Iraq's 'Vortex of Corruption'
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Iraq's 'Vortex of Corruption' David a. Kay, the former chief of the U.S. arms inspection team in Iraq, has said he does not believe President George W....
...Libya volunteered antiterrorist intelligence support...
...At a subsequent meeting with the Secretary-General in the Oval Office, President Bush further indicated a desire to have him try to break the political deadlock...
...It looks like a start has been made on the Europeanization of American politics...
...Interestingly, America's parent democracy, Great Britain, faced a similar circumstance and handled it in a much more orderly fashion...
...An independent inquiry was commissioned, headed by a senior judge, Lord Hutton...
...To what extent it will scrutinize past intelligence performance in, say, Iraq may not be clear until the commission issues its report, some time after the November elections...
...In an interview with author Milton Viorst for Foreign Affairs magazine, the Libyan dictator said about terrorism, "All of these things are of the past, an era that is over...
...Without mentioning countries like France, Germany and Russia that opposed the invasion of Iraq, the President gave them the back of his hand by saying, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country...
...Possibly the trickiest passage of the speech, however, was Bush's bow to the Christian right on opposition to gay marriage...
...President Bush, asked about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, said, "Yes, they are secure," and changed the subject...
...The CIA," he said, "missed the significance of the chaos in Iraq's leadership...
...In Indonesia, the former military chief, General Wiranto, who is charged by the UN with war crimes in East Timor, is a candidate in the country's first-ever directpresidential election, scheduledfor July...
...Blair, his position in danger, gave the inquiry commission mil cooperation...
...In fact, nearly twice as many say there is too little reference to religious faith among politicians than say there is too much...
...intelligence operations...
...In 1986, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Qaddafi's compound, killing 37 persons in reprisal for the bombing of a West Berlin café in which two American GIs were killed...
...But the United States being what it is and this being an election season, there is no way a war that may have been fought for insufficient reason can be kept out of politics...
...administrator L. Paul Bremer III, the plan was rejected by Grand Ayatollah Ali alSistani, the charismatic leader of the Shi'ites...
...Without uttering the word "gay," he said that "if judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process...
...Bush administration—and twice left to the mercy of Saddam when the chips were down...
...He is also in almost total control of the Duma, the Lower House of Parliament...
...troops and could conceivably become an issue in the American election campaign...
...It's not a political issue," Dr...
...No question there are votes in them there hills, but more for Republicans than for Democrats...
...Since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, the five charter members of the nuclear club—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China—worked to keep the bomb out of other hands...
...Qaddafi's Road to Reality The idea that Colonel Muammar elQaddafi saw American forces invading Iraq last March and decided that the jig was up for Libya is attractive in its simplicity...
...Libya and the United States have been in an unannounced state of conflict since 1981, when American jets shot down two Libyan planes over disputed waters...
...The Pakistani government has confirmed that the A.Q...
...Before him, President Ronald Reagan spoke in almost prophetic terms about the Soviet Union as "the evil empire...
...And the willingness of its chief nuclear scientist to share the bomb with rogue regimes intensifies that danger...
...And in America—ahh, America— where the Democratic Presidential primaries have vied for attention with Michael Jackson's child abuse case and his sister Janet's breast-baring Super Bowl performance, the Federal Election Commission was examining a possible loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act...
...Apparently to the surprise of U.S...
...That, presumably, would include a role for the UN in the governing process that the Administration had long refused...
...The Strangelovian character stands at the center of an international network of aspiring proliferators...
...Greater threats may lie ahead...
...Not Ready for Export Elsewhere on the democracy front: • In Afghanistan, a new constitution— basically a joint product of the United States, the United Nations and interim President Hamid Karzai—immediately generated a minority challenge...
...Qaddafi retaliated with terrorist attacks in Rome and Vienna...
...The President said, "May God continue to bless America...
...Kay said his team had learned from interviews with scientists and other sources that around 1997 or '98 Iraq plunged into a "vortex of corruption," because scientists came to realize they could get Saddam to approve large amounts of money for weapons programs that were fantasies...
...Kay declared...
...Khan...
...I'mnot sure what to make of that...
...Kay's willingness to lay the blame on the CIA is noteworthy, for it was the agency that hired him to head the Iraq Survey Group...
...Kay made the astounding suggestion that not only American intelligence was the victim of a hoax—so was President Saddam Hussein...
...He also eventually agreed to pay $2.7 billion in compensation for the families of Pan Am victims...
...And as if to soften the impact of his statement, he went on to say that "each individual has dignity and value in God's sight...
...They have bitter memories of twice being summoned to rebellion—by the Richard M. Nixon Administration and by the George H.W...
...Germany's opposition party is the Christian Democratic Union...
...He spoke of the "dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting against us," but did not name the victims of the "illusion...
...Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani said the document did not represent a consensus and that it would push Afghanistan toward dictatorship...
...Especially since the President and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to talk as though the threat was real and the weapons stockpiles might still be found...
...Educators and Democrats who have iticized the testing provision and the u, 'erfunding of the No Child Left Behind Act became an unspecified "some" who want to "undermine" the act...
...Khan Research Laboratories peddled nuclear know-how and components to North Korea, Iran and Libya...
...He described corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state...
...Apoll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds Americans on the whole comfortable with religious rhetoric...
...The parliament would, in turn, elect an interim government to which power would be handed over with great ceremony on June 30...
...So Bremer, after feeling the pulse of the White House, went figuratively hatin-hand to New York, to ask UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to broker some kind of compromise...
