>> PROGRESS REPORTS?...


Iraq awards oil contracts to U.S., European firms

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, April 19, 2004
BAGHDAD - Iraq has awarded oil contracts to companies from Europe and the United States.
The Iraqi Oil Ministry awarded these companies the right to purchase six million barrels of oil from the Kirkuk fields. The leading award was relayed to ExxonMobil of the United States, which won the right to purchase three million barrels of oil.
ExxonMobil, which won a similar award in March, was followed by Spain's Repsol, Greece's Hellenic Petroleum and Turkey's Tupras. They were awarded one million barels each.
The ministry said the oil will be loaded at the Turkish terminal of Ceyhan, along the Mediterranean Sea. The oil will be transported via the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, operations of which were renewed in March after a seven-month recess.
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Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.


U.S. Marines engaged in 'silent war' near Syrian border

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, April 19, 2004
BAGHDAD - The United States has been fighting what officials term a silent war with Syria which killed at least five soldiers over the weekend.

U.S. officials said U.S. Marines have deployed along the Syrian border to stop the flow of insurgents and equipment to Iraq. They said Marines have engaged with both Sunni insurgents as well as some Syrian security personnel along the border in clashes that have intensified over the last few weeks.
The U.S. military presence - increased by more than a third over the last two months - was said to be focused on the western Iraqi towns of Al Qaim and Qusaybah, regarded as key points in the smuggling of insurgents and weapons from Syria to Iraq.
Officials acknowledged that at least five soldiers of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, who replaced the 82nd Airborne Division, were killed in battle with 150 insurgents in Husaybah over the weekend, Middle East Newsline reported.
"The Marines did suffer some casualties there," Maj. Gen. John Sattler, director of operations for U.S. Central Command, said. "But in the end, they were able to go ahead and calm that area down. I would say the last six, seven, eight days, we've had some sporadic fighting up in that area, but very limited casualties on the part of the Marines."
In a briefing on April 16, Sattler outlined the mission of the Marines along the Syrian border. He said the mission included constant air and mobile patrols as well as operation of reconnaissance and sensor assets.
Sattler said the Marines have deployed a quick reaction force that includes helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft for attacks along the Syrian border. He said the insurgents move through the Syrian border past Al Qaim to Ramadi and Fallujah. Eventually, he said, many of the insurgents arrive in Baghdad.
"It is a large border and at nighttime there's a lot of wadis and places where individuals can go in and work their way across," Sattler said. "But once they get across they still have a vast portion of desert to come through, and we constantly patrol that to either A. deter them because we are out there in such force, or B. catch them and go ahead and bring them to justice."
U.S. officials said that despite numerous warnings Syria continues to allow Al Qaida-aligned insurgents to enter Iraq. The officials said Syrian border guards have been bribed to ignore the infiltration of insurgents into Iraq.
So far, they said, the Syrian military has not engaged the U.S. Marines along the Iraqi-Syrian border. But they said in some cases Syrian border guards were involved in clashes between insurgents and U.S. troops. They did not report casualties among the Syrian guards.

Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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>> OIL FOR SCANDAL CONTINUED...


Oil-for-Terror?
There appears to be much worse news to uncover in the Oil-for-Food scandal.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosett200404182336.asp
By Claudia Rosett

Beyond the billions in graft, smuggling, and lavish living for Saddam Hussein that were the hallmarks of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, there is one more penny yet to drop.

It's time to talk about Oil-for-Terror.
Especially with the U.N.'s own investigation into Oil-for-Food now taking shape, and more congressional hearings in the works, it is high time to focus on the likelihood that Saddam may have fiddled Oil-for-Food contracts not only to pad his own pockets, buy pals, and acquire clandestine arms -- but also to fund terrorist groups, quite possibly including al Qaeda.
There are at least two links documented already. Both involve oil buyers picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. One was a firm with close ties to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that had close dealings with the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's 1990's heyday in Afghanistan.
These cases were reported in a carefully researched story published last June by Marc Perelman of the New York-based Forward, relying not only on interviews, but on corporate-registry documents and U.S. and U.N. terror-watch lists. It was an important dispatch but sank quickly from sight. At that stage, the U.N. was still busy praising its own $100-billion-plus Oil-for-Food program, even while trying quietly to strip out the huge graft overlay from the remaining $10 billion or so in contracts suddenly slated for handover to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). That was shortly before the records kept in Baghdad by Saddam began surfacing in such damning profusion that Secretary-General Kofi Annan was finally forced last month to stop stonewalling and agree to an independent investigation -- though just how independent remains to be seen.
As it now appears, Oil-for-Food pretty much evolved into a BCCI with a U.N. label. The stated aim of the program, which ran from 1996-2003, was to reduce the squeeze of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis by allowing Saddam to sell oil strictly to buy food and other relief supplies. As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, however, the program gave Saddam rich opportunity not only to pad his own pockets, but to fund almost anything and anyone else he chose, while the U.N. assured the world that all was well. (For the full saga, see my article in the May issue of Commentary, "The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know and When Did He Know It?").
For a sample of the latitude enjoyed by Saddam, there's Treasury's announcement last week that the U.S., in its latest round of efforts to recover Saddam's loot, is asking U.N. member states to freeze the assets of a worldwide group of eight front companies and five individuals that were "procuring weapons, skimming funds, operating for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and doing business in support of the fallen Saddam Hussein regime." The list includes a Dubai-based firm, Al Wasel & Babel General Trading, a major contractor under the Oil-for-Food program that turned out to be a front company set up by Saddam's regime specifically to sell goods (and procure arms) via the program -- right under the U.N.'s approving eye. Indeed, Al Wasel & Babel's website boasts that the company was set up in 1999 especially to "cater to the needs of Iraq Government under 'Oil for Food Program.' "
HOW SADDAM GOT HIS WAY
In this context, which suggests just how easily money might also have been passed right along to terrorists, Perelman's tale of terrorist links deserves a reprise. We will get to that below. The details are complex, which in matters of terrorist financing tends to be part of the point. Complications provide cover. So before we dive into a welter of names and links, let's take a look at how Oil-for-Food was configured and run by the U.N. in ways that left the program wide open not only to the abuses and debaucheries by now well publicized, but also to the funneling of money to terrorists -- if Saddam so chose.
And though this avenue remains to be explored, it is at least worth noting that the explosive growth of Oil-for-Food -- from a limited program for Iraqi relief introduced in 1996 to a kickback-wracked fiesta of fraud and money-laundering by the late 1990s and beyond -- coincided neatly with the period in which al Qaeda really took off. It was in 1998 that Oil-for-Food began to expand and more fully accommodate Saddam's scams. If allegations detailed in a Wall Street Journal story on March 11 prove correct, 1998 was also the year that Saddam may have begun sending oil to a Panamanian front company linked to the head of the program, Benon Sevan. And it was in 1998 that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, specifically denouncing U.S. intervention in Iraq and urging Muslims to "Kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they can find it."
To be sure, there is no evidence of a causal connection. But there is certainly room to wonder whether Saddam, a master of manipulation, on record as sharing bin Laden's sentiments at least in regard to U.S. involvement in Iraq, would not have been tempted to involve himself in the terrorist boom of the next few years. In principle he was still under sanctions, but Oil-for-Food gave him loopholes through which billions of dollars could pass.
As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, there were two glaring flaws that lent themselves to manipulation by Saddam. One was the U.N. decision to allow Saddam to choose his own buyers of oil and suppliers of goods -- an arrangement that Annan himself helped set up during negotiations in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, shortly before he was promoted to Secretary-General. The other problem was the U.N.'s policy of treating Saddam's deals as highly confidential, putting deference to Saddam's privacy above the public's right to know. Even the Iraqi people were denied access to the most basic information about the deals that were in theory being done in their name. The identities of the contractors, the amounts paid, the quantity and quality of goods, the sums, fees, interest, and precise transactions involved in the BNP Paribas bank accounts -- all were kept confidential between Saddam and the U.N.
With Saddam allowed to assemble a secret roster of favorite business partners, the only hope of preserving any integrity under Oil-for-Food was that the U.N. would ferociously monitor every deal, and veto anything remotely suspect. Instead, the Security Council looked for weapons-related goods; the Secretariat looked for ways to expand the program (while collecting its three-percent commission on Saddam's oil sales); and Saddam looked for -- and found -- ways to pervert the program.
To grasp just how easily the U.N. let Saddam turn Oil-for-Food to his own ends, it helps to see his lists of contractors, which the U.N. kept confidential. Luckily, some lists have leaked, and in paging through the wonderland of Saddam's U.N.-approved clientele, including many hundreds of oil buyers and goods suppliers, what one finds is a vast web of business partners that -- had the U.N. followed any reasonable policy of disclosure -- should have set off major alarms from beginning to end of the program. Why, for instance, was Saddam allowed to peddle oil (especially under-priced oil -- yielding fat profits) to clusters of what were clearly middlemen in such financial hideouts as Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and Panama? Was it wise to let him kick off the program by including among the first 50 or so oil buyers a full dozen based in Switzerland? Did nobody at the U.N. wonder about his choice of business partners -- such as a holding company in the Seychelles; the Burmese state lumber enterprise; and the Center for Joint Projects at the executive committee of the Belarus-Russia Union?
On the suppliers' list, the entries are no less intriguing. To take just one typical example: On the vague and generic lists provided by the U.N. to the public, you can see that Saddam bought both milk and oil-industry equipment from Russia. Once you see the in-house spreadsheet, however, what emerges is that Saddam bought not only oil equipment, but more than $5 million worth of milk from a Russian state oil company, Zarubezhneft. What look like diverse suppliers in various countries in some cases track back to fronts elsewhere, or to parent companies that in the graft-rich environment of Oil-for-Food clearly had enough of an inside track with Saddam to garner hundreds of millions worth of business -- hidden at least to some extent from both their competitors and the wider public, which was asked to trust the U.N.
In other words, Saddam did pretty much what he wanted, and the U.N. role seems to have consisted largely of occupying one more slot -- and not a terribly vigilant one -- on his patronage payroll.
AIDING AL QAEDA?
Which brings us to back to terrorist ties, and Perelman's story of June 20, 2003, for which the reporting checks out. In brief (hang on for the ride): One link ran from a U.N.-approved buyer of Saddam's oil, Galp International Trading Corp., involved near the very start of the program, to a shell company called ASAT Trust in Liechtenstein, linked to a bank in the Bahamas, Bank Al Taqwa. Both ASAT Trust and Bank Al Taqwa were designated on the U.N.'s own terror-watch list, shortly after 9/11, as entities "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." This Liechtenstein trust and Bahamian bank were linked to two closely connected terrorist financiers, Youssef Nada and Idris Ahmed Nasreddin -- both of whom were described in 2002 by Treasury as "part of an extensive financial network providing support to Al Qaeda and other terrorist related organizations," and both of whom appear on the U.N.'s list of individuals belonging to or affiliated with al Qaeda.
The other tie between Oil-for-Food and al Qaeda, noted by Perelman, ran through another of Saddam's handpicked, Oil-for-Food oil buyers, Swiss-based Delta Services -- which bought oil from Saddam in 2000 and 2001, at the height of Saddam's scam for grafting money out of Oil-for-Food by way of under-priced oil contracts. Now shut down, Delta Services was a subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian firm, Delta Oil, which had close ties to the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's heyday in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In discussions of graft via Oil-for-Food, it has been assumed that the windfall profits were largely kicked back to Saddam, or perhaps used to sway prominent politicians and buy commercial lobbying clout. But that begs further inquiry. There was every opportunity here for Saddam not solely to pocket the plunder, but to send it along to whomever he chose -- once he had tapped into the appropriate networks.
Are there other terrorist links? Did Saddam actually send money for terrorist uses through those named by the Forward? Given the more than $100 billion that coursed through Oil-for-Food, it would seem a very good idea to at least try to find out. And while there has been great interest so far in the stunning sums of money involved in this fraud, there has been rather less focus on the potential terrorist connections. While Treasury has been ransacking the planet for Saddam's plunder, there is, as far as I have been able to discover, no investigation so far in motion, or even in the making, focused specifically on terrorist ties in those U.N. lists of Saddam's favored partners.
Indeed, the whereabouts of the full U.N. Oil-for-Food records themselves remain, to say the least, confusing. By some official U.N. accounts, they were all turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority; by others they were not. A U.N. source explained to me last week that some of the records might be in boxes somewhere on Long Island; yet another says they were sent over to the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Especially crucial, one might suppose, would be the bank records, which should show into which accounts, and where, the Oil-for-Food funds were paid. But what is clear is that no one has so far sat down with access to the full records and begun piecing together the labyrinth of Saddam's financing with an eye, specifically, to potential terrorist ties.
If there is a silver lining to all this, it is that those contract lists and bank records could be a treasure trove of information -- an insider tour of what Saddam's regime knew about the dark side of global finance. There are plenty of signs that the secret U.N. lists became, in effect, Saddam's little black book (papered over with a blue U.N. label). Though perhaps "little" is not the correct word. The labyrinth was vast. The wisest move by the U.N., the U.S., or any other authority with full access to these records, would be to make them fully public -- thus recruiting help from observers worldwide, not least the media, in digging through the hazardous waste left by Oil-for-Food. The issue is not simply how much Saddam pilfered, or even whether he bought up half the governments of Russia and France -- but whether, under the U.N. charade of supervision, he availed himself of the huge opportunities to fund carnage under the cover of U.N. sanctions and humanitarian relief. We are way overdue to pick up that trail.

-- Claudia Rosett is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.
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KILLER GOT U.N. OIL 'REWARD'

By NILES LATHEM
Lebanese businessman George Tarkhaynan
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/22925.htm
April 19, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - In a sinister oil-for-murder plot, Saddam Hussein used the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program to set up the assassination of a prominent Iraqi exile politician, the slain man's family has charged.
A mysterious George Tarkhaynan appears on an Iraqi Oil Ministry list, published by a Baghdad newspaper, of 270 politicians and businessmen who received sweetheart oil deals under the U.N. humanitarian program.
Safia al-Souhail, a leading political figure in post-Saddam Iraq, told The Post she has evidence that Tarkhaynan is a former Beirut shirtmaker and once-trusted family friend who helped Iraq assassinate her father, anti-Saddam dissident Sheik Taleb al-Souhail al-Tamimi, in Lebanon in 1994.
"George Tarkhaynan was a good agent for them. He facilitated the killing of my father who was an enemy of the regime. This oil voucher was like a present for what he did," al-Souhail said by phone from Baghdad.
The plot is the latest allegation to surface in the mushrooming U.N. scandal in which Saddam is said to have pocketed a staggering $10.1 billion through illegal oil sales and kickbacks.
Tarkhaynan and three Iraqi diplomats in Beirut spent two years in jail for murdering the 64-year old al-Souhail, who had helped organize an unsuccessful 1993 coup against Saddam.
Although media reports at the time said Lebanese prosecutors had solid evidence against them, including coded messages from Baghdad, they were released in 1996 and sent to Iraq as part of a controversial deal to reopen economic ties between the two countries.
Tarkhaynan was later allocated vouchers enabling him to buy up to 7 million barrels of Iraqi oil at below-market prices that could be resold at profits of between 25 and 50 cents a barrel.
That means he was slated to receive up to $3.5 million in oil profits.
Al-Souhail was outraged to learn that Tarkhaynan and others had gotten oil deals.
"These people were covering for Saddam, they were lobbying for him . . . The money they got belongs to the Iraqi people," she said.
Tarkhaynan, who has in the past protested his innocence, could not be reached for comment.
Al-Souhail said Tarkhaynan spent at least seven years in Iraq after being sprung from jail and fled Baghdad days before Saddam fell. She said he'd been employed by the State Oil Marketing Organization, which sold Iraqi oil abroad, and was often a point of contact for foreigners seeking deals with SOMO under the U.N. program.
Al-Souhail described Tarkhaynan as a trusted advisor to her father, who fled Iraq in 1968.

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The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/SpecialArticle.asp?article=A11705017_1
Claudia Rosett

For years, the United Nations Oil-for-Food program was just one more blip on the multilateral landscape: a relief program for Iraq, a way to feed hungry children in a far-off land until the world had settled its quarrels with Saddam Hussein. Last May, after the fall of Saddam, the UN Security Council voted to lift sanctions on Iraq, end Oil-for-Food later in the year, and turn over any remaining business to the U.S.-led authority in Baghdad. On November 20, with some ceremony, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan lauded the program's many accomplishments, praising in particular its long-serving executive director, Benon Sevan. The next day, Oil-for-Food came to an end.

But it has not ended. Suddenly, Oil-for-Food is with us again, this time splashed all over the news as the subject of scandal at the UN: bribes, kickbacks, fraud, smuggling; stories of graft involving tens of billions of dollars and countless barrels of oil, and implicating big business and high officials in dozens of countries; allegations that the head of the program himself was on the take. In February, having at first denied any wrongdoing, Sevan stopped giving interviews and was then reported to be on vacation, heading into retirement. By March, the U.S. Congress was preparing to hold hearings into Oil-for-Food. Kofi Annan, having denied any knowledge of misdeeds by UN staff, finally bowed to demands for an independent inquiry into the UN program, saying, "I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned."

The tale has been all very interesting, and all very complicated. For those who look yearningly to the UN for answers to the world's problems, it has provoked, perhaps, some introspection about the pardonable corruption that threatens even the most selfless undertakings. For those who believe the UN can do nothing right, Oil-for-Food, whatever it was about, is a delicious vindication that everyone and everything at the world organization is crooked, the institution a fiasco, and politicians who support it fit for recall at the next electoral opportunity.

The excitement may be justified, but a number of important facts and conclusions have gone missing. Oil-for-Food, run by the UN from 1996 to 2003, did, in fact, deliver some limited relief to Iraqis. It also evolved into not only the biggest but the most extravagant, hypocritical, and blatantly perverse relief program ever administered by the UN. But Oil-for-Food is not simply a saga of one UN program gone wrong. It is also the tale of a systematic failure on the part of what is grandly called the international community.

Oil-for-Food tainted almost everything it touched. It was such a kaleidoscope of corruption as to defy easy summary, let alone concentration on the main issues. But let us try.

Oil-for-Food had its beginnings in the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq following Saddam Hussein's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. These prohibited UN member states from trading with Iraq until the regime had satisfactorily disarmed. Saddam refused to comply, and in the aftermath of the first Gulf war the sanctions remained in place. (Even under sanctions, Iraqis were theoretically allowed to import essential foods and medicines, but Saddam's repressive system prevented them from earning the necessary foreign exchange.) Reports fed by Saddam's regime soon began to surface that the sanctions were imposing severe suffering on ordinary Iraqis. The UN, then led by Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, broached the idea of allowing Iraq to sell oil in limited quantities, strictly to buy relief supplies.

