Laura Rozen

The story of the troubled U.S. anthrax-vaccine program is a tangled saga of science, politics, private-sector deal-making and national security. There have been persistent questions about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Critics say Defense Department studies have never proven the vaccine works against the more dangerous inhaled form of anthrax, only against cutaneous, or skin anthrax. Some military personnel have complained of mysterious illnesses after taking the vaccine, and at least 400 have been disciplined for refusing the mandatory inoculation. But the Pentagon insists the vaccine is both effective and safe. Even now, some researchers say the vaccine is seriously outdated, as BioPort gears up to ship more.

Then there are questions about BioPort’s role as the nation’s only anthrax-vaccine maker. How did Fuad El-Hibri, 43, a German-born entrepreneur and former director of British vaccine-maker Porton Products, come to have so much control over the West’s supply of anthrax vaccine? Why didn’t the Pentagon turn to a larger, more established drug maker for the crucial anti-biowarfare weapon? And how could it let BioPort remain the sole maker of the vaccine after it failed repeatedly to gain FDA approval for its renovated facility?

“It speaks to DoD culture more than anything else,” says a congressional staff aide who asked not to be named. “The Pentagon just does not have a corporate culture. Once they decided to go with this program (BioPort), they stuck with it, even though oversight indicated they had built their biodefense program on a foundation of sand, and they had an unreliable producer. The DoD is simply incapable of admitting a mistake. They genetically just can’t back out.”

The Pentagon and BioPort deny they made a mistake, of course, and they believe their problems will be solved, perhaps next week. Government sources close to the process say as early as Monday, the FDA will approve BioPort’s renovated facility, and enable it to resume shipments of the vaccine it has been stockpiling since 1999.

A government official who asked not to be named says while BioPort is “70 percent on the way there” in terms of improvements in quality control demanded by the FDA, political pressure due to the terrorism scare is playing more of a role than quality control in expediting FDA approval. But BioPort officials say FDA approval for their renovated facility is long overdue.

“We have heard the process will be speeded up, and it has taken an incredibly long time,” said Jay Coupe, a longtime aide to Adm. William Crowe, who with Fuad El-Hibri serves as one of BioPort’s owners, and who served as chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan administration. (Fuad’s father, Ibrahim El-Hibri, also well-connected to the defense establishment, is a third partner in the venture.) “While BioPort certainly supports the FDA, and doesn’t want any special consideration and wants a safe and effective vaccine, the approval process has gone on for a very long time for most vaccine manufacturers. This is one of the reasons people are getting out of the vaccine business.”

“We have been manufacturing vaccine,” BioPort spokeswoman Kim Brennan Root said. “As we submit final documentation for approval from the FDA, we have been manufacturing vaccine and contributing it to the stockpile so when approval comes we can be in a position to release the vaccine.”

But critics of BioPort say that repeated FDA inspections have shown the company has failed to prove it can produce the same dose of vaccine twice.

“The most fundamental problem has to do with the quality of the process of vaccine manufacture,” a congressional aide, who asked not to be named, told Salon. “They cannot show they can produce the same vaccine of the same potency and consistency twice in a row. The quality of the process is not validated. That means they don’t have the data to show that, within this process, within this heat range, this process produces this vaccine. They are trying to retrofit a modern inspection and validation process on an old system.”

“BioPort has tried to say it didn’t know how much it would cost to bring the company to 2001 FDA standards,” another congressional staffer told Salon. “But that is kind of a hard pill to swallow. They consistently showed deviations from good manufacturing practices. Some of the FDA complaints are substantive. There were contaminants in the lot. There were some deficiencies in packaging. There were problems with paperwork and record keeping. There was an inability to show consistency from one lot to the next.”

“They have come a long way,” he added, “at significant taxpayer support.”

Even if BioPort gets FDA approval to resume vaccine sales, anthrax vaccine will be available only to the military, not to the general public. That is, unless BioPort can step up production, and get the Defense Department to agree to sales to federal health agencies. If the current anthrax scare in New York and Florida grows, some members of the public are certain to pressure their political leaders for access to the vaccine.

“I will tell you right now, I wish I had access to the vaccine myself, I can tell you,” says Dr. Zsolt Harsyani, a former business partner of Fuad and Ibrahim El-Hibri who is president of the Washington office of Porton International.

BioPort’s Kim Brennan Root would not disclose how much vaccine the company had stockpiled while awaiting FDA approval for their renovated facility since renovation was completed in 1999. But a congressional aide who has researched the matter estimates that approximately 5 million doses are stockpiled. Vaccination requires six doses over 18 months, and a yearly booster shot.

In testimony to congressional committees, BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri has indicated BioPort’s viability depends on being able to sell anthrax vaccine to a much larger market than to just the Defense Department, which he said is getting “rock-bottom prices.”

“It has become clear to us that the prices paid by the Department of Defense for anthrax vaccine are significantly below BioPort’s costs for producing anthrax vaccine,” El-Hibri told the House Government Reform Committee in June 1999, a year after he purchased the Defense Department’s former anthrax vaccine supplier. “Traditionally vaccine manufacturers have been able to offer lower prices to the government by recovering a substantial portion of their costs through commercial sales. Because of the current unavailability of product, the commercial sales market has not materialized as anticipated. Without a second market, the government cannot expect the rock-bottom pricing it enjoys with some of the other vaccines it purchases.”

“As a commercial entity,” el-Hibri added, “BioPort cannot continue to subsidize the DoD.”

Critics of BioPort are outraged at El-Hibri’s contention that BioPort has subsidized the Defense Department. Chief among them is U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. Jones estimates that the Pentagon has paid BioPort almost $150 million since BioPort purchased the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI) in 1998, giving it the exclusive U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine — with no new shipped vaccine to show for the money.

“My whole concern has been that this company cannot meet FDA requirements to produce the product,” Jones told Salon Thursday. “So how long does the government continue to put taxpayers’ money into a company that cannot produce the product?”

“Since former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen raised the concern about the possibility of anthrax being used on the military or civilians,” Jones added, “the Clinton administration made the decision to go with BioPort.”

As his comment suggests, partisan politics may at least initially have played a part in Jones’ troubles with BioPort, and its co-founder, Adm. Crowe. Alone among top military brass, particularly those who served Republican administrations, Adm. Crowe endorsed the election of “draft-dodger” Bill Clinton, who was widely despised by the Republican-leaning military establishment. Clinton rewarded Crowe for his endorsement, Jones suggests, with a plumb ambassadorship to England from 1994 to 1997.

And England in the years during and after the Gulf War is key to understanding the close links between the half dozen people who have come to dominate the sale of vaccines against deadly bioweapons in the U.S. and the U.K. Only two countries, the U.S. and Britain, make anthrax vaccine, and El-Hibri has been involved in both, first at Porton International in Britain during the Gulf War, and now with BioPort in the U.S., as the world faces a new terrorism scare. Sources say El-Hibri remained involved with Porton International up until the firm partnered with defense contractor DynCorps in 1997 to get a new Defense Department contract to make a second generation of vaccines against bioweapons. The new company is named DynPort Vaccine Company, and its license to make second generation vaccines to protect against small pox, anthrax and other bioweapons was publicly announced Thursday, although the contract appears to date from 1997.

It was in Britain that Ambassador Crowe resumed his acquaintance with an old family friend, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a wealthy Venezuelan citizen of Sunni Lebanese descent, and his son Fuad. Ibrahim El Hibri had made a fortune in the telecom business with Phillips Company, working in the Gulf states.

Crowe and Ibrahim el-Hibri were first introduced decades ago by a U.S. Naval Academy classmate of the admiral who, like Ibrahim El-Hibri, lived in Venezuela. They had stayed in close contact during the 1970s when Adm. Crowe was posted to head the U.S. Central Command in Qatar, in the Middle East, where Ibrahim El-Hibri was active in his businesses. And in England during his ambassadorship, they met again.

The mania for privatization in Margaret Thatcher’s England made it a great place for entrepreneurs like El-Hibri. In the 1980s, an El-Hibri acquaintance named Zsolt Harsyani, an American Ph.D. in genetics who had spearheaded an early report on biotechnology for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, became involved in what would become in its time the largest private biotechnology firm in the world, Porton International. Porton got the rights to sell vaccines and other products developed by the U.K.-government run laboratory, the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), on commercial markets. CAMR had done the early research into products like botulinum toxin, or botox, a bacterium that can be injected to stop spasms (as well as prevent wrinkles, its most popular use in the U.S., at least until now) and anthrax vaccine.

The marketing relationship between Porton and CAMR ended in the 1990s, Dr. Harsyani said, and CAMR now markets its own products.

“At the time of Mrs. Thatcher, there was a philosophy in the U.K. supporting taking public works to the private sector,” Harsyani told Salon. The spirit of public-private partnership that existed in Thatcher’s England in the 1980s then moved to the States, Harsyani explained. “A lot of U.S. government and military research was not commercialized because there was no mechanism for it. One of the things that has changed in the United States in the last 20 years is that intellectual property that came out could in fact be owned by the institution where the researchers worked. The U.S. has now taken steps towards that kind of privatization.”

