several specifications. The Airbus aircraft was larger than what the Air Force wanted and at the time Airbus did not have the specific type of refueling boom required by the Air Force, Kennett said.
Other sources said Boeing would have to redesign the wings of the 767 to add the ability to refuel more than one plane at a time. That cost also would be additional to the Air Force.
Politics has played a heavy role in the Boeing deal. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., whose state is home to Boeing headquarters, and Democratic Rep. Norman D. Dicks, who represents the state of Washington, where a key Boeing production plant is located, lobbied the White House on the deal.
Boeing and the Air Force also lobbied for the deal, and President Bush designated his chief of staff, Andrew Card, as the point man on the issue.
The Office of Management and Budget and other independent agencies criticized the tanker deal as too expensive and unneeded.
Card intervened and ordered them to move ahead with the Boeing deal.
White House spokesman Claire Buchan said Card sought to mediate the contract dispute without taking sides.
"There were disagreements among the Air Force, the DOD (Department of Defense) and the OMB. His role was to ensure that all sides were heard, and that the military's needs were met, and that the taxpayers got the best value for their money," she said Saturday.
Boeing e-mails indicated that Card was primarily interested in how many jobs the contract would create: Boeing claimed upwards of 28,000, but Roche, the Air Force secretary, in a letter to the White House upped the ante to 39,000 new jobs.
"This was a negotiation between the Air Force and Boeing; they weren't giving it to Airbus," said Steven Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University. "It definitely lends support to the generally accepted reflection that this was never intended to be an open competition.
"In a competitive procurement, you don't let one of the competitors write this because it gives them a competitive advantage," Schooner said.
Senate investigators have plowed through some 8,000 pages of Boeing documents that were so embarrassing and revealing that the company last year fired one of its vice presidents, Darleen Druyun. Druyun had been an Air Force acquisitions officer involved in negotiations on the tanker deal. Boeing also fired its chief financial officer, who had hired Druyun. Boeing chairman and chief executive Phil Condit also left the company in an attempt to help Boeing put the scandal behind it and get the deal back on track.
McCain - who's led a two-year fight against what he considers both a bad deal for the government and an unnecessary deal for the Air Force - pointed out in a letter to Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz earlier this month that the Air Force in 2001 developed a draft Operational Requirements Document (ORD) with 26 specifications for the new tanker aircraft, then gave the document to Boeing.
The Air Force's minimum requirements were subsequently reduced to only seven - and Boeing tailored the specifications to the airplane the company had on hand. The first 100 planes can only be used to refuel Air Force fighters and bombers.
The rewritten document was so thoroughly tailored to Boeing's wish list that when it was briefed to the Pentagon's Joint Requirements Board in July 2002 it was actually titled the "KC-767 ORD."
A board member's memo on the briefing said the operational requirements documents "should not be written for a specific aircraft but rather for a capability" and directed the title to be changed so as not to identify a particular aircraft.
The Air Force changed the name, but not the specifications.
Schmitz is set to release his audit report within the next week. It's the first of several investigations of the Boeing deal, including one by federal prosecutors.
A draft of the audit report, leaked earlier this month to Bloomberg News, said the Boeing contract was flawed and may need to be renegotiated because of "unsound acquisition and procurement practices." But Schmitz could find "no compelling reason" to kill the deal.
His report also questions whether the government should be leasing any of the aircraft, because the cost of leasing a Boeing 767 tanker is greater than the cost of buying one at $138.5 million each. The deal, as presently structured, would have the government lease 20 of the tankers and buy 80.
Schmitz told Knight Ridder that the audit report, once proprietary and source information is removed, will be released to the public. He added that his office has initiated an investigation "into related matters." An investigation by the inspector general involves law enforcement, while an audit looks into fiscal practices.
The Schmitz audit report is certain to generate fresh outrage on Capitol Hill, resulting in new hearings and renewed demands for the Air Force to hand over its internal documents on the Boeing deal, which it has been refusing to do for nearly a year on what one Senate investigator called "very shaky grounds."
McCain, who also sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is pressing the committee to force the Air Force to hand over its internal documents as well.
Sambur said that the decision to withhold the internal documents "is taken at a much higher level than the Air Force. It is a very serious decision. If everyone knew that their e-mails were subject to this kind of scrutiny no one would use it to debate with their colleagues and develop positions. They would watch every word they write."
