Next Stop for Saddam

...Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wrote a memo expressing his misgivings about progress in the war on terrorism...

...But somebody apparently thought the memo needed greater circulation— perhaps to light a fire under the Administration...

...No longer only an advocate for the elderly, the AARP is itself in the insurance business, and it strongly endorsed the Administration bill...

...In the end, surprise...

...When Iran was discovered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be secretly enriching uranium and extracting plutonium, the United States demanded a formal finding of treaty violation and the imposition of sanctions...

...actions that had been agitating Britain...

...Nevertheless, the President has clearly made a pragmatic decision that the U. S. has too much at stake in China to allow Taiwan to disturb the tacit truce that has served for three decades...

...Apparently to good effect...

...In 1970 Congress passed the Clean Air Act, andPresidentRichardM...

...Still another post-Watergate reform was the Ethics in Government Actof 1978...

...Some of the loudest complaints about violations of the secrecy code come from those not above leaking when it serves their interests...

...I wish it were otherwise___The main thing is that they're trying to do this to me personally...

...And on December 4, the White House announced the President's decision to rescind the steel tariff...

...On Hold: The 'Axis of Evil' You may have missed a quiet shift in the Bush Administration's international posture...

...Out of Watergate emerged the Federal Election Campaign Act, putting restrictions on campaign contributions and spending...

...Briefed on October 15 by his chief of staff, H.R...

...All of this reminds me of the book that my late friend, Philip Stern, wrote 15 years ago...

...If that was supposed to be the standard, then his rights were quickly violated by the circulation of humiliating pictures of him...

...As time passed, the Bush Administration began to perceive new ends for China's goodwill—currency re-evaluation to aid American exports, cooperation in the war on terrorism, and brokering North Korea's dismantling of its nuclear program...

...That idea is currently being eroded...

...He and Haldeman are talking about an article in Washingtonian magazine on "Sex, Power, and Politics...

...In the 1960s the nation became aware of the menace of pollution...

...In what must have been a slip of the tongue, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on CBS' 60 Minutes that Saddam would be "treated according to the Geneva Convention and given the protections of a prisoner of war...

...Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA...

...it is on my mind...

...It also originated the idea of Federal financing, at least for Presidential elections...

...The United States agreed to go along with its European allies and dropped its insistence on sanctions...

...There was widespread chagrin in Britain in November when President Bush came and went without announcing any concessions on two U.S...

...Bush's stern warning to Taiwan may not accord with his mission of spreading democracy around the world, and it may not go down well with his conservative base...

...That was a time of big Earth rallies...

...Nixon on Reagan Almost three decades after his resignation, and nine years after his death, RichardNixon continues to fascinate...

...It's the damn Eastern Establishment...

...You get the idea...

...The goddamn press can do anything it wants," he says bitterly...

...Secrets are weapons in internecine battles...

...A law recently signed by President Bush bans late-term abortion, a procedure its opponents call partial-birth abortion...

...One was a tariff on imported steel, condemned by the World Trade Organization as illegal and subject to retaliation...

...He raised the idea that maybe some new kind of agency was needed, perhaps something that could be organized as a private foundation...

...Now, as some of these reforms are diluted, repealed or allowed to expire, I feel as though I am present at the cremation...

...And the game goes on...

...The State Department says these talks are entirely unofficial...

...When the 35-member IAEA board held its meeting in Vienna at the end of November, the U.S...

...That formula has basically held all these years, while trade with China boomed and President Clinton spoke of a "strategic partner...

...Similarly, in the post-Watergate year of 1974 Congress passed a beefed-up Freedom of Information Act, one of the greatest democratic reforms...

...In 1973 the Supreme Court, in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision, established a constitutional right to abortion...

...Then everybody raises their hands in horror...

...Taiwan Warning The 30-year-old policy of "strategic ambiguity" on Taiwan, the most sensitive issue in Chinese-American relations, became a little less ambiguous with President Bush's warning Taiwan not to take any unilateral action toward independence...

...This is no doubt due in part to the periodic release of another batch of the 3,700 hours of Oval Office tapings Nixon, incredibly, did not destroy when he could have...