In 1989-1990, with Persian Gulf tensions heating up and the U.S. and Britain preparing to lead a war against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, El-Hibri became a principal silent investor in Porton, while his Yale and Stanford-educated son Fuad was installed as director of a Porton subsidiary, Porton Products. Their Middle East connections were put to use, as Porton sold tens of millions of dollars worth of anthrax vaccine to Saudi Arabia and other countries — deals all approved by the British Ministry of Defense.

(A U.S. government investigator says Porton sold vaccine to Saudi Arabia at the insanely high price of $300-$500 per dose — some 30 to 50 times what the U.S. Defense Department agreed to pay BioPort per dose.)

The Gulf War was a boon to businesses like Porton, as well as its officers, the el Hibris and Dr. Harsyani. Increasingly, they started to look for similar business opportunities in the U.S., particularly in areas that revolved around biodefense. They gravitated to opportunities where the government-run defense industry meets the private sector.

After the Gulf War, with concerns mounting in the U.S. about reports of Iraq’s production of anthrax, Adm. Crowe was posted as ambassador to England. There, he resumed his friendship with the El-Hibris. About the same time, the El-Hibri family was hearing that the U.S.’s lone anthrax vaccine manufacturer, the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI), was financially troubled and looking for a buyer.

In 1970, the Michigan lab had received the only U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine, but its facility was antiquated. By the late 1980s, according to Judith Miller’s “Germs,” Michigan’s Biologic Products Institute was making small batches of the vaccine — 15,000 to 17,000 doses — every four years, and selling them mostly commercially, to people in the animal hides business who came into contact with anthrax. But in 1988, the U.S. Army went to the lab and signed a contract to buy 300,000 doses in five years. The order was ambitious. By the time Gulf War troops assembled in early 1991, there was only enough vaccine to protect 150,000 of the half million troops assembled there, and none for civilians or allies, though the Saudis were able to buy some from the U.K.’s Porton International.

After the war, as worry increased over Iraq’s biowarfare capacity, some in the Pentagon proposed that the military build its own vaccine factory, but officials thought it best left to the private sector. By 1996, however, concerns were mounting that the Michigan facility, already inadequate to the challenge of producing enough vaccine for the entire military, was having new problems. After several years of troubling inspections, the FDA threatened to close the lab in 1997, citing problems with sterility and equipment maintenance as well as scientific procedure. The only other facility producing a vaccine, Britain’s CAMR, which at one time had a marketing relationship with Porton, now terminated, was using a different anthrax strain, and wasn’t licensed for U.S. use anyway.

The el-Hibris and Crowe came up with the idea for BioPort, which they thought could do in the U.S. what Porton had done in Britain: bring private-sector methods (and profits) to a public research lab. As Fuad el-Hibri testified to Congress in 1999, “When BioPort was originally conceived, we believed that Admiral Crowe’s background would be important in ensuring that we did everything correctly in establishing a company that would best serve DoD’s needs.”

El-Hibri and Crowe also partnered with two former managers of the state-owned facility, Robert Myers, who serves as BioPort’s COO, and Rob van Ravenswaay — a deal former Michigan state Sen. Linng Brewer, a Lansing Democrat, has long charged was ethically suspect, because Myers and Ravenswaay as employees of MBPI “knew the identities of at least two bidders (El-Hibri and Crowe) and the substance of their bids, information not made available to the general public. It appears they used information not available to others to enhance their financial position relative to the other bidders, a clear violation.” The BioPort partners have long denied the charges.

In June 1998, BioPort’s $24 million bid for MBPI — $17 million upfront and the rest in loans to be paid over five years — beat out competitors, including a $16.6 million bid endorsed by the Defense Department by Gruppo Marcucci, that involved no debt. Some expressed concern about selling the sensitive national security facility to a foreign company. (Brewer says the Marcucci bid lost out because it had failed to partner with managers of the Institute, but he has been unable to bring his ethical violations against Myers and Ravenswaay to court.)

A former Porton employee who asked not to be named says the company was looking to make a fortune on the Pentagon contract. “When El-Hibri bought the Michigan plant, he thought they would make a killing. The lab was already knocking out this product. The vaccine was already FDA approved. It’s an essential business but no one wanted to talk about bioweapons back then, even though they knew Iraq and other countries had anthrax.”

But it didn’t turn out to be so easy.

Despite El-Hibri’s experience marketing anthrax vaccine at Porton, Crowe’s strong ties with the defense establishment, and growing interest from the Pentagon in protecting troops from anthrax, BioPort’s problems quickly mounted after it acquired the MBPI facility.

Troubles seemed unlikely, because in May 1998, shortly before BioPort’s bid for MBPI was finalized, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced plans to require all 2.4 million U.S. soldiers and reservists to be inoculated against anthrax, which looked like a windfall for the new venture.

In testimony to Congress, Adm. Crowe has adamantly denied that he had any insider knowledge that led to his purchase of the anthrax vaccine facility. “It has on occasion been rumored that the decision to inoculate all service personnel was made to benefit BioPort Corporation and indirectly me, presumably because of my past associations with the military and the administration,” Crowe told the House Committee on Government Reform in October 1999. “If this charge were not so ridiculous, it would be offensive. It outrageously exaggerates my influence. Let me be completely clear. I never, repeat never, solicited any official of this administration to install or promote a mandatory inoculation program.”

Despite the Pentagon’s decision to require anthrax vaccination for all troops, which clearly could have been lucrative for the new firm, BioPort was struggling. Only three months after their acquisition of MBPI, El-Hibri and Crowe were prevented from shipping any new vaccine, by a scathing FDA inspection that found over 40 items wrong with the plant, the vaccine, its consistency, the firm’s accounting, and other problems. Indeed, by September 1999, BioPort was already appealing to the DoD for relief from a contract requesting BioPort’s delivery of some 8 million doses of anthrax vaccine. It simply could not deliver, and certainly not at that price.

A Defense Department audit from July 12, 2000, shows that shortly after BioPort bought MBPI, the DoD awarded it a $29.4 million contract to supply 8.7 million doses of anthrax vaccine at the price of $4.36 a dose. But a year later, unable to ship product, BioPort requested and the DoD granted $24.1 million in relief to BioPort, reduced the number of doses demanded from 7.9 million to 4.6 million, and agreed to raise the price per dose from $4.36 to $10.36.

Even after a full-scale yearlong renovation of its manufacturing facilities, and significant efforts to meet FDA requirements to get its new facility reapproved, BioPort continues to wait for FDA approval to ship doses of the vaccine it has been manufacturing all this time. Problems have been found not simply with BioPort’s process, but with the doses of the anthrax vaccine already produced. FDA tests found a lack of consistency in dosage and other problems with the finished product.

The delay has prevented the Pentagon from vaccinating all but the troops it is currently sending abroad, and has forced some soldiers to actually suspend vaccination mid-process.

“Now we’re in a situation with the terrorist attack that we still have this company that has still not met FDA approval,” Rep. Walter Jones says, “and we’re spending almost $3 million per month on this company that is still months away from having FDA approval.”

So why did the DoD stick with BioPort all these years of their failing to get final FDA approval — until now, when the U.S. faces a real anthrax crisis?

“I blame everybody,” says a congressional staffer well versed in the BioPort controversy. “The buyer — the Pentagon — kept BioPort alive. The DoD should have pulled the plug on this outfit a long time ago.”

To be fair to the Pentagon and BioPort, however, it’s not as if major pharmaceutical companies have been clamoring for the contract. A reliable anthrax vaccine has proven hard to make, and questions about its safety have likely scared off other manufacturers (although the Defense Department agreed to protect BioPort against lawsuits by military personnel.)

Even now, just as BioPort seems set to perhaps overcome its long regulatory and financial difficulties, many in the industry and government are coming to consensus that the anthrax vaccine BioPort produces is outdated.

Increasingly, the government is also supporting research into a second generation of vaccines that can protect against multiple bacteria — perhaps all in one shot. The government has also turned to the well-connected defense contractor, DynCorps, known for its involvement in the drug war in Colombia, and sending retired U.S. cops to Bosnia and Kosovo to serve as U.N. police, to subcontract vaccine research. (DynCorps was implicated in the accidental killing of an American Baptist missionary and her infant daughter by the Peruvian military earlier this year.) In 1997, DynCorps partnered with the El-Hibris’ old company Porton International, to form DynPort Vaccine Company (DVC), just in time to beat out four other bids for a $322 million, 10-year contract.

Under the award, “DVC acts as a prime system contractor for the management of the existing stockpile of biological defense vaccines (except anthrax vaccine) and the advanced development, testing, production, FDA licensure, and storage of up to 18 new biological defense vaccines, including new vaccines against anthrax, small pox, plague, botulism and tularemia,” according to Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner.