At first, Saddam resisted this, too. But in the mid-1990's, perhaps because he was feeling the pinch, or quite likely because he had by then seen ways and built up the leverage to turn such a plan to his advantage, he finally agreed. On April 14, 1995, the UN (then under Boutros Boutros-Ghali) passed Resolution 986, authorizing as a "temporary measure" what become known as the Oil-for-Food program, and then spent months working out with Saddam the details of implementation.

From the start, the program was poorly designed. Saddam had blamed the fate of starving Iraqi children on the sanctions regime and specifically on the United States. Seeking to address these charges, the Clinton administration went looking for a compromise; with the Secretariat in the lead, the Security Council agreed to conditions on Oil-for-Food that were, to say the least, amenable to manipulation. Saddam, the author of the miseries of Iraq, was given the right to negotiate his own contracts to sell Iraqi oil and to choose his own foreign customers. He was also allowed to draw up the shopping lists of humanitarian supplies--the "distribution plans"--and to strike his own deals for these goods, picking his foreign suppliers. The UN also granted Saddam a say in the choice of the bank that would mainly handle the funds and issue the letters of credit to pay these suppliers; the designated institution was a French bank now known as BNP Paribas.1

To be sure, the UN reserved for itself the authority to reject Saddam's proposed contracts and his plans for distribution of goods inside Iraq; to control the program's bank accounts; and to ensure that Saddam's buying and selling were in compliance with the UN's humanitarian plan. As spelled out in Resolution 986, oil was to be sold "at fair-market value," and the proceeds were to pay solely for goods and services that would be used "for equitable distribution of humanitarian relief to all segments of the Iraqi population throughout the country."

To all this, the UN added another twist. Unlike most of its relief programs, in which both the cost of the relief itself and UN overhead were paid for by contributions from member states, Oil-for-Food would in every respect be funded entirely out of Saddam's oil revenues. The UN Secretariat would collect a 2.2-percent commission on every barrel of Iraqi oil sold, plus 0.8 percent to pay for UN weapons inspections in Iraq.

If the aim of this provision was to make Saddam bear the cost of his own obstinacy, the effect was to create a situation in which the UN Secretariat was paid handsomely, on commission, by Saddam--to supervise Saddam. And the bigger Oil-for-Food got, the bigger the fees collected by Annan's office. Over the seven years of the program, oil sales ultimately totaled some $65 billion. On the spending side, the UN says $46 billion went for aid to Iraq, and $18.2 billion was paid out as compensation to victims of Saddam's 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait. As for commissions to the Secretariat, these ran to about $1.9 billion, of which $1.4 billion was earmarked for administrative overhead for the humanitarian program (the UN says it turned over $300 million of this to help pay for relief, but no public accounting has ever been given) and another $500 million or so for weapons inspections in Iraq. Discrepancies in these numbers can be chalked up to interest paid on some of the funds, exchange-rate fluctuations, or simply the murk in which most of the Oil-for-Food transactions remain shrouded to this day.

Whether Saddam should have enjoyed the right to dispose of all Iraqi oil was never questioned. In Iraq, oil was the province of a state monopoly, which Saddam in effect claimed for his own, and on that basis was the UN deal struck. The arrangement actually helped strengthen Saddam's chokehold at home. With sanctions effectively forbidding all other foreign commerce, Iraq's only legitimate trade was whatever flowed through Saddam's ministries under the supervision of the UN program. Thus the UN gave to Saddam the entire import-export franchise for Iraq, taking upon itself the responsibility for ensuring that he would use this arrangement to help Iraq's 26 million people. The success of the program depended wholly on the UN's integrity, competence, and willingness to prevent Saddam from subverting the setup to his own benefit.

This was perhaps an impossible brief. But the Secretariat eagerly shouldered the burden, accepting along with it the commissions that flowed straight from Iraq's oil spigots. Introduced as an ad-hoc deal, Oil-for-Food soon took on the marks of a more permanent arrangement. It was a project in which Annan had a direct hand from the beginning. As Under-Secretary General, he had led the first UN team to negotiate with Saddam over the terms of the sales under Oil-for-Food. The first shipment went out in December 1996; the following month, Annan succeeded Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General.

Nine months later, in October 1997, Annan tapped Benon Sevan, an Armenian Cypriot and longtime UN official, to consolidate and run the various aspects of the Iraq relief operation under a newly established agency called the Office of the Iraq Program (but usually referred to simply as Oil-for-Food). Sevan served as executive director for the duration, reporting directly to Annan. The program was divided into roughly six-month phases; at the start of each phase, Sevan would report and Annan would recommend the program's continuation to the Security Council, signing off directly on Saddam's "distribution plans."

An issue that would later become important was how, precisely, the responsibilities for executing the program were parceled out between the Security Council--a committee of fifteen member states--and the Secretariat, run by Annan. All of Saddam's proposed contracts flowed through the Security Council, which doubled as the Iraq "sanctions committee." But in practice, the fifteen member governments were mostly on the watch for so-called dual-use items: goods that might be used to make weapons.

As it turned out, only two of the five permanent, veto-wielding members appear to have done any overseeing at all. These were the UK and the U.S., both of which had almost no direct business with Saddam's Iraq. The UN representatives of the other three--France, Russia, and China--devoted their energies chiefly to urging expansion of the program and forwarding the paperwork submitted by the many contractors in their respective nations whom Saddam had selected as his buyers and suppliers. As for the ten rotating members of the Security Council, some--like Syria--were among Saddam's favored trading partners, while most of the others lacked the resources to keep track of the huge volume of business the program soon generated.

If final responsibility lay anywhere at all, it lay with the Secretariat. It was this body that fielded a substantial presence in Iraq (the U.S., apart from weapons inspectors ejected early on, had none), employing at the height of the program some 3,600 Iraqis plus 893 international staff working in Iraq for the nine UN agencies coordinated by the Oil-for-Food office; another 100 or so were employed back in New York. The Secretariat was the keeper of the contract records and the books, and controller of the bank accounts, with sole power to authorize the release of Saddam's earnings to pay for imports to Iraq. The Secretariat arranged for audits of the program, was the chief interlocutor with Saddam, got paid well for its pains, and disseminated to the public extremely long reports in which most of the critical details of the transactions were not included.

One of the first changes introduced by Sevan was greater secrecy. According to John Fawcett, the co-author of a 70-page report on Saddam's finances released in 2002 by the Washington-based Coalition for International Justice, the UN had been fairly open about the specifics of Saddam's contracts during the first year of the program. From about 1998 on, however, it categorized the most germane details as "proprietary"--carefully guarding Saddam's privacy in his business deals. Thus, there was no disclosure of such basic information as the names of individual contractors or the price, quality, or quantity of goods involved in any given deal--all vital to judging the integrity of contracts.

Instead, the Office of the Iraq Program released long lists representing billions of dollars in business but noting only the date, country of origin, whether or not the contract had been approved for release of funding, and highly generic descriptions of goods. Typical of the level of detail were notations like "electric motor" from France, "adult milk" from Saudi Arabia, "detergent" from Russia, "cable" from China. Who in particular might be profiting, or at what price, was kept confidential. Nor did the UN disclose interest paid on the Oil-for-Food accounts at BNP Paribas or (possibly) other banks, which toward the end of the program held balances of more than $12 billion. Nor did it ever share with the public the details of how the $1.9 billion in commissions flowing from Saddam for aid and arms inspections (the latter were discontinued from late 1998 to late 2002) were spent by the UN Secretariat.

The year 1998, the first full year of the program under Sevan's directorship, is of special interest in this connection. For starters, if evidence cited in the Wall Street Journal turns out to be correct, this was the year in which Saddam's government may have begun covertly sending gifts of oil to Sevan himself by way of a Panamanian firm. It was also the year in which the UN terminated a contract with a UK-based firm, Lloyd's Register, for the crucial job of inspecting all Oil-for-Food shipments into Iraq, and replaced it with a Swiss-based firm, Cotecna Inspections, with ties to Kofi Annan's son Kojo. At the time, neither Cotecna nor the UN declared these ties as a possible conflict of interest, which they were.2

Also in 1998, at Sevan's urging, the UN expanded Oil-for-Food to allow Saddam to import not just food and medicine but oil-industry equipment, and at Annan's urging more than doubled the amount of oil Iraq was allowed to sell, raising the cap from roughly $4 billion to more than $10 billion per year. That same year, after much hindering and dickering, Saddam threw out the UN weapons inspectors--forbidding their return until the U.S. and Britain finally forced the issue four years later.

This brings us to 1999-2000, when, following Sevan's urging, the program expanded yet further; with more funds devoted to the oil sector, and with the weapons inspectors gone, the UN now removed the limits on sales. In 2000, Saddam enjoyed a blockbuster year. By this time he was not only selling vastly more oil but had institutionalized a system for pocketing cash on the side.

It worked like this. Saddam would sell at below-market prices to his hand-picked customers--the Russians and the French were special favorites--and they could then sell the oil to third parties at a fat profit. Part of this profit they would keep, part they would kick back to Saddam as a "surcharge," paid into bank accounts outside the UN program, in violation of UN sanctions.

By means of this scam, Saddam's regime ultimately skimmed off for itself billions of dollars in proceeds that were supposed to have been spent on relief for the Iraqi people. When the scheme was reported in the international press--in November 2000, for example, Reuters carried a long dispatch about Saddam's demands for a 50-cent premium over official UN prices on every barrel of Iraqi oil--the UN haggled with Saddam but did not stop it.

Beyond that, Saddam had also begun smuggling out oil through Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. This was in flagrant defiance of UN sanctions and made a complete mockery of Oil-for-Food, whose whole point was to channel all of Saddam's trade. The smuggling, too, was widely reported in the press--and shrugged off by the UN. In the same period, Saddam imposed his own version of sanctions on the U.S., demanding that Oil-for-Food funds be switched from dollars into euros. The UN complied, thereby making it even harder for observers to keep track of its largely secretive and confusing bookkeeping.

As Oil-for-Food grew in size and scope, the U.S. mission to the UN began putting a significant number of its relief contracts on hold for closer scrutiny. Both Sevan and Annan complained publicly and often about these delays, describing them as injurious to the people of Iraq and urging the Security Council to push the contracts through faster. What Sevan did not convey was that, by 2000, complaints had begun reaching him about Iraqi government demands for kickbacks from suppliers on the relief side. These (according to a recent report in the Financial Times) Sevan simply buried, telling complainants to submit formal documents to the Security Council through their countries' UN missions (something they had no incentive to do since Saddam would most likely have responded by scrapping the deals altogether).

By 2002, the sixth year of the program, it was no longer credible that the UN Secretariat could be clueless about Saddam's systematic violations and exploitation of the humanitarian purpose of Oil-for-Food. On May 2, in a front-page story by Alix M. Freedman and Steve Stecklow, the Wall Street Journal documented in detail Saddam's illicit kickbacks on underpriced oil contracts, noting that "at least until recently, the UN has given Iraq surprising influence over the official price of its oil." In fact, against the resistance of Russia, France, China, and the UN Secretariat, the U.S. and Britain had been trying to put a halt to the kickbacks through an elaborate system to enforce fairer pricing--but with only limited success. Sevan, clearly aware of the scam, was quoted in the Journal article as saying he had "no mandate" to stop it.

Apparently, however, there was a near-boundless mandate for the Secretariat to expand the scope of the spending. A mere fortnight later, on May 14, 2002, the Security Council passed a resolution cutting itself out of the loop entirely on all Oil-for-Food contracts deemed humanitarian, and giving direct power of approval to the Secretary-General. Henceforth, the Security Council would confine its oversight to items of potential dual use, such as chemical spraying equipment, or forbidden goods like highly enriched uranium, nuclear-reactor components, and the like. Unimpeded responsibility for the "humanitarian" aspect of the program fell to Annan.

The next month, "humanitarian" became a broad category indeed. On June 2, Annan approved a newly expanded shopping list by Saddam that the Secretariat dubbed "Oil-for-Food Plus." This added ten new sectors to be funded by the program, including "labor and social affairs," "information," "justice," and "sports." Either the Secretary-General had failed to notice or he did not care that none of these had anything to do with the equitable distribution of relief. By contrast, they had everything to do with the running of Saddam's totalitarian state. "Labor," "information," and "justice" were the realms of Baathist party patronage, propaganda, censorship, secret police, rape rooms, and mass graves. As for sports, that was the favorite arena of Saddam's sadistic son Uday, already infamous for torturing Iraqi athletes.

Then came the autumn of 2002, when President Bush delivered his warning to Saddam to comply with sixteen previous UN resolutions to disarm, and the U.S. persuaded the Security Council to pass a seventeenth. Though there was by this time no dearth of damning information in the public domain, Oil-for-Food rolled on. On September 18, the Coalition for International Justice released its heavily researched report, Sources of Revenue for Saddam & Sons, documenting rampant corruption and smuggling under UN sanctions and Oil-for-Food, warning of an Iraqi shift from "informal, on-the-sly deals" to increasingly "brazen and formal government-to-government arrangements," and asking how, "given . . . the world's largest humanitarian program ever, can there remain shortages of basic medicines and foodstuffs" in Iraq? Four months later, with Saddam still defiant and war looking likely, Annan signed a letter to the Security Council in which, among other things, he approved the use of $20 million in Oil-for-Food funds to pay for an "Olympic sport city" and $50 million to equip Saddam's propaganda arm, the Ministry of Information.3

By then, of course, debate over Iraq was raging in the Security Council, and the U.S. and Britain were bitterly at odds with France and Russia. Annan weighed in publicly on the side of the latter, urging yet more time and tolerance. He did not mention his own interest as the boss of a massive relief program funded by Saddam. Neither did he mention that Saddam's commercial deals heavily favored French and Russian companies, though he had access to actual numbers about those deals that, thanks to UN secretiveness, the public did not.

On March 17, with the U.S.-led coalition poised to invade, Annan pulled his international staff out of Iraq. Three days later, as coalition forces rolled into Iraq, he expressed regret that war had come "despite the best efforts of the international community and the United Nations." Describing the UN as the keeper of international "legitimacy," he assured the Iraqi people that, as soon as possible, the UN would be back to do "whatever it can to bring them assistance and support."

Following the fall of Saddam's regime, the U.S.-led coalition decided that Iraq had experienced enough of UN-style "assistance and support," at least as far as Oil-for-Food was concerned. With Russia and France suddenly willing to go along, perhaps to avoid scrutiny of Oil-for-Russia and Oil-for-France, the Security Council voted unanimously on May 22 that the program should be wound down. No more oil revenues were to flow in, but the UN Secretariat was to continue administering the remaining relief contracts until November, when any unfinished business would be turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad.

At that stage, Oil-for-Food had close to $13 billion in BNP Paribas's Iraq accounts, most of it set aside to pay for contracts already approved. During the summer and early fall, the New York office began tidying up loose ends, renegotiating, "prioritizing," and basically removing the graft elements from the remaining contracts before handover to the CPA. In these efforts, the UN got some prompting from the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA)--the agency that has been auditing Halliburton's recent activities in Iraq.

From the thousands of remaining contracts, the DCMA (together with the Defense Contract Audit Agency) culled a batch of 759 of the largest deals, valued altogether at $6.9 billion. The reviewers estimated that among these contracts, almost half were overpriced by about 21 percent, for a total of $656 million that Saddam's regime had overpaid. This was in all likelihood the kickback component, part of which the suppliers were meant to share illicitly with the regime. Dryly, the DCMA's report adds that, in the course of its researches, "Some items of questionable utility for the Iraqi people (e.g., Mercedes Benz touring sedans) were identified."

By the time the Oil-for-Food office was finished renegotiating its contracts, it had scrapped more than a quarter of them. Some of the reasons, listed in UN public documents, are intriguing. There was, for example, the Syrian supplier of "spare parts for rotating equipment" whom it was "not possible to contact"; the Lebanese vendor of "welding machines" who was "unwilling to accept the 10-percent deduction"--i.e., a price minus the bribe-plus-kickback; and the Jordanian seller of school furniture whose contract had to be dropped because "company does not exist and the person in charge moved to Egypt."

Then came the formal ceremonies to which I have already alluded. On November 19, Sevan's office put out a press release praising Oil-for-Food as "one of the most efficient of UN programs." On November 20, Annan chimed in with his own praise for Oil-for-Food, paying tribute to the staff and "particularly to its executive director, Benon Sevan." On November 21, almost seven years after setting up shop as a temporary and limited measure to bring food and medicine to hungry people in Iraq, the program shut down, handing the CPA a royal mess.

Sevan had assured the Security Council that, along with control of the more than $8 billion in funds and contracts still to be administered, the CPA would get "the entire Oil-for-Food database." In fact, the transfer was incomplete. Plenty of contract information was missing. So Byzantine were the BNP Paribas accounts that, rather than risk interrupting relief deliveries, the CPA simply left them under the management of the UN treasurer, who until almost a year after the fall of Saddam never got around to sending any current bank statements, let alone prior records.4

Meanwhile, however, the Iraqi Governing Council had itself begun to pore over records of the Saddam regime from various ministries, and former Baath officials were also starting to talk. On December 5, a British adviser to the Council, Claude Hankes-Drielsma, wrote from Baghdad to Annan, urging the UN to "take the moral high ground" and appoint an independent commission to investigate profiteering under Oil-for-Food.

Not a moment too soon: now the revelations were beginning to flow rapidly. On January 25 of this year, the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada published a list, reportedly recovered from the Iraqi oil ministry, of some 270 individuals and entities in some 50 countries who were alleged to have received vouchers good for oil from Saddam Hussein. The list was an eye-opener. It included the former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, British MP George Galloway, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a large number of Russian oil companies, the Russian state, and the Russian Orthodox Church. It also included the family name of the head of the UN Oil-for-Food program: Sevan.

Those named in Al-Mada's list ignored, denied, or dismissed it on grounds that they had legitimately bought oil from Saddam. As for Sevan, he categorically repudiated the notion that he had ever received oil or oil money from the Iraqi regime, while Annan, in a statement more artfully hedged, said: "As far as I know, nobody in the Secretariat has committed any wrongdoing." A spokesman for the UN Secretariat repeated the by-now usual line that Oil-for-Food had been the most audited program at the UN--"audited to death" was the exact phrase--and in late February the Oil-for-Food office released a seven-page statement clearly aimed at deflecting blame for any graft involved with the program.