...The administration has announced it is planning to release the nine Britons, to be dealt with by British justice...

...Bush, in his campaign for President, changed that to "strategic competitor...

...Pork Barrels and Lobbyists Of the two major initiatives in this Congressional session...

...The influence wielders are now playing in the big leagues...

...President Bush won a resounding victory on what he describes as Medicare expansion and lost, albeit as a result of a filibuster, on energy policy...

...The lobbyist, once someone who patrolled the lobbies on Capitol Hill to buttonhole legislators, has graduated to large ? Street firms that deploy campaign money along with their arguments...

...The energy bill would have provided tax breaks for oil, gas and other energy producers amounting to nearly $24 billion over 10 years...

...In the presence of visiting Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, the President warned Taiwan against "any unilateral decision...

...Big lobbies also scored spectacular successes in the drafting of a Medicare bill that went far beyond its original idea of helping the elderly pay for prescription drugs...

...It is on his mind...

...Altogether, I have a sense of watching a television tape on which someone has pressed the rewind button...

...This presents the Bush Administration with an opportunity to start patching up relations with countries like France, Germany and Russia, who were offended by being barred from bidding on reconstruction contracts in Iraq...

...Chen is still talking of holding a "defensive referendum" demanding withdrawal of Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan, but he is not talking of a vote on independence...

...Maybe...

...It was titled The Best Congress Money Can Buy...

...Its theme is that no one ever has a good, romantic affair with a politician, and that there is not a single satisfactory relationship in the entire White House...

...Today it can involve huge monetary giveaways to political supporters...

...encouragement, but the United Nations does not recognize the Council as a government, and therefore questions its ability to create such a tribunal...

...And—are you ready—here is Nixon on sex...

...Having invaded Iraq to pre-empt some still undetermined threat, tying up a good share of available American forces, the Administration seems in no mood for taking on Iran and North Korea, although they may pose greater nuclear threats than Iraq ever did...

...The dilemma arises from the confusion and disagreement about who should try Saddam...

...Many of the beneficiaries of government largess are also major contributors to political campaigns...

...Built into the 681 -page legislation is $125 billion over 10 years in subsidies for the health industry andrelated businesses...

...Now Attorney General John Ashcroft has made it easier for the bureaucrats to withhold requested information...

...He explodes, "Sue the bastards...

...This was done with U.S...

...I've seen those Secret Service guys out at San Clemente...

...It enabled any citizen to demand information contained in the vast government files...

...Washington has implied since then that it would come to Taiwan's defense if it were attacked, but not if Taiwan tried to assert its own sovereignty...

...So somebody leaked the document to USA Today, the whole document, with its call for bold moves in the antiterrorism war...

...Human rights organizations point to the so-called"hybridcourts" created under UN auspices for countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia in which international judges sit side by side with indigenous judges...

...How that justice is to be carried out presents the Bush Administration with a dilemma—and an opportunity...

...Offstage, though, a track-two dialogue is going on...

...It created an independent counsel to ensure that the President could not fire the prosecutor investigating him, as Nixon had done to Archibald Cox...

...With Iran promising to suspend its nuclear program, France, Germany and Russia proposed a more conciliatory approach, censuring Iran and requiring more rigorous inspections...

...In a series of agreements dating back to the U.S.-Chinese Shanghai Communique of 1972, the United States acknowledged that "there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China...

...Staff aides of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and of Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Committee, have visited Pyongyang, and North Korean representatives have been invited to discussions in university settings in San Diego and Athens, Georgia...

...But the relationship has survived strains over Chinese human rights policy and the midair collision involving an American spy plane...

...On steel, Bush noted at a joint news conference that Blair had raised the subject two or three times...

...But it did issue visas to the North Koreans...

...Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith sent a highly classified memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee saying there were 50 items of intelligence pointing to an operational relationship between Iraq and the AI Qaeda terrorists, a contention the CIA did not share...

...The last independent counsel was Kenneth W. Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton...

...to change the status quo...

...The "axis of evil" has been mothballed, or at least put on hold...

...The latest 240 hours cover July to October 1972, the period shortly after the break-in to the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building and shortly before the election, when Nixon had reason to worry whether the scandal would hurt his re-election chances...