Why did the Pentagon turn to the unknown DynPort over more established companies? Some in the industry say not a whole lot of pharmaceutical companies want to get into bioweapons vaccine research, because the capital costs to build a dedicated lab safe from airborne toxins are so high, and the market — at least until now — has been so small, primarily just the Pentagon.

“No one else wants these contracts,” insists Ron Rader, who leads an industry research firm called BioPharm.com. “Spore-forming microorganisms, because of FDA regulations, require totally separate facilities. Botulinim toxin, anthrax — the facilities have to be dedicated. No one wants to have a dedicated, one-product facility. The trend now is to have multiple suites, and/or large manufacturing facilities. That way, you can switch from product to product every few months. No one wants to deal with spore-forming organisms.

“Also back then, anthrax vaccine was just not an attractive product. It’s associated with biological warfare — and that’s not a positive thing. It’s not the kind of thing you want to put in your brochure. Mainstream pharmaceutical companies had no interest. And you’re also talking about being absolutely dependent on one customer. Very few companies are willing to take that risk. Any day, the Defense Department could just walk away.” But P.W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has studied private military companies such as DynCorps and Military Professional Resources Inc., says the Pentagon seems to be treating bioweapons vaccines as just another weapons system they want to outsource to a trusted private-sector insider.

“The Pentagon is in search of two things: efficiency, and expediency,” Singer said. “They either think they can get a better product in terms of quality or price or rapidity, or for expedient reasons. DynCorps provides a disconnection, when they would rather not have the government involved in some activity.”

“My concern,” he added, “is that the company in Michigan [BioPort] is actually a government lab that was privatized. It strikes me that for something so important for societal security, that you don’t want to leave it in private hands. There are just some things that are too important.”

And indeed, for BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri, BioPort is not an exclusive priority. El-Hibri, who became a U.S. citizen around the time of the BioPort purchase of MBPI, does not work out of the Michigan company, but out of the Rockville, Md., offices of his company East West Resources Management. His secretary there, Sheila Glick, says BioPort is one of 15 different companies El-Hibri runs, including some mobile phone operators in El Salvador, Venezuela and Jamaica. El-Hibri did not respond to numerous requests by Salon for an interview, and his secretary later referred questions to back to BioPort.

Dr. Zsolt Harsyani, president of Porton International, which has now been bought by the French pharmaceutical company Ipsen, and who is now involved in the DynPort vaccine contract with the Defense Department, said there is nothing sinister about the way the El-Hibris have approached the business of anthrax vaccine — as a business opportunity.

“Mr. Ibrahim El-Hibri is a wonderful gentleman,” Harsyani said Friday. “He started a charity for orphans.” A scan of the Internet shows Mr. El-Hibri on the board of a Beirut-based Sunni charity, Dar Al Aytam Al Islamyah, that provides relief to orphans and widows, and espouses “commitment to the humanitarian principles of Islam such as justice, tolerance, and abhorrence of confessionalism or sectarianism.”

Harsyani said he had not spoken with Ibrahim El-Hibri in over a year, but that the two parted on good terms. The El-Hibris divested from Porton International about three years ago, about the time when DynPort got the Pentagon contract to begin work on a second generation of bioweapon vaccines.

The former Porton employee, who asked not to be named, says the El-Hibris should be viewed as defense contractors, and their relationship with the Pentagon is not unique. “You have to realize: BioPort and now DynPort, these are arms dealers. They are part absolutely of the military industrial complex. This is their business. They are selling to a captive audience: the Defense Department. That’s all-American. All these defense contracts — they are boondoggles — and that’s the American way, to make as much money as possible. There’s not that much unique about BioPort.”

Before she arrived in Beirut, Rice had downplayed the diplomatic estrangement between the U.S. and Damascus. “The problem isn’t that people haven’t talked to the Syrians,” Rice told the Associated Press. “I think this is simply just a kind of false hobby horse that somehow it’s because we don’t talk to the Syrians.

“It’s not as if we don’t have diplomatic relations,” she insisted. “We do.”

But other reports said that rather than hold direct talks between Washington and Damascus, the Bush administration was leaning on Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Syria, with the aim of trying to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran, both supporters of Hezbollah. Rice also met with Lebanese Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, widely understood to be an unofficial liaison with Hezbollah. In both cases, the Bush team preferred proxies to direct conversation.

Increasingly, some former U.S. policymakers and diplomats, including self-described conservatives, are losing patience with the Bush administration’s allergy to talking, and are challenging its underlying assumption. The rationale for not talking to rogue regimes and extremist groups is that it rewards or legitimates them, demonstrates appeasement, and therefore sets back U.S. security interests.

“In diplomacy, you do not negotiate peace with your friends,” says former Undersecretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward Djerejian, who served as ambassador to Syria and Lebanon during the George H.W. Bush administration. “You negotiate peace with your enemies and your adversaries. That is one of the highest tasks of diplomacy.

“In the Arab-Israeli equation, people often say we have to put pressure on the parties to make peace,” Djerejian continued. “There’s some truth to that. At the same time, you have to deal with all relevant parties in order to obtain the political buy-in and chart out the common ground to make necessary compromises to come to an agreement. For that, you need dialogue and muscular diplomacy.”

“Real conservatives have never minded talking,” insists Arthur Hughes, a former ambassador to Yemen under the elder George Bush and former chargé d’affairs of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. “It needs to be set up properly, to make sure there is no misunderstanding. But remember when [Reagan's former Secretary of State] George Shultz — no liberal –convinced Reagan that the PLO in Tunis were fit discussion partners?”

In fact, it was during the Reagan administration that the schism between neoconservatives and realists on the subject of diplomacy first became apparent. As Rick Perlstein, author of a book about Barry Goldwater and a forthcoming one on Richard Nixon (and a political liberal), points out, some on the right were calling Reagan unprincipled for negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and not providing more backing for the Polish Solidarity movement. “It’s a founding narrative of the modern right,” claims Perlstein. “It is built into the right-wing characterological DNA.” With the ascendancy of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, the non-talkers seemed to have won the battle on the right.

David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, says it’s not just his fellow conservatives who’ve voiced concerns about engaging with extremists. “Warning against the dangers of legitimating terrorist groups is not an exclusively conservative concern,” Frum told me. “It’s a concern everyone had to deal with. This problem goes back to the debate over how you deal with the rise of the Nazi Party. It’s an eternal problem, and not a distinctly conservative problem, nor one confined to the question of terrorist groups.”

Yet it’s modern conservatives, both in and out of power, who openly disparage talking to the wrong people. “‘We have accepted the lawyer-diplomatic fantasy that talking while North Korea builds bombs and missiles and talking while the Iranians build bombs and missiles is progress,” Newt Gingrich told the Washington Post recently. “Is the next stage for Condi [Rice] to go dancing with Kim Jong Il? I am utterly puzzled.”

“We would love to practice diplomacy with people who are worth talking to,” said a current Bush administration official who asked not to be identified. “But you’ve heard it before: Don’t reward terrorists by giving them any legitimacy or negotiating with them. Maybe if they came over to the right side of civilization, then there would be something to discuss. There’s a way to go about these things. Their way is not the way of normal people.”

This more hard-line approach has been apparent since George W. Bushs first term, when his administration refused to deal directly with Yasser Arafat. The posture was almost a mirror image of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hard-line stance toward Arafat, and his government’s subsequent decision that with no acceptable Palestinian negotiating partner, it would carry out unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Now the Bush administration avoids dealing directly with the Hamas-led Palestinian government, though it supported the recent elections that brought Hamas to power.

Neoconservatives like Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy see their approach as pragmatic, not ideological. “The problem with talking to rogue states is that we don’t get anywhere with them,” Clawson told me. “In particular, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad repeatedly lied to us. We go, get a promise, and then nothing happens. On [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell’s first trip to the Middle East, Assad directly lied to Powell about whether Iraqi oil products were flowing through Syria.” With “three big rogue states,” concludes Clawson, meaning Iran, Syria and North Korean, “it just doesn’t work.”

But talking can be OK, as long as it’s done with a baleful countenance, and the party across the table is suitably intimidated. “As for Syria, the question is, we want this crisis to end with a change in Lebanon, with Hezbollah under a different station than now,” says Joshua Muravchik, of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative Washington think tank. “And I have always been categorically against appeasement or concessions to miscreants. But I don’t think talking to someone is per se appeasement or concession. If our attitude toward Syria is what I think it ought to be, more threatening than supplicating, then I am perfectly happy to talk with them.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of principle not to talk to these people,” Muravchik adds. “And there’s not a principle that you have to talk to everyone. There are some times you might want to delegitimize someone, you might want to give them a cold shoulder. I think I completely support what we have done vis à vis Hamas, saying that if they want to talk to us, that there’s a certain price of admission.”