An Airbus spokesman told Knight Ridder that if the aerial tanker contract was re-bid, the Airbus group would not only underbid Boeing again, but it would also agree to build the aircraft in the United States.
A federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia has been investigating allegations that Druyun simultaneously conducted negotiations on the tanker deal for the Air Force while negotiating with Boeing for a job when she retired after 33 years with the Air Force.
(Knight Ridder correspondents Seth Borenstein and Ron Hutcheson contributed to this report.)
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>> GENERICS 2...
Bush's AIDS Program Balks at Foreign Generics
U.S. Insistence on More Tests Complicates Rollout
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 27, 2004; Page A03
The Bush administration is requiring that foreign-made generic AIDS drugs undergo further evaluation before they are used in its $15 billion global AIDS program, even though the same pills have passed muster by the World Health Organization and other international health groups.
Announced three weeks ago to the first organizations to get money through the Bush program, the decision is already complicating the rollout of the enormously ambitious President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. That plan, which goes by the acronym PEPFAR, aims to put 2 million people in 14 African and Caribbean countries on life-saving antiretroviral therapy over the next five years.
The decision to spend U.S. funds only on brand-name drugs until foreign generics are studied further has angered AIDS activists. They see it as an effort to protect the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and undercut, at least symbolically, the burgeoning offshore generic drug industry.
"They are trying to hand the U.S. global AIDS plan over to Big Pharma," said Sharonann Lynch of the group Health GAP. "Look at the leg up that brand-name drugs are getting, courtesy of George Bush."
PEPFAR officials say they are only showing an abundance of caution as the United States government commences paying for lifelong medical treatment for millions of noncitizens, most of them in Africa.
"If in two or three years we have drug resistance as a result of a therapy that we introduce, we will have lost the continent in terms of our ability to treat," said Mark R. Dybul, an AIDS researcher from the National Institutes of Health now assigned to the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, at the State Department.
" 'Good drugs' isn't good enough. Because of the risk of resistance, we need the highest possible quality drugs to avert a disaster on the continent," he added.
Several experts believe the policy could have two possible effects.
It could delay initiating antiretroviral therapy in some AIDS patients in the developing world. Alternatively, it might require some of them to start taking more expensive brand-name pills and then switch to generic equivalents in six months to a year.
Even at the deep discounts offered by their makers, brand-name drugs in most cases are about three times the price of generics. And even if the period in which more expensive drugs are used is short, the policy could sow confusion in the minds of newly treated AIDS patients and complicate the operation of newly established AIDS clinics.
This is especially true in countries getting money not only from PEPFAR but also from sources such as the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which endorses the pills that PEPFAR now prohibits.
"It is hard to simplify [an AIDS treatment system] when the Americans say: Let's do it with different drugs and a separate procurement system," Stephen Gloyd, a physician at the University of Washington, said. "It has a potential negative effect on the ground. It's not just an issue of buying more expensive drugs."
Through an organization called Health Alliance International, Gloyd is helping set up treatment programs in Mozambique with about $3 million from PEPFAR.
Practically speaking, the main drug that PEPFAR recipients will not be able to use immediately is a "fixed-dose combination" of three antiretroviral drugs -- stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine -- made by several companies in India.
Sold as Triomune, Triviro and other names, it comes in a single pill and is taken twice a day. A year's supply can cost from $136 to $263. Taken as separate pills bought at a discount, this combination costs $559 a year.
The combination is one of four that World Health Organization experts recommend in the guidelines for the "3 by 5" program -- WHO's separate effort to help put 3 million people in poor countries on antiretrovirals by the end of 2005. In practice, about 90 percent of people who have never taken AIDS drugs are expected to start with it.
PEPFAR's prohibition against using this unusually handy pill arises from the requirement that AIDS drugs bought through the U.S. program must be "approved by a stringent regulatory authority or otherwise demonstrate quality, safety and efficacy at the lowest possible cost," according to guidelines issued in December. In practical terms, that means drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -- this country's "stringent regulatory authority" -- or through other mechanisms the PEPFAR may set up.
Several years ago, WHO set up a system to help countries shop wisely for drugs used to treat the three big infections of poverty -- AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The system is called "prequalification."
Drug companies -- both those making patented brand-name drugs as well as those making unpatented generics -- are invited to submit their products for WHO evaluation. The drugs (or, in the case of combinations, their components) have been tested and licensed elsewhere. WHO examines them for purity, safety and efficacy. Employing three-person teams of regulatory experts, it also inspects the factories where they are made.