According to this official account, the Secretariat had no responsibility for confirming that contract-pricing was fair, or that suppliers were legitimate (that was the job of Saddam and the UN country missions); no responsibility for implementing the program (that too was the job of Saddam); no responsibility for either spotting or stopping corruption by Saddam via Oil-for-Food contracts (that was the job of the Security Council); and no awareness of unauthorized oil exports (though the office confirmed its knowledge of "media reports on alleged violations"). By the light of this clarification, indeed, it was hard to tell what the Oil-for-Food program was, in fact, responsible for, beyond controlling the opaque bank accounts, checking that the contracts--honest or not--were properly punctuated, watching Saddam do whatever he chose, and collecting a 2.2-percent commission on his oil.

And so we arrive at the denouement--at least so far. On February 29, the New York Times published a long news article based on "a trove of internal Iraqi government documents and financial records" unearthed by the Iraqi Governing Council. The article described oil traders lugging suitcases full of illicit cash to the ministries and cited stacks of evidence showing that, through Oil-for-Food, Saddam's regime had squirreled away billions for itself while ordinary Iraqis received expired medicines and substandard rations.

Still the UN hung tough. On March 3, Hankes-Drielsma notified Annan that Iraqi authorities had asked an auditing firm, KPMG International, and a law firm, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, to prepare an independent report. In his letter, Hankes-Drielsma explained his reasoning:

Based on the facts as I know them at the present time, the UN failed in its responsibility to the Iraqi people and the international community at large. The UN should not be surprised that the Iraqi people question the UN's credibility at this time and any future role for the UN in Iraq. It will not come as a surprise if the Oil-for-Food program turns out to be one of the world's most disgraceful scams and an example of inadequate control, responsibility, and transparency, providing an opportune vehicle for Saddam Hussein to operate under the UN aegis to continue his reign of terror and oppression.

On March 10 came confirmation that Annan's son Kojo had held a consultancy with Cotecna right around the time the company won the UN job to inspect goods coming into Iraq. On March 11 came an article in the Wall Street Journal detailing further links between Saddam's oil largesse and Sevan. The following week came word that Congress would hold hearings on Oil-for-Food. And on March 19, having ignored, stonewalled, and denied, Annan finally conceded that "it is highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrongdoing," and called for an independent inquiry.

As the various audits, investigations, and hearings gear up to delve into the saga of UN involvement in Saddam's Iraq, we may learn even more about his worldwide net of corruption. With skill, we may locate some of the billions he is believed to have salted away under UN oversight. With luck, we may get to this money ahead of the terrorists with whom he consorted--if they have not gotten to it already. Already known, for example, is that two firms doing business with Saddam through Oil-for-Food were linked to financier Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, now on the UN's own watchlist of individuals "belonging to or associated with" al Qaeda.

But let us retain our focus. That Saddam Hussein was a monster and a corrupt monster is not news. That he would exploit, for massive personal gain, a humanitarian program meant to relieve the miseries of his countrymen is horrifying but hardly astonishing. Nevertheless, any investigation that confines itself to detailing the abundantly evident corruption of Saddam Hussein will have missed the point.

What lies at the core of this story is the United Nations, and how it came to pass that an institution charged with bringing peace and probity to the world should have offered itself up--willingly, even eagerly--as the vehicle for a festival of abuse and fraud.

To begin with, Oil-for-Food was an enormous venture in central planning, the biggest project of its kind launched in many a decade and one that utterly ignored the lessons about such systems learned at agonizing cost over the past century. The UN Secretariat, in its well-paid arrogance, set out to administer virtually the entire economy of Iraq. Under its eye, all legitimate trading privileges became the franchise of a tyrant who laid first claim to every barrel of oil and every dollar (or euro) of proceeds. How could Oil-for-Food not help consolidate Saddam's grip on power? Nevertheless, it was with this grand thief of Baghdad that the UN cut its humanitarian deal, chalking in a fat commission for the Secretariat.

Nor did anyone in the UN system so much as lift an eyebrow, even after questions began to be raised. Last November, before the Security Council of the United Nations, the organization's Secretary-General proclaimed it a splendid achievement that the UN had legitimized a scheme by which 60 percent of Iraq's population depended entirely on the rationing cards of a totalitarian state. This was an event that should have seized the vaunted international community with horror. Instead, from out of the mouth of the Angolan ambassador who that month was chairing the UN Security Council there issued only unctuous praise for "the exceptionally important role of the program in providing humanitarian assistance to the people of Iraq."

But all that is only prelude. The scope of UN dereliction is much broader, encompassing factors institutional, personal, and, finally, political.

It is true that Oil-for-Food managed to deliver to Iraqis some portion of what it promised. On sales totaling $65 billion, some $46 billion (by Annan's uncheckable reckoning) went for "humanitarian" spending. Of this amount, an official total of $15 billion worth of food and health supplies--the original rationale for the program--had been received by the time Saddam fell. The actual figure was no doubt considerably less if you factor in the kickbacks and spoiled goods; from the remainder came the equipment for Saddam's oil monopoly, the construction materials, the TV studio systems, the carpets and air conditioners for the ministries, and all the rest.

But at what cost? Are we supposed to conclude that, in order to deliver this amount of aid, the UN had to approve Saddam's more than $100 billion worth of largely crooked business, had to look the other way while he skimmed money, bought influence, built palaces, and stashed away billions on the side, at least some of which may now be funding terror in Iraq or beyond?

No, something was at work here other than passive acquiescence. At precisely what moment during the years of Oil-for-Food did the UN Secretariat cross the line from "supervising" Saddam to collaborating with him? With precisely what deed did it enter into collusion? Even setting aside such obvious questions as whether individual UN officials took bribes, did the complicity begin in 1998, when Saddam flexed his muscles by throwing out the weapons inspectors and when Oil-for-Food, instead of leaving along with them, raised the cap on his oil sales? Did it come in 1999, when, even as Saddam's theft was becoming apparent, the UN scrapped the oil-sales limits altogether? Or in 2000 and 2001, when Sevan dismissed complaints and reports about blatant kickbacks? Did it start in 2002, when Annan, empowered by Oil-for-Food Plus, signed his name to projects for furnishing Saddam with luxury cars, stadiums, and office equipment for his dictatorship? Or did the defining moment arrive in 2003, when Annan, ignoring the immense conflict posed by the fact that his own institution was officially on Saddam's payroll, lobbied alongside two of Saddam's other top clients, Russia and France, to preserve his regime? Certainly by the time Annan and Sevan, neck-deep in revelatory press reports and standing indignantly athwart their own secret records, continued to offer to the world their evasions and denials, the balance had definitively tipped.

Annan's studied bewilderment is itself an indictment not only of his person but of the system he heads. If anyone is going to take the fall for the Oil-for-Food scandal, Sevan seems the likeliest candidate. But it was the UN Secretary-General who compliantly condoned Saddam's ever-escalating schemes and conditions, and who lobbied to the last to preserve Saddam's totalitarian regime while the UN Secretariat was swimming in his cash.

Annan has been with the UN for 32 years. He moved up through its ranks; he knows it well. He was there at the creation of Oil-for-Food, he chose the director, he signed the distribution plans, he visited Saddam, he knew plenty about Iraq, and one might assume he read the newspapers. We are left to contemplate a UN system that has engendered a Secretary-General either so dishonest that he should be dismissed or so incompetent that he is truly dangerous--and should be dismissed.

The final perfidy, though, is not personal but political. The UN, in the name of its own lofty principles, and to its rich emolument, actively helped sustain and protect a tyrant whose brutality and repression were the cause of Iraqi deprivation in the first place. What can this mean? The answer may be simply that, along with its secrecy, its massed cadres of bureaucrats beholden to the favor of the man at the top, its almost complete lack of accountability, external oversight, or the most elementary checks and balances, the UN suffers from an endemic affinity with anti-Western despots, and will turn a blind eye to the devil himself in order to keep them in power. Certainly there is much in its history and its behavior to support this view.

Perhaps, then, the complicity was there all along, built in, and was merely reinforced year after year as the UN collected the commissions and processed the funds that transformed Oil-for-Food into the sleaziest program ever to fly the UN flag and the single largest item on every budget of all nine UN agencies involved, plus the Secretariat itself. That, in the end, may be the dirty secret at the center of the Oil-for-Food scandal.

And is this the same United Nations that, now, we are planning to entrust with bringing democracy to Iraq?


Claudia Rosett, who contributes a bi-weekly column on foreign affairs to the Wall Street Journal's online edition, OpinionJournal.com, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute.

1 As of 2001, one of the largest shareholders in BNP was Iraqi-born Nadhmi Auchi, among Britain's richest citizens. In the 1980's Auchi had brokered business deals for Saddam; last year he was convicted in France of illicit profiteering as part of the huge Elf oil scandal. The UN says the Oil-for-Food contract was awarded to BNP on a strictly competitive basis.

2 According to a spokesman at the UN Secretary-General's office, Kojo Annan had been a trainee at Cotecna from December 1995 to February 1998, and two months later was back at work for the firm as a consultant; his consultancy, which lasted until December 1998, thus coincided with the period during which the UN would have been receiving and reviewing bids for the Oil-for-Food inspection job. Both Kojo and Kofi Annan have denied that Kojo's consulting work was in any way related to the UN.

3 This is especially significant in light of the role that would be played by Saddam's televised propaganda during the war. In the event, Saddam may have had to rely on equipment brought in earlier under Oil-for-Food from places like France and Jordan. He was unable to take delivery of TV studio equipment ordered from Russia and approved and funded by the Secretariat on February 7, 2003, just six weeks before the war. But that was not for want of Kofi Annan's approval.

4 Not only the occupation authority but the Iraqis themselves have failed to penetrate the UN wall of disdain, although it is their own money they wish to know about. The Iraqi Central Bank began requesting copies of the relevant BNP bank statements in July 2003. Not until late March of this year, after I aired the matter in a piece in National Review Online, was there some halting sign of movement in the UN treasurer's office. Similar stonewalling--no accounting given, no access to statements--has met the repeated efforts of Kurds in northern Iraq to find out what happened to about $4 billion in separate allocations owed to them under Oil-for-Food.


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Volcker's U.N. Cleanup
The Russians are blocking a proper Oil for Food probe.

Monday, April 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Meanwhile, back at the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, the news leaked Friday that Secretary-General Kofi Annan has picked Paul Volcker to lead a three-man panel to investigate what we now know was a Saddam Hussein skimming operation. What we'd also like to know is why it is taking so long for the Volcker appointment to be formally announced.
Mr. Annan first offered the job to Mr. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, some two weeks ago. It shouldn't take this long to close the deal--unless some members of the U.N. Security Council really don't want a probe. Word is that Mr. Volcker, who is nobody's toady, doesn't want to lend his reputation to this exercise unless the Security Council passes a new resolution calling on members to cooperate with his team. Under pressure from the U.S. and Britain, Mr. Annan has agreed.
But, lo, the Russians are objecting to any resolution. "We don't mind for the Secretary-General to appoint the commission but we don't see the need to support his decision in the form of a resolution," says Russia's U.N. Ambassador Gennady Gatilov. In other words, he wants Mr. Volcker to serve as eyewash for the U.N. but without the political clout to expose what really happened. We don't suppose it is a coincidence, comrade, that Russians were among Saddam's best business partners. No word yet on where the French stand on a resolution, but we can guess.
The Oil for Food program was designed to let Iraq sell some oil to finance food and humanitarian aid for Iraqis hurt by sanctions against Saddam's regime. But we have learned that Saddam skimmed off as much as $10 billion to build his own palaces and pay off apologists for his regime around the world.
Only last week, Detroit businessman Shakir al-Khafaji admitted to the Financial Times that he received Oil for Food allocations. Mr. al-Khafaji had earlier denied receiving such allocations in an interview with our Robert Pollock, who recently reported that Mr. al-Khafaji had helped to finance a pro-Saddam documentary by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and had donated to antiwar Congressional Democrats. Another hearing in Congress is scheduled this week into what is already the worst corruption scandal in U.N. history.
A new resolution would be especially helpful because Security Council nations and members of the U.N. Secretariat have been implicated in the scandal. If Mr. Volcker is going to conduct a credible probe, he'll need the political clout that a new resolution would provide. We trust he's also asking for an independent staff of his own choosing and ample funding. And while a public accounting is necessary, we hope Mr. Volcker will also conduct the probe with an eye to U.S. banking and other laws that may have been broken.
All of this relates not merely to a "look backwards," as Mr. Gatilov dismissively puts it, but directly to the U.N.'s current ambitions in Baghdad. Iraqis now know that the U.N. and some of its leading members conspired with their former dictator to fleece them of their national wealth. The very least Iraqis should expect is that the U.N. will come clean about its sins and punish those who profited at their expense. George Bush, John Kerry and others who now want to give the U.N. control in Baghdad should also settle for nothing less.


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Texas Talk on Palestine
The president's critics attack him for telling the truth.

Saturday, April 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Listening to the furious reaction to President Bush's letter to Ariel Sharon, you would never know that it reiterated his call for a Palestinian state that is "viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent."
Instead, Mr. Bush now finds himself blasted for a "drastic and unfortunate policy reversal" that will "put the final nail in the coffin of the peace process." His move, say critics, risks "inflaming the Arab world," angers "moderate" Arab governments and might aggravate the situation in Iraq.
There may indeed be a lost opportunity here, but it's not the one Mr. Bush's opponents think. In his declaration that any two-state resolution of the crisis could include some Israeli settlements on post-1949 lands and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in a Palestinian state, Mr. Bush did not so much break new ground as acknowledge demographic reality. Those attacking him for daring to speak this frankly only encourage Palestinian hardliners to continue along their debilitating course of rejectionism.
Rather than losing his credibility as an honest broker, as critics charge, the President's straight talk has strengthened his position. Anyone who claims to be a moderator in the pursuit of a just, two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians cannot at the same time tolerate ideas that would lead to the demise of one of those states. A "right of return" for Palestinians to Israel is such an idea.
All this passion over Mr. Bush's words, moreover, overshadows the significance of the withdrawal plan itself. After three years of relentless terror, Prime Minister Sharon--the father of the settlement movement--has agreed to withdraw all 7,500 Israeli settlers and all military installations from Gaza and four settlements from the West Bank.
At the very least, such a withdrawal will remove frictions between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, ending daily confrontations over roadblocks, checkpoints and curfews. The security barrier Israel builds in conjunction with the disengagement plan is designed to make it harder for terrorists to carry out their attacks, reducing the number of Israeli counterattacks. This will be the first positive step in the region in more than three years. By leaving Gaza, Mr. Sharon puts the ball squarely into the Palestinian court.
In his letter, Mr. Bush lays out the obligations Palestinians have: to stop the terror, to demonstrate a commitment to political reform, to start behaving like a respectable government. But the underlying message--underscored by the U.S. embrace of the Sharon plan--is that the Palestinian failure to meet those obligations will have consequences in American foreign policy.
In this light, keeping alive the myth that Palestinian refugees will "return" to Israel does the Palestinian people a disservice by emboldening hard-liners and making it impossible for moderate voices to gain popular support. Mr. Bush makes plain that he remains willing to work with the Palestinians in pursuit of a viable state and lays out the terms for doing so. The real question here is whether they will take him up on it.




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>> WHAT? - NO WIRES WATCH...

Analysis: Nuke-for-energy deal for Kim?
By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
Published 4/19/2004 11:40 AM
SEOUL, South Korea, April 19 (UPI) -- Will North Korean leader Kim Jong Il bring a breakthrough on the nuclear impasse?
Kim's surprise visit to Bejing this week for a summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao raised hopes of progress in the long-stalled nuclear issue.
China is considered one of few nations that have leverage over Kim's defiant regime, which has been heavily dependent on Beijing's food and energy aid. Beijing's economic assistance is vital for the North's tattered economy. China also needs North Korea to ease the nuclear standoff to boost its leverage in pressing for a more accommodating U.S. stance toward Taiwan.
"The two nations need each other's help. The Beijing summit was arranged for mutual benefit," said Moon Heung-ho, a China expert at Hanyang University in Seoul. "We hope to see progress in the nuclear stalemate in the North Korea-China summit," Seoul's Foreign Ministry official said.
Kim held talks with Chinese President Hu on Monday in Beijing after arriving in the Chinese capital by train earlier in the day for an informal visit, according to South Korea's media reports and diplomatic sources in Seoul.
Neither the South Korean nor the Chinese government would confirm Kim's visit, which was cloaked in secrecy. But both sides are widely expected to announce his visit after Kim returns to Pyongyang, as they have done in the past.
When Kim visited China in 2000 and 2001, neither side announced the visits in advance or commented on the trips until after he returned home. "North Korea has requested that Kim's schedule be kept secret due to security concerns," a diplomatic source in Seoul said.
Kim crossed the border city of Sinuiju into China around 9 p.m. Sunday after leaving his office in Pyongyang at 1 p.m. that day by special train. Kim was greeted at the Chinese border city of Dandong by Wang Jiarui, the Communist Party's director of international relations, South Korea's official Yonhap News Agency said in a report from the Chinese capital that quoted "informed diplomatic sources."
Kim's train, carrying an entourage of some 40 high-level ruling party, state and military officials, drew into Beijing's main railway station around 6 a.m. Monday amid tight security. Beijing's railway station was guarded by military police and a station official said it was closed for the arrival of a "special visitor."
A convoy of unmarked cars, including a black Mercedes limousine, pulled out of the railway station and headed west towards the state guesthouse, where Kim has stayed on previous trips, said Yonhap and Seoul's state-run television, KBS.
Kim reportedly met Hu over lunch at Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing. It was the first summit between the two communist allies since the new Chinese leaders took office last year.
No details of the summit were available, but media reports quoted sources as saying it was focused on how to end the standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear arms ambitions, Beijing's food and energy assistance, and North Korea's economic reforms.
At the summit, Kim said his country was ready to give up its nuclear development program if the United States dropped its hostile policy towards Pyongyang. He also asked for economic and energy aid from China.
In return, Hu reportedly called for Pyongyang to move to ease the nuclear crisis, saying U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on a visit to Beijing last week warned that time was running out for a resolution on the issue.
Analysts in Seoul said Beijing wanted to hear Kim's position on North Korea's nuclear program and use the summit to make progress toward six-party talks to end the nuclear crisis. "China invited the North Korean leader to visit Beijing to offer economic aid and persuade Pyongyang to make concessions to break the nuclear impasse," said Paek Seung-joo, an analyst at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis in Seoul.
China has been mediating between North Korea and the United States at the six-way talks, which also involve South Korea, Japan and Russia, aimed at seeking a peaceful resolution to the crisis. China hosted two rounds of six-party talks, the latest one in February, but no agreement has been reached.
"North Korea is not in a position to dismiss Chinese pressure," said Lee Tae-hwan, a China specialist at the Sejong Institute, a private think tank in Seoul, "because China provides between 70 percent and 90 percent of North Korea's oil and more than one-third of its imports and food aid."
"Beijing wants to use its role in defusing the nuclear crisis as leverage in dealing with Washington over the Taiwan issue," a Western diplomat said, requesting anonymity. "With the North Korea card in hand, China would call for the United States to discourage Taiwan from adopting a confrontational stance with the mainland following Chen Shui-bian's re-election as the island's president.
Kim Jong Il's China trip came after Cheney came to China last week armed with fresh evidence of North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities and pressing Beijing to take a tougher line with its communist neighbor.
After the summit, Kim visited Zhongguancun technology park, China's leading high-tech development zone. He is scheduled to have a series of meetings with Chinese leaders, including former President Jiang Zemin, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, parliamentary leader Wu Bangguo and Vice President Zeng Qinghong.
On his way back to North Korea on Wednesday, he is expected to visit Shenyang or Dalian in China's northeast to study government efforts to boost the economy with outside investment.