There are already signs, however, that as on the ground in Iraq, such ideological purity is bumping up against messy reality. In June, the Bush administration moderated its stance toward Iran. Where once it had forsworn any direct diplomacy, the administration indicated it was open to joining in some European-led talks with Iran, provided the regime suspend its nuclear enrichment program. Predictably, just as they had done with Reagan two decades before, conservative foreign policy activists led by former Reagan-era Pentagon official Richard Perle began to accuse the Bush team of going soft.

But even as Milosevic berates the war crimes tribunal, the dozens of people who have struggled for years to bring a measure of justice and peace to the victims of the Balkans wars feel a profound satisfaction — tinged with disbelief — that they have lived to finally see the former Serb strongman sitting in the dock. And they hope that the trial, although painful, will allow Milosevic’s fellow Serbs to come to terms with what was done in their name.

When the U.N. Security Council mandated the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993, it required a huge leap of faith to believe that a mere legal institution — operating out of a bland former insurance-company building in this seaside Dutch city — would ever be able to exert any power over the perpetrators of the worst atrocities Europe had seen since the Holocaust. Justice itself seemed a remote and abstract possibility in a world where one saw nightly news reports of emaciated men held in concentration camps; people shelled and sniped at while standing in bread and water lines in the former Olympic city of Sarajevo; smugly confident Bosnian Serb troops bullying U.N. humanitarian convoys and holding U.N. peacekeepers chained to poles; Red Cross buses full of inconsolable women and girls from a previously unknown town called Srebrenica saying that Bosnian Serb troops had rounded up all of their male relatives. Those anguished reports were the first news of one of the great atrocities of the 20th century: the slaughter by Bosnian Serb forces of some 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a three-day orgy of killing in July 1995.

But those who were appalled by the horrors unfolding in the Balkans never gave up. They dedicated years of their lives to reconstructing what had happened in the former Yugoslavia and bringing justice to the guilty — interviewing survivors of atrocities and family members of those who didn’t, lobbying governments to detain and extradite war crimes suspects.

One such person is Stefanie Frease. Currently a program director at the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington nonprofit, Frease formerly worked at the tribunal in The Hague as a researcher in the office of the prosecutor, investigating the killings at Srebrenica, among other atrocities.

Long before the world heard of Slobodan Milosevic, Frease had an experience that gave her a chilling premonition of the ethnic tensions that simmered below the surface in Communist-era Yugoslavia. It was back in 1980, just months after Marshall Tito, the country’s longtime communist ruler, died. Frease was an American high school exchange student living in the western seaside town of Split, in Croatia — at the time one of Yugoslavia’s six republics.

“Someone made a remark, using some derogatory word for one of Yugoslavia’s ethnic minorities I can’t remember now,” Frease recalls. “And it just made me think, if there’s ever a war here, I have to come to help.”

Twelve years later, Frease — the child of an American Fulbright scholar located in Yugoslavia — became a humanitarian aid worker for the International Rescue Committee in Croatia. After working in the field for the IRC, Frease headed to The Hague to work as a researcher gathering testimony, interviewing witnesses, and documenting exactly what happened in the weeks and months before, during and after 8,000 people were massacred at Srebrenica. She also researched other crimes. That evidence is part of Milosevic’s 29-count Bosnia indictment, which accuses him, among other crimes, of responsibility for genocide.

Tribunal prosecutors say Milosevic paid, equipped and was ultimately responsible for the actions of the troops that overran Srebrenica, besieged Sarajevo and Gorazde, and operated concentration camps where torture, rape and murder were rampant at Omarska and Trnopolje. But Milosevic denies he knew anything about any atrocities committed by Serb troops. He claimed he “heard of Srebrenica” for the first time from Carl Bildt, a Swedish peace envoy. And on Thursday, Milosevic said he asked Bosnian Serb leaders about reports of concentration camps in northwest Bosnia but that they “deceived” him, insisting that they were merely prisoner of war camps where non-Serbs were kept for a short while before being exchanged.

The question of collective guilt — whether Milosevic and a few other accused leaders are being blamed for the sins, or non-sins, of an entire nation — is central to the trial. Prosecutors have been at pains to argue that Milosevic is on trial, not Serbia as a whole. For his part, Milosevic has sought to portray both himself and the vast majority of his fellow Serbs as honorable and innocent. “I want to say something that everybody in Serbia knows,” Milosevic told the chamber in his opening remarks on Thursday. “In the Serb tradition, and the tradition of the Serb military, a prisoner of war and an unarmed person is held sacred. Whoever violated this sacred principle has to be held accountable. However, this was not done by the military and the police. I am not trying to say that this wasn’t committed by some individuals and some groups. But this was not done by the army and police, who defended their own country with honor and chivalry. Such dirty crimes cannot be ascribed to an army, a police, a people, a nation, a country, their government,” Milosevic insisted.

In his 10 hours of opening remarks, Milosevic has tried to dip into wells of resentment many Serbs feel not just at the NATO bombing, but for incidents going back to World War II. In his testimony, as during his 10-year reign over Serbia, Milosevic has repeatedly compared NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia to the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia during World War II, in which 2 million Yugoslavs were killed, most at the hands of other Yugoslavs. A detailed accounting by Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, estimates that stray NATO bombs accidentally killed some 500 Serbs and ethnic Albanian civilians during its 1999 air war.

How well are Milosevic’s remarks playing in Serbia? Bogdan Ivanisevic, a Serbian Balkans researcher for Human Rights Watch, is watching the trial from Belgrade, the capital of the country Milosevic ruled for more than a decade, and which saw massive protests a year and a half ago demanding he step down. Ivanisevic says it’s hard to gauge what ordinary people in Serbia make of Milosevic’s statements at his trial. But he says that at some level, Serbs know about some of the crimes committed during the wars, and that Milosevic is not being truthful in his account.

“Milosevic has been saying [at his trial] that NATO deliberately tried to kill as many Serb civilians as possible,” Ivanisevic — who risked his safety to count the bodies of those killed by NATO bombs — cites as an example. “Nobody could believe that crap. People [in Serbia] know that if that were true, thousands of people would be dead, instead of just a few hundred.

“Any person with any intelligence and decency is not really going to put full faith in Milosevic’s words,” Ivanisevic says. “But now of course, when Milosevic shows those photos [of people killed by NATO bombs], some people are going to be angry. People here don’t like NATO.

“But the way Milosevic goes on for hours and hours, this is counterproductive,” Ivanisevic continued. “A few words, a few photos would suffice. Now it continues, it goes on and on, and first of all, it’s boring. Second of all, a person here can ask himself, ‘is this guy normal, showing all these corpses?’”

Ivanisevic says there’s a third element that weakens Milosevic’s attempt to make Serbs feel like they are on trial with him for war crimes: Despite Milosevic’s years of propaganda and control of the media, Serbs know that some of what he says is not true. In particular, Ivanisevic says, they know that Serbian forces and police deliberately evicted Kosovo Albanians from the province in 1999 — although Milosevic insisted at the trial that they fled NATO bombs. (This is also the position held by the American leftist Noam Chomsky.)

“They know Albanians didn’t just leave because of NATO bombs,” Ivanisevic says. “My [relative] who hates NATO, who is a Serbian nationalist, will only watch the parts of the trial where Milosevic speaks. But when I asked him about the forced deportation of Albanians, does he think that’s a crime, he says, ‘Well, they were not killed, just deported.’ But when I ask him about the deportation of Serbs from Croatia, he thinks it’s a crime, and that’s a whole different context. But the significant thing is that my relative didn’t deny the Albanians were deported. He knows.”

Ivanisevic says the analysts and journalists commenting on the Milosevic trial for Serbian television are surprisingly balanced — a stark contrast from the days when Milosevic held the country’s media in an iron grip, permitting almost no coverage of the Serbian opposition or the wartime suffering of non-Serbs.

For her part, Frease hopes that the trial, by allowing Serbs to come face to face with what actually happened, will have a cathartic effect. “I think a lot about the impact this trial will have on Serbia and on Serbs in the Republika Srpska. I really have a deep hope that the truth is going to be revealed, and that it is going to have a positive impact,” Frease told Salon. “That it is going to be able to penetrate people’s thinking in a way that the nationalism, and being so wrapped up in the war, didn’t allow them to do before. And that people won’t need to feel as if this is an indictment against their ethnicity.”

The lack of such a truth-establishing mechanism after World War II — which saw some of the fiercest fighting in the former Yugoslavia — actually contributed to the myths, resentments and nationalism that fueled the savagery of the past decades’ wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Frease believes.

“I have always wondered what impact this kind of tribunal would have had on Serbs if it had existed 50 years ago,” Frease said. “Because it gets at the truth. And when there isn’t any sort of justice process in place, it’s just impossible to get over things. You need an acknowledgment; there needs to be a recognition of the facts, of what happened. It doesn’t work to bury the past, to just say, ‘Oh well, that’s the past.’ It doesn’t go away.”