If the drug is deemed safe and potent, and the manufacturing procedures good, it is published on a list. Periodically, samples of these "prequalified" drugs are tested to make sure they are still up to standard, and are being made where they are supposed to be made.
The system is voluntary. Because it has no legal standing and is simply a service for WHO's 192 member states (especially ones that do not have an equivalent of the FDA), "prequalification" does not meet PEPFAR's legal requirements.
Generic drug manufacturers in India, Brazil and elsewhere could submit their products to the FDA for approval, but most do not because they would then have to honor U.S. patent law. Consequently, Triomune and similar products are not licensed for use in the United States.
Dybul said the data WHO collects may contain all the information PEPFAR needs to reassure itself that Indian generics are good enough. However, WHO collected the data with the understanding it would be confidential.
"All we are saying is: We need to see the data ourselves," Dybul said. He added that if anything bad happened because the Bush program used substandard drugs, "you would crucify us for not having the due diligence of looking at the data ourselves -- and rightly so."
However, because the data cannot be turned over to PEPFAR, U.S. officials are proposing that countries and organizations agree on a set of principles by which fixed-dose combination drugs -- not only for AIDS but also for other diseases -- can be evaluated. Each group could adopt the principles as its own, and drug companies would know what documentation to submit.
A meeting to work on a statement of principles is scheduled to take place Monday and Tuesday in Gaborone, Botswana. Even if adopted quickly, it could be fall before offshore AIDS generics get PEPFAR's approval under this mechanism.
Many experts do not think such a parallel system is necessary, given the existence of WHO's prequalification program.
"We are basically doing all the same functions" that the FDA does when it reviews generic combinations composed of medications that have long been taken together as separate pills, said Lembit Rago, WHO's coordinator for quality assurance and safety of medicines.
A clinical pharmacologist who once headed Estonia's counterpart to the FDA, Rago said in practical terms it is irrelevant that "prequalification" is not "legal licensure."
"It doesn't matter which color is the cat. It has to catch the mice," he said.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Rapid Oral Test for HIV Approved
Reuters
Saturday, March 27, 2004; Page A03
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first rapid saliva test for the virus that causes AIDS, officials said yesterday.
The test, made by OraSure Technologies Inc., provides results within 20 minutes with 99 percent accuracy. Other approved rapid tests for the human immunodeficiency virus require taking blood samples.
"This oral test provides another important option for people who might be afraid of a blood test," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson.
Officials also said the test could help on two fronts, encouraging more people to get tested as well as actually getting them the results.
One-fourth of the roughly 900,000 HIV-infected people in the United States are not aware they have the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
People given standard tests that take a week or two often do not return to get the results. With a rapid test, a patient can get an answer in just one clinic visit. Those who test positive can start treatment quickly and take steps to keep from spreading the virus.
The new test also helps protect health care workers from becoming infected with HIV because they do not have to handle blood, officials said.
Results should be confirmed by a second, more specific test, the FDA said.
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Plan to Fight AIDS Overseas Is Foundering
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS and 14 months after President Bush promised $15 billion for AIDS treatment in poor countries, shortages of money and battles over patents have kept antiretroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them.
Progress in distributing the drugs, which have sharply cut the death rate in the United States and other Western countries, has been excruciatingly slow despite steep drops in their prices.
As a result, only about 300,000 people in the world's poorest nations are getting the drugs, of six million who need them, according to the World Health Organization.
Experts, advocacy groups and health officials agree that the delays, compounded by inadequate medical facilities and training in very poor countries, are likely to persist unless spending is stepped up sharply.
Early this month, Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, conceded that the W.H.O.'s ambitious plan to have three million people in treatment by 2005 -- announced on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day -- was already collapsing from a lack of money. Donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are now about $1.6 billion a year, barely 20 percent of what Secretary General Kofi Annan said was needed when he created the fund in 2001.
Saying that global contributions come to a tiny fraction of what is being spent on military operations and building civilian institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Lewis added that if the W.H.O. program failed, "there are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference -- there will only be the mass graves of the betrayed."
While Mr. Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, his budget requests have fallen far short of that goal. For the most recent donation to the Global Fund, he requested only $200 million, although Congress authorized $550 million.
Nor have Europe and Asia been as generous as the fund had hoped.
