RDRutherford

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/europe/28plot.html?ei=5094&en=09d0e2102978e4b1&hp=&ex=1156824000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all]Details Emerge in British Terror CaseBy DON VAN NATTA Jr., ELAINE SCIOLINO and STEPHEN GREY
Published: August 28, 2006

LONDON, Aug. 27 — On Aug. 9, in a small second-floor apartment in East London, two young Muslim men recorded a video justifying what the police say was their suicide plot to blow up trans-Atlantic planes: revenge against the United States and its “accomplices,” Britain and the Jews.

“As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed,” said one of the men on a “martyrdom” videotape, whose contents were described by a senior British official and a person briefed about the case. The young man added that he hoped God would be “pleased with us and accepts our deed.”

As it happened, the police had been monitoring the apartment with hidden video and audio equipment. Not long after the tape was recorded that day, Scotland Yard decided to shut down what they suspected was a terrorist cell. That action set off a chain of events that raised the terror threat levels in Britain and the United States, barred passengers from taking liquids on airplanes and plunged air traffic into chaos around the world.

The ominous language of seven recovered martyrdom videotapes is among new details that emerged from interviews with high-ranking British, European and American officials last week, demonstrating that the suspects had made considerable progress toward planning a terrorist attack. Those details include fresh evidence from Britain’s most wide-ranging terror investigation: receipts for cash transfers from abroad, a handwritten diary that appears to sketch out elements of a plot, and, on martyrdom tapes, several suspects’ statements of their motives.

But at the same time, five senior British officials said, the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike.

The suspects had been working for months out of an apartment that investigators called the “bomb factory,” where the police watched as the suspects experimented with chemicals, according to British officials and others briefed on the evidence, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, citing British rules on confidentiality regarding criminal prosecutions.

In searches during raids, the police discovered what they said were the necessary components to make a highly volatile liquid explosive known as HMTD, jihadist materials, receipts of Western Union money transfers, seven martyrdom videos made by six suspects and the last will and testament of a would-be bomber, senior British officials said. One of the suspects said on his martyrdom video that the “war against Muslims” in Iraq and Afghanistan had motivated him to act.

Investigators say they believe that one of the leaders of the group, an unemployed man in his 20’s who was living in a modest apartment on government benefits, kept the key to the alleged “bomb factory” and helped others record martyrdom videos, the officials said.

Hours after the police arrested the 21 suspects, police and government officials in both countries said they had intended to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11.

Later that day, Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” On the day of the arrests, some officials estimated that as many as 10 planes were to be blown up, possibly over American cities. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, described the suspected plot as “getting really quite close to the execution stage.”

But British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said. Some of their suspected bomb-making equipment was found five days after the arrests in a suitcase buried under leaves in the woods near High Wycombe, a town 30 miles northwest of London.

Another British official stressed that martyrdom videos were often made well in advance of an attack. In fact, two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated.

In his first public statement after the arrests, Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged that the police were still investigating the basics: “the number, destination and timing of the flights that might be attacked.”

A total of 25 people have been arrested in connection with the suspected plot. Twelve of them have been charged. Eight people were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and preparing acts of terrorism. Three people were charged with failing to disclose information that could help prevent a terrorist act, and a 17-year-old male suspect was charged with possession of articles that could be used to prepare a terrorist act. Eight people still in custody have not been charged. Five have been released. All the suspects arrested are British citizens ranging in age from 17 to 35.

Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne.

A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality, said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, “in theory is dangerous,” but whether the suspects “had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen.”

While officials and experts familiar with the case say the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters, they add that questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time.

“In retrospect,’’ said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, “there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”

Some of the suspects came to the attention of Scotland Yard more than a year ago, shortly after four suicide bombers attacked three subway trains and a double-decker bus in London on July 7, 2005, a coordinated attack that killed 56 people and wounded more than 700. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Overt.’’

The Police Are Tipped Off

The police were apparently tipped off by informers. One former British counterterrorism official, who was working for the government at the time, said several people living in Walthamstow, a working-class neighborhood in East London, alerted the police in July 2005 about the intentions of a small group of angry young Muslim men.

