The End Might Be Nearer Than You Think

Another that hit north of Australia around 536 A.D. set off a global cooling akin to a nuclear winter, with summertime frost covering China, researchers say.

Many more asteroids may have been doused in the oceans, leaving no crater but roiling the Earth with Biblical-like floods. One that landed in the Indian Ocean around 2800 B.C., thinks Columbia University geophysicist Dallas Abbott, launched a 600-foot high wall of water across the Pacific, many times the size of the 2004 tsunami in Asia.

Is there no hope?

There is, the Udall bill points out.

“Unlike earthquakes and hurricanes,” asteroids and comets are predictable. If we can find them in time, we may be able to knock them off course.

At the Movies

Haven’t we seen this movie before?

Sure, twice.

“Deep Impact”, and “Armageddon”, both in 1998, portrayed American crews rocketing into space in a desperate race to intercept life-snuffing asteroids tumbling toward Earth.

“The Bruce Willis movie is incredibly silly,” says Easterbrook. “You see two space shuttles blast off, and they immediately fly to the Russian space station to get more fuel. And then you see them blasting off into outer space.”

He snorts.

“The space shuttles obviously have no ability to operate beyond low-Earth orbit. The comet would be coming toward the Earth at a thousand times the speed of the space shuttle. But they land on it and put a nuclear bomb in it.”

Ridiculous.

The End Might Be Nearer Than You Think

But the movies were politically harmful, too, he maintains.

“If something’s so preposterous that Hollywood’s made a movie about it, then it can’t be true. But just because there’s been a really bad Bruce Willis movie made about it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about it,” Easterbrook says.

Dana Rohrabacher does worry about it. Then again, the southern California Republican often gets spun up on things that his Capitol Hill colleagues yawn over.

Rohrabacher introduced a bill (HR 4917) last year directing NASA to come up with a strategy “for deflecting and mitigating potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.”

He has no cosponsors. He frets. The United States has to start coming up with a strategy now, he (and many scientists) agree because it could take 20 years to perfect a space rock intercept program.

“Right now, if we saw an asteroid heading toward Earth that was going to hit us in five to 10 years, there is no procedure established to determine who would be responsible to deflect that particular object,” he says. “The most important factor is time. It’s an “urgent national security issue.”

“It’s not a cockamamie idea,” he adds later. “Very prominent scientists now are indicating that the threat of a near-Earth object hitting the earth and causing enormous damage is much higher than we thought.”

But Congress and NASA are already happily throwing truckloads of cash at President Bush’s plan to create a manned Moon station (which Easterbrook slams as an impractical boondoggle). Money to develop an asteroid-intercept program would have to come from there, rendering it a non-starter.

“If I had to make a choice,” Rohrabacher told me late Friday, “I would de-fund the moon project.”

Not a chance, especially in an election year. The Democrats aren’t about to take food from the mouths of their children, figuratively speaking, to pay for it.

“I think the view on Capital Hill is that NASA has been taken captive by the congressional districts where the spending currently is,” Easterbrook says. The asteroid intercept idea has pretty much fizzled so far.

The Air Force likes the idea — no surprise, considering all the rockets it could build and fly in it — but not enough to make a fight of it.

“The Air Force has tried to raid NASA’s budget before and they haven’t been terribly successful,” Easterbrook says, “And the total amount of money you could get by raiding NASA’s budget is small, in comparison to the amount of money they already have. So it’s a victory that they would like to win, but it’s not high on their agenda of priorities.”

The End Might Be Nearer Than You Think

The Udall measure, backed by House Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon of Tennessee and cosponsored by senior Republicans Tom Feeney of Florida and Ralph M. Hall of Texas, merely “reiterates” its support for other funding bills that toss a couple million dollars at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, the lone eyeball dedicated to looking for dangerous deep space items.

Five million can keep it open, Rohrabacher says. “Lunch money.” He has introduced a separate bill (HR 3737) to keep its lights on past 2010.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, perhaps eyeing the island’s June 7 primary, also introduced a bill (S 2862) authorizing NASA to continue using Arecibo.

What Happens In Vegas

Easterbrook may snort at the asteroid-disaster movies, but Rohrabacher told me that “Deep Impact” shook him up.

So he held a hearing to look into it.

“One of the scientists was trying to downplay the threat,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Congressman, the threat of a near-Earth object hitting the planet is about the same as you going to Las Vegas and drawing a royal straight flush.’

“I’ll never forget it,” Rohrabacher remembers, “because I had been to Las Vegas and drawn a royal straight flush.”

He chuckles.

“It was like a light going on in my head.”

The odds have changed over the past decade, he says.

“Now we’re finding out that, in reality, it’s like going to Las Vegas and being dealt four of a kind,” he says. “which happens a lot.”