Sonja Biserko, the president of the Serbian chapter of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, says while there is still an audience for Milosevic’s denials that some forces under his command committed atrocities, this trial could be a turning point.

“This trial is an opportunity for people to disassociate from the Milosevic policy,” Biserko — who has faced serious threats from extremists in her own country — said by telephone from Belgrade Friday. “I am afraid they still somehow identify with it. Most of the media is defending him, because he took the opportunity to accuse NATO in front of the whole world. But the wider reaction here is not pro-Milosevic. Most people here feel uneasy about this trial, which is normal. Anyone decent enough feels uneasy, for what happened.”

International justice activists say the Yugoslavia tribunal, the first of its kind, has been an experiment that will help them in the future, as well as in war crimes tribunals currently underway in Sierra Leone and East Timor.

The tribunal’s biggest problem, according to several observers, was its insufficient initial attention to outreach programs — efforts to explain, in the local languages and in the local context, what the tribunal is about. Such programs are installed in capitals throughout the former Yugoslavia. But Frease says they should have started outreach programs earlier. In the case of Serbia, such programs could have defused considerable hostility: People in Belgrade have tended to look at the tribunal as a totally anti-Serb institution, when in fact the tribunal has also indicted and arrested several non-Serbs accused of committing crimes against Serbs. (Almost all of them have already been handed over by Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.)

Echoing that criticism is Nina Bang-Jensen, the executive director of the Coalition for International Justice. “I think the tribunal initially did not devote enough attention to explaining themselves to people in the region. It took them years to translate the court documents into the local languages. The outreach programs were very slow in coming. It’s most improved now.”

Indeed, the Milosevic trial is a logistical wonder, with the prosecutors and judges speaking in English, Milosevic testifying in Serbian, and the first prosecutorial witness today testifying in Albanian. The trial is simultaneously translated into Albanian, French, and the triad of almost identical languages that emerged with the breakup of Yugoslavia known as “Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS).” Some 1,200 people work for the tribunal — judges, lawyers, translators, researchers, investigators, registrars, secretaries and pathologists. Although Milosevic is the biggest name the tribunal has tried to date, it has indicted over 80 people — Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Serbs — some 49 of whom are in its custody, and another 31 of whom remain at large.

Prosecutors and international justice activists hope that Milosevic will not be the last powerful figure to be brought to justice. They are encouraged by growing signs from Belgrade that it may at last hand over the Bosnian Serb general accused of orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre, Ratko Mladic. And on Friday, chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte skipped Milosevic’s testimony to go to the Bosnian Serb capital, Banja Luka, to press yet again for the arrest and extradition of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic. Both Karadzic and Mladic are indicted for genocide at Srebrenica, and for crimes against humanity.

Some of the more utopian of those who backed the idea of the tribunal back in 1993 believed that its very existence would serve as a deterrent to further atrocities. Those hopes have been dashed. But Milosevic’s presence in the dock these past two weeks has offered a lesson for leaders the world over who believe that power itself guarantees that they can act with impunity.

“I challenge the very legality of this tribunal,” Milosevic said, speaking from his bulletproof glass-enclosed trial chamber, flanked by two policemen. “This tribunal does not have the competence to try me. My extradition violated the constitution of Serbia and Yugoslavia.”

“You have failed to take this into account,” Milosevic told the presiding judge, Richard May, referring to his extradition here by Belgrade authorities on June 28 of last year. “You are duty bound to call hearings into my unlawful arrest. I was brought here on the basis of a crime being committed.”

Milosevic also accused the court of being biased against him.

“Your prosecutors have already proclaimed my sentence and judgment,” Milosevic said. “Your prosecution has orchestrated a parallel trial of me through the media — a parallel lynch process.”

After listening to his protests for a few minutes, Judge May interrupted Milosevic to say the court had already considered his arguments, made in several pretrial hearings, and dismissed them.

“Your views about the tribunal are completely irrelevant,” May, a British jurist, said, adding that the court had responded in writing to Milosevic’s earlier demands that the court review the legality of his arrest and extradition, but Milosevic has refused “to bother” to read any of the court documents, including even the indictments against him.

Milosevic’s comments came after prosecuting attorneys had finished their own lengthy presentation, displaying before the court a gruesome gallery of images and descriptions from the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. The court heard and saw evidence of forced expulsions by Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police; mass killings of men, women and children; rape of Muslim and Albanian women; and the destruction of mosques, homes and livestock — all aimed at “cleansing” parts of the Balkans of the non-Serbian. Prosecutors also charged today that war-crimes investigators in Kosovo had discovered a systematic effort by Serbian forces to cover up massacres by digging up many of the bodies of those they killed, removing them in refrigerator trucks, and reburying them in mass graves in Serbia. In the months since Milosevic was removed from power in October 2000, the new authorities in Belgrade have discovered the bodies of hundreds of murdered Kosovars in mass graves on Yugoslav army bases near Belgrade’s airport and in a refrigerator truck dumped in the Danube River in eastern Serbia.

Prosecuting attorney Dirk Ryneveld described what happened after Yugoslav soldiers and Serb police surrounded one extended family’s compound in the Kosovo village of Meja, near the southwestern Serbian city of Djakovica, in April 1999.

“Women and children were sheltering in the basement,” Ryneveld told the court, displaying an aerial photograph of the village and pointing out the building under which the women and children hid. “Armed men came and ordered them upstairs. One gunman shot the group of 17 women and 10 children. But one child, a 10-year-old boy, survived. He could see that his sister was alive too, under his mother’s body, and he could hear her calling to him. But because the boy was shot, he was unable to lift his mother’s body to save his sister. Serb soldiers set fire to that house.

“Imagine this boy’s agony,” Ryneveld said, “knowing that his sister was being burnt alive. That gruesome night, that boy saw his mother, all his sisters, his two aunts, his cousins, and their friends murdered.”

As Ryneveld spoke of the killings at Meja, Milosevic looked on, without the slightest trace of emotion or concern. Indeed, at points during the prosecution’s testimony today, he could be seen yawning into the back of his hand. During the prosecution’s showing of a video made by a doctor who had survived a massacre of 127 Kosovars in the village of Izbica, Milosevic seemed to be looking down, as if he were refusing to see the grim pictures of dead elderly men, women and children, some with their walking sticks and canes next to their bodies, splayed out in a field.

Ryneveld also described how eight bodies, out of of 340 people reported missing from the village of Meja, were later discovered in a mass grave near Belgrade.

“So piece by piece, the jigsaw puzzle is becoming clearer,” Ryneveld continued. “Kosovar civilians were murdered and buried. Then an organized attempt was made to move the bodies and put them elsewhere.”

Ryneveld showed the courtroom a photo of a white refrigerated truck that was found by a Serbian policeman, sunk in the Danube River in eastern Serbia, filled with 80 bodies of Kosovar Albanians. In the photo, one can see the shoes of corpses hanging out the back of the truck doors.

“This evidence points to an attempted coverup, to hide the bodies ‘where they won’t be found,’” declared Ryneveld. “The architects of this coverup failed miserably.”

Ryneveld also described the alleged massacre of 47 members of the Berisha family of the Kosovar village of Suva Reka on March 26, 1999. “Their ages ranged from 12 months old to 81 years old. One of those killed was a 24-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant.”

Prosecutors also asserted today that Serbian forces under Milosevic’s command engaged in a much more systematic practice of rape than had previously been reported in Kosovo. The reason this has not been widely reported, Ryneveld suggested, is due to the tremendous stigma the rape victims felt in their communities. “Some women and girls have not told their families,” Ryneveld said, describing how the court would protect the identities of some rape victims who testify. “It takes great courage for them to come forward”

In one case, Ryneveld said, “Witnesses described how soldiers executed a group of 17 Kosovar men, and then selected some 50 women and girls, who were raped in front of the rest of the group.”

In another case described by the prosecution, eight women and girls who had been kept in a shed by Yugoslav army soldiers were found dead at the bottom of the village well.

Ryneveld said the rapes, like the widespread destruction of mosques and other monuments to Albanian culture that took place during the war, were a form of systematic ethnic and religious persecution against Albanians practiced by Yugoslav forces.

But if prosecutors hoped Milosevic’s defiant posture would be shaken by the grisly evidence of his forces’ crimes, they were disappointed. Milosevic did not acknowledge a single point made by the prosecution over the past two days, and instead continued to insist that the trial itself was illegal.

Instead of defending himself against the 66 charges of war crimes that U.N. prosecutors have leveled against him, Milosevic, who has refused to appoint a defense lawyer and insisted upon defending himself, has signaled that he plans to attempt to try NATO and the West in his trial.

Zdendko Tomanovic, a Serbian legal advisor to Milosevic, told journalists after the proceedings today that the accused war criminal would open his defense tomorrow by playing a videotape “showing what really happened in Yugoslavia for the past 10 years.” Milosevic and his supporters contend that he is being persecuted by the international community because he attempted to defend Yugoslavia from Western aggression and attempts to break up and overrun the country.