Dr. Richard G. A. Feachem, a Briton who is the fund's executive director, put a brave face on the situation, describing current donations as "a steep upward flight path to our cruising altitude, which we anticipate to be $8 billion." To get there in the fund's first two years would be "inconceivable," he added. He is lobbying Congress for $1.2 billion for 2005.
At the same time, few people in poor countries have been able to get lower-priced generic antiretroviral drugs. While the generic drugs have been approved by the W.H.O., endorsed by the World Bank and used in several African countries, the Bush administration has so far paid only for medicines that are still under patent and cost much more.
For example, Daniel Berman, co-director of the Doctors Without Borders campaign for low-cost drugs, said that in Zimbabwe his organization planned to treat 1,000 patients with drugs from two approved Indian generic makers, Cipla Ltd. and Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.
Both companies combine three antiretrovirals so that a day's dose is just two pills and the cost is $244 to $292 per patient per year. Meanwhile, Mr. Berman said, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta plans to pay for the treatment of 1,000 Zimbabweans, buying the same three drugs separately from GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim. The best prices available in Africa from those companies, he said, add up to $562 a year, and a daily dose is six pills.
Advocates of cheap drugs say the Bush administration has yielded to pressure from the pharmaceutical lobby to find ways to reject the generics.
On Friday, Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote a joint letter to the White House urging it to accept W.H.O.-approved generics.
In a separate letter, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, accused the administration of trying to set standards for Indian generics higher than those for American ones.
A spokesman for Randall L. Tobias, the administration's AIDS coordinator, said any suggestion that he was snubbing generics was "utter nonsense."
"We will buy whatever drug is safe and effective at the lowest possible price," said the spokesman, Dr. Mark R. Dybul. "We don't care if it's made by Cipla or Ranbaxy, in South Africa or Brazil or Nigeria."
Mr. Tobias has scheduled a meeting in Botswana for Monday to ascertain whether the W.H.O.'s approval process is rigorous enough.
Dr. Lembit Rago, who leads the W.H.O. assessments, said he used "absolutely the same principles" as the Food and Drug Administration, and borrowed his inspectors from regulatory agencies in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. As soon as his office approved the Indian pills, he said, "a very cold wind began to blow from the U.S."
"It is no secret that Pharma is lobbying against us in a big way," he said.
A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America, the industry's American lobbying group, said his association was "not involved in any way in this." But he called the Indian drugs "new combinations that have not been appropriately treated."
Dr. Dybul said Mr. Tobias wanted to see all the data the Indian companies gave the W.H.O.
A W.H.O. spokeswoman said the agency signed confidentiality agreements, but she said the Bush administration could ask the Indian companies for the data.
Against that backdrop, prices for both branded and generic medicines have plunged in the last two years. Last October, a foundation organized by former President Bill Clinton announced an agreement with Indian and South African generic makers to sell the drugs for $140 per patient per year if large orders were guaranteed, payment was in cash and the drug maker did not have to pay the legal and lobbying costs of getting each drug licensed in each country.
In January, Mr. Clinton announced that he had brokered another price-cut deal with five companies making AIDS tests. One of the companies, Becton, Dickinson & Company, dropped the cost of its CD-4 count, which measures immune cells, to as little as $3, from a high of $10.
On Dec. 9, with little fanfare, an important step took place in South Africa. Two pharmaceutical giants, Glaxo and Boehringer-Ingelheim, agreed to grant licenses to produce AIDS drugs to four generic companies from India and South Africa.
The companies will be allowed to sell the drugs anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In return, Glaxo and Boehringer will get royalties of 5 percent of sales. Under the threat of heavy fines, the companies had backed down from their original plan: a license for one small generic maker supplying only South Africa's public hospitals and royalties of 15 percent to 30 percent.
The Canadian government has proposed a law encouraging its drug makers to make cheap copies of drugs to treat AIDS and malaria for export to poor countries. The bill is bogged down in Parliament.
Treatment plans have varied wildly in different countries. South Africa, with the world's largest number of AIDS patients, was slow to roll out nationwide treatment because of years of opposition by President Thabo Mbeki. India, which has the second largest number, has been slow to negotiate low prices with its own generic companies. Brazil makes its own generic drugs. Romania buys only brand-name drugs, but its epidemic is confined to about 10,000 people.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has had trouble running even so much as a pilot program for 15,000 of an estimated 3.5 million infected people. Many of the country's 25 treatment centers, which were selling the drugs at a subsidized price of $85 a year, ran dry in September and did not get new supplies until February.