Walthamstow is best known for its faded greyhound track and the borough of Waltham Forest, where more than 17,000 Pakistani immigrants live in the largest Pakistani enclave in London.

Armed with the tips, MI5, Britain’s domestic security services, began an around-the-clock surveillance operation of a dozen young men living in Walthamstow — bugging their apartments, tapping their phones, monitoring their bank transactions, eavesdropping on their Internet traffic and e-mail messages, even watching where they traveled, shopped and took their laundry, according to senior British officials.

The initial focus of the investigation was not about possible terrorism aboard planes, but an effort to see whether there were any links between the dozen men and the July 7 subway bombers, or terrorist cells in Pakistan, the officials said.

The authorities quickly learned the identity of the man believed to have been the leader of the cell, the unemployed man in his mid-20’s, who traveled at least twice within the past year to Pakistan, where his activities are still being investigated.

Last June, a 22-year-old Walthamstow resident, who is among the suspects arrested Aug. 10, paid $260,000 cash for a second-floor apartment in a house on Forest Road, according to official property records. The authorities noticed that six men were regularly visiting the second-floor apartment that came to be known as the “bomb factory,” according to a British official and the person briefed about the case.

Two of the men, who were likely the bomb-makers, were conducting a series of experiments with chemicals, said the person briefed on the case.

MI5 agents secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment, two senior British officials said. In a secret search conducted before the Aug. 10 raids, agents had discovered that the inside of batteries had been scooped out, and that it appeared several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes, the person with knowledge of the case said. Investigators have said they believe that the suspects intended to bring explosive chemicals aboard planes inside sports drink bottles.

In that apartment, according to a British official, one of the leaders and a man in his late 20’s met at least twice to discuss the suspected plot, as MI5 agents secretly watched and listened. On Aug. 9, just hours before the police raids occurred in 50 locations from East London to Birmingham, the two men met again to discuss the suspected plot and record a martyrdom video.

As one of the men read from a script before a videocamera, he recited a quotation from the Koran and ticked off his reasons for the “action that I am going to undertake,” according to the person briefed on the case. The man said he was seeking revenge for the foreign policy of the United States, and “their accomplices, the U.K. and the Jews.” The man said he wanted to show that the enemies of Islam would never win this “war.”

Beseeching other Muslims to join jihad, he justified the killing of innocent civilians in America and other Western countries because they supported the war against Muslims through their tax dollars. They were too busy enjoying their Western lifestyles to protest the policies, he added. Though British officials usually release little information about continuing investigations, Scotland Yard took the unusual step of disclosing some detailed information about the investigation last Monday, when the suspects were charged.

A Trove of Evidence

“There have been 69 searches,” Mr. Clarke, the chief antiterrorist police official from Scotland Yard, said Monday. “These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces.”

Investigators also seized more than 400 computers, 200 mobile phones and 8,000 items like memory sticks, CD’s and DVD’s. “The scale is immense,” Mr. Clarke said. “Inquiries will span the globe.”

He said those searches revealed a trove of evidence, and officials and others last week provided additional details.

Four of the law firms that are defending suspects declined to comment.

When police officers knocked down the door to the second-floor apartment on Forest Road, they found a plastic bin filled with liquid, batteries, nearly a dozen empty drink bottles, rubber gloves, digital scales and a disposable camera that was leaking liquid, the person with knowledge of the case said. The camera might have been a prototype for a device to smuggle chemicals on the plane.

In the pocket of one of the suspects, the police found the computer memory stick that showed he had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to the United States, a British official said. The man is said to have had a diary that included a list that the police interpreted as a step-by-step plan for an attack. The items included batteries and Lucozade bottles. It also included a reminder to select a date.

In the homes of a number of the suspects, the police found jihadist literature and DVD’s about “genocide” in Iraq and Palestine, according to British officials. In one house searched by the police in Walthamstow, the authorities found a copy of a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.”