Copyright ? 2001-2004 United Press International

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N. Korea's Kim in Beijing for Rare, Secretive Talks
Mon Apr 19, 5:45 AM ET

By John Ruwitch and Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuters) - Reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-il arrived unannounced in Beijing on Monday and went straight into talks on his nuclear weapons ambitions after Washington urged Beijing to push to end the crisis.
Kim, whose special train drew into Beijing after an overnight journey from Pyongyang, will be in China for up to four days, during which he expects to meet his counterpart, military chief Jiang Zemin, and do some sightseeing, said a Chinese source familiar with the talks.
He met President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao for lunch in the high-walled Zhongnanhai leaders' compound and for talks dominated by the nuclear crisis and the North's economic and food problems, South Korea (news - web sites)'s Yonhap news agency said.
Kim was likely to tour a Beijing high-tech zone dubbed "China's Silicon Valley," it said.
Solving the nuclear issue is key to unlocking outside aid to the ailing and isolated North Korean economy, including from China, the North's closest friend.
Kim's trip, cloaked in the secrecy that traditionally surrounds his rare overseas journeys, comes less than a week after Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) warned in Beijing that time was running out to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions that has gripped North Asia since late 2002.
China's leaders are likely to dangle the prospect of economic help while repeating that they oppose a nuclear-armed Pyongyang and insist on a peaceful resolution to a problem that has enraged Washington and triggered nervousness among neighbors.
"Putting pressure on North Korea (news - web sites) isn't a good way to do things," said Korea expert Piao Jianyi with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "But we have emphasized all along that the North Korean nuclear issue should be resolved peacefully."
Kim's first visit to China in three years was expected to last about four days. His previous two trips were not publicized until after he left.
Chinese officials declined formally to confirm the visit but a second source said Kim had originally been scheduled to visit last week.
"The arrangements are being kept secret," he said. "He was supposed to have arrived last week. But it was delayed because things had not been sorted out."
Cheney was in Beijing last Tuesday and Wednesday. And Thursday marked the 92nd anniversary of the birth of Kim's father, North Korea's late founder Kim Il-sung.
The first sign of his arrival was a convoy of unmarked cars, including a black Mercedes limousine, that pulled out of Beijing's main railway station. The station was guarded by military police and an official said it was closed for the arrival of a special visitor, whose identity was a secret.
ECONOMIC NEEDS
Kim's entourage included 40 high-level ruling party, state and military officials in a trip aimed to shore up ties, South Korean state broadcaster KBS said. Kim, who avoids travel by plane, was also seeking economic aid and might tour the northeastern city of Shenyang or Dalian, Yonhap said.
Kim is also to meet Premier Wen Jiabao, who is at the helm of China's booming economy, and former president and Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, KBS said. Jiang and Kim both command the military in their respective countries.
In 2001, the leader of the communist North toured Shanghai and was reportedly impressed with the glitz of China's financial hub. He later began to experiment with market reforms.
"The backdrop of the Kim Jong-il trip is that North Korea is in a situation where it has to resolve the nuclear issue before there can be progress on the economic front," said Koh Yoo-hwan, Dongguk University professor on North Korea studies.
The United States is key.
Cheney came to China last week armed with fresh evidence of the North's nuclear weapons capabilities and pressing Beijing to take a firmer line with its communist neighbor.
China has played host at two rounds of inconclusive six-party talks with the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia aimed at ending the crisis. A third round is planned before July.
Regional tensions have simmered since October 2002, when U.S. officials say Pyongyang disclosed it was working on a clandestine program to enrich uranium -- in addition to a plutonium-based program that had been mothballed in 1994.
In the talks in February, the six agreed to meet again before mid-year and to start working-level talks before that to discuss the dispute. No progress has been reported since. (Additional reporting by Paul Eckert and Jack Kim in Seoul)





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Iran gets its hands dirty
By Safa Haeri

PARIS - It took a hail of bullets into the car of Iranian envoy Khalil Naimi in Baghdad on Thursday to jeopardize Tehran's attempts to become an influential mediator in Iraq, with the strong hope of seeing itself removed from George W Bush's "axis of evil".
Press and cultural attache Naimi died instantly when the car in which he was traveling near the Iranian embassy was raked by three heavily-armed men.
Against all odds, Iran had embarked on an unlikely diplomatic mission to get the American "Satan" out of its difficulties in Iraq. A five-man Iranian foreign ministry delegation, headed by the ministry's director for Persian Gulf affairs, Hossein Sadeqi, is in Najaf to assist in the crisis over the rebel leadership of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Shi'ite followers have been engaged in week-long battles with US-led occupation forces.
Muqtada, whom US forces have vowed to "kill or capture", is barricaded inside Najaf, Iraq's holiest city. The US has massed more than 2,000 troops for an offensive, though both sides have said that they want to avoid bloodshed.
Now, though, Iran finds itself as yet another victim of the spiral of violence in Iraq that has seen citizens of a host of countries - ranging from Italy to Japan - either killed or kidnapped over the past weeks, and its official involvement in the country becomes problematical. It was not immediately clear whether the assassination had any direct impact on Sadeqi's plans in Iraq, although the envoy ruled out holding any talks with Muqtada after earlier hinting that this might be a possibility.
And the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, on an unannounced visit to Baghdad, said that the last thing Iraq needed was "influence from neighboring countries trying to promote or protect their own self interest".
Sunni Muslims in Iraq, who for many years under Saddam Hussein and even before dominated the corridors of power, are known to be extremely fearful of Shi'ites - who form the majority in the country - becoming the new rulers. And they constantly warn in newspapers and at mosques of Iran interfering in Iraq and attempting to stir sectarian trouble.
In their first reaction, authorities in Tehran vehemently condemned the murder of Naimi, blaming it indirectly on the American presence in Iraq. But diplomats did not rule out a possible connection between the killing and the mediation efforts undertaken by Tehran to assess the chances of calming down Muqtada, the young and volatile cleric who has plunged American forces and their allies into their fiercest battles since their triumphant entry into Baghdad a year ago.
This was the first time that an Iranian diplomat had been assassinated in Iraq, where Iran, with its strong Shi'ite ties to the Shi'ite majority in Iraq, would think itself "immune" to such attacks.
"Those who killed our diplomat are the same that do not want to see Iraq living in peace and stand up on its feet," one Iranian diplomat in Baghdad said, while in Tehran, Hamid Reza Asefi, the Iraqi-born official spokesman of the foreign affairs ministry squarely accused the Americans, saying: "The violence and bloodshed in Iraq are the direct result of American's foolish policies in the region, making the whole world an unsafe place for humanity."
Officials in Washington confirmed that Britain had invited the Iranian delegation to help restore calm and security in Iraq, as, in the words of Mehdi Karroobi, the speaker of the majlis, or parliament, "it is obvious that Iran has strong influence in Iraq, where the people have traditional brotherly bonds with the Iranians".
An aide to Muqtada told French news agency Agence France Presse that the cleric welcomed the Iranian initiative because it came from an Islamic country. He said Muqtada was ready to meet the Iranian diplomats.
A senior State Department official said in Washington of the Iranian mediation: "They were invited by the British trying to put an end to the bloody standoff between American-led coalition forces with the Mahdi Army of Mr al-Sadr," explaining, however, that although the US went along with the British initiative, the proposal did not come from the Bush administration.
Iranian foreign affairs minister Kamal Kharrazi said in Tehran hours after the delegation left for Iraq that "naturally, there are such requests from the US and Britain that we help improve the situation in Iraq, and we are making efforts in this regard. There has been a lot of correspondence with the US about Iraq and the Swiss embassy in Tehran, which represents US diplomatic interests in the Islamic republic, played a mediating role in the recent exchanges," Kharrazi added, accusing at the same time the US of breaking its promises in Iraq and "taking a wrong path".
"When the Americans, or their most close and trusted ally, the British, call on Iran to help, this shows the influence Iran exercises in Iraq and the region, something that is not to the liking of many Arab nations and their proxies in Iraq hating the Iranians," one Iraqi diplomat told Asia Times Online.
Jean Pierre Perrin, chief of the foreign desk at the leftist French paper Liberation and a former correspondent of the French news agency AFP in Tehran, commented: "Iran's main adversary is not Washington but the two traditional enemies of the Iranian political Shi'ism: the exacerbated Arabian nationalism that carried to Iran the hardest strokes under Saddam Hussein and the imported Islam Wahhabite of Saudi Arabia that always sees in Shi'ism a 'plot of the Jewish on the one hand and the other groups that are currently engaged against the Americans in the Sunnite regions of Iraq'."
Tehran's attempts to help the US out of its troubles in Iraq (even if for self-serving reasons) have not dulled the rhetoric coming out of Tehran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of Iran, told the country's state-run, conservative-controlled television: "The United States accuses other countries of intervening in Iraq and of inciting the Iraqis, but it is very clear that the crimes of the occupation and their insulting behavior with regard to the young and the women are at the origin of the reaction of the Iraqis, Shi'ite or Sunni."
For the Supreme Leader, it is obvious that "sooner or later, the Americans will be forced to leave Iraq in shame and humiliation".
The assassination happened just hours before Sadeqi and his delegation were to leave for Najaf, from where Muqtada had earlier announced that he would obey the supreme religious authorities, and if necessary give himself up to an independent Iraqi court and dismantle his army, transforming it into a political party.
Michael Rubin, who recently resigned as an "advisor" to the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council, wrote: "The British government, with tacit US approval, has initiated discussions with the Iranian foreign ministry. A team led by top Iranian diplomat Hossein Sadeqi visited Iraq in recent days, but his talks went nowhere. The Iranian regime used Washington and London's outreach not to promote dialogue, but to humiliate the United States at a time our soldiers make sacrifices to preserve Iraq's freedom."
Leaking news of the talks on Iranian television, foreign minister Kharrazi demonstrated to his domestic audience that the US was not in control and had run to Iran for assistance. Moving in for the propaganda kill, Kharrazi stated: "The solution is for the occupiers to leave Iraq."
And Iran's repeated offer for a meeting of Iraq's neighbors to "advise" the Americans who "ignore both the situation in Iraq and the psychology of the Iraqi people", helping them "not to repeat and cumulate mistakes" there.
But at the same time, though the Iranian leaders call on Iraqis to give a lesson to the "wounded American monster", they are nevertheless worried of impending chaos in Iraq, and have avoided any direct praise for the Sunnite opposition in Fallujah, and even for Muqtada's revolt.
So while the Arab press in general glorifies Muqtada, describing him as a "hero", a "popular figure" fighting the occupation of Iraq by foreign forces, etc, the Iranian media are more cautious, observing that the young cleric is "a noise", without any religious or political legitimacy.
The Iranian daily Aftab Yazd said that the media were "wrongly" presenting the activities of Muqtada and his followers as the widespread resistance of the Iraqi people. "It is quite erroneous for our media to give implicit or open backing to people like Sadr, whose causes are not entirely known to us," it said, adding that "clearly no friend of liberty would defend the occupation in Iraq, but it is one thing to oppose occupation and another to take sides in a fight where none of the potential winners are favorably inclined toward Iran".
Columnist Ali Hamade said in the an-Nahar of Beirut, referring to the handling of Muqtada and his Mahdi Army, "The United States administration has made a major blunder in Iraq by thinking it could follow Israel's heavy-handed example against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza without having to pay the political price."
"The Americans are on their way to doom in Iraq. In addition, the US failure in Iraq will have drastic implications on US plans for the region ... Iraq has shown that it was one thing to bring down an unpopular regime in an Arab state, but quite another to be able to rule that state. Iraq has shown that ruling post-war Iraq was the closest thing to hell for the Americans," Hamade said.
Columnist Rafik Khoury wrote in al-Anwar, another Lebanese Arabic-language daily: "Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi'ite militia leader, has shown that the Americans did not come to introduce democracy, but to rule Iraq and lay their hands on its vast oil resources. Washington, which came to Iraq under the pretext of liberating its people from the previous regime of Saddam Hussein, has now saddled them with a more repressive authority," he said, adding: "Meanwhile, Sadr has become the symbol of anti-American Iraqi armed resistance, and Fallujah has become the symbol of Iraqi cities being oppressed by allied force."
Commented the London-based al-Qods al-Arabi. "It was impossible for the United States to succeed in wiping out Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army because it is not an organized group, but a popular movement that expresses a religious ideology."
The paper said that US forces represented the largest power in the world, one that could defeat the Iraqi army and "perhaps the entire Arab armies united in a few days, because of the military disparities, but the US army is unable to defeat the ideas and religious ideologies in a country like Iraq".
According to this paper, capturing and killing Muqtada, as promised by the Americans, would "make him a martyr, while if he is arrested alive, he will become a symbol of resistance, just like Nelson Mandela or the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin", the founder and spiritual leader of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas. However, that if the US forces fail to arrest Muqtada, it will constitute "a blow to US credibility".
Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that US officials have repeatedly accused Iran of trying to meddle in Iraq's internal affairs. Iran has rejected the accusations.
On April 12, the head of US forces in the Gulf region, General John Abizaid, said that Iran and Syria had been involved in what he called "unhelpful actions" in Iraq. But he acknowledged that there are elements in Iran who are trying to limit the influence of Muqtada.
Iranian officials have distanced themselves from the cleric. On April 10, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami indirectly criticized the insurgency led by Muqtada. He said Iran "considers any policy that would intensify the crisis in Iraq and jeopardize the establishment of security to be harmful for Shi'ite and Islam".
Gary Sick is a professor of Middle East politics at New York's Columbia University and was a top White House aide for Iran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and ensuing hostage crisis. Sick said that, despite US criticism of Tehran, Washington has been relying on Iran's assistance in Iraq.
"There have always been two strains to US policy. Just as Iran often seems to follow policies where the one part of the government seems to differ from what the other part of the government is doing, we see the same thing in the United States very much. We have, from the beginning, in fact, relied on Iran and its assistance, especially in the south and its relations with the Shi'ite, to maintain peace and order and to lend support to a more moderate perspective in Iraqi politics. At the same time, almost without stop, we have been criticizing Iran's activities in Iraq," Sick said.
Sick said the US had been maintaining indirect contacts with Iran through British officials and also through members of the Iraqi Governing Council, some of whom have made several official trips to Tehran.
"If you really want to work out cooperation on the ground, you have to do it in person. It's very difficult to send a letter and say, 'Why don't you do such-and-such', and the other side comes back and says, 'Why don't you do such-and-such'. You really need to sit down and talk to each other to do that," Sick said.
Sick said Tehran's role in Iraq cannot be ignored, given Tehran's influence among Iraq's Shi'ite and its past experiences with Baghdad. "If Iran wishes to cooperate with the United States, it's going to be helpful. If Iran decides to openly oppose the United States, that is going to be very unhelpful from the US point of view and could, in fact, be disastrous. So it seems to me that developing a working relationship - it doesn't mean that the countries have to reestablish diplomatic relations, it doesn't mean that they have to express love for each other - it basically means working together on issues that are of mutual significance. What happens in Iraq is tremendously important to Iran, and it's tremendously important to the United States," Sick said.
Iran and the United States cut diplomatic ties following the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Since then, the two countries have communicated through the Swiss embassy in Tehran, which represents US interests in Iran. Diplomats from the two sides have reportedly held talks in Geneva over the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

>> OKC SLEEPER...

Document: Oklahoma City Bombing Was Taped

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A Secret Service document written shortly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing described security video footage of the attack and witness testimony that suggested Timothy McVeigh (news - web sites) may have had accomplices at the scene.
"Security video tapes from the area show the truck detonation 3 minutes and 6 seconds after the suspects exited the truck," the Secret Service reported six days after the attack on a log of agents' activities and evidence in the Oklahoma investigation.
The government has insisted McVeigh drove the truck himself and that it never had any video of the bombing or the scene of the Alfred P. Murrah building in the minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion.
Several investigators and prosecutors who worked the case told The Associated Press they had never seen video footage like that described in the Secret Service log.
The document, if accurate, is either significant evidence kept secret for nine years or a misconstrued recounting of investigative leads that were often passed by word of mouth during the hectic early days of the case, they said.
"I did not see it," said Danny Defenbaugh, the retired FBI (news - web sites) agent who ran the Oklahoma City probe. "If it shows what it says, then it would be significant."
Secret Service spokesman Charles Bopp declined to discuss the video footage reference, saying it would be addressed by witnesses later this week at the capital murder trial of McVeigh co-defendant Terry Nichols. "It is anticipated Secret Service employees will testify in court concerning these matters," he said.
Other documents obtained by AP show the Secret Service in late 1995 gave prosecutors several computer disks of enhanced digital photographs of the Murrah building, intelligence files on several subjects in the investigation and a file detailing an internal affairs inquiry concerning an agent who reconstructed key phone evidence against McVeigh.
"These abstract sheets are sensitive documents which we have protected from disclosure in the past," said a Secret Service letter that recounted discussions in late 1995 with federal prosecutors on what evidence would be turned over to defense lawyers.
Lawyers for Nichols say they have never been given the security video, photo disks or internal investigative file referenced in the documents.
The trial judge has threatened to dismiss the death penalty case if evidence was withheld. McVeigh was executed in 2001 on a separate federal conviction. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison on federal charges before being tried by the state this year.
The government has maintained for years that McVeigh parked the Ryder rental truck carrying a massive fertilizer bomb outside the Murrah building and left alone in a getaway car he parked around the corner. The bombing killed more than 160 people.
The only video prosecutors introduced at trial showed the Ryder truck without any visible passengers as it passed a security camera inside a high-rise apartment building a block away from the Murrah building.
But the Secret Service log reported on April 24 and April 25, 1995, that there was security footage showing the Ryder truck pulling up to the Murrah building. The log does not say where such video came from or who possessed it.
A log entry on April 25 states that the security footage allowed agents to determine the time that elapsed between suspects leaving the truck and the explosion.
An entry a day earlier on the same log reported that the security video was consistent with a witness' account that he saw McVeigh's getaway car in the lead before a woman guided the truck to its final parking spot in front of the Murrah building.
"A witness to the explosion named Grossman claimed to have seen a pale yellow Mercury car with a Ryder truck behind it pulling up to the federal building," the log said. The witness "further claimed to have seen a woman on the corner waving to the truck."
A Secret Service agent named McNally "noted that this fact is significant due to the fact that the security video shows the Ryder truck pulling up to the Federal Building and then pausing (7 to 10 seconds) before resuming into the slot in front of the building," the log said. "It is speculated that the woman was signaling the truck when a slot became available."
Defenbaugh said the FBI had talked to several witnesses suggesting two people had left the truck, but prosecutors never introduced the scenario at trial because it couldn't be corroborated. That's why a new security video would be significant, he said.
"It would have taken the investigation in a very specific direction," Defenbaugh said. "Rather than having to go down an eight-lane highway during rush hour, we would have gone down a faster path with just two or four lanes."
Defenbaugh said the FBI kept a log similar to the Secret Service document inside the Oklahoma City investigation command center that might help solve the mystery of the video. Justice officials declined to discuss documents, citing the ongoing Nichols' trial.
In addition to the witness mentioned in the Secret Service document, a woman working in Murrah's Social Security (news - web sites) office who was rescued from the rubble and a driver outside the building both reported to the FBI seeing two men leave the truck, according to government documents.
The Secret Service (news - web sites) log contained other information about the case -- including that McVeigh made 30 calls to an Illinois gun dealer in the months before the attacks to seek dynamite and that the gun dealer subsequently failed a lie detector test. The Secret Service lost six employees in McVeigh's bombing, the single largest loss in agency history.
Nichols' attorneys last week asked the judge to dismiss the case on grounds the government withheld evidence, including the security video footage.
New documents obtained by AP show the Secret Service provided prosecutors other evidence that may not have been provided to defense lawyers, including a file showing the Secret Service agent who reconstructed crucial phone evidence against McVeigh was subjected to an internal affairs investigation and eventually cleared for her conduct in the case.
FBI officials say that file details allegations the agent wrongly collected grand jury-subpoenaed phone information about McVeigh's calls without FBI knowledge, and kept it for weeks while she produced analysis that helped the investigation.
The internal investigation caused complications for prosecutors. They decided it tainted the agent as a witness and they chose instead to hire an outside expert to re-do the phone analysis for trial, officials said.
Bopp said the Secret Service did nothing wrong.
"The Secret Service worked cooperatively with the FBI and other federal state and local law enforcement throughout the investigation," Bopp said. "The expertise of the Secret Service on electronic crimes and telecommunications provided unique and timely information to the ongoing investigation."