Malaysia is the only country to exercise a "compulsory license" right under trade treaties to ignore a patent and import generics, said James P. Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a group that is pushing for cheaper drugs. Uganda, Mozambique and Zambia may soon do the same, he said, but China backed away from doing so for fear of American trade retaliation. "They're using older drugs that are already off patent in China," he said.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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>> TERROR FILES...
Imam Not Allowed To Attend Va. Meeting
By Timothy Dwyer and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 27, 2004; Page A11
A federal judge yesterday rejected a Cleveland imam's request to travel to Northern Virginia for what prosecutors said was a meeting with a group with ties to terrorists.
The imam, Fawaz Damra, faces federal charges in Ohio that he lied on his citizenship forms by concealing his affiliation with several terrorist groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He had asked a judge earlier this week for permission to travel to Springfield for a meeting last night sponsored by the United Association for Studies and Research Inc., or UASR.
The group says it is a Muslim American think tank, but federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have linked it to terrorist groups, primarily the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, court records and interviews show. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
Anisa Abd el Fattah, director of public affairs for UASR, said the organization is not tied to Hamas or any other terrorist group. She said last night's meeting at the UASR offices was the first in a series that would lead to "a structure for what we hope is going to be Muslim-Jewish dialogue between Muslim and Jewish leaders in the United States."
Local Muslim leaders and imams were planning to attend last night's meeting, she said. Future meetings, she added, would include Jewish community leaders.
In documents filed this week in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, Damra's attorneys described the meeting as "a panel discussion between Rabbis and Imams at an Interfaith meeting." Damra is required under terms of his bail to request permission to travel.
Damra, the imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, also known as the "grand mosque," was indicted by a federal grand jury in December on one count of naturalization fraud. A trial date has not been set.
Prosecutors allege that Damra did not disclose his ties to Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for bombings and other terrorist acts in Israel. Law enforcement sources said Damra was formerly the head of al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y., whose adherents include men convicted in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik" who was convicted along with nine others in a plot to blow up Manhattan landmarks including the United Nations.
An attorney for Damra, who has pleaded not guilty, did not return telephone calls yesterday.
In response to Damra's travel request, Gregory A. White, the U.S. attorney in Cleveland, filed a memo saying he "strongly opposes" granting it because UASR "has demonstrated its sympathies for Hamas." He added that several "key associates" of the Springfield group "are, or have been, integrally involved in Hamas activities."
Among those, prosecutors said, is Mousa Abu Marzook, a Hamas leader and Gaza native who lived in Northern Virginia until 1993 and was designated a terrorist by the U.S. government in 1995.
El Fattah said Marzook founded UASR but did not begin his affiliation with Hamas until five years later and has not been involved with UASR since at least 1996. She added that Marzook's wife and children still attend UASR's functions.
Another former UASR official is Abdurahman Alamoudi, a prominent Muslim activist indicted in federal court in Alexandria in October on money laundering and fraud charges. Among the charges is that Alamoudi lied on his citizenship forms by not revealing his role as a "director" of UASR.
After the judge rejected Damra's request to travel to Springfield, his attorneys filed another motion saying he was "unaware of any of the facts" alleged by prosecutors.
UASR is also one of the dozens of Muslim charities and foundations for which Senate Finance Committee investigators are seeking tax and financial records. The records were requested as part of a widening probe into alleged ties between tax-exempt organizations and terrorist groups, according to documents and federal officials.
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WAR ON TERRORISM | VENEZUELA
IDs easily bought in Venezuela could aid terrorists, U.S. fears
U.S. officials worry that Venezuela's trade in fake identification documents could help terrorists and other criminals hide their identities.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@herald.com
CARACAS - Juli?n runs a small office supply shop in downtown Caracas, but his main income comes from the dilapidated government immigration offices nearby.
Juli?n readily admits that he moonlights as a purveyor of fraudulent Venezuelan passports and national identity cards, and an expediter of real ones.
And he gladly ticks off the prices he offers, usually to illegal immigrants: about $260 for a fake passport and $80 for a fake national identity card known as a cedula. It's a lot more for real ones, depending on how fast his clients want them.