A “last will and testament” for one of the accused was said to have been found at his brother’s home. Dated Sept. 24, 2005, the will concludes, “What should I worry when I die a Muslim, in the manner in which I am to die, I go to my death for the sake of my maker.” God, he added, can if he wants “bless limbs torn away!!!”

Looking for Global Ties

In addition, the British authorities are scouring the evidence for clues to whether there is a global dimension to the suspected plot, particularly the extent to which it was planned, financed or supported in Pakistan, and whether there is a connection to remnants of Al Qaeda. They are still trying to determine who provided the cash for the apartment and the computer equipment and telephones, officials said.

Several of the suspects had traveled to Pakistan within weeks of the arrests, according to an American counterterrorism official.

At a minimum, investigators say at least one of the suspects’ inspiration was drawn from Al Qaeda. One of the suspects’ “kill-as-they-kill” martyrdom video was taken from a November 2002 fatwa by Osama bin Laden.

British officials said many of the questions about the suspected plot remained unanswered because they were forced to make the arrests before Scotland Yard was ready.

The trigger was the arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a 25-year-old British citizen with dual Pakistani citizenship, whom Pakistani investigators have described as a “key figure” in the plot.

In 2000, Mr. Rauf’s father founded Crescent Relief London, a charity that sent money to victims of last October’s earthquake in Pakistan. Several suspects met through their involvement in the charity, a friend of one of them said. Last week, Britain froze the charity’s bank accounts and opened an investigation into possible “terrorist abuse of charitable funds.” Leaders of the charity have denied the allegations.

Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot.

But within hours of Mr. Rauf’s arrest on Aug. 9 in Pakistan, British officials heard from intelligence sources that someone connected to him had tried to contact some of the suspects in East London. The message was interpreted by investigators as a possible signal to move forward with the plot, officials said.

“The plotters received a very short message to ‘Go now,’ ” said Franco Frattini, the European Union’s security commissioner, who was briefed by the British home secretary, John Reid, in London. “I was convinced by British authorities that this message exists.”

A senior British official said the message from Pakistan was not that explicit. But, nonetheless, investigators here had to change their strategy quickly.

“The aim was to keep this operation going for much longer,” said a senior British security official who requested anonymity because of confidentiality rules. “It ended much sooner than we had hoped.”

From then on, the British government was driven by worst-case scenarios based on a minimum-risk strategy.

British investigators worried that word of Mr. Rauf’s arrest could push the London suspects to destroy evidence and to disperse, raising the possibility they would not be able to arrest them all. But investigators also could not rule out that there could be an unknown second cell that would try to carry out a similar plan, officials said.

Mr. Clarke, as the country’s top antiterrorism police official in London with authority over police decisions, ordered the arrests.

But it was left to Mr. Reid, who has been home secretary since May and is a former defense secretary, to decide at emergency meetings of police, national security and transport leaders, what else needed to be done. Mr. Reid and Mr. Clarke declined repeated requests for interviews.

Prime Minister Tony Blair was on vacation in Barbados, where he was said to have monitored events in London; Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott did not attend the meeting.

“While the arrests were unfolding, the Home Office raised Britain’s terror alert level to “critical,” as the police continued their raids of suspects’ homes and cars. All liquids were banned from carry-on bags, and some public officials in Britain and the United States said an attack appeared to be imminent. In addition to Mr. Stephenson’s remark that the attack would have been “mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Mr. Reid said that attacks were “highly likely” and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an “unprecedented scale.”

Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate. As more information was analyzed and the British government decided that the attack was not imminent, Mr. Reid sought to calm the country by backing off from his dire predictions, while defending the decision to raise the alert level to its highest level as a precaution.

In lowering the threat level from critical to severe on Aug. 14, Mr. Reid acknowledged: “Threat level assessments are intelligence-led. It is not a process where scientific precision is possible. They involve judgments.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by William J. Broad from New York, Carlotta Gall from Pakistan, David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
More Articles in International »

IN ISTANBUL LAST OCTOBER, an acquaintance invited me to lunch with three participants in a conference of historians, journalists, and civil society activists that had recently been held at Bilgi University. Its subject was the fate of Armenians in Turkey during the early part of the 20th century.

Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution of novelist Orhan Pamuk for speaking publicly about the deaths of over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds, the conference was just as significant, demonstrating Turkish civil society’s growing self-confidence in questioning the official line on the Armenian genocide–and the ruling AKP party’s messy flexibility in allowing such questioning to take place. Postponed, then blocked in court after the justice minister called it a “stab in the Turkish nation’s back,” the conference finally took place with the public support of the prime minister.

According to my lunch companions, the conference participants agreed, as one put it, that these massacres were “deliberately done by a small group within the ruling party.” In other words, without using the word “genocide,” the specific elements of its definition are increasingly being accepted by Turkish society.

Describing the fate of the Armenians in Turkey as genocide is much less charged in the United States. “Turkish deniers are becoming the equivalent–socially, culturally–of Holocaust deniers,” says author Samantha Power in The Armenian Genocide, a documentary by Andrew Goldberg and Two Cats Productions, to be broadcast Monday, April 17, on PBS. The one-hour program provides a compact, evocative, and visually rich treatment of the massacres by the Ottoman sultan’s Hamidiye regiments in the late 19th century, and the 1915 deportations and massacres of approximately one million Armenians, including intellectuals from Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called. It also includes the campaign of assassination against Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and ’80s.

Even here, however, the matter remains fraught. When PBS decided to follow the documentary with a 25-minute debate among academics and authors, there were objections that this would suggest the genocide itself was in question. Some individual PBS stations, including the Washington and New York stations, have decided not to air the panel discussion.

The reason controversy persists has little to do with scholarship and everything to do with the role the United States plays as a battleground for efforts to achieve official recognition of the genocide. While the Armenian-American community ensures that the issue is brought up annually before Congress, Turkey, a NATO ally with a high diplomatic profile in Washington, wages a campaign that can be presumptuous. Speaking to the Congressional Study Group on Turkey last month, the Turkish ambassador admonished American congressmen to do their patriotic duty by voting down resolutions recognizing the genocide.

Paradoxically, the importance of the Holocaust to Americans ensures both sensitivity to the Armenian tragedy and a reluctance to accord it the significance of genocide. There is also a disinclination to criticize Turkey, a valuable Muslim ally of Israel. These considerations inform the views of Turkey’s allies in the foreign policy establishment, of which conservatives constitute a significant part. Within the conservative camp, criticism of Turkey recently has been concerned mainly with an Islamic tilt under the ruling AKP, and growing anti-Americanism across the Turkish political spectrum. And, of course, Turkey’s refusal to provide support for the Iraq war.

Little concern has been expressed about persisting limits on speech, which are frequently connected (in the Pamuk case and many others) to criticisms of Turkey’s treatment of minorities, and its relationship to a Turkish national identity forged during a period of instability and imperial collapse.

As The Armenian Genocide demonstrates, it is precisely this historical background upon which a specious, yet persistent, objection to recognition of the genocide is based. In its most respectable form it is the contention that the deportations, massacres, and starvation of Armenians took place in a particular “context”–that is, amid (or in response to) rebellion and treachery from Turkey’s Armenian population, in league with Russia.

“So, if the Armenians killed and were killed,” Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the Turkish Historical Society, says in the film, “the fact is there were two sides involved in a civil war.” The argument boils down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children, and the elderly, brought on their fate.

It is a variation on the argument, made by some in the 1990s, that there was no obligation to stop the killing of Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia since the people of the region had been “killing each other for centuries.” Both justifications are red herrings, which can be effective when made with confidence by articulate proponents.

In the documentary, Turkish historians reject this claim, providing historical context that enhances rather than undermines an understanding of the fate of the Armenians as genocide. The loss of Balkan territory, the flow of refugees from these Christian quarters of the empire telling of persecution–all combined, says Taner Akcam, to make “fear of collapse . . . [the] basic factor of the emergence of Turkish nationalism.”