On the Net:

The FBI: http://www.fbi.gov

The documents obtained by The Associated Press can be viewed at http://wid.ap.org/documents/okc/okcdoc2.pdf

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
OKC BOMBING FALLOUT
Video shows McVeigh had accomplices?
Secret Service account indicates previously unknown footage

Posted: April 19, 2004
5:45 p.m. Eastern

? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
A Secret Service document to be entered as new evidence this week contradicts government accounts of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, indicating the existence of a videotape showing Timothy McVeigh with accomplices at the scene.
"Security video tapes from the area show the truck detonation 3 minutes and 6 seconds after the suspects exited the truck," says the document according to the Associated Press.
The Secret Service report, six days after the bombing, was a log of agents' activities and evidence in the investigation, the AP said.
The government, which has concluded McVeigh acted along at the scene, contends there was no video of the blast or of the area minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion that killed more than 160 people.
Danny Defenbaugh, the retired FBI agent who led the investigation, told the AP he had not seen the document, but if it "shows what it says, then it would be significant."
Others who worked the case said it either could be a misconstrued accounting of investigative leads or significant evidence kept hidden for nine years.
Secret Service agents are expected to testify on the log this week at the capital murder trial of McVeigh co-defendant Terry Nichols, Secret Service spokesman Charles Bopp told the AP.
McVeigh was executed in 2001 on a separate federal conviction. Nichols was given a life sentence on federal charges and now is being tried by the state of Oklahoma.
The Secret Service log has an entry April 24 consistent with the account of a "witness to the explosion named Grossman claimed to have seen a pale yellow Mercury car with a Ryder truck behind it pulling up to the federal building and a "woman on the corner waving to the truck."
A Secret Service agent named McNally "noted that this fact is significant due to the fact that the security video shows the Ryder truck pulling up to the Federal Building and then pausing (7 to 10 seconds) before resuming into the slot in front of the building," the log said. "It is speculated that the woman was signaling the truck when a slot became available."
Defenbaugh said a security video would be significant because it would corroborate the accounts of several witnesses who told the FBI two people had left the truck.
Their testimony was not introduced at trial because it lacked corroboration, the agent told the AP, noting it would have led the investigation in a new direction.
Prosecutors entered a security video at McVeigh's trial, but it showed no passengers.
Other government documents, the AP said, report a rescued woman working in the Murrah building's Social Security office and a driver outside the building both told the FBI they saw two men leave the truck.
Investigative reporter Jayna Davis' new book, "The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing," convincingly concludes McVeigh and Terry Nichols did not act alone.
The new release by WND Books presents substantial evidence of Iraqi involvement and a refusal by federal government agents to investigate the bombing.
As WorldNetDaily reported, Davis said last week Sept. 11 Commission testimony by former FBI Director Louis Freeh lent credibility to the theory. She repeatedly has tried since 1997, without success, to convince the FBI to examine her investigation, but when asked by a commissioner to respond to assertions in her book, Freeh was careful to say he knew of no other "credible source," instead of dismissing the premise of the book outright.
"I find it very encouraging," she said, "because every time the FBI has been asked to officially comment in any fashion about my research, we have the same canned response that the Department of Justice is confident that all those responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing have been arrested, charged and prosecuted."
Davis's reporting was vetted by former CIA director James Woolsey and given credibility by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last April when it dismissed a lawsuit filed against her after finding "defendants did not recklessly disregard the truth" in reporting on an Iraqi soldier's alleged involvement in the bombing.
"After eight years of oppressive litigation, the courts have vindicated my work ethic as a dedicated journalist," Davis told WorldNetDaily at the time. "The lawsuit was obviously designed to silence a legitimate investigation into Middle Eastern complicity in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing."
In an interview with WND in October 2001, attorney David Schippers, who prosecuted the House of Representatives' impeachment case against Bill Clinton, said his examination of the evidence Davis presented him was conclusive.
"I am thoroughly convinced that there was a dead-bang Middle Eastern connection in the Oklahoma City bombing," he said.
Read WorldNetDaily's extensive coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing case.


Jayna Davis's blockbuster - "The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing" - is available now from the source, WorldNetDaily. Order today and qualify for three FREE issues of WND's acclaimed Whistleblower magazine.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
OKC BOMBING FALLOUT
Ex-congressman's aide has video of explosion?
Police raid home for evidence Nichols' attorneys say investigators never saw

Posted: February 1, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

This story appears in today's edition of the McCurtain Daily Gazette.
By J.D. Cash
? 2004 McCurtain Daily Gazette
The Fairfax County, Va., home of John Culbertson - once a member of former U.S. Rep. James Traficant's scandal-plagued congressional office - was raided Friday afternoon by Oklahoma City police detectives searching for evidence related to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
A copy of the search warrant obtained by the McCurtain Daily Gazette described the evidence sought by detectives as including any and all computer equipment, letters, correspondence, electronic mail and image files.
The raid follows a Jan. 27 closed-door meeting attended by prosecutors and defense attorneys involved with the Terry Nichols murder trial, set to begin one month from now in Oklahoma.
During the meeting, it was brought to the attention of prosecutors Culbertson could have critical evidence concerning the bombing - evidence that had not come to the attention of state or federal prosecutors.
According to the affidavit filed with the search warrant, Nichols' defense attorneys filed a motion under seal with the court and further advised prosecutors Culbertson ''may have possession of a video and/or still photographs of a Ryder truck parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah building before the explosion and during the explosion.''
The affidavit also indicates Nichols' defense attorneys said they attempted to contact Culbertson and he was not cooperative in showing them the possible evidence.
The motion presented by defense attorneys also stated Dallas, Texas, attorney Thomas W. Mills Jr. observed and described a video and still photos that Culbertson showed him.
Oklahoma City police detective Mark R. Easley interviewed Mills at his law office after District Judge Steven Taylor recommended an investigation into the matter.
Mills said he had gone to Washington, D.C., years ago to meet with Culbertson and actually viewed the video on Aug. 26, 1998.
Mills specifically told police detectives he saw a portion of a video and possibly three still pictures that were stored on Culbertson's laptop computer.
In an affidavit obtained by this newspaper, Detective Easley said Mills told him the images he was shown included the Murrah building in ''pristine condition.''
Mills then said, ''Mr. Culbertson pushed a button and a second photograph came up with a small glow at the bottom of the building. Mr. Culbertson pushed another button and another frame appeared of a ball of fire rising from the building and the building fell.
''Mr. Mills asked where the video and pictures came from (and) Mr. Culbertson said it came from an ATF agent.''
In the motion filed by Nichols' defense earlier, attorney Mark Earnest explained he interviewed both Mills and Culbertson about the potential evidence. He said Culbertson told him his request for a copy of the video and photographs ''placed Culbertson in a tight spot.''
When contacted by telephone late last week, Culbertson told an Oklahoma City police detective he had turned over a copy of the evidence to the House Judiciary Committee several years ago. Asked if he still had a copy of the material, Culbertson was described as evasive - refusing to divulge that information.
Appearing July 27, 2000, before the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, the record shows Culbertson alluded to the subject of the possible existence of a videotape of the bomb blast in Oklahoma City.
Speaking as the director of the Center for Reform in Washington, D.C., Culbertson told members of the committee: ''With respect to the statements made by the Department of Justice that there are no photos or videos of the explosions of the Murrah Building, we have discovered that some indeed exist and are known to members of the law enforcement community.
''We have a short video presentation with a federal police officer describing a surveillance tape he personally witnessed at a gathering of law enforcement officers and comparing it to similar photos we have obtained in the Oklahoma City investigation, which will be presented after this opening statement, with your consent, Mr. Chairman. It is about two minutes long.
''This is a video taken April 13 of this year. It is a federal police officer describing a surveillance tape from Oklahoma City he personally witnessed and comparing it to other photos we have uncovered.''
During his appearance before the House Committee, Culbertson filed an affidavit containing statements he says were made by a federal agent who, Culbertson claimed, told him he was present at a training seminar after the bombing when the videotape was alleged to have been shown to several federal agents.
The statement included in the official record of the hearing is as follows:
''The federal police officer described two distinct explosions the locations of which are consistent with evidence uncovered in the course of investigating the attack on the Murrah Federal Building. The federal police officer also stated that the photos and video frames recovered as described above are consistent with the surveillance video that he witnessed in the training seminar. The officer's statement as well as photos obtained in the investigation is contained in this document.''
Culbertson went on to testify: ''The Department of Justice has deprived the public of this important information as well as the courts in various jurisdictions charged with trying cases related to the bombing. This act is nothing short of callous and malicious obstruction of justice in what many might consider one of the most important cases of the 20th century.''
However, under direct examination by a member of the committee, Culbertson admitted he did not have possession of the film.

The transcript of the hearing contains this exchange between Culbertson and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York:

NADLER: Have you seen it?

CULBERTSON: I actually conducted the interview in Mr. Traficant's office.

NADLER: Have you seen the tape, I asked.

CULBERTSON: The surveillance tape?

NADLER: No. You have not seen the surveillance tape. Do you have it with you today?

CULBERTSON: The videotape?

NADLER: No, the surveillance tape.

CULBERTSON: No.

NADLER: So this is a tape of an officer talking about a different tape that we cannot see?

CULBERTSON: We are attempting to get this tape. This is a tape of a police officer describing what he saw and comparing it to photographs and videotape frames that we have in our possession. There are more than one series of surveillance.

On July 30, 2002, a federal judge sentenced Culbertson's boss, James Traficant, to eight years in prison and fined him $150,000 after a jury found the Ohio Democrat guilty on 10 counts of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion.
The guilty verdict led the House to strip Traficant of his seat, making him only the second member of Congress kicked out since the Civil War. Culbertson remained on the former congressman's office staff for a short time until elections could be held to fill the vacancy.
An inventory of the items removed from the Culbertson residence has not been made public.
Read WorldNetDaily's extensive coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing

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Top Guerrilla Killed in Chechnya
Saudi Who Led Arab Fighters Was Suspect in Moscow Bombing
Reuters
Monday, April 19, 2004; Page A14
MOSCOW, April 18 -- A Saudi who led Arab fighters in Chechnya was killed there a few days ago, his brother said Sunday.
Russian officials have said the Saudi, known as Abu Walid, was among those who organized a bombing in the Moscow subway that killed about 40 people in February.
"My brother has been martyred," Abdullah Saeed Ghamdi said from the Saudi capital, Riyadh. "We don't have any details but we know he was killed recently. We received the news yesterday and now people are coming to congratulate us on his martyrdom."
In Russia, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service declined to comment.
The pro-Moscow Chechen president, Akhmad Kadyrov, said there was a "real possibility" that Abu Walid had been killed.
"Those who offered armed resistance [in the past week] have been killed. In particular, more than 10 rebels have been killed in Vedensky region near village Tazen-Kale and Ersenoi. Among them were fighters who looked like Arab fighters," Kadyrov was quoted as saying by the Russian Tass news agency.
On Sunday, Russian news agencies said troops had killed four Chechen rebels linked to the guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev in a shootout with militants near the Chechen border.
Separately, troops in the Chechen capital, Grozny, killed a Wahhabi militant who Russian security services said could be linked to a suicide bomb attack on President Murat Zyazikov of the Ingushetia region. The austere Wahhabi creed is Saudi Arabia's mainstream Muslim denomination.
The insurgency in mainly Muslim Chechnya has attracted mujaheddin, or holy fighters, from Saudi Arabia and many other Arab countries.
In March, the al-Jazeera satellite television network broadcast a videotape it said featured Abu Walid vowing to stage a new wave of attacks in Russia.
The Kremlin blames Chechen rebels for a spate of attacks, including a suicide bombing that killed almost 50 people on a train in southern Russia before last December's parliamentary elections. The Kremlin believes Abu Walid was also among those behind the 1999 apartment bombings across Russia.

Russia has been fighting separatists in Chechnya for a decade.


? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Gorelick role raised early


By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Former acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard told the September 11 commission in a private interview earlier this year that he was surprised that Jamie S. Gorelick is serving on the panel because she had played a key role in setting the very counterterrorism policies being investigated.
According to a summary of that interview obtained by The Washington Times, Mr. Pickard said Ms. Gorelick -- who was No. 2 in the Clinton Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno -- resisted efforts by the FBI to expand the counterterrorism effort beyond simple law enforcement tactics and agencies.

"Mr. Pickard indicated that it was a growing concern that the international terrorism threat was 'bigger than law enforcement,' " according to the notes from a Jan. 20 meeting at the commission's New York office.
"Despite expression of these concerns by FBI executive management, Attorney General Reno and her Deputy Jamie Gorelick believed that a law enforcement approach was appropriate," the notes say.
In a footnote, the FBI employee who attended the meeting and kept the notes wrote: "Mr. Pickard stated that he finds her 'membership on your Commission surprising since it [the decision to counter international terrorism with a law enforcement-only approach] was her and Reno's policy.' "
The notes show that concerns about Ms. Gorelick's impartiality on the commission were raised months before House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, called for her resignation last week.
Mr. Sensenbrenner's demand came after a memo Ms. Gorelick wrote was declassified by Attorney General John Ashcroft and blamed for hampering U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
Mr. Pickard, who spent most of his career at the FBI as deputy director during the Clinton administration, testified publicly before the commission last week and talked about his brief tenure as acting director of the FBI in 2001 before the terrorist attacks.
But in that open, televised testimony, he never mentioned Ms. Gorelick, her role in confining the counterterrorism effort, or his concerns about Ms. Gorelick's service on the commission.
Nor did Ms. Gorelick recuse herself from Mr. Pickard's testimony or refrain from questioning him, as she did when Miss Reno and former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh testified.
According to the commission guidelines on recusals: "Commissioners and staff will recuse themselves from investigating work they performed in prior government service."
The rules also state: "Where a commissioner or staff member has a close personal relationship with an individual, or either supervised or was supervised by an individual, the commissioner or staff member should not play a primary role in the Commission interview of that person."
Ms. Gorelick has defended her impartiality to sit on the panel and judge U.S. counterterrorism efforts even as she has strenuously defended her own actions in the past on some of those very efforts. She appeared last week on several TV programs to say she won't step down from the board and has the support of the Republican chairman of the panel.
During one television interview, Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked her if the release of her 1995 memo and current calls for her resignation were in response to her tough questioning about Mr. Ashcroft's policies and those of the Bush Justice Department.
Ms. Gorelick did not speculate on any political motives by her opponents, but said, "I'm not bringing a partisan ax to grind here."
Yesterday, however, in an opinion piece that appeared in The Washington Post, Ms. Gorelick implied a link between Mr. Ashcroft's release of the memo and prior questioning about his department.
"At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that 'the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents' and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo," she wrote. "This is simply not true."
In that column -- as well as during her TV appearances last week -- she also defended her role in fighting terrorism at the Justice Department, distancing herself from the "wall" separating law enforcement fighting terrorism and intelligence services that gather counterterrorism information.
She didn't raise the wall, Ms. Gorelick said, and her memo was simply intended to define the boundaries between law enforcement and intelligence services so that cases against terrorists would not be thrown out of court because law enforcement had overstepped its bounds.
"Look: In my view, if we could have lowered that wall sooner, we should have," she told Mr. Matthews.
But that was not what she was saying around the time she wrote her memo. Ms. Gorelick appeared in October 1995 before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she testified that many people wondered why the government doesn't merge law enforcement and counterintelligence agencies.
"I mean, they have a lot of resources. You have a lot of resources, you have all got the same enemies, why don't you just merge to achieve greater efficiency?" she said to the assembled senators, including Sen. Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Democrat, who has since left the Senate and now sits with Ms. Gorelick on the 9/11 commission.
"I think on both sides of the river, if you will, we think this would be a serious mistake," she said. "There are ample reasons, both in history and in constitutional principles, to maintain a clear demarcation between the missions of the two communities."
Even in her 1995 memo, she noted that the separation procedures outlined "go beyond what is legally required."

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The Wall Truth
Gorelick provides the clearest proof yet that she should resign.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this:



Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice:
Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our Nielson numbers) to address provocative allegations by another commission fave -- er, witness -- Richard Clarke. Turns out we should have mentioned that if Condi had just zipped an op-ed over to the Washington Post that would have done the trick. We regret any inconvenience to you, your staff, or the Constitution.
Respectfully, the 9/11 Commissioners.