In the post-Sept. 11 era, Venezuela's trade in false documents has alarmed U.S. officials, in light of allegations that leftist President Hugo Ch?vez's government has issued fake IDs to leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, Arabs with suspicious backgrounds and Cuban intelligence agents.
The trade is indeed widespread and at times worrisome, a month-long Herald review of the allegations found.
Two Venezuelan Muslims -- one who attended two of the same U.S. aviation schools as one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, another arrested with a grenade in London -- may have false documents, the former head of Venezuelan immigration told The Herald.
But the trade has been going on for decades, mainly linked to corrupt employees in the immigration department, known by its Spanish acronym DIEX, and apparently has not increased significantly under Ch?vez, The Herald also found. Ch?vez has denied the allegations.
`HISTORIC PRACTICE'
''I've been doing this long before Ch?vez became president,'' said Juli?n, who asked that his last name not be published. ``It's a traditional, historic practice in our country.
U.S. officials said their main fear is that Islamic radicals, hiding their true identities with Venezuelan documents, could slip into the United States, past terrorist ''watch lists,'' and stage another Sept. 11-style attack.
''The sale of cedulas and passports . . . did not start with Ch?vez. But we are more concerned now because terrorists can exploit a corrupt system to hurt us,'' said a top U.S. government official familiar with Venezuela.
Washington already has taken action. In recent months, the U.S. Consulate in Caracas has denied visas to Venezuelans carrying flimsy ''temporary'' passports or regular passports that were renewed multiple times after the initial expiration date of five years.
RAN OUT
Stuart Patt, a State Department spokesman, said the single-sheet temporary passports were issued by the Venezuelan government in the last few months after it ran out of the more secure regular passports.
''In general,'' Patt said, ``Venezuelan passports are not very reliable documents. They are susceptible to fraudulent use.''
Colombian officials, who have long alleged that Ch?vez is helping the guerrillas, say that scores of the rebels killed or captured near the eastern border with Venezuela were carrying Venezuelan cedulas.
''We know they can buy them easily there,'' one army general in Bogot? said recently. ``They can buy them easily here, too, by God. We Colombians are famous around the world for making false documents.''
''But there's so many of them these days that we have to ask: Is it a business or is it a policy?'' the general added.
The cedula is the primary national identification document in Venezuela, serving as proof of birth for Venezuelans and residency for foreigners.
PAPERS FOR BRIBES
But retired national guard Gen. Marco Antonio Ferreira, who resigned as head of DIEX in April 2002, said that some of the agency's branch offices outside Caracas long have issued cedulas to illegal migrants in exchange for bribes.
He gave The Herald a computerized list of more than 3,000 names of people holding what he suspects are real but fraudulently obtained documents.
They carry the numbers for blank cedulas that were sent to provincial branches but then ordered withdrawn for a number of reasons, chief among them that the branches had a surplus of blank forms, Ferreira said.
MIDDLE EAST NAMES
Ferreira's lists of suspect cedulas included more than 300 people with Middle Eastern names. A U.S. Homeland Security Department official checked the names against a terrorist watch list and found no matches.
But Ferreira said he suspected that the Venezuelan ID cards carried by Hakim Mohamed Ali Diab Fattah and Hazil Muhammad Rahaman Alan were false. Venezuelans are required to obtain cedulas at age 7. Ferreira said the two Muslims obtained theirs when they were 19 and 24.
Diab Fattah, 30, was detained in the United States after taking lessons at two of the same aviation schools attended by Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour. He was deported to Venezuela in 2002. Rahaman, 38, was arrested in London last year after a hand grenade was found in his luggage at Gatwick airport. He is awaiting trial there.
'EXPRESS' RESIDENCY
Concerns over Venezuela's ID system deepened in January when the Ch?vez government implemented a new immigration initiative: ''express'' residency and naturalization for foreign nationals living illegally in Venezuela.
Opposition leaders said the system will compromise the nation's security and that Ch?vez is only trying to increase the number of voters who may support him if electoral officials approve the recall referendum against Ch?vez sought by his political opponents.
But Venezuelan immigration officials argue that legalizing longtime illegals strengthens national security -- the same argument President Bush used recently when he proposed granting temporary work permits to illegal immigrants.
'SAFEGUARD' SECURITY
''Regularization is a policy which will not only resolve the situation of illegal foreigners but will also seek to safeguard the security of the state,'' Hugo Cab?zas, current head of DIEX, was quoted as saying recently by the Caracas daily El Universal.