The effects of this fear have been profound, and the documentary’s most compelling moments come when the Turkish historians describe their experience with their society’s most stubborn taboo. Halil Berktay received death threats for being a “Turkish historian inside Turkey that has spoken up.” He argues that the new Turkish republic, launched in 1923, dissociated itself from the past by adopting attributes of Western society, including secularism, and found itself embraced and courted by Western powers.

“All kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for the young republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done
in 1915,” says Berktay, and “as a result, you have an enormously constructed, fabricated, manipulated, national memory.”

After decades of denial and silence, it took an act of courage for these historians to question the official version. Fatma M?ge G?cek expresses the confusion she felt upon realizing “you could actually live in a society, get the best education that society has to offer, which I did, and not know about it or have any books or anything available to read about it.”

This situation is changing, as this documentary and events like the Bilgi conference make clear. While my acquaintances in Istanbul have complicated feelings about international pressure on Turkey to confront its past, America has been involved from the outset. Reporters and diplomats relayed news of the atrocities, and charity appeals raised enormous sums, all of which is documented in the film. For some Turks, it was in the United States that they found the freedom, the libraries, and the contacts with Armenian Americans that enabled them to delve into the past and develop independent judgments. Of course, the U.S. government is still the prime target of Turkish efforts to prevent official recognition of the genocide.

It will be up to the Turks to come to a complete understanding of their past, and consolidate their democratic institutions and civil liberties. In the meantime, less deference to the Turkish official position would put America on the side not only of justice for genocide victims, but also of Turks, like the historians in this film, who refuse to accept limits on their speech and scholarship.

And that was the way it was.

BOMB-DISPOSAL SQUADS and sniffer dogs. Passengers waiting for hours for stringent checks as security officials painstakingly went through every piece of hand baggage. Bottles — of water, shampoo, cologne — being disposed of or stowed into check-in luggage. Delayed flights. The airports in the Capital were hurtled into chaos on Friday. From Kochi to Kolkata, the scene was much the same at airports across the country.Also, the US embassy issued an advisory, asking its citizens to “maintain a low profile” and cautioning the Indian government of likely terror attacks in the run-up to Independence Day. India, however, is treating the alert as part of its overall security precaution, terming the US caution as “general and innocuous”.A day after a mammoth terror plot was busted in the UK and with just three days to go for Independence Day, the government announced measures to “make airports in the country safe and secure”. The restrictions that were earlier placed on aircraft bound for the US and the UK were extended to all flights.Civil Aviation secretary Ajay Prasad said, “A new threat has emerged from the unearthing of the terror plot in London that liquids and gels can be used as explosives. We’ve taken note of this fact.” CHECKLIST No liquids allowed apart from baby food, medicines Only one item of hand baggage allowed on flights (except those bound for UK). Laptops or camera bags will count as hand baggage. But small purses or bags of ladies will be allowed separately Report 90 mins early for domestic and 3 hrs before for international flights No cellphones, laptops and other electronic gadgets allowed on flights to UK Hand baggage (in transparent air bags) containing passport, wallet and ticket allowed on flights to UK No liquor purchased from duty free will be allowed aboard BOMB-DISPOSAL SQUADS and sniffer dogs. Passengers waiting for hours for stringent checks as security officials painstakingly went through every piece of hand baggage. Bottles — of water, shampoo, cologne — being disposed of or stowed into check-in luggage. Delayed flights. The airports in the Capital were hurtled into chaos on Friday. From Kochi to Kolkata, the scene was much the same at airports across the country. Also, the US embassy issued an adviso- ry, asking its citizens to “maintain a low profile” and cautioning the Indian govern- ment of likely terror attacks in the run-up to Independence Day. India, however, is treating the alert as part of its overall se- curity precaution, terming the US caution as “general and innocuous”. A day after a mammoth terror plot was busted in the UK and with just three days to go for Independence Day, the gov- ernment announced measures to “make airports in the country safe and secure”. The restrictions that were earlier placed on aircraft bound for the US and the UK were extended to all flights. Civil Aviation secretary Ajay Prasad said, “A new threat has emerged from the unearthing of the terror plot in Lon- don that liquids and gels can be used as explosives. We’ve taken note of this fact.” CHECKLIST No liquids allowed apart from baby food, medicines Only one item of hand baggage allowed on flights (except those bound for UK). Laptops or camera bags will count as hand baggage. But small purses or bags of ladies will be allowed separately Report 90 mins early for domestic and 3 hrs before for international flights No cellphones, laptops and other electronic gadg- ets allowed on flights to UK Hand baggage (in transparent air bags) containing passport, wallet and ticket allowed on flights to UK No liquor purchased from duty free will be allowed aboard