If that note is not forthcoming, then someone's got some explaining to do about "The Truth About 'the Wall,'" Jamie Gorelick's remarkable Washington Post op-ed from Sunday, which purports to put to rest the nettlesome squawking about her untenable position as a commissioner judging the causes of pre-9/11 intelligence failure, a matter in which she was a key participant. Leaving aside, for a moment, how off-the-wall her account of the wall is, the fact that she well knows she needed to say something is the clearest indication yet that she belongs in the witness chair, not on the commissioners' bench.

Gorelick's op-ed intentionally raises five different points in her purported defense. Around them are sandwiched two others -- opening and closing salvos that she can't resist mentioning but avoids identifying as argument points because she is too smart not to know that they scream out for her recusal. I'll take them in the order in which she makes them.

1. Ashcroft is wrong. Gorelick starts by asserting that Attorney General John Ashcroft gave testimony that was "simply not true" when he claimed both that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents[,]" and that Gorelick "built that wall through a March 1995 memo." In fact, Ashcroft's testimony was entirely true: The wall was a policy that virtually guaranteed intelligence failure, and the March 1995 memo was its first building block, a harbinger of the further institutionalizing of the wall that would come, from Gorelick, only a few months later. That, however, is beside the point.

When witnesses give differing accounts, it is left to an impartial arbiter -- not one of the witnesses -- to sort it out. Moreover, the commission's standard, announced to maximum preening effect only three weeks ago after Clarke's testimony spawned demands for Rice's testimony, is that essential witnesses, and particularly those who are in a position to clarify or refute the testimony of prior essential witnesses (i.e., the position Rice was in vis-?-vis Clarke), must testify under oath and in public. Not surprisingly, while brazenly accusing the attorney general of the United States of giving false testimony, Gorelick elides mention of the Clarke/Rice dust-up. But it did happen, and Gorelick was gleefully in the thick of it. Why is what's sauce for the goose not sauce for the commissioner?

2. "I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it." Gorelick did invent the wall. The wall was not a set of procedures implementing FISA as construed by federal decisional law. To quote Gorelick's 1995 memorandum (something she carefully avoids doing), the procedures her memorandum put in place "go beyond what is legally required...[to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation." (Emphasis added.) As this rather straightforward English sentence illuminates, the wall exceeded the requirements of FISA and then-existing federal case law.

What the wall implemented was not the FISA statute as construed by the courts but rather Gorelick's overheated view of what would be useful to avoid being accused of misusing FISA. To be sure, it is often prudent for the government to hamstring itself beyond legal requirements; going-the-extra-mile improves the (already good) chances that courts will reject motions by defendants to suppress damaging evidence (like incriminating recorded conversations). It is, however, irresponsible for the government to hamstring itself when that means national security will be imperiled -- which is what happens when agents are forbidden from communicating with one another.

3. The prohibition on prosecutors directing intelligence investigations was in effect long before the 1995 guidelines issued by the Reno Justice Department. This is transparent misdirection. The government usually collects evidence of ordinary crimes under the criminal law, not FISA; but there is nothing inherently wrong with collecting evidence of ordinary crimes under FISA. The error that was made during the 1980s was FISA's certification requirement (which merely called for a representation that the government was seeking FISA-interception authority for the purpose of collecting national-security intelligence) was read as if it limited the government's ability to use FISA-derived evidence in ordinary criminal cases. The federal courts compounded this error by fashioning a "primary purpose" test which required the government, before it could use FISA evidence in a criminal case, to prove that it had been motivated to use FISA by national-security concerns -- i.e., that it hadn't used FISA as a pretext to conduct what was really a criminal investigation.

This was the state of play in 1995, when the Reno Justice Department -- with Gorelick pulling the laboring oar -- instituted the wall. Gorelick may be correct -- we'd have to hear her testify subject to cross-examination to be sure -- when she declares that "[t]he point [of the Reno guidelines] was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents." (My own sense, for what little it may be worth, is that the point was to mollify civil-liberties activists and conspiracy theorists who trumped up baseless fears that the government would dishonestly use FISA authority to investigate people who were not national-security risks -- but I am not the person who wrote the guidelines, and we should probably give her the benefit of the doubt regarding her intentions. But good intentions hardly mean the actions they spawn will be sound.)

The wall generally forbidding intelligence agents from communicating with their criminal counterparts was a suicidally excessive way to ensure that what little information intelligence agents were permitted to pass would be admissible in court. This is the product of a mindset that insists, beyond all reason and common sense, that terrorism is just a law-enforcement problem. The object of a rational counterterrorism approach is to prevent mass murder from happening in the first place, not to improve your litigating posture for the indictment you return after thousands of people have been slaughtered.

4. The Ashcroft Justice Department failed to dismantle the wall prior to the 9/11 attacks. Yes, that's true. And it was dumb, which was why Ashcroft got grilled over it by Gorelick's fellow commissioners. But Gorelick's argument actually makes my point. If it was relevant, probative and highly material for the commission to probe why Ashcroft did not eradicate the wall when he had the chance in the months before 9/11, it is doubly relevant, probative, and highly material to probe why on earth Gorelick erected the wall in the first place.

5. Gorelick's March 1995 memo concerned only two cases and permitted "freer coordination between intelligence and criminal investigators than was subsequently permitted by the 1995 guidelines" and the Ashcroft Justice Department. So what? The fact is that Gorelick's 1995 memo was excessively prohibitive. Who cares if it was somewhat less excessively prohibitive than the July 1995 guidelines -- especially given that Gorelick was responsible for the 1995 guidelines (that were reaffirmed in 2001). If Gorelick is looking for a medal because she was, at least as she sees it, marginally less irresponsible in March 1995 than she was in July 1995, she should not hold her breath.

And her hyperventilating about acting to protect the two cases (including mine) from the threat of having convictions reversed is specious. By the time she penned her March 1995 memo, the first World Trade Center bombing prosecution had been over for a year and my case was in its third month of trial. The only conceivable threat to eventual convictions would have been (a) if the prosecutors and agents in my case had learned information about defense strategy by virtue of the government's continuing investigation of some of our indicted defendants for possible new crimes; or (b) if the continuing investigation had turned up exculpatory information about the defendants in my case and I had not been told about it so I could disclose it. Far from being unique to national-security matters, that situation is a commonplace when the government deals with violent organizations (which tend to obstruct justice and routinely plot to kill or influence witnesses, prosecutors, and/or jurors, thus requiring continuing investigations even as already indicted cases proceed).

To avoid constitutional problems in such a situation, the government regularly assigns a prosecutor and agent who are not involved in the already indicted case to vet information from the continuing investigation before it is permitted to be communicated to agents and prosecutors on the indicted case. This way, the team on the indicted case learns only what it is allowed to know (viz., evidence of new crimes the defendants have committed), but not what it should not know (viz., defense strategy information and incriminating admissions about the indicted case made without the consent of counsel); and the government maintains the ability to reveal any exculpatory information (as federal law requires). As Gorelick's 1995 memorandum recounts, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York had already made sure that was done in my case long before Gorelick's memo. There was no need for Gorelick to do more; what she did served only to place additional, unnecessary barriers to information sharing which -- her memo, again, acknowledges -- were not required by existing law.

6. The July 1995 guidelines -- the wall -- did not really prevent information sharing and merely implemented court decisions. The guidelines did prevent information sharing -- that was their purpose. They literally permitted some information to be passed over the wall if intelligence agents realized that evidence they'd developed might prove the commission of a serious crime. Intelligence agents, however, were hardly in a position to come to such a realization with any confidence because the wall generally forbade them from coordinating with criminal agents. Thus, they were ill equipped to recognize the significance of information to which they were privy.

More importantly, the hyper-technical 1995 guidelines were so byzantine as to be inscrutable for non-lawyer agents in the field, who found it far easier to assume they weren't allowed to communicate with one another than to venture into Gorelick's labyrinth without benefit of Ariadne's golden cord. That is why, for example, the FBI's criminal division declined to assist its intelligence division in August 2001, when an astute agent was frantically trying to find Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the eventual suicide hijackers who steered Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Whether or not the wall procedures dictated that decision, the culture of dysfunction the procedures had fostered was by then firmly entrenched.

7. The relevant history regarding the wall is well known, Gorelick has recused herself from consideration of her own actions and those of the Justice Department while she was there, and her fellow commissioners have spoken up in her defense. This is offered as Gorelick's wind-up. If it is adopted as the new standard, the commission should stop wasting everyone's time and money right now. First, the relevant history of many aspects of the 9/11 investigation is extensively well documented; yet, the commission has insisted on calling witnesses -- despite the fact that our nation is at war and many of the witnesses have been taken away from their wartime responsibilities for hours (and sometimes days) to comply with commission requests for information and testimony. To this point, no witness has been permitted to get away with a curt "you don't need me -- you've already got enough information."

Second, Gorelick's conflict is not so tidy as to be solved by avoiding inquiry into her time in the Justice Department. If that were the case, John Ashcroft could have been a commissioner -- and just imagine the howling if someone had proposed that. Gorelick's conflict, central to the matter of intelligence lapse, goes to the heart of the commission's investigation. Whenever she asks a question on another subject -- even if she does it in good faith -- the public is entitled to wonder whether she is trying to shift blame or scrutiny away from herself. The legitimacy of the commission is thus critically undermined.

Finally, the support of Gorelick's fellow commissioners is irrelevant. Again, these are the same guys who were screaming for Rice three weeks ago, for no better reason than that Clarke had made allegations Rice was in a position to shed light on. Ashcroft has now made assertions far more central to the salient matter of institutional impediments to information sharing. That those same commissioners are not being consistent, that they are not calling for Gorelick to step down and be sworn as a witness, is inexplicable. I'm sure they have all bonded; I'm quite certain they admire and respect Gorelick's powerful mind and exemplary work ethic -- they'd be foolish not to. But imagine for a moment that Gorelick had not been appointed to serve on the commission. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't think she'd have been subpoenaed to testify after her memorandum came to light during last week's proceedings? Is there anyone who thinks she could have avoided testifying under such circumstances by writing an op-ed?

Gorelick's "defense" merely underscores how inappropriate it is for her to sit in judgment as a commissioner. Obviously, she's hell-bent on staying. And so we watch as the commission slowly mutates from a potentially useful exercise, to a politicized teledrama, to a hopelessly suspect irrelevancy.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is an NRO contributor.


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>> NOW SELL THEM NUKE TECH?

China Lets Cheney Speak on TV but Censors Remarks Afterward
By JOSEPH KAHN

Published: April 20, 2004

Pool photo by Eugene Hoshiko
Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to students at Fudan University in Shanghai. The session was broadcast on Chinese television.
BEIJING, April 19 -- Before his high-profile visit to China last week, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that Beijing leaders allow him to speak, live and uncensored, to the Chinese people.
After weeks of intense negotiations, Mr. Cheney was granted that measure of openness -- but not one millimeter more.
Anyone who tuned in to CCTV-4, China's all-news television channel, shortly after 10 a.m. on Thursday could watch Mr. Cheney deliver an address to students at Fudan University in Shanghai. A State Department translator provided simultaneous interpretation.
But the broadcast received no advance promotion or even listing in the Chinese news media and was not repeated. The authorities promptly provided leading Web sites with a "full text" of the vice president's remarks, including his answers to questions after the speech, that struck out references to political freedom, Taiwan, North Korea and other issues that propaganda officials considered sensitive.
The censorship showed that even a hopeful sign of political progress in China can be more like a mirage. Officials sought to convey a relaxed attitude about what Mr. Cheney might say in public but worked to alter the record. "What they do to control the media is sometimes surreal," said Yu Maochun, a China expert at the United States Naval Academy who noticed discrepancies between Mr. Cheney's speech and the Chinese transcript. "Censorship is a habit they can't kick."
In a similar sleight of the invisible hand late last year, a government-owned Chinese publisher issued an authorized Chinese version of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, "Living History," that removed most of Ms. Clinton's references to her and former President Bill Clinton's visits to China.
The Chinese company did not notify Ms. Clinton's publisher that it was making any changes to the text, and it was sold as an unabridged translation.
American officials say that to the best of their knowledge the Chinese side lived up to the letter of their agreement on Mr. Cheney's speech, but expressed frustration that the record was later expunged.
"It was extremely important to the White House to have a live and uncensored broadcast," said a United States consular official in Shanghai. "We feel good that we were able to do that."
Bush administration officials said they had not negotiated how the Chinese transcript would be handled. When the excised version came to their attention, they worked to prepare their own Chinese version. It was posted on Friday to the American Embassy's Web site, which is not blocked within China.
Although Mr. Cheney was accorded the trappings of a state visit by a major foreign leader -- motorcades, television coverage and meetings with top officials -- there were no large crowds, and interest among the public most likely was limited to the well informed in urban areas.
In his speech last Thursday, Mr. Cheney spoke broadly about American foreign policy. But he devoted much of the talk and a subsequent exchange with students to links between political and economic freedom in China, as well as Taiwan, the most delicate topic in United States-China relations.
The Chinese transcript was prepared by the official People's Daily immediately after the address, and was distributed to newspapers and Web sites across the country. While faithful to most of what Mr. Cheney said, it dropped many references to "political freedom" and "individual freedom."
While Mr. Cheney praised "rising prosperity and expanding political freedom" across Asia, the official Chinese transcript refers only to "rising prosperity." It drops his statements that "the desire for freedom is universal" and that "freedom is indivisible."
It also wiped out any record of what Mr. Cheney had said about the Taiwan Relations Act, an American law mandating that the United States sell Taiwan military equipment so it can defend itself against any attack from the Chinese mainland. China maintains that the act violates agreements with the United States.
Mr. Cheney said the campaign against terror must not be used to suppress "legitimate dissent." The Chinese, who have battled dissidents in their largely Muslim region of Xinjiang, dropped that phrase.
The longest elisions involved Mr. Cheney's references to the North Korean nuclear crisis, North Korea's acquisition of nuclear technology from Pakistan and the problem of weapons proliferation generally. China, which has close ties to North Korea, is acting as a broker in negotiations over how to end the North's nuclear arms program.
The full address was carried live by China Central Television on its Chinese-language news channel and a second channel that broadcasts in English. Although China Central Television is the country's main television news provider, the number of people who watch its specialty news channel during working hours is thought to be quite small.
The edited text, without indications of editing changes, was posted on the Web sites of People's Daily, the New China News Agency and other online locations.
An editor at the People's Daily Web site involved with preparing the transcript denied that any censorship had occurred. The editor, who declined to be identified, said missing sentences or sections were attributable solely to the speed with which the transcript had been prepared.
Administration officials have been on guard against censorship since the visit of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to China in February 2003. State Department officials arranged an interview with Mr. Powell on China Central Television that by diplomatic agreement was to be broadcast unedited, administration officials said. The broadcast nonetheless left out Mr. Powell's references to human rights abuses, among other sensitive issues.
The consular official said the American side had tried to anticipate how the Chinese might censor Mr. Cheney's remarks but could not prevent all alterations. "It's a challenge," the official said.

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Brazil Refusal on Inspection Angers IAEA
By GEORGE JAHN
ASSOCIATED PRESS

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Brazil's refusal to allow the U.N. atomic agency to fully inspect one of its nuclear facilities has led to frustration within the organization, even though its officials do not believe the country is hiding a weapons program, diplomats said Monday.
The diplomats, who are familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency's work, suggested the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog is more annoyed than worried about Brazil's decision to deny access earlier this year to uranium enrichment centrifuges at a facility being built near Rio de Janeiro.
"It's not a question of suspecting that Brazil has a covert nuclear weapons program," said one of the diplomats, who all spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's more a question of principle."
Although Brazil signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997 and said its nuclear program has purely peaceful objectives, questions about its commitment have simmered for more than a year.
The government earlier this month confirmed that IAEA inspectors were denied access in February and March to centrifuges at the facility, in the town of Resende.
It cited the need to protect industrial secrets and said the centrifuges were, and will remain, off-limits for visual inspection.
The diplomat in Vienna, however rejected that argument.
"The agency monitors some 900 facilities around the world with a myriad of technologies and has a good record of protecting those trade secrets," he said.
Another diplomat said Brazil's argument could set a worrying precedent at a time the agency is fighting to gain full access to Iran's nuclear secrets to test Tehran's assertions that it was not pursuing a weapons program.
Iran became a focus of world concern after last year's discovery that it was assembling thousands of centrifuges for uranium enrichment, which has uses ranging from generating power to making nuclear weapons. Iran denies any weapons ambitions, saying it only wants to produce electricity.
"Brazil's reticence could lead other countries to follow suit," and make the agency's job of policing nuclear programs more complicated, said the diplomat.

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>> THEIR NEW FRIEND...

Gadhafi Seeks Abolition of Courts, Laws

ASSOCIATED PRESS
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) - Moammar Gadhafi on Sunday called for the abolition of Libya's three decade-old exceptional courts and other strict laws criticized by human rights groups.
During talks in Tripoli with judges and prosecutors, the Libyan leader urged delegates meeting across the country since Saturday in weeklong annual People's Congress forums to annul the laws, which were passed three years after Gadhafi seized power in a 1969 military coup.
Libya's exceptional laws have, among other things, banned the formation of political parties and stipulated death penalties for dissidents.
The official news agency JANA reported that Gadhafi also called for an end to arrests without warrant and urged the congresses to endorse international anti-torture conventions.
Long considered a rogue state and sponsor of terrorism, Libya recently started winning back international support with Gadhafi's decision to abolish the nation's weapons of mass destruction program and accept responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie jetliner bombing.
His appeal Sunday came after the March visit to Libya by a team of human rights workers from Amnesty International, the organization's first to the North African nation in 15 years.
The Amnesty team visited Libyan prisons and met with Gadhafi, urging him to abolish the country's exceptional laws and People's Court, which handles political and security cases, and replace them with ordinary criminal courts.
Those convicted by the People's Court have no recourse to appeal and no right to obtain independent legal counsel.
Gadhafi had promised to consider Amnesty's recommendations.
The regional People's Congress forums usually adopt Gadhafi's recommendations, which eventually reach the General People's Congress, Libya's version of a parliament that meets annually in March, for ratification.
There have been occasions when Gadhafi's calls have not been accepted, such as his appeal for free primary school education.
Gadhafi, who holds that Libya is ruled by the people, abolished the country's constitution when he came to power. His "Green Book" - a political philosophy that mixes socialism, populism and Arab nationalism - is the closest thing his country has to a constitution.