While Serbs overthrew Milosevic in October 2000 after he refused to accept his loss in presidential elections, many in his homeland agree with his claim that the West and the war crimes tribunal are biased against the Serbs, and that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a war crime in itself. Many of Milosevic’s statements to date seem intended to win sympathy from Serbs back home, rather than to advance his legal defense.

Milosevic also has drawn defenders to his trial here from the West, including a group associated with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is a longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy; Jacques Verges, the French former lawyer for the accused Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie; and Canadian attorney Christopher Black. The motley group has held a series of press conferences in this sleepy Dutch city, claiming some of the video footage the prosecution has shown, such as pictures of emaciated Bosnian Muslim men allegedly held by Bosnian Serb troops at Trnopolje concentration camp in 1992, are fakes.

But human rights groups attending the trial claim Milosevic’s refusal to acknowledge the charges laid against him could backfire.

“Milosevic’s tirades will grow tiresome in the face of the evidence,” said Richard Dicker, director of international justice programs for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization. Dicker is in The Hague observing the trial. “If all Milosevic can do is say, ‘I am here illegally and I am a victim of NATO,’ if he can’t do any better than that in the face of this horrific evidence of human carnage, then I think that will boomerang on him. Because at the end of the day, people are going to be asking, ‘Why doesn’t this guy have anything to say about the evidence being presented against him?’”

Dicker also says there is no substance to Milosevic’s allegation that the U.N. war crimes court is illegitimate. “This court was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993. It is clearly part of the Security Council’s authority to maintain international peace and security — and establish this kind of court. Under international law, the authorities of Yugoslavia, as a member state of the United Nations, had an overriding obligation to cooperate with this court.”

“I think part of the picture Milosevic is trying to paint — that here he is in the courtroom, all by himself, with this team of four prosecutors all focusing on him, and, my gosh, he’s the poor David to this Goliath — nothing could be further from reality,” Dicker added. “He’s in there by himself because he made the decision he did not want legal counsel. He chose to represent himself because he realized that he might convey a more sympathetic image to public opinion in Belgrade.”

Political analysts in Belgrade have long observed that Milosevic is a brilliant tactician, but a disastrous strategist. In this case too, as in previous wars, Milosevic seems intent on winning some early public relations battles, but doing little to contribute to his long-term defense. Like the Balkans wars he’s accused of inciting, Milosevic seems determined to take on the international institutions he decries as illegitimate, only to ultimately concede no contest.

“We should just pause to recall the daily scenes of grief and suffering that came to define armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia,” Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), told the trial chamber. “The events themselves were notorious, and a new term, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ came into common use in our language. Some of the incidents revealed almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare.

“The Chamber will now begin the trial of this man for the wrongs he is said to have done — to the people of his own country and to his neighbors,” Del Ponte said. “How simple that statement is to make today, and yet how remarkable it is that I am able to speak them here. Today, as never before, we see international justice in action.”

Del Ponte told the court that the 66 counts of war crimes against Milosevic, ranging from crimes against humanity to genocide to violations of the Geneva conventions, are not “local affairs,” and their prosecution belongs in a world court.

“Crimes of [this] magnitude affect all of us throughout the world,” Del Ponte said, as Milosevic, in a navy suit with his white hair cut short and brushed back from his face, looked on. “These crimes touch every one of us, wherever we live, because they offend against our deepest principles of human rights and human dignity. This Tribunal, and this trial in particular, give the most powerful demonstration that no one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice.”

Del Ponte, a Swiss, and her fellow prosecutor, British lawyer Geoffrey Nice, allege that Milosevic deliberately fanned the flames of ethnic nationalism and fear that contributed to Yugoslavia’s violent breakup. Further, they claimed today, Milosevic was both aware of and refused to halt the savage behavior of troops, police and paramilitaries under his de facto and official control who committed genocide, crimes against humanity, the willful destruction of property and ethnic cleansing.

As prosecutors laid out the scope of their case against Milosevic today, they emphasized that the trial will be an opportunity for survivors of atrocities to tell their stories, and give voice to the tens of thousands who didn’t survive to testify.

Some 200,000 people were killed in wars that began in Croatia in 1991, continued in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and erupted in Kosovo in 1999. Many hundreds of thousands were forced to flee as refugees. Houses were burned, women were raped, ethnic minorities were forced to flee their homes and many thousands of civilians were massacred.

“In 1992, in Visegrad, Bosnia, a young woman, heavily pregnant, found the town taken over by Yugoslav soldiers,” Nice told the courtroom today. “Because of what was happening, she and many other people took to the woods at night, indeed she gave birth to her daughter in the woods at night. And it would appear from evidence we do have, that she gave that daughter a name. But we can’t tell you what the name is. In due course, that woman, her baby and many others including some 45 members of her extended family were taken to a house that had been prepared for them, with petrol on its carpets. They were burnt alive. And the baby’s screams were heard for some two hours before it too succumbed.

“And so,” Nice continued, “that is one crime to represent the thousands killed in the Bosnian conflict.”

In her speech to the chamber, Del Ponte emphasized that the victims should be the focus of the trial. “Your Honors, while I bring the indictments as Prosecutor in the international public interest, I do not mean to ignore the victims of the crimes committed during the conflicts,” del Ponte said. “Many victims cannot come before you because they did not survive. Nor is it possible, in the proof of crimes on such a scale as those in the indictments, for any prosecutor to bring all the surviving witnesses to give evidence in court.”

Del Ponte also made a crucial legal distinction between Milosevic the individual, and Serbia, the nation and its people. “The accused in this case is charged as an individual,” she said. “No state or organization is on trial here today: The indictments do not accuse an entire people of being collectively guilty of the crimes, even the crime of genocide … Collective guilt forms no part of the prosecution case, it is not the law of the Tribunal, and I make it clear that I reject the very notion.”

Her remarks seemed intended to forestall Milosevic’s likely argument that the trial is really against Serbia, as well as being directed at those Serbs who, although they overthrew Milosevic in a peaceful revolution in October 2000, believe that the Hague Tribunal is biased against Serbs, and that Serbia as a nation is being symbolically tried for war crimes.

“What I most appreciate were Mrs. Del Ponte’s comments that the focus of the trial is definitely on the victims,” said Mary Greer, a Hague-based observer of the trial for the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization. “I also very much appreciated her distinction between individual criminal responsibility and collective guilt. And it shows that this trial is really all about the evidence. The evidence may include historical and political perspectives. But it really does boil down to what the actual evidence against Mr. Milosevic is, not about his country or his political party.”

The prosecution’s position that Serbs are not collectively guilty for Milosevic’s alleged crimes will also be important in securing Belgrade’s future cooperation with the Tribunal. In recent weeks, Del Ponte has ratcheted up the pressure on Belgrade’s new leaders to extradite other Serb war crimes suspects, who could be crucial links in the chain of command connecting Milosevic to crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia. Two indicted men in particular, the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, at large in eastern Bosnia, and the Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is believed to be living under Yugoslav army protection in Belgrade, are key figures without whom it may be difficult for prosecutors to establish Milosevic’s command responsibility for war crimes perpetrated in Bosnia from 1992-95.

Rumors are rife here that Belgrade could extradite key war-crimes suspects here in the next few weeks. Belgrade authorities extradited Milosevic himself here last June, under pressure of a U.S. threat to boycott an upcoming donors conference for Yugoslavia if they did not do so.

The trial, in a four-story blond brick courthouse in this sleepy, windswept seaside Dutch city, is the most important war crimes trial since the Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II. It could involve as many as 300 witnesses and is expected to last two years. Del Ponte acknowledged that the trial “will certainly test the criminal justice process itself.”

Beyond logistics, Milosevic’s trial raises momentous questions about the relationship between law and politics and law and power. A permanent international criminal court could hold heads of state or their subordinates responsible for war crimes years later, with the definition of “war crimes” a highly political judgment. For this reason, the United States, fearing its own officials could be prosecuted, has opposed the creation of such a court.

As was the case at the Nuremberg trials, some accuse this trial of being political. A group associated with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, an outspoken supporter of Milosevic and critic of U.S. foreign policy who has accused NATO of war crimes in the Balkans, passed out leaflets reading “Free Slobodan Milosevic! Jail George Bush!” to journalists at the trial today.

“This is an illegal court,” said Bill Cecil, who was passing out the fliers on behalf of Clark’s group, the International Action Center. (The IAC is affiliated with the Workers World Party, which took the side of the Chinese regime against the Tiananmen movement.) “It’s a private court that’s funded by the U.S., the U.K., the belligerent parties, also by [financier George] Soros and private corporations like CNN. The judges are in complete collaboration with the prosecutors and with the arresting forces.”