...At Camp Davidhe tells Haldeman, "Reagan on a personal basis is just terrible...

...Distribution was limited to four top officials...

...On the detainees, the President said, "We are working with the British government...

...Another subject of enormous dispute, especially between the Pentagon and the CIA, is the extent, if any, of the Iraq and AI Qaeda connection...

...The Washington Post calculates that more than three dozen major Bush contributors stood to gain from the energy bill, and it will surely come back in one form or another...

...Defense Secretary Rumsfeld still calls North Korea "evil," but the rest of the Administration acts as though it is not spoiling for another "axis of evil" confrontation...

...The lobbies thatwon these goodies represented the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical industry, the HMOs, and the hospitals...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Next Stop for Saddam In hailing the end of a "dark and painful era" in Iraq, with the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, President George W. Bush said the dictator would "face the justice he denied to millions...

...He just isn't pleasant to be around...

...But in recent years enforcement has been eased, and the EPA is cutting back on investigations into power plants for past violations of the Act...

...He rambles some more and concludes that the real problem is the press, especially the Washington Post...

...There are tangential disputes over whether the trial should be held in Iraq, vulnerable to insurgent attack, and whether it could impose the death penalty, banned in most countries...

...He realizes he could not win but thinks a suit would "create some doubt in the public mind...

...Nixon's comment...

...Leaking from the Top A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine showed an official handing a document to an underling and saying, "Leak this against my wishes...

...When Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean announced he was giving up Federal matching funds as President Bush had already done, so that he too could exceed spending limits during the primary season, I was transported back to 1974...

...The pork barrel is no longer simply a favor like a post office in a Congressman's home district...

...The Congressional debates on both illustrate how far the institutions of the pork barrel and the lobbyist have come...

...The week before his capture, the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council issued regulations providing for the naming of a five-member tribunal, empowered to try war crimes and crimes against humanity...

...Nixon displays some of his racism as he discusses the White House staff with Haldeman, who says, "We gotta get the Niggers out of the garden___Get the Filipinos and work em like slaves...

...in Iraq, which he has maintained at some jeopardy to his own position at home...

...Take, for example, one of the more interesting recent leaks...

...The memo ended up in the hands of the conservative Weekly Standard, which generally supports Feith's position against the CIA's...

...Haldeman, about the latest details in the investigation, Nixon says, "We'll just have to brazen it out...

...Nixon responds, "Right...

...That should have been the 3 5-million-member American Association of Retired People (AARP), but the organization had other fish to fry...

...Iraqi judges sitting side by side with, say, an American, a French and a German judge would be a promising start in restoring a measure of American cooperation with its one-time friends and allies...

...Blair's Reward It looks like Prime Minister Tony Blair has finally gotten his reward for his loyal support of the U.S...

...The bill is loaded with benefits for doctors, hospitals, and managed health organizations...

...Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly has visited Seoul, South Korea, to lay the groundwork for a second round of six-way talks—that is, with North and South Korea, China, Russia and Japan...

...joined in the censure resolution...

...Nixon reveals an antipathy for Ronald Reagan that I, for one, never knew about...

...Leading members of the Governing Council have altered their position on a tribunal, saying that there should be some form of international involvement in the judicial process...

...This is the most significant attempt to restrict abortion rights in 30 years...

...I narrated a CBS documentary called Our Poisoned Air...

...So when Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian, attentive to his own electoral needs, proposed holding a referendum that hinted at a drive for independence, the Bush Administration took vigorous exception...

...Who was it who said once, "The ship of state is the only kind of ship that leaks mainly from the top...

...Where in this high-powered mix of health care providers was a lobby for the consumers...

...The other was the holding of nine British subjects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as "enemy combatants...

...President Bush, atanews conference, also talked of developing a system to try Saddam "that will stand international scrutiny...

...In 1999, the act was allowed to expire...

...On the surface, the United States and North Korea remain deadlocked over the American refusal to make a pledge of nonaggression until North Korea actually dismantles its nuclear program...

...They're wrong...

...Present at the Cremation While covering some of the great reforms of the 1960s and '70s, I felt I was present at the creation...