Bomber

The House of Representatives yesterday voted 322-97 to sharply curtail defense spending by scrapping production of the B-2 stealth bomber and making deep cuts in other weapons programs favored by President Bush. The House adopted a $268 billion defense spending bill, $39 billion lower than Bush's budget request for fiscal 1991. The deepest cuts include a $2.4 billion reduction in funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative space shield and elimination of the B-2 bomber beyond the 15 aircraft already in production.

TO ALL the outraged people quick to vent their feelings toward Michael Vick and the Eagles: Where is your outrage at the release of the Libyan bomber who was pardoned by the bleeding hearts in Scotland? All this louse did was send 250 people to their deaths by blowing up the plane they were on. He got a hero's welcome in Libya. Where's the outrage for this injustice? The silence is deafening. Mark Dwyer, Philadelphia

Sculptor Jordan Griska couldn't talk for long Monday. "I'm in the middle of lifting an airplane," he said over the phone from his West Philadelphia studio, an old trolley shed on Haverford Avenue. The airplane in question, a decommissioned Cold War submarine bomber, has taken on a new life in Griska's hands. It has become a work of art, a sculptural installation for the pristine Lenfest Plaza. There, in the shadow of Claes Oldenburg's newly installed giant paintbrush at Broad and Cherry Streets, Griska's plane will rest, nose driven into the ground next to the historic Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

AS I HELPED my toddler get dressed the other day in a crisp white T-shirt imprinted with an American flag, I couldn't erase a heinous picture from my mind. It was an Associated Press photo taken Saturday in Berlin of a father and his little girl. He is an unidentified Palestinian demonstrator; she is riding on his shoulders with a giant poster of Yasser Arafat in the backdrop. The smiling child - no more than 4 or 5 years old - is dressed in a powder-blue sweat shirt. Maybe she picked it out herself, but what's wrapped around her waist had to be all daddy's doing.

On the eve of the public unveiling of the B-2 "Stealth" bomber, critics asserted yesterday that the new plane will not be able to accomplish its key mission of hunting down Soviet mobile missile launchers and could cost as much as $850 million each, three times more than the new B-1 bomber. Officials of the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists told reporters that the B-2, scheduled to be seen in public for the first time on Tuesday, should be scrapped.

More than a year ago, FBI agents knew enough to use the worldwide computer web to chase the bomber. They knew enough to link 15 incidents in two decades, to send out an E-mail warning to the 20 million users of the Internet about opening certain packages. "This serial bomber will strike again," Special Agent William L. Tafoya, a Ph.D. who heads the Unabom task force, said in a June 1993 Internet bulletin that sought information on the bomber. "We do not know who his next victim will be. " This past weekend, they found out. That victim, authorities say, was Thomas J. Mosser.

The House Armed Services Committee yesterday voted to halt further production of the B-2 stealth bomber and cut nearly $2 billion from President Bush's request for the "Star Wars" missile shield. Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D., Wis.) said the panel voted 34 to 20 against adding money to build more than the 15 radar-eluding planes now under construction. President Bush wants to build 75, at a cost of $840 million each. "This is the first time this committee has, in effect, voted to kill a weapon system in recent memory," one committee aide said.

"Grif 21, stable and ready," Air Force Capt. Mike Arnold radios the crew of a KC-135 aerial tanker looming overhead. The B-52 pilot has maneuvered his 200-ton Stratofortress to within a few yards of the flying gas station for a tricky air-to-air linkup. For five minutes he must keep the bomber "in the groove" - nearly motionless relative to the tanker - while thousands of gallons of fuel are transferred down a 5-inch-diameter pipe into the bomber's tank. Aerial refueling is critical to the Strategic Air Command's mission.

Congress should consider halting production of the B-2 stealth bomber for up to three years until flight tests prove the plane performs as advertised, the General Accounting Office said yesterday. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, also said in a report that the bomber had serious manufacturing and technical problems that could impair its performance and drive the price far above the estimated $530 million per plane. "Under the current acquisition plan, 31 aircraft will be on order and over $48 billion will be appropriated before anyone knows whether the B-2 will do its job," Frank C. Conahan, the GAO's top defense expert, told the House Armed Services Committee.

The Air Force, in its rush to add the B-1 bomber to its arsenal, bought $2.3 billion worth of spare parts at highly inflated prices from middlemen instead of the manufacturers, a General Accounting Office report released yesterday said. The congressional watchdog agency said it could not calculate precisely how much the Air Force could have saved on the parts purchases. But the GAO said "substantial" savings would have been realized if the parts had been bought directly from the manufacturers rather than from the plane's 10 prime contractors.