...But, incomprehensibly, the plan did not reckon with the feelings of the longpersecuted Shi'ites, who make up 60 per cent of the population...
...The United States is in the business of exporting democracy, but it appears that democracy at home still needs a little work...
...They did not succeed with Israel, or India or Pakistan...
...I doubt whether a candidate would speak with such secular absolutism today, when religion has become a familiar part of politics...
...Howard Dean has talked of himself, especially in the South, as a committed believer in Christ...
...Increasingly, Democratic wannabes are paying their respects to religion...
...But Bush wants it to focus on the future "global security challenges of the 21 st century," according to an Administration official...
...According to a comprehensive report in the New York Times, and his own confession shortly afterward on national television in Islamabad, much of the responsibility for this will go to the father of the Pakistani bomb...
...When the commission completed its 740page report, Lord Hutton read its conclusions from the bench in the Royal Courts of Justice...
...The White House has a lot at stake...
...A new menace arose when Pakistan went into the export business undeterred by the U.S...
...The word "Democrat" never crossed his lips...
...By the late '90s a full-scale peace offensive was under way...
...In our country, there is more and more religion in politics...
...The BBC created a sensation when it reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair had used intelligence he "probably knew was wrong...
...I detected only one ad lib in a speech many weeks in the making...
...The number refers to a section of the tax code under which the Democrats have allegedly been trying to create ostensibly independent groups backed with soft money contributions...
...Having invaded Iraq without a UN mandate last March, the Administration did not mention any role for the world organization when it reached an agreement with the American-created Iraqi Governing Council in November for a summer transfer of sovereignty...
...Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf was the target of two recent assassination attempts, raising the thought of nuclear weapons in the hands of an extremist successor regime...
...It totally cleared the Prime Minister of the charge of having "sexed up" intelligence information in order to justify a war...
...In Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, "Christian" or "Catholic" enter into the names of parties...
...Meanwhile, Dr...
...No specific reference was made to a constitutional amendment...
...And Republicans are widely viewed as more friendly toward religion than Democrats...
...If only Saddam Hussein had...
...Dangerous Illusion' President Bush's State of the Union speech on January 20 was effectively the kickoff for his re-election campaign— couched in the lofty, above-politics language of a constitutionally mandated message to Congress...
...Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, let it be known that he transacts no business on the Sabbath...
...Bush has spoken of his religiousjourney starting in 1986, when he gave up drinking and committed his heart to Jesus Christ...
...Religion and Politics "I believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute," said Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy before an association of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960...
...arms inspection team in Iraq, has said he does not believe President George W. Bush deliberately overplayed the threat of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an invasion...
...The closing words in the text were "God bless America...
...Abdul Qadeer Khan...
...Pakistan's instability heightens the danger of nuclear proliferation...
...With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world began to look different...
...After the 9/11 attacks, Qaddafi made a speech expressing sympathy with America and stressing the need to eliminate the "common dangers of international extremism and terrorism...
...But the events that led to the surprise declaration that Libya would scrap its own weapons programs are more complicated and stretch out over a longer period...
...If rogue states have not yet produced any mushroom clouds, it is in large part because these developing countries have not yet mastered the complex technology involved in extracting uranium and designing the special-purpose centrifuges...
...It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information...
...British intelligence had compiled a dossier that went so far as to suggest that Iraq could activate its weapons of mass destruction on 45 minutes notice...
...He surrendered two Libyan agents to the Netherlands who were tried for their role in the Flight 103 bombing...
...Colonel Qaddafi, often called eccentric, had perceived the way the wind was blowing in a post-Cold War world...
...Even as Blair was being vindicated by the Hutton report, Dr...
...The situation became more painful when the BBC's source, a scientist named David A. Kelly, committed suicide...
...In 1988, the back-and-forth violence reached its climax with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 on board...
...Kay was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, urging a similar independent inquiry in the United States...
...So the Administration has approached the UN with something it has not displayed for a long time—humility...
...In a recent Gallup poll, President Bush held a 67-to30 per cent lead over Dean among religious voters...
...It concerns something called 527 groups...
...Annan magnanimously agreed to send a mission to Iraq...
...A Gallup poll finds religion "very" or "extremely" important to the choices made by one in three voters...
...He demanded popular elections that would give his people a dominant voice, and they poured into the streets by the tens of thousands to support him...
...The idea then was that assemblies of notables, something like caucuses, would select a parliament with a safe number of delegates friendly to the U.S...
...An official-looking brochure offering nuclear hardware bears the name of the Pakistani government and a photo of Dr...
...In Russia, a dozen years after Communism was vanquished, President Vladimir V Putin faces hardly more than token opposition in his March 14 run for reelection...
...He admonished "somepeople" who question whether American is in a war, but did not say who they were either...
...Nuclear Trader History may recall that the early 21 st century witnessed the breakdown of the three-decade-long effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons...
...Democrats were quick to support the idea, and the White i House equally quick to turn it down...
...Calling Kofi Annan With a certain air of controlled desperation the Bush Administration has solicited a bailout in Iraq from the United Nations that it has long scorned...
...The targets for his criticism were "some" and "those who" disagreed with him...
...The United States embargoed Libyan commerce...
...Within days, though, it was announced that the President would set up a bipartisan commission to look into U.S...
...He was assuring his listeners that being a Catholic would not affect his policies...
...Qaddaf i started putting out conciliatory feelers...
...Disruption of the timetable for the creation of an Iraqi government could delay the rotation of U.S...
...The system became so corrupt, and we missed that...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