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

The End Might Be Nearer Than You Think

Terrorist Page-Turner: Regular SpyTalk readers will remember last November’s column reporting that a CIA kidnap victim known as Abu Omar could end up with the title to an Italian country house owned by Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA official who quarterbacked the ill-starred op. Now Omar (real name: Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr) may have another title: author. Omar told Reuters last week that he’s been writing a book about the 2003 affair, which began with his abduction from a Milan street and ended with his harsh interrogation in a Cairo prison. Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro has opened a trial in absentia against 26 Americans, including Lady, said to be involved in the snatch of the suspected al Qaeda operative, which was observed by a passer-by. Now free but ailing in Egypt, Omar also told Reuters he plans to sue Lady for his pain and suffering unless he gets an out-of-court settlement. “But the compensation will still have to be generous because of the injuries I sustained — the kidnapping, the oppression, the torture and the violation of the privacy of my home.” It’s not likely he’ll ever occupy Lady’s intended retirement home, however: Omar is wanted on suspicion of terrorist activities in Milan.

Catching Up to Quds: McClatchy reporters Hannah Allam, Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel recently caught up to and significantly advanced my April 11 column on “Iran’s Top Terrorist,” as I called him, Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. More than a terrorist, evidently, Suleimani has not only been directing underground operations in Iraq but conducting clandestine political missions right under the noses of U.S. officials in Baghdad. At one point in 2006, he even slipped into the Green Zone, nerve center for the U.S. war effort and the Iraqi government, “to try to orchestrate the selection of a new Iraqi prime minister,” they report in a must-read piece (http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/2923498). So what? “Suleimani’s role in Iraq illustrates how President Bush’s decision to topple Saddam has enabled Shiite, Persian Iran to extend its influence in Iraq, frustrating U.S. aims there, alarming America’s Sunni Arab allies in the Persian Gulf and prompting new Israeli fears about Iran’s ambitions.”

When Worlds Collide: Vaunted Georgetown terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman takes a mighty swing at former CIA officer Marc Sageman in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the quarterly bible of the East Coast national security establishment. “Marc Sageman claims that al Qaeda’s leadership is finished and today’s terrorist threat comes primarily from below,” says a summary of the piece, a review of Sageman’s new book, “Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century.” “But the terrorist elites are alive and well, and ignoring the threat they pose will have disastrous consequences.” Sageman, a psychiatrist by training, worked closely with the U.S.-backed Afghan rebels who took on the Red Army in the 1980s, argues that Osama bin Laden and company have been eclipsed by disaffected young Muslims in the West, “bunches of guys” who get spun up on jihad during what amounts to all-night dorm room b.s. sessions. Nonsense, says Hoffman, the author of “Inside Terrorism” and other influential works. “Sageman’s impressive resum?? cannot overcome his fundamental misreading of the al Qaeda threat,” he says, in what amounts to trash-talking for the drawing room set. OBL’s still the man. Get your beer and popcorn.

Iraq’s Houdini Cut Loose? NBC’s Kianne Sadeq and Aram Rostonreported last week that U.S. military and civilian officials “have cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, the former favorite of Washington’s once powerful neoconservatives,” because of “unauthorized contacts with Iran’s government.” It’s hardly the first time. Chalabi, who manufactured false pre-war reports on Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, has survived previous cutoffs and allegations of secret contacts with the Iranians, Trounced in the Iraqi elections, the Shiite Houdini managed to get himself appointed last fall as head of a Baghdad “services” committee supposedly coordinating the restoration of water and power to city residents. It’s possible that his latest excommunication is connected to very discreet talks between high-level U.S. and Iranian officials April 20-23 at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey. Chalabi “was brought in for some of the talks,” according to the always-interesting Paris-based newsletter Intelligence Online.

Questions “related to Dr. Chalabi and his duties and status” should be addressed to the Iraqi government, U.S. officials told NBC’s Roston, author of the recently published “The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi”.

Drop the Chalupa: Blackwater, struggling with its public image after a deadly traffic incident in Baghdad, is showing its kindler, gentler side. The “global leader in advanced law enforcement and military peacekeeping training” is teaming up with the USO, which has been providing comfort and entertainment to American troops since 1943, according to a May 15 company announcement. Blackwater “has committed $2 million over four years to support USO programs and services for the troops, including homecoming celebrations and logistical support for USO entertainment tours.” Just keep your hands in sight, GIs. Speaking of which, the American Psychiatric Foundation, the Lilly Foundation and the Give an Hour veterans help organization are planning to announce on May 19 “a major expansion of a nationwide professional volunteer effort to provide mental health services for U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.” According to news reports citing internal VA e-mails, 18 vets a day are committing suicide. According to an April report from the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, State Department Foreign Service officers who served in the war zones are also falling victim to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.