PHOENIX - A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a white supremacist to 40 years in prison for a 2004 bombing that wounded a black city official in suburban Phoenix. A jury earlier this year found Dennis Mahon, 61, guilty of three federal charges stemming from the package bomb that injured Don Logan, who is black and was Scottsdale's diversity director at the time, and hurt a secretary. The jury stopped short of finding Mahon guilty of a hate crime after a six-week trial that included dramatic testimony from Logan and a female government informant.

After the only man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing was reported to have died Sunday, two South Jersey families who lost daughters that day were left to wonder if anyone else would be brought to justice. Susan Cohen of Cape May Court House and Stan Maslowski of Haddonfield say there are lingering questions about who else was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Scotland, killing 259 onboard and 11 on the ground. Cohen - whose daughter Theodora, 20, a Syracuse University theater major, was among the dead - worries that the U.S. and British governments will see the death of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi as an excuse to stop investigating the bombing.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer who was the only person ever convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, died Sunday at home in Tripoli, nearly three years after he was released from a Scottish prison to the outrage of the relatives of the attack's 270 victims. He was 60. Scotland released Megrahi on Aug. 20, 2009, on compassionate grounds, allowing him to return home to die after he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. At the time, doctors predicted he had only three months to live.

WASHINGTON - The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Monday. The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. This new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger's underwear, but this time al-Qaeda developed a more refined detonation system, U.S. officials said.

LAGOS, Nigeria - A suicide car bomber detonated his explosives Sunday morning on a busy road after apparently turning away from attacking Nigerian churches holding Easter services, killing at least 38 people in a massive blast that rattled a city long at the center of religious, ethnic, and political violence in the nation. The blast struck Kaduna, the capital of Kaduna state, leaving charred motorcycles and debris strewn across a major road in the city where many gather to eat at informal restaurants and buy black-market gasoline.

LOS ANGELES - Calling it unreasonably lenient, a federal appeals court Monday overturned a 22-year prison sentence for "millennium bomber" Ahmed Ressam, who was stopped with a carload of explosive materials before he could kill people at Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. In a 7-4 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the government's appeal and sent the case back to a federal judge in Seattle for resentencing for a third time. The court, which has some of the nation's most liberal judges, said that Ressam's plot to blow up the airport on New Year's Eve 1999 was "horrific" and intended to intimidate the nation and the world.

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber detonated his car Sunday as a group of police recruits left their academy in Baghdad, killing 20 in the latest strike on security officials that angry residents blamed on political feuding that is roiling Iraq. Police said the bomber was waiting on the street outside the fortified academy near the Interior Ministry in the Iraqi capital. As the recruits left the compound's security barriers about 1 p.m. and walked into the road, police said, the bomber drove toward them and blew up his car. "We heard a big explosion, and the windows of the room shattered," said Haider Mohammed, 44, an employee in the nearby Police Sports Club.

DETROIT - Defiantly declaring "a day of victory," a Nigerian man was given a mandatory life sentence Thursday for trying to blow up a packed jetliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear. People aboard the flight testified that the failed attack had disturbed their sleep and travels for more than two years. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was the same remorseless man who four months ago pleaded guilty to all charges related to Northwest Airlines Flight 253. He seemed to relish the mandatory sentence and defended his actions as rooted in the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

DETROIT - A Nigerian man on a suicide mission for al Qaeda was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for trying to blow up an international flight with a bomb in his underwear as the plane approached Detroit on Christmas 2009. The mandatory punishment for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the well-educated son of a wealthy banker, was never in doubt after he surprised the courtroom and pleaded guilty to all charges on the second day of trial last fall. Abdulmutallab sat with his hands folded under his chin, leaning back in his chair as the sentence was announced.

ALEPPO, Syria - Two suicide car bombers struck security compounds in Aleppo on Friday, killing 28 people, Syrian officials said, bringing significant violence for the first time to an industrial center that has largely stood by President Bashar al-Assad during the 11-month uprising. Anti-Assad activists denied any involvement and accused the regime of setting off the blasts to smear the opposition as government forces pummel rebels in one of their main strongholds, Homs. State media touted the bombings as proof the regime faces a campaign by terrorists, not a popular uprising.