Thousands of illegal migrants signing up for the express program -- most of them Colombians who fled here when their country was awash in political bloodshed and Venezuela's oil-fueled economy was humming along -- now mob the DIEX building almost daily.
And for those not willing to stand in line, there are still many fake-ID dealers nearby like Juli?n, known here as gestores, Spanish for brokers or middlemen.
``Many of the businesses around the DIEX have gestores. Here, I photocopy documents, and others plastify the cedulas. But thats just part of what we really do. Many people around here survive on selling cedulas and passports.
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VENEZUELA | TERROR SUSPECTS
A pair of arrests illustrates problem
CARACAS - The cases of two Venezuelan Muslims arrested in the United States and London illustrate the unreliability of the country's national identification card system.
If they were not who their documents said they were, who were they?
* Hakim Mohamed Ali Diab Fattah. Carries Venezuelan National ID card No. v16.105.824, issued in 1993, identifying him as a Venezuelan citizen.
Detained in the United States in 2001 after he was found to have attended two of the same aviation schools as Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour.
Deported to Venezuela March 8, 2002, four days after the U.S. Embassy in Caracas sent a letter to the Venezuelan government saying he had violated U.S. immigration laws and that an FBI investigation had shown he had ``threatened that he was going to blow up an Israeli airliner.''
U.S. officials familiar with the case said they were confident that U.S. investigators thoroughly checked his background and found him not to be a threat.
His identification card, issued in the Caribbean town of Maiquetia, shows he would be 30 years old now. He is believed to be of Palestinian descent.
But former Venezuelan immigration department chief Marco Antonio Ferreira said he suspected the ID was fraudulently obtained because Diab was 19 when it was issued. Venezuelans usually obtain ID cards at age 7 to register for school.
His whereabouts are unknown.
A family member told The Herald that other relatives had taken Diab to Israel. An Israeli official said Diab had not sought a visa at the Israeli Embassy in Caracas.
* Hazil Muhammad Rahaman Alan. Carries ID card No. v6.285.604, issued in 1990.
Arrested in London last year after a hand grenade was found in his luggage at Gatwick airport, he is awaiting trial there. Media reports say he visited Afghanistan and Sudan, two former Al Qaeda strongholds.
Rahaman obtained his ID card at age 24. Ferreira said he has more suspicions about him because the records backing up his ID card application ``appear to have been extracted from the files.''
Rahaman is believed to be of Southeast Asian descent, and his family has a home in the well-to-do Caracas district of El Cafetal. The home is now empty.
A neighbor told The Herald that Rahaman's mother had told him shortly after the arrest in London that her son had disappeared eight or nine years ago and not been heard from.
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Uribe sees Bush, hopes aid follows
BY FRANK DAVIES
fdavies@herald.com
WASHINGTON - President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia ended a four-day visit Thursday with an upbeat assessment of his country's progress against drugs, guerrillas and economic woes.
After his third meeting with President Bush in two years, Uribe said he is grateful for $2.5 billion in U.S. aid since since 2000, adding that the so-called Plan Colombia is helping to improve security and reduce coca cultivation.
Aggressive eradication efforts have reduced coca cultivation by 33 percent in the last two years, according to a State Department report released during Uribe's visit.
''These are credible numbers, but we are not bragging,'' Uribe told an audience at the National Press Club. ``These are just the first results, and I am not satisfied.''
Colombian officials said they also have high hopes for free-trade talks with the United States, scheduled to begin in May.
And this week Gen. James Hill, chief of the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, asked Congress to raise the limit on the U.S. presence in Colombia to 800 military personnel and 600 civilian contractors. The current cap is 400 of each.
With recent Colombian advances against guerrilla groups, Hill said he saw a chance, with increased training and support, to ``deal a decisive blow against narco-terrorists.''
Uribe said that improved security was his top concern and essential to luring investment and improving democratic institutions. He quoted the former Socialist leader of Spain, Felipe Gonzalez, who once told him, ``Security is a democratic value.''
Asked about support for the U.S. war in Iraq, Uribe ducked the question. But he said the war is part of a larger global conflict with terrorism.
He faced critical questions on Capitol Hill about his efforts to make peace with several hundred members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, an illegal paramilitary group widely accused of brutality in fighting leftist guerrillas.
Several House members said the agreement could protect human rights abusers, but Uribe said he was trying to reintegrate the AUC fighters into society.
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