From the outset, Milosevic has also rejected the Tribunal’s legitimacy. As a sign of that rejection, the 60-year-old Serb, a graduate of Belgrade University law school, has refused to appoint lawyers to defend him and chosen to represent himself. In previous statements, Milosevic has vowed to call as witnesses world leaders and diplomats such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton and diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who at one time, Milosevic alleges, treated him as a peacemaker. Meantime, the ICTY has appointed a team of amici curiae, or friends of the court, to try to make sure the trial is fair to the former Serbian and Yugoslav president.

Milosevic was originally supposed to face two trials: one for the five counts he is charged with in Kosovo, and another for the 61 counts he is charged with in Bosnia and Croatia. But earlier this month, Tribunal judges agreed with Del Ponte’s request that the trials be combined into one, in part so that many of the witnesses she wants to call to testify only have to appear one time.

Because he served as president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, of which Kosovo is a part, Milosevic’s command responsibility over troops and police that are alleged to have commited atrocities in Kosovo is considered easier for the prosecution to prove than for those crimes that occurred in Bosnia and Croatia.

While prosecutors had the floor today, laying out their case for more than four hours in a presentation that included video clips and recorded phone conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic, Milosevic will address the court at length on Wednesday.

Then the victims will take the stand.

“The victims demand truth,” del Ponte said. “This is the contribution of justice, and we wish to make it dispassionately.”

“If humanity wishes to be worthy of that name,” del Ponte concluded, recalling the words of the Nobel prize-winning Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric spoken at Sarajevo’s Jewish cemetery, on a grassy hilltop above which Bosnian Serb snipers shot at Sarajevo civilians during the war, “it must erect a barrier which is sound and sure, and truly punish all the murderers of men and peoples.”

“Only a very small group of people could have made this,” said David Franz, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and biodefense scientist at USAMRIID, who now works for the Southern Research Institute, a defense contractor. “If you look at the sample from the standpoint of biology, it tells me this person [who made the anthrax] was very good at what they do. And this wasn’t the first batch they’ve made. They’ve done this for years. The concentration was a trillion spores [on anthrax] per gram. That’s incredibly concentrated.”

Anderson and Franz aren’t drawing conclusions about where the anthrax came from — perhaps in part because the subject is deeply sensitive at the U.S. Army’s own biodefense lab, which could find itself at the center of the investigation. But conversations with dozens of scientists and experienced biodefense hands reveal a growing belief that last fall’s anthrax letter culprit is most likely an experienced bioweapons scientist. And while Franz and others note that there are Iraqi and Russian scientists with the skills to pull off the complex anthrax-mail attack, many experts now believe the culprit worked at a U.S. bioweapons facility.

Only a few dozen individuals in the U.S. possess the expertise to produce the sophisticated anthrax specimen sent to Daschle, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy and at least three media outlets last fall. There may be as many as 200 Russian scientists capable of such work, and perhaps 10 Iraqis. But certain clues have convinced many — though not all — bioweapons experts who’ve followed the FBI investigation closely that the anthrax in the letters most likely came from a U.S. lab. That’s chiefly because Ames strain anthrax, the type used in the letters, has been distributed by USAMRIID to about 20 U.S labs since 1981. Of those, only four facilities are believed to have the ability to produce the highly lethal, dry powder form of the Ames strain anthrax the lethal letters contained.

But despite signs that this should narrow the list of anthrax suspects to a few dozen people, the FBI appears to be casting a wider net in its investigation, which seems to have made fairly limited progress since the first victim, American Media Inc. photo editor Bob Stevens, died of anthrax inhalation four months ago.

Just two weeks ago, for instance, the FBI blanketed New Jersey, where at least four of the anthrax letters were mailed from, with fliers asking anyone who might have any knowledge of the culprit to contact the Bureau. This week, a University of Illinois law professor said that his university was one of dozens that recently received FBI subpoenas demanding that they turn over all documents relating to anthrax. And last week, the American Society for Microbiology in Washington announced that, at the request of the FBI, it had e-mailed its 40,000 members asking for possible clues.

A spokesman for the group said that while they happily complied, they found the FBI request a bit perplexing. “As we understand, it’s not just microbiology needed to create [the anthrax that was in the letters],” said the microbiology society’s spokesman, who asked not to be named. “You need the microbiology skills to grow it, but to process it, you need a totally different set of skills,” such as advanced chemical engineering training, he said.

The wide net cast by the FBI also baffles many scientists and other weapons nonproliferation experts familiar with the anthrax investigation, who think federal authorities could make more progress identifying the anthrax attacker by focusing on a much narrower group.

“If you want to see the intersection of the two talents — the microbiologic ability to obtain and safely grow lots of anthrax, and the industrial ability to turn it into a dry powder — then that would suggest to me that the person did indeed have some experience with the biological warfare program,” says C.J. Peters, who, as a doctor specializing in hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, worked at USAMRIID from 1977 to 1990, and later at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He now heads a new center for biodefense at the University of Texas at Galveston.

“Frankly, I find it puzzling,” says Elisa D. Harris, who served as director of nonproliferation issues at the National Security Council from 1993 until 2001, and is currently a resident scholar at the University of Maryland. “Given what’s been reported about the nature and quality of the anthrax material in the Daschle and Leahy letters, that the material itself almost certainly originated in the U.S. biological weapons program, they ought to be able to narrow the investigation to a fairly limited number of facilities. That number is certainly less than 20. So I find it puzzling that the FBI has approached all 40,000 members of the American Society of Microbiologists. I don’t understand why they seem to be casting the net so widely.”

The FBI says it is pursuing all avenues.

“We are continuing to investigate the source of the anthrax, and who might be responsible for sending it,” an FBI spokesman told Salon. “That investigation is very thorough and very exhaustive and we have not ruled anything out. We have pursued thousands of leads.”

Perhaps responding to a growing chorus of criticism, on Thursday unnamed FBI sources were quoted telling the Wall Street Journal that they are in fact zeroing in on U.S. weapons labs in their anthrax investigation. But the article also revealed a startling fact: The FBI has not yet subpoenaed employee records of the labs where Ames strain anthrax is worked with.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York at Purchase and chair of a bioweapons working group at the independent Federation of American Scientists, believes the FBI has intentionally dragged its heels on the weapons-lab angle, most likely for political reasons.

“For more than three months now the FBI has known that the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is American,” Rosenberg wrote to Salon on Tuesday. “This conclusion must have been based on the perpetrator’s evident connection to the U.S. biodefense program.”

Rosenberg has become convinced that the FBI knows who sent out the anthrax letters, but isn’t arresting him, because he has been involved in secret biological weapons research that the U.S. does not want revealed.

“This guy knows too much, and knows things the U.S. isn’t very anxious to publicize,” Rosenberg said in an interview. “Therefore, they don’t want to get too close.”

Other experts aren’t ready to make that leap. Some suggest that the FBI may just be moving slowly and carefully to gather incriminating evidence that can stand up in court. Some blame simple incompetence.

“Barbara says the FBI’s been told to look for things, and they haven’t,” says Milton Leitenberg, a biological arms control expert at the University of Maryland. “I don’t know. I think they [the FBI] are doing a half-assed job of it myself. But maybe other people would have done as bad a job, who knows.”

But Jonathan A. King, a professor of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he, too, is suspicious of the government’s handling of the investigation.

“The first place one would have looked for the anthrax perpetrator is at the U.S. facilities where people have grants from the government to do biological defense research,” King said in an interview. “But for months, there was no statement from any federal authorities naming these laboratories as under suspicion. It’s extraordinary.”

Although Rosenberg goes further than most experts in criticizing the FBI’s anthrax investigation, her analysis of the case has become must reading for scientists and congressional staffers concerned about biodefense issues. (An FBI spokesman contacted by phone Thursday says the agency, too, is reading her work, but won’t comment on it.) A microbiologist by training, Rosenberg worked as a cancer researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and as a professor of biochemistry at Cornell Medical College. A decade ago, she founded the Federation of American Scientists’ biological and chemical weapons program, which she now heads.

In her analysis of the details known about the anthrax attacks to date, she has built a persuasive and disturbing case that the anthrax culprit is a deep insider to the U.S. government’s biological weapons program.

Her conclusion is based on a collection of facts that point to a smaller and smaller number of individuals who could have met all the criteria for producing, handling and sending out the anthrax letters. The perpetrator seemed to have advanced expertise and experience in biological weapons like anthrax, for instance, and access to the technology to produce and refine it. He or she (but most think it’s a he) probably would have had to have access to the anthrax vaccine, which is not widely available, in order not to succumb to the disease himself — which means records of anthrax vaccinations, which require a yearly booster shot, would be available to further help identify the person.

In addition, the perpetrator used a highly sophisticated, lethal powder form of the Ames strain of anthrax. Although the strain itself came into the possession of USAMRIID in 1981, and was distributed from there for research purposes to about 20 labs, only about four facilities in the U.S. are believed to have the capability for “weaponizing” dry anthrax — which basically means refining or cultivating a pure sample whose spores are so tiny and uniform they can easily be inhaled into the lungs.

