Truth Is the First Casualty. Is Credibility the Second?
There is a saying here that wars tend to be fought three times. First comes the battle over whether to go to war. Second is the war itself. Third is the battle over the war's meaning once it is over.

Two months after the fall of Baghdad, the third fight is well underway, now that the principal rationale cited by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell for war with Iraq — that Saddam Hussein's possession of chemical and biological weapons posed an imminent threat — remains clouded by doubt. No chemical and biological weapons have been found, and some experts say they will never be found.

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Before the war, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the administration was exaggerating its case for war — a war he supported. He cited administration statements that Iraq was "on the verge" of getting nuclear weapons, when in fact it was not close. Also overstated, he said, were the existence of actual chemical and biological weapons and Iraq's links to terrorism.…

Truth Is the First Casualty. Is Credibility the Second?

…the law has imposed very few limits on what [data] they can get and how they can get it…

TIA Gets New Name, Old Questions Persist
The Pentagon's research arm, in a report released Tuesday, changed the name of its mammoth electronic surveillance project following public outcry, but concerns that the project will unnecessarily invade privacy without necessarily improving national security remain strong.

The Total Information Awareness program, now called the Terrorism Information Awareness program, under development at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will integrate data search, pattern recognition and collaborative software to analyze potential terrorist threats. Because of public controversy over the secret research, Congress ordered DARPA in January to submit a report explaining the project, its efficacy and its impact on privacy.

According to the TIA report released today, one of the key elements of the program is developing a secure environment for collaboration among agencies. The program is also researching ways to structure and automate data searches, develop software to discover linkages among events, places, people and things, and incorporate memory into decision-making.


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1097384,00.asp

Wiretap Law to Fight Terrorism Used in Other Ways
New electronic surveillance powers enacted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have been used widely by law enforcement agents, but not solely in pursuit of terrorism; some new powers bestowed by the USA PATRIOT Act allegedly have been used in cases involving drug violations and credit card fraud.

Even as the law enforcement and defense communities consider requesting additional spying technologies and wiretap powers from Congress, lawmakers are taking a close, critical look at the powers enacted hastily in the USA PATRIOT Act. Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee released the Justice Department's answers to dozens of questions lawmakers have raised.

Charging that the USA PATRIOT Act was rushed into law without thoughtful consideration, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said its enactment was a "shameful procedure" driven by vague threats from the Bush administration that lives could be lost if Congress did not hurry.

"With this kind of hysteria, the bill was passed almost sight unseen by this House," Nadler said during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. "It is now time for a sober second look."

The second look includes a review of the emergency searches done under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed in 1978. Over the course of one year, Attorney General John Ashcroft authorized 113 emergency electronic surveillance orders. In the previous 23 years, only 47 such authorizations were issued.

Privacy advocates are particularly concerned about a provision in the USA PATRIOT Act that extends "trap and trace" and "pen register" authorities from the wireline telephone environment to the Internet and wireless networks. A full search warrant, which allows the interception of content, requires a showing of probable cause, but a trap and trace order, which allows the interception only of telephone digits dialed, requires a lower standard of judicial review. The problem for privacy rights advocates is that in Internet communications the equivalent of digits dialed is undefined, and content could be wrongly intercepted without a showing of probable cause.…
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1098052,00.asp

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'DEATH AS A WAY OF LIFE'
After the Oslo agreement came the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the election of the hard-line Benjamin Netanyahu, the rise of Ehud Barak and his willingness to explore points of accommodation never before offered, the agonizing failure to reach agreement, the second intifada with its suicide bombings, Ariel Sharon's electoral victory and the all-out triumph of noise.

"Noise . . . gunshots and shouts, incendiary words and mournful laments, and explosions and demonstrations, and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terrorist attacks, and calls for revenge. . . .

"And within that whirlwind, in the eye of the storm, there is silence. It can't be heard; it is felt, in every cell of the body. A silence such as one feels in the brief moment between receiving bad news and comprehending it, between the blow and the pain. This is the empty space in which every person, Israeli or Palestinian, knows with piercing certainty all that he does not want or does not dare to know."

The temptation is to flee back to the noise, because the silence is unbearable. "There, laid bare, stripped of any national, religious, tribal or social garments that protect him, a man sits alone, curled up inside himself."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/books/21EDER.html

Texas Deleted Documents About Search for Democrats
The fight over the flight of Democratic legislators intensified yesterday as the Texas Department of Public Safety admitted it had destroyed documents that were collected last week as state troopers searched for the missing lawmakers.
What started out as a local partisan dispute about redistricting escalated into accusations of a cover-up and abuse of federal power.

Indeed, federal authorities are investigating how the Department of Homeland Security became involved in the search for the lawmakers.

Today's uproar began after The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that a commander at the Department of Public Safety issued an e-mail notice instructing that all "notes, correspondence, photos, etc." concerning the search "be destroyed immediately."

"It just doesn't smell right," said State Representative Garnet F. Coleman of Houston, a leader of the move by 51 Democrats to go to Oklahoma to deny House Republicans a quorum for a vote on redistricting.

"Clearly, there's some people trying to remove information, or delete information, that is damaging to their reputation," Mr. Coleman said. "We question the motive on the destruction. And what we really want to know is, who told the Department of Public Safety to do it?"

Democrats in Texas and in the state's delegation in Washington have asked for an investigation into why the federal Department of Homeland Security was called in on the case.

The security department has begun its own inquiry and said it got involved only because it had been told that a plane carrying the lawmakers was missing or had crashed.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/national/22TEXA.html

U.S. Wins Support to End Sanctions Imposed on Iraq

The final American concessions on the resolution to end nearly 13 years of sanctions against Iraq won the support of France, Russia and Germany today, ensuring the overwhelming approval of the measure, which is set for a vote on Thursday morning.

The measure grants the United States and Britain an extraordinary amount of authority over Iraq's political and economic affairs until a representative, internationally recognized government is installed. The resolution would give a limited but independent role to a United Nations special representative to help the occupying powers and Iraqi groups create a new government.

In a final concession, Washington agreed to a Security Council review within 12 months to examine how the resolution has been put into effect. The French had sought to give the Council power to rescind the mandate later.

The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, appearing at a news conference with his German and Russian counterparts, Joschka Fischer and Igor S. Ivanov, said last night that the latest version of the resolution put the United Nations "back in the game," adding that the United Nations special representative will now have a "tangible and independent role."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/international/worldspecial/22NATI.html

5/19/03 Worm Alert: Don't Open E-Mail from support@microsoft.com
"Your Password" -- To Trouble
by Eric Grevstad

A new virus infection has been spreading rapidly since last weekend, luring gullible e-mail users to execute an attachment to a bogus e-mail message from support@microsoft.com.

The subject line of the message may read "Your Password," "Your details," "Approved (Ref: 38446-263)," "Screensaver," or a "Re:" variation on the above. The message body reads only, "All information is in attached file."

The attached file is the Palyh worm, which -- like last week's fast-spreading Fizzer or the Sobig virus of several months ago -- copies itself to the Windows directory, Registry, and Startup folder and begins looking for open network connections and sending itself to every e-mail address it can find on the infected PC. Antivirus vendors say the worm will stop propagating after May 31.
5/19/03 Worm Alert: Don't Open E-Mail from support@microsoft.com