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Powell Asks Syria to Boost Iraq Patrols
By GEORGE GEDDA
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday said he has asked Syrian President Bashar Assad to send more forces to the border area with Iraq to prevent infiltration by militants opposed to the U.S. military presence there.
Powell said in an interview with The Associated Press that a letter he sent to Bashar last week did not link Syrian border control efforts to the administration's plan to impose sanctions against Syria that Congress has approved.
The legislation has a range of options for sanctions from which the administration can choose.
"We're exploring ways of working with the Syrians to increase the density of forces with surveillance over that (the Iraqi) border," Powell said.
He said Syria has taken steps to control border crossing sites but added that more can be done. He acknowledged the difficulty in patrolling an area 600 miles long.
"It is in our mutual interest to deal with the problem," Powell said. "It is not in Syria's interest to be seen as a base from which infiltrators can come across to kill innocent Iraqis or to kill coalition troops."
Last week, Maj. Gen. John Sattler, director of operations for Central Command, said Marines have had great success in shutting off the flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq.
"We had an extreme amount of success on the front side, meaning that we did find, fix and ultimately finish a number of cells that were up there that were facilitating" the infiltration, he said.
The Bush administration is assessing how to administer Syria sanctions legislation signed by President Bush in December. Powell said the administration will take action on the sanctions in the near future.
The legislation, passed by broad majorities in both houses, reflects the view that Syria has been a detriment to the fight against terrorism in the Middle East and Iraq.
It notes that Syria provided a safe haven for anti-Israeli militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and is accused of pursuing the development and production of biological and chemical weapons.
It states that Syria must end its support of terrorists, terminate its 27-year military presence in Lebanon, stop efforts to obtain or produce weapons of mass destruction and long-range ballistic missiles and prevent terrorists and weapons from entering Iraq.
If Syria fails to meet those conditions, the president must ban sales of dual-use items, which can have both civilian and military applications.
He also must impose at least two out of a list of six possible penalties: a ban on exports to Syria, prohibition of U.S. businesses' operating in Syria, restrictions on Syrian diplomats in the United States, limits on Syrian airline flights in the United States, reduction of diplomatic contacts or a freeze on Syrian assets in the United States.

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>> ARKANSAS MAFIA WATCH...

Clinton leaves Jamaica Holidayed at Tryall

Monday, April 19, 2004
FORMER US first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, left Jamaica yesterday after a one-week vacation at the exclusive Tryall Club in Hanover, highly placed sources confirmed.
Hotel officials declined to confirm or deny Rodham Clinton's stay at the property, but one knowledgeable source told the Observer: "She had a quiet, delightful and restful holiday. That was the way she wanted it."
According to Observer sources, between her aides, friends and Secret Service protectors Rodham Clinton's entourage occupied 40 rooms.
Her visit, like that of President George Bush's daughter, ??, was kept quiet for privacy and security reasons.
The wife of former president Bill Clinton, Rodham Clinton is now a member of the US Senate from New York, the first former first lady ever to be elected to the US legislature. She is being touted as a likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2009.
Rodham Clinton had planned to holiday at an old Jamaican plantation house after her Senate campaign in November 2000, but shelved the plan in the wake of the close, and controversial, presidential race between Bush and Bill Clinton's vice president Al Gore that was eventually decided by the US Supreme Court.
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FEC investigating
Hillary fund-raiser
2000 Hollywood event collected
$1 million for Senate campaign

Posted: April 19, 2004
5:00 p.m. Eastern

? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

The Federal Elections Commission is investigating a Hollywood fund-raiser that brought in more than $1 million for Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign.
According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, a source familiar with the probe supplied information about the investigation, which began several weeks ago.
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
In addition to the FEC action, the paper reported a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has been examining evidence of wrongdoing by a number of people in connection with the activities of Aaron Tonken, the fund-raising guru who staged the Hillary event.
Sources say Tonken, who in December pleaded guilty to fraud charges involving charity events, is cooperating with investigators.
The Hollywood gala took place in August 2000 on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in L.A. Billed as a tribute to outgoing President Clinton, the event also brought in much-needed cash for Hillary's campaign, the Times reported.
Peter Paul, an Internet entrepreneur who helped pay for the event, is locked in a court battle with the Clintons over allegations the then-first couple defrauded him in connection with the fund-raiser. According to the report, Paul is one of those being questioned in the FEC probe.
The FEC normally works in secret and would not comment on the investigation for the Times.
Part of Tonken's current bankruptcy proceedings includes his contention that over $2 million in charity funds was diverted to nearly three dozen Hollywood celebrities and power players.
Philip Dapeer, Tonken's attorney, tells the paper his client "has been personally threatened." Tight security was provided at a bankruptcy creditors' meeting last week. According to the report, Tonken refused to answer some questions at the meeting because California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office had served notice that it was considering criminal charges against him.
Tonken is writing a book for WND Books with a working title of "King of Cons: Exposing the Dirty Rotten Scandals of the Washington Elite and Hollywood Celebrities." The book is due out next year. Negotiations are under way with film producer Michel Shane to make a movie version of the book. Shane was credited as executive producer on the recent Steven Spielberg film "Catch Me If You Can."
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Now Can We Talk About Health Care?
By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

know what you're thinking. Hillary Clinton and health care? Been there. Didn't do that!

No, it's not 1994; it's 2004. And believe it or not, we have more problems today than we had back then. Issues like soaring health costs and millions of uninsured have yet to fix themselves. And now we are confronting a new set of challenges associated with the arrival of the information age, the technological revolution and modern life.

Think for a moment about recent advances in genetic testing. Knowing you are prone to cancer or heart disease or Lou Gehrig's disease may give you a fighting chance. But just try, with that information in hand, to get health insurance in a system without strong protections against discrimination for pre-existing or genetic conditions. Each vaunted scientific breakthrough brings with it new challenges to our health system. But it's not only medicine that is changing. So, too, are the economy, our personal behaviors and our environment. Unless Americans across the political spectrum come together to change our health care system, that system, already buckling under the pressures of today, will collapse with the problems of tomorrow.

Twenty-first-century problems, like genetic mapping, an aging population and globalization, are combining with old problems like skyrocketing costs and skyrocketing numbers of uninsured, to overwhelm the 20th-century system we have inherited.

The way we finance care is so seriously flawed that if we fail to fix it, we face a fiscal disaster that will not only deny quality health care to the uninsured and underinsured but also undermine the capacity of the system to care for even the well insured. For example, if a hospital's trauma center is closed or so crowded that it cannot take any more patients, your insurance card won't help much if you're the one in the freeway accident.

Let's face it -- if we were to start from scratch, none of us, from dyed-in-the-wool liberals to rock-solid conservatives, would fashion the kind of health care system America has inherited. So why should we carry the problems of this system into the future?

21st-Century Problems
At the dawn of the last century, America was coping with the effects of the industrial revolution -- crowded living conditions, dangerous workplaces, inadequate sanitation and infrastructure in cities and pollution and infectious diseases like typhoid fever and cholera that exacted a huge toll on the oldest and youngest in society.

Since then, a century's worth of advances yielded remarkable results. Antibiotics were developed. Anesthesia was improved. Public health programs like mosquito control and childhood immunizations succeeded in reducing or even eradicating diseases like malaria and polio in this country. Congress passed legislation regulating the quality of food and drugs and assuring that safety and science guided medical developments. Workplace and product-safety standards resulted in fewer deaths and injuries from accidents. Effective campaigns cut tobacco use and alcohol abuse. Employers began providing some workers with health care coverage, primarily for hospitalization costs. And to aid some of those left out, President Lyndon B. Johnson persuaded Congress to establish Medicare and Medicaid to address the poorest, sickest, oldest and highest-risk patients in our society. As a result of these accumulated gains, life expectancy grew from 47 years in 1900 to 77 years for those born in 2000.

As astounding as those changes were, we are likely to see even more revolutionary changes in the next 100 years. Advances in medicine coincide with advances in computers and communications. The American workplace is changing in response to global pressures. But even positive advances may come with a negative underside. Our affluence contributes to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that, combined with a diet filled with sugar and fat-rich foods, undermines our ability to fend off chronic diseases like diabetes. And research is proving that the pollutants and contaminants in our environment cause disease and mortality.

It is overwhelming just thinking about the problems, never mind dealing with them. But we have to begin applying American ingenuity and resolve or watch the best health care system in the world deteriorate.

Medical Advances
The pace of scientific development in medicine is so rapid that the next hundred years is likely to be called the Century of the Life Sciences. We have mapped the human genome and seen the birth of the burgeoning field of genomics, offering the opportunity to pinpoint and modify the genes responsible for a whole host of conditions. Scientists are exploring whether nanotechnology can target drugs to diseased tissues or implant sensors to detect disease in its earliest forms. We can look forward to ''designer drugs'' tailored to individual genetic profiles. But the advances we herald carry challenges and costs.

Think about the potential for inequities in drug research. Today, pharmaceutical and biotech companies have little incentive to research and develop treatments for individuals with rare diseases. Never heard of progeria? That's the point. This fatal syndrome, also called premature-aging disease, affects one in four million newborns a year. It's rare enough that there is no profit in developing a cure. This is known as the ''orphan drug'' problem. Genetic profiles and individualized therapies have the potential to increase the problem of orphaned drugs by further fragmenting the market. Even manufacturers of drugs for conditions like high blood pressure might focus their efforts on people with common genetic profiles. Depending on your genes, you could be out of luck.

The increasing understanding and use of genomics may also undermine the insurance system. Health insurance, like other insurance, exists to protect against unpredictable, costly events. It is based on risk. As genetic information allows us to predict illness with greater certainty, it threatens to turn the most susceptible patients into the most vulnerable. Many of us will become uninsurable, like the two young sisters with a congenital disease I met in Cleveland. Their father went from insurance company to insurance company trying to get coverage, until one insurance agent looked at him and said, ''We don't insure burning houses.''

Many have worked to get laws on the books to protect people from genetic discrimination, but we have yet to pass legislation that addresses job security and health coverage. The challenges do not stop there. Health insurance will have to change fundamentally to cope with predictable, knowable risks. Will health insurance companies offer coverage tailored to a person's future health prospects? Right now, if you have asthma, or even just allergies, insurers in the individual market can exclude your respiratory system from your health insurance policy. Will all health plans stop offering benefits that relate to genetic diseases?

The ability to predict illness may overwhelm more than just the insurance system; it may overwhelm the patient and the provider. Studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly 6 out of 10 patients at risk for breast and ovarian cancer declined a genetic test, and a similar fraction of those at risk for colon cancer also declined testing. Why? One reason is probably to avoid higher insurance premiums. But the decision to undergo genetic testing is a complex one that involves many issues. Positive test results often indicate increased risk but no certainty that a disease will occur. Negative results also come without guarantees. The development of genetic profiles and individual therapies will exponentially increase the amount of information a physician is expected to manage. Instead of remembering one or two drugs for any condition, a physician will have to analyze all the different genetic, demographic and behavioral variables to generate optimal treatment for a patient.

Medical advances have the potential to overwhelm the health care system top to bottom. At the very least, the pace of technological progress is so rapid that our antiquated health care system is ill equipped to deliver the fruits of that progress. But these advances are not occurring in isolation from other factors affecting both how we finance health care and how much care we need and expect.

Globalization
The globalization of our economy has changed everything from how we work as individuals to what we produce as a nation to how quickly diseases can spread. American companies -- and workers -- compete not only with one another but all over the world. It is called competitive advantage, but it can put American businesses and workers at a disadvantage.

The United States' closest economic rivals have mandatory national health care systems rather than the voluntary employer-based model we have. Automakers in the United States and Canada pay taxes to help finance public health care. But in the United States, automakers also pay about $1,300 per midsize car produced for private employee health insurance. Automakers in Canada come out ahead, according to recent news reports, even after paying higher taxes.

At the same time, American companies are outsourcing jobs to countries where the price of labor does not include health coverage, which costs Americans jobs and puts pressure on employers who continue to cover their employees at home.

And many new jobs, especially those in the service sector and part-time jobs, don't include comprehensive health benefits. More uninsured and underinsured workers impose major strains on a health system that relies on employer-based insurance. In addition, the failure of government to help contain health costs for employers has led to a fraying of the implicit social contract in which a good job came with affordable coverage.

Gone are the days when a young person would start in the mail room and stay with the company until retirement. Employee mobility is now the rule rather than the exception. Those who pay for health care -- insurance companies and employers -- increasingly deal with employees who change jobs every few years. This has the effect of not only increasing the numbers of uninsured but also of decreasing the incentive for employers to underwrite access to preventive care.

At the same time, war, poverty, environmental degradation and increased world travel for business and pleasure mean greater migration of people across borders. And with people go diseases. The likes of SARS can travel quickly from Hong Kong to Toronto, and news of a strange flu in Asia worries us in New York. Welcome to the world without borders.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett has described it as ''payback for decades of shunning the desperate health needs of the poor world.'' No matter the blame, the need to act now to address issues of global health is no longer just a moral imperative; it is self-interest.

Lifestyle and Demographic Changes
One hundred years ago, who could have predicted that living longer would be a problem?

In three decades, the number of Medicare beneficiaries will double. By the year 2050, one in five Americans will be 65 or older. We will have to find a way to finance the growing demand not only for health care but also for long-term care, which is now largely left out of Medicare.

Our society's affluence is only half of the story. Widening disparities in wealth and in health care too often cleave along ethnic lines. Today, a Hispanic child with asthma is far less likely than a non-Hispanic white child to get needed medication. African-Americans are systematically less likely to get state-of-the-art cardiac care. As our country becomes more and more diverse, these disparities become more obvious and more intolerable.

Our changing lifestyles also contribute to behavior-induced health problems. We can shop online, order in fast food, drive to our errands. Entertainment -- movies, TV, video games and music -- is one click away. The physical activity required to get through the day has decreased, while the pace and stress of daily life has quickened, affecting mental health. Persistent poverty, risky behaviors like substance abuse and unprotected sex and pollution from cars and power plants all add to the country's health problems. As Judith Stern of the University of California at Davis so aptly put it, genetics may load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.

Old Problems Persist
If all we had to do was face these tremendous changes, that would be daunting enough. But many of the systemic problems we have struggled with for decades -- like high costs and the uninsured -- are simply getting worse.

In 1993, the critics predicted that if the Clinton administration's universal health care coverage plan became law, costs would go through the roof. ''Hospitals will have to close,'' they said, ''Families will lose their choice of doctors. Bureaucrats will deny medically necessary care.''

They were half-right. All that has happened. They were just wrong about the reason.

In 1993, there were 37 million uninsured Americans. In the late 90's, the situation improved slightly, largely because of the improved economy and the passage of the Children's Health Insurance Program. But now some 43.6 million Americans are uninsured, and the vast majority of them are in working families.

While employer-sponsored insurance remains a major source of coverage for workers, it is becoming less accessible and affordable for spouses, dependents and retirees. In 1993, 46 percent of companies with 500 or more employees offered some type of retiree health benefit. That declined to 29 percent in 2001. When you think about the new economy and worker mobility, it's no wonder employers are dropping retiree health benefits. You can only wonder how many yet-to-retire workers are next.

Even those Americans not among the ranks of the uninsured increasingly find themselves underinsured. In 2003, two-thirds of companies with 200 or more employees dealt with increasing costs by increasing the share that their employees had to pay and dropping coverage for particular services. With rising deductibles and co-pays, even if you have insurance, you may not be able to afford the care you need, and some benefits, like mental health services, may not be covered at all.

The problem of the uninsured and underinsured affects everyone. A recent Institute of Medicine study estimates that 18,000 25- to 64-year-old adults die every year as a result of lack of coverage. But even if you are insured, if you have a heart attack, and the ambulance that picks you up has to go three hospitals away because the nearby emergency rooms are full, you will have suffered from our inadequate system of coverage.

If, as a nation, we were saving money by denying insurance to some people, you could at least say there's some logic to it -- no matter how cruel. But that's not the case. Despite the lack of universal coverage in our country, we still spend much more than countries that provide health care to all their citizens. We are No. 1 in the world in health care spending. On a per capita basis, health spending in the United States is 50 percent higher than the second-highest-spending country: Switzerland. Our health costs now constitute 14.9 percent of our gross domestic product and are growing at an alarming rate: by 2013, per capita health care spending is projected to increase to 18.4 percent of G.D.P.

What drives skyrocketing spending? The cost of prescription drugs rose almost twice as fast as spending on all health services, 40 percent in just the last few years.

Hospital costs have been rising as well, in large measure because more than one in four health care dollars go to administration. In 1999, that meant $300 billion per year went to pay for administrative bureaucracy: accountants and bookkeepers, who collect bills, negotiate with insurance companies and squeeze every possible reimbursement out of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Asthma and other pulmonary disorders linked to pollution contribute significantly to these costs, according to the health economist Ken Thorpe. Diabetes, high blood pressure and mental illness are also among the conditions that keep these costs rising.

If we spend so much, even after administrative costs, why does the United States rank behind 47 other countries in life expectancy and 42nd in infant mortality?

A lot of the money Americans spend is wasted on care that doesn't improve health. A recent study by Dartmouth researchers argues that close to a third of the $1.6 trillion we now spend on health care goes to care that is duplicative, fails to improve patient health or may even make it worse. A study in Santa Barbara, Calif., found that one out of every five lab tests and X-rays were conducted solely because previous test results were unavailable. A recent study found that for two-thirds of the patients who received a $15,000 surgery to prevent stroke, there was no compelling evidence that the surgery worked.

In situations in which the benefits of intervention are clear, many patients are not receiving that care. For example, few hospitalized patients at risk for bacterial pneumonia get the vaccine against it during their hospital stays. A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine by Elizabeth McGlynn found that, overall, Americans are getting the care they should only 55 percent of the time.

As a whole, our ailing health care system is plagued with underuse, overuse and misuse. In a fundamental way, we pay far more for less than citizens in other advanced economies get.

How We Deliver Care
There is no ''one size fits all'' solution to our health care problems, but there are common-sense solutions that call for aggressive, creative and effective strategies as bold in their approach as they are practical in their effect.

First, the way we deliver health care must change. For too long our model of health care delivery has been based on the provider, the payer, anyone but the patient. Think about the fact that our medical records are still owned by a physician or a hospital, in bits and pieces, with no reasonable way to connect the dots of our conditions and our care over the years.

If we as individuals are responsible for keeping our own passports, 401(k) and tax files, educational histories and virtually every other document of our lives, then surely we can be responsible for keeping, or at least sharing custody of, our medical records. Studies have shown that when patients have a greater stake in their own care, they make better choices.

We should adopt the model of a ''personal health record'' controlled by the patient, who could use it not only to access the latest reliable health information on the Internet but also to record weight and blood sugar and to receive daily reminders to take asthma or cholesterol medication. Moreover, our current system revolves around ''cases'' rather than patients. Reimbursements are based on ''episodes of treatment'' rather than on a broader consideration of a patient's well-being. Thus it rewards the treatment of discrete diseases and injuries rather than keeping the patient alive and healthy. While we assure adequate privacy protections, we need care to focus on the patient.