Even the FBI seems to acknowledge the anthrax suspect has technical expertise in biology. In the letter sent to the 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology, Van Harp, assistant director of the FBI’s Washington field office, told recipients: “It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual. A review of the information to date in this matter leads investigators to believe that a single person is most likely responsible for these mailings. This person is experienced working in a laboratory. Based on his or her selection of the Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis, one would expect that this individual has or had legitimate access to select biological agents at some time.

“This person has the technical knowledge and/or expertise to produce a highly refined and deadly product,” the letter continued. “This person has exhibited a clear, rational thought process and appears to be very organized in the production and mailing of these letters. The perpetrator might be described as ‘stand-offish’ and likely prefers to work in isolation as opposed to a group/team setting. It is possible this person used off-hours in a laboratory or may have even established an improvised or concealed facility comprised of sufficient equipment to produce the anthrax.”

Rosenberg says the perpetrator has dangled plenty of clues in front of investigators. One of those clues, she says, is a letter sent to the military police at the Quantico, Va., Marine base (and forwarded to the FBI) in late September — well before the public was aware that anthrax was being sent in the mail — that tried to frame a former U.S. biowarfare researcher as a bioterrorist. That anonymous letter stated that the writer had worked with the man, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, and had details about him that only an insider would know (although some details in the letter turned out to be incorrect.) The FBI has cleared Assaad of any possible connection to the case, but Assaad himself has criticized the agency for not zeroing in on his accuser as a likely culprit, since that person seemed to have foreknowledge about the anthrax attacks.

“The perpetrator has left multiple, blatant clues, seemingly on purpose,” Rosenberg writes. “Second letters, addressed similarly to the anthrax letters and containing [talc] powder … The postal addresses and dates of these letters map out an itinerary of the perpetrator(s) … which single out the perpetrator from the other likely suspects.”

Rosenberg also says three senior U.S. biodefense officials have given the same name of a likely suspect to the FBI. She would not reveal that person’s name, but said he is a former USAMRIID scientist, who she understands is working for a defense or CIA contractor in the Washington metropolitan area. Rosenberg says that the FBI has questioned the individual, along with many other former biodefense scientists.

Interestingly, William C. Patrick III, the founder of the U.S. military’s biological weapons program, and the man who taught the folks at the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah how to make dry anthrax (using a harmless anthrax substitute, though), is no longer willing to talk to the press. Contacted by Salon Thursday, Patrick said that he has been misquoted in the media, and doesn’t wish to comment on the investigation anymore. Rosenberg believes that the anthrax perpetrator may know Patrick, because the attack resembles a classified study that Patrick wrote for a CIA contractor a couple of years ago, which tried to predict how an anthrax attack through the mail would work.

Based on all the evidence, Rosenberg sums up her conclusions this way: The perpetrator, she believes, is “angry at some biodefense agency or component, and he is driven to demonstrate, in a spectacular way, his capabilities and the government’s inability to respond. He is cocksure that he can get away with it. Does he know something that he believes to be sufficiently damaging to the United States to make him untouchable by the FBI?”

But C.J. Peters, the former USAMRIID and CDC doctor, says the FBI’s dragnet to date is just standard operating procedure, and he doubts that it’s been a ploy to hide secret weapons research.

“The FBI throws the net as wide as they possibly can,” Peters said. “They put hundreds of people on this case and turn the crank and look for little clues and putting A and B together. I could imagine that maybe, just maybe, there might be someone in the Defense Department who says, I don’t want this to be traced back to Dugway [the Army proving grounds in Utah]. I could imagine a person thinking that. But I couldn’t imagine that the FBI would care if it were traced back to Dugway. The FBI guy’s thinking, ‘Hey, man, I got them. I am going to be famous now. We are going to be heroes, we found it.’ I don’t believe it’s a grand government-wide conspiracy.”

That said, Peters does have concerns about the FBI’s ability to use the scientific information the physical anthrax provides.

“I’m not sure the FBI understands how to use the biological information,” Peters added. “They think they are going to solve this the way they solve all other crimes. But it also seems possible to me they may be overlooking some helpful hints from the biology of the anthrax itself. I wonder if they are making full use of everything that’s known about the biology.”

And while few other scientists admit to sharing Rosenberg’s dark conclusions about why the FBI has been slow to solve the anthrax case, some believe that casting the net widely served multiple political purposes for the Bush administration.

“From the moment one saw that it was highly concentrated Ames strain anthrax, the first lead candidate should have been a U.S. laboratory with a military contract,” says MIT’s Jonathan King. “Instead, we heard no such public admission. Immediately they were talking about Iraq and al-Qaida, when the largest such facilities are in the U.S. That leads me to think two things: the U.S. government is covering up the fact that the most likely source of the anthrax was not al-Qaida, was not foreign terrorists, but was a home-grown individual. And secondly, it was turned into part of the anti-terrorist propaganda.”

Indeed, while in the early days of the anthrax letter scare, U.S. political leaders said they were actively looking to see if there was a connection between the anthrax and Iraq and al-Qaida, those views are now in the minority. On Dec. 17, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that it is “increasingly looking like it was a domestic source.” On Jan. 13, Homeland Defense Director Thomas Ridge told media, “the primary direction of the investigation is turned inward.” Two weeks ago, at a New Jersey press conference, an FBI official said the investigation was focusing on a U.S. government scientist.

It would be easier to dismiss Rosenberg’s fears of a high-level U.S. coverup as cloak-and-dagger paranoia if it weren’t for the fact that U.S. bioweapons programs are so secretive and mysterious. There is growing evidence that the programs, which are governed by international law and are supposed to be under congressional oversight, are more widespread and ambitious than officials have admitted.

Many experts are still angry that the U.S. walked out of the Biological Weapons Convention conference this past July in Geneva, after the Bush administration rejected language that would have subjected signatory nations, including the U.S., to inspections to make sure they’re not engaging in any prohibited offensive bioweapons development.

“They [U.S. government officials] don’t want the treaty to be tighter, and they don’t want people coming here and investigating our facilities and stockpiles,” says Meryl Nass, an MIT-trained physician who has long advocated for stricter arms control. “So it turns out that the U.S. did have this dry weaponized anthrax after all, and that was a big secret. But no one has really discussed the implications of this. They completely avoided the issue. But the rest of the biodefense establishment around the world knew exactly what it meant. They knew the U.S. had basically transgressed the weapons convention.”

And even if the FBI isn’t intentionally trying to protect bioweapons secrets from being revealed, some experts worry that the proliferation of bioweapons programs — some of them still secret — could be hampering the FBI’s anthrax investigation.

“I think a number of us were surprised by some of the revelations” of secret bioweapons programs, says Elisa D. Harris, the former Clinton administration NSC official. Harris thinks it’s possible the FBI itself is not aware of all of the biodefense work being contracted out by the U.S. government, because it is such a highly secretive and compartmentalized program.

Harris says she was shocked to read in the New York Times last September about biodefense research programs that she herself had not known about, although she had served for eight years in the White House as the point person for weapons of mass destruction nonproliferation issues.

On Sept. 4, 2001 — just a week before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Times reported that from 1997-2000, the CIA conducted a program called Clear Vision, to build a model of a Soviet germ bomblet. The program was carried out at the West Jefferson, Ohio, labs of Battelle Memorial Institute, a defense and CIA contractor. In addition, the Times story reported, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, hired Battelle last year to create a type of genetically enhanced version of anthrax, a “superbug,” to see if the anthrax vaccine currently in use by the Pentagon was effective against it. A second Pentagon program, called Bacchus, involved building a germ factory in the Nevada desert from scratch, but reportedly did not use real germs, but simulants that mimic their dispersal.

“I was only aware of one of those three programs,” Harris says. “I was never told by the Defense Department about the other two. I was also not aware that since the early 1990s, the U.S. Army has apparently been producing small quantities of dry, very potent Ames strain anthrax.”

An FBI spokesman said he knew of no effort by other government agencies to hamper the bureau’s investigation. But whatever is stalling the investigation — the forensic complexity of the case, bureaucratic resistance to FBI scrutiny, or a darker scenario of the sort Rosenberg describes — Harris and others say it’s now clear the U.S. biodefense program lacks proper oversight. And some experts even think it could take a congressional investigation to get to the bottom of what has stalled the anthrax investigation — especially to answer questions about why the FBI didn’t beat a quicker path to U.S. bioweapons labs.

“If it turns out that the anthrax that killed 5 people and injured a dozen and resulted in tens of thousands of people having to take antibiotics, if that anthrax came from the U.S. biodefense program, that just underscores the importance of the Congress looking into this program and getting a really comprehensive picture about what has been taking place.

“There has been no real serious oversight of the U.S. biological defense program for a very long time,” Harris added. “And I think this is a good moment, given the impact of the anthrax attacks, for Congress to take responsibility.”

This story has been corrected since it was first published.