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Today: Wednesday August 09, 2006

More than 40 Lebanese civilians killed at village of Houla, Siniora

Lebanon-Attack-Houla Village
More than 40 people were killed Monday in an Israeli attack on five residential buildings on the border village of Houla, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said.
He told the emergency meeting of foreign ministers of League of Arab States that Lebanon expects the fellow Arab states to help a nation “stunned” by a devastating Israeli onslaught since July 12 that has targeted civilians and infrastructure.

Siniora disclosed the attack in the village, where heavy ground fighting between Lebanese defense forces and Israel has been raging in recent days.

“An hour ago, there was a horrific massacre in the village of Houla in which more than 40 martyrs were victims of deliberate bombing on residential buildings,” he said.

Siniora said: “If these horrific actions are not state terrorism then what is state terrorism?”
He denounced Israeli action as taking revenge from Lebanese nation.

1416/1416

—> Lebanon-Attack-Houla Village

http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-22/0608074154182337.htm

Japan aims to build Moon base by 2030

Ambitious plan surprises fellow space agencies.Michael Hopkin & Ichiko Fuyuno

Building plans: could a base appear on the Moon within decades? © NASA

Japan’s space agency has provoked surprise among other space experts by re-affirming its ambition to build a habitable base on the Moon within decades. At a lunar exploration symposium in Tokyo this week, head of the country’s lunar and planetary exploration programme Junichiro Kawaguchi announced a deadline of 2020 for sending astronauts to the Moon, and 2030 for constructing the base.

The plan isn’t yet official: the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has not been allocated a budget for the project, which would be expected to cost up to 3 trillion yen (US$26 billion). But a vocal group of Japanese space scientists has called for the plan to become reality.

The dates and details presented by Kawaguchi build upon the country’s 20-year vision for space exploration, released in the spring of 2005, which began to consider far-flung ideas such as a Moon base.

The agency intends to kick-start the project next year by launching a satellite into lunar orbit. This would be followed over the next decade by three unmanned spacecraft to collect samples and conduct research. Once a base has been built, JAXA envisions a few astronauts manning the facility for 6 months in turn.

It has been almost four decades since man first walked on the Moon. “The Apollo programme is old, so the technology to visit the Moon is there,” says Bruno Gardini, manager of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Aurora project in Noordwijk, Netherlands. “But in terms of the financial capacity to build a base, we are talking billions of dollars.”

Boldly go

Gardini says he is surprised by the boldness of the Japanese plan. The Aurora project is investigating robotic technologies that could potentially be used on missions to Mars, but the ESA has no plan to pursue a manned Moon station, Gardini says.

“To go to the Moon would cost so much that I don’t think anyone could afford to, except possibly America,” he says. “The financial effort associated with it is so high that it would have to be a joint global effort.”

Satoki Kurokawa, a JAXA spokesperson, told news@nature.com that it isn’t yet decided whether Japan would try to go it alone to fulfil these ambitions, or enlist international involvement.

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A unilateral move by any country to colonize the Moon doesn’t make sense, comments Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. “I don’t think you’ll see separate countries each with bases on the Moon — there’s not that much to do there,” he says. “It’s not like Antarctica,” he notes, where countries do have the funding and political will to maintain independent bases.

NASA has made it clear that it wants to develop its own capacity to go to the Moon and back. “It wants to be dependent on no one,” Gardini says.

“Japan’s level of commitment can’t be compared to that of the United States,” a senior executive from JAXA, who wished to remain anonymous, told news@nature.com.