Our system rewards clinicians for providing more services but not for keeping patients healthier. The structure of the health care system should shift toward rewarding doctors and health plans that treat patients with their long-term health needs in mind and rewarding patients who make sensible decisions about maintaining their own health.

Harnessing Modernization
As paradoxical as it is that advances in medical technology could potentially break our antiquated system, advances in other technologies may hold the answer to saving it. Using a 20th-century health care system to deal with 21st-century problems is nowhere more true than in the failure to use information technology.

Ten years ago, the Internet was used primarily by academics and the military. Now it is possible to imagine all of a person's health files stored securely on a computer file -- test results, lab records, X-rays -- accessible from any doctor's office. It is easy to imagine, yet our medical system is not there.

The average emergency-room doctor or nurse has minutes to gather information on a patient, from past records and from interviewing the patient or relatives. In the age of P.D.A.'s, why are these professionals forced to rely on a patient's memory?

Information technology can also be used to disseminate research. A government study recently documented that it takes 17 years from the time of a new medical discovery to the time clinicians actually incorporate that discovery into their practice at the bedside. Why not 17 seconds?

Why rely solely on the doctor's brain to store that information? Computers could crunch the variables on a particular patient's medical history, constantly update the algorithms with the latest scientific evidence and put that information at the clinician's fingertips at the point of care.

Americans may not be getting the care they should 45 percent of the time, but the tools exist to narrow that gap. Research shows that when physicians receive computerized reminders, statistics improve exponentially. Reminders can take the form of an alert in the electronic health record that the hospitalized patient has not had a pneumonia vaccine or as computerized questions to remind a doctor of the conditions that must be fulfilled before surgery is considered appropriate.

Newt Gingrich and I have disagreed on many issues, including health care, but I agree with some of the proposals he outlines in his book ''Saving Lives and Saving Money,'' which support taking advantage of technological changes to create a more modern and efficient health care system. I have introduced legislation that promotes the use of information technology to update our health care system and organize it around the best interests of patients. Improvements in technology will end the paper chase, limit errors and reduce the number of malpractice suits.

I strongly believe that savings from information technology should not just be diffused throughout the system, never to be recaptured, but should be used to make substantial progress toward real universal coverage. By better using technology, we can lower health care costs throughout the system and thereby lower the exorbitant premiums that are placing a financial squeeze on businesses, individuals and the government. At the same time, some of those savings should be used to make substantial progress toward real universal coverage. (I may have just lost Newt Gingrich.)

Taking the Broader View: Public Health And Prevention
While we focus on empowering the individual through technology, we also have to recognize the larger factors that affect our health -- from the environment to public health.

If asthma and other pulmonary disorders are the main drivers of increased health spending, that argues strongly that we should rethink how social and environmental factors impact our collective health. Consider that over the last century we have extended life expectancy by 30 years but that only 8 of those years can be credited to medical intervention. The rest of our gains stem from the construction of water and sewer systems, draining mosquito-infested swamps and addressing spoilage, quality and nutrition in our food supply. Yet we continue to underinvest in these important systematic measures -- resulting in expensive health consequences like the explosion of asthma among children living in New York City or the harmful levels of lead found among children drinking water from the District of Columbia water system.

Our neglect of public health also contributes to spiraling health costs. We tend to address health care -- as a nation and as individuals -- after the sickness has taken hold, rather than addressing the cause through public health. Public health programs can help stop preventable disease and control dangerous behaviors. Take obesity, for example. Individuals should understand that they put their lives at risk with unhealthy behavior. But let's face it -- we live in a fast-food nation, and we need to take steps, like restoring physical-education programs in schools, that support the individual's ability to master his or her own health. Studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified ''Programs That Work,'' which should be financed. It comes down to individual responsibility reinforced by national policy.

The public health system also needs to be brought up to date. The current public health tools were developed when the major threats to health were infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. But now chronic diseases are the No. 1 killer in our country. We need to be concerned not just about pathogens but also about carcinogens.

Over the last three years, I have introduced legislation to increase investment in tracking and correlating environmental and health conditions. I have met with people from Long Island to Fallon, Nev., who want answers about cancer clusters in their communities. The data we have seen about lead and mercury contamination in our food and water suggest that the effects they have on the fetus and children may have contributed to the increasing number of children in special education with attention and learning disorders. We need more research to determine once and for all if increasing pollution in our communities and increasing rates of learning-related disabilities are cause and effect.

We should also be looking at sprawl -- talking about the way we design our neighborhoods and schools and about our shrinking supply of safe, usable outdoor space -- and how that contributes to asthma, stress and obesity. We should follow the example of the European Union and start testing the chemicals we use every day and not wait until we have a rash of birth defects or cancers on our hands before taking action. And we should look at factors in our society that lead to youth violence, substance abuse, depression and suicide and ultimately require insurance and treatment for mental health.

After Sept. 11, mental health was a significant factor in the health toll on our nation's first responders. And yet our mental health delivery system is underfinanced and unprepared.

Finally, as a society, we need greater emphasis on preventive care, an investment in people and their health that saves us money, because when families can't get preventive care, they often end up in the emergency room -- getting the most expensive care possible.

Expanding Coverage
All that we have learned in the last decade confirms that our goal should continue to be what every other industrialized nation has achieved -- health care that's always there for every citizen.

For the first time, this year a nonpartisan group dedicated to improving the nation's health, the Institute of Medicine, recommended that by 2010 everyone in the United States should have health insurance. Such a system would promote better overall health for individuals, families, communities and our nation by providing financial access for everyone to necessary, appropriate and effective health services.

It will, as I have been known to say, take the whole village to finance an affordable and accountable health system. Employers and individuals would share in its financing, and individuals would have to assume more responsibility for improving their own health and lifestyles. Private insurers and public programs would work together, playing complementary roles in ensuring that all Americans have the health care they need. Our society is already spending $35 billion a year to treat people who have no health insurance, and our economy loses $65 billion to $130 billion in productivity and other costs. We are already spending what it would cost if we reallocated those resources and required responsibility.

In the post 9/11 world, there is one more reason for universal coverage. The anthrax and ricin episodes, and the continuing threat posed by biological, chemical and radiological weapons, should make us painfully aware of the shortcomings of our fragmented system of health care. Can you imagine the aftermath of a bioterrorism attack, with thousands of people flooding emergency rooms and bureaucrats demanding proof of insurance coverage from each and every one? Those without coverage might not see a doctor until after they had infected others.

Insurance should be about sharing risk and responsibility -- pooling resources and risk to protect ourselves from the devastating cost of illness or injury. It should not be about further dividing us. Competition should reward health plans for quality and cost savings, not for how many bad risks they can exclude -- especially as we enter the genomic age, when all of us could have uninsurable risks written into our genes.

So achieving comprehensive health care reform is no simple feat, as I learned a decade ago. None of these ideas mean anything if the political will to ensure that they happen doesn't exist.

Some people believe that the only solution to our present cost explosion is to shift the cost and risk onto individuals in what is called ''consumer driven'' health care. Each consumer would have an individual health care account and would monitor his or her own spending. But instead of putting consumers in the driver's seat, it actually leaves consumers at the mercy of a broken market. This system shifts the costs, the risks and the burdens of disease onto the individuals who have the misfortune of being sick. Think about the times you have been sick or injured -- were you able under those circumstances to negotiate for the best price or shop for the best care? And instead of giving individuals, providers and payers incentives for better care, this cost-shifting approach actually causes individuals to delay or skip needed services, resulting in worse health and more expensive health needs later on.

Meanwhile, proposals like those for individual health insurance tax credits, without reforms for the individual insurance market, leave individuals in the lurch as well. We know that asthmatics can have their entire respiratory systems excluded from coverage. Individual insurance companies can increase your premium or limit coverage for factors like age, previous medical history or even flat feet. Those in the individual market cannot pool their risk with colleagues or other members of the group. The coverage you can get and the price you pay for it will reflect individual risk, and you simply don't receive many of the benefits of what we consider traditional insurance when people pool risks. So the proposal to give individuals tax credits to buy coverage in the individual market, without any rules of fair play, won't provide much help for Americans who need health care. In the same way, the recent Medicare bill, which seeks to privatize Medicare benefits, long a government guarantee, threatens to leave the ''bad risks'' without any affordable coverage. With the new genetic information at our disposal, that could mean any one of us could one day be denied health insurance.

When many of those who opposed the Health Security Act look back, they are still proud of their achievement in blocking our reform plan. The focus of that proposal was to cover everybody by enabling the healthier to pool the ''risk'' with others. The plan was to redirect what we currently pay for uninsured care into expanding health coverage.

We could make cosmetic changes to the system we currently have, but that would simply take what is already a Rube Goldberg contraption and make it larger and even more unwieldy. We could go the route many have advocated, putting the burden almost entirely on individuals, thereby creating a veritable nationwide health care casino in which you win or lose should illness strike you or someone in your family. Or we could decide to develop a new social contract for a new century premised on joint responsibility to prevent disease and provide those who need care access to it. This would not let us as individuals off the hook. In fact, joint responsibility demands accountability from patients, employers, payers and society as a whole.

What will we say about ourselves 10 years from today? If we finally act to reform what we know needs to change, we may take credit in building a health care system that covers everyone and improves the quality of all our lives. But if we continue to dither and disagree, divided by ideology and frozen into inaction by competing special interests, then we will share in the blame for the collapse of health care in America, where rising costs break the back of our economy and leave too many people without the medical attention they need.

The nexus of globalization, the revolution in medical technology and the seismic pressures imposed by the contradictions in our current health care system will force radical changes whether we choose them or not. We can do nothing, we can take incremental steps -- or we can implement wide-ranging reform.

To me, the case for action is clear. And as we work to develop long-term solutions, we can take steps now to help address the immediate problems we face. As Senator John Kerry has proposed, we should cover everyone living in poverty, and all children; allow people to buy into the federal employee health benefits program; and also help employers by reinsuring high-cost claims while assuming more of the costs from hard-pressed state and local governments.

We can pass real privacy legislation that will ensure that Americans continue to feel secure in the trust they place in others for their most intimate medical information. And we can realize the promise of savings through information technology and disease management by passing quality health legislation now.

If we do not fix the problems of the present, we are doomed to live with the consequences in the future. As someone who tried to promote comprehensive health care reform a decade ago and decided to push for incremental changes in the years since, I still believe America needs sensible, wide-ranging reform that leads to quality health care coverage available to all Americans at an affordable cost.

The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic senator from New York.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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>> GOOD LUCK WITH THIS...

WHO's on Last?
A politicized and irrelevant global agency.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bate200404190820.asp
By Dr. Roger Bate

A 1999 World Bank analysis of its own donations for health projects in the previous ten years demonstrated that over two thirds of them had failed to deliver the expected benefits, and were deemed "failures." Such is the world of aid, that even internal audits of projects show massive failure.
As a result, faith in the usefulness of aid and in the reputations of the dispensing agencies, has diminished from its peak in the 1960s. After 50 years of pursuing the U.N. aid model, its flaws are becoming too obvious to ignore. Aid expenditure continued to fall as a percentage of GDP to the end of the century, when AIDS gave it a shot in the arm.
Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) is benefiting from a turn in the tide of aid fatigue. Tens of billions of dollars are being pledged to deliver treatment to those afflicted by HIV/AIDS. But has anything really changed at the WHO?
Not really. The politically minded Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, who took over as general director in 1998, did much to raise the organization's profile. Her predecessor, Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, oversaw an ineffectual, and some said, corrupt regime, and there were high hopes for Dr. Brundtland. Although AIDS was a huge medical issue at that time, there was little political interest and it did not feature as a target for her time in charge. Instead, she chose to halve the number of global malaria cases and to establish a tobacco-control convention.
The "Roll Back Malaria" initiative has failed disastrously in the five-plus years it has been operating. Rather than reducing malaria rates, the number has increased by about ten percent since the WHO put political niceties above medical expediency. The WHO will not adopt insecticide spraying, which is the cheapest method for reducing the number of mosquitoes that transmit the disease.
The tobacco convention is in place, but one wonders why. Rather than going after infectious diseases (like cholera or dengue) in poor countries, or at least "involuntary" disease in rich countries (like cancer or hypertension), the WHO decided to go after "voluntary" smokers. It's debatable whether smoking-related diseases should be classified as a public health issue at all -- surely, it's a private matter if you decide to smoke.
While there is merit in heading off a future problem, the main effect of the anti-tobacco convention has been to introduce a far-reaching power base from which WHO has launched other initiatives that encroach deep into private life.
No critical analyst or journalist seriously believed WHO that the tobacco convention was the only one WHO would establish in its campaign against lifestyle choices. Back in 2001, I attended one of the tobacco-control workshops organized by WHO. One journalist in the audience asked whether "alcohol and food were next." The WHO officials insisted tobacco was different from other lifestyle issues. But, no sooner was the convention signed last fall, than the WHO announced an obesity initiative.
Of course, officially, this was set up by Dr. Brundtland's successor, the Korean doctor, Lee Jong-wook. Dr. Lee himself is more interested in AIDS, but lower-level officials have been pushing hard for the obesity initiative. They have engaged in a fairly rancorous battle with William Steigers (aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson), who has become a thorn in the side of the anti-corporate WHO obesity initiative. Targeting the Coca-Cola vending machines in schools seems to be the main thrust of the WHO obesity plan.
Dr. Lee has set AIDS as his main target. He, laudably, wants to treat three million Africans in a few years, trumping the two million target of President Bush. On account of the lack of public-health capacity, the high incidence of poverty, and the absence of political will in many African countries, this target is doomed to failure. But with insiders claiming that Dr. Lee wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting AIDS treatment in Africa, an heroic failure may do the trick.
The now-infamous report of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health advocates health investment as a "means to achieving other development goals relating to poverty reduction." Essentially, the WHO is saying that countries, owing to disease, are too poor to grow. Although at first sight this seems a common-sense argument, it is obviously false, as no country in history could have ever developed! It takes managerial incompetence to really hold up development, but bureaucracies are immune to such nuance.
The commission says it needs $22 billion per year by 2007, and $31 billion dollars per year by 2015, in order to save eight million lives a year. These "saved" lives, it calculates, will become economically active and boost GDP many-fold, thereby repaying all costs. This is an awful lot of money based on an awful lot of supposition, but even this is only the beginning.
Naturally, most of the expenditure will come via WHO, since it apparently houses "the expertise." As the U.S. is the largest funder of the WHO, it has the most to lose from failed policies. Fortunately, some Senate committees, notably Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, are beginning to look carefully at appropriations for AIDS. It's not a moment too soon.

-- Dr. Roger Bate is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a director of health-advocacy group, Africa Fighting Malaria.

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The Out-of-Towner
While Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 4:54 PM PT



In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.

The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.

Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."

And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years--as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning--the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice--as she has testified--wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.

A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation--scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3--would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken. A week before he left, Bush made a videotaped message for the Boy Scouts of America. On the tape, he said, "I'll be going to my ranch in Crawford, where I'll work and take a little time off. I think it is so important for the president to spend some time away from Washington, in the heartland of America."

Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post recently wrote a story recalling those halcyon days in Crawford. On Aug. 7, 2001, the day after the fateful PDB, Bush, they wrote, "was in an expansive mood ... when he ran into reporters while playing golf." The president's aides emphasized that he was working, now and then, on a few issues--education, immigration, Social Security, and his impending decision on stem-cell research. On Aug. 29, less than a week after Tenet found out about Moussaoui, Bush gave a speech before the American Legion. The White House press office headlined the text of the address, "President Discusses Defense Priorities." Those priorities: boosting soldiers' pay and abandoning the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty. Nothing about terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, hijackings. Nothing that reflected the PDB or Moussaoui.

Anyone who has ever spent time in Washington knows that the whole town takes off the month of August. Despite the "threat spike," August 2001, it seems, was no different.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB--let alone the Moussaoui finding--should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title--"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"--was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)

Bush got back after Labor Day. That first day, Sept. 4, was when the "Principals Committee"--consisting of his Cabinet heads--met in the White House to discuss terrorism. As Dick Clarke has since complained, and Condi Rice and others have acknowledged, it was the first time Bush's principals held a meeting on the subject.

This morning, Roemer asked Tenet if he brought up the Moussaoui briefing at that meeting. No, Tenet replied. "It wasn't the appropriate place." Roemer didn't follow up and ask, "Why not? Where was the appropriate place?" Perhaps he was too stunned. He sure looked it.

The official story about the PDB is that the CIA prepared it at the president's request. Bush had heard all Tenet's briefings about a possible al-Qaida attack overseas, the tale goes, and he wanted to know if Bin Laden might strike here. This story is almost certainly untrue. On March 19 of this year, Tenet told the 9/11 commission that the PDB had been prepared, as usual, at a CIA analyst's initiative. He later retracted that testimony, saying the president had asked for the briefing. Tenet embellished his new narrative, saying that the CIA officer who gave the briefing to Bush and Condi Rice started by reminding the president that he had requested it. But as Rice has since testified, she was not present during the briefing; she wasn't in Texas. Someone should ask: Was that the only part of the tale that Tenet made up? Or did he invent the whole thing--and, if so, on whose orders?

The distinction is important. If Bush asked for the briefing, it suggests that he at least cared about the subject; then the puzzle becomes why he didn't follow up on its conclusions. If he didn't ask for the briefing, then he comes off as simply aloof. (It's a toss-up which conclusion is more disturbing.)

Then again, it's easy to forget that before the terrorists struck, Bush was widely regarded as an unusually aloof president. Joe Conason has calculated that up until Sept. 11, 2001, Bush had spent 54 days at the ranch, 38 days at Camp David, and four days at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport--a total of 96 days, or about 40 percent of his presidency, outside of Washington.

Yet by that inference, Bush has remained a remarkably out-of-touch--or at least out-of-town--leader, even in the two and a half years since 9/11. Dana Milbank counts that through his entire term to date, Bush has spent 500 days--again, about 40 percent of his time in office--at the ranch, the retreat, or the compound.

The 9/11 commission has unveiled many critical problems in the FBI and the CIA. But the most critical problem may have been that the president was off duty.

Update, April 15, 2004: On Wednesday evening, after the hearings, a CIA spokesman called reporters to tell them Tenet had misspoken: It turns out he did brief Bush in August 2001, twice--on Aug. 17 and Aug. 31. Assuming the correction is true, it doesn't negate the point. The first briefing, which the spokesman described as uneventful, took place before Tenet learned about Moussaoui. The second occurred after the president returned to Washington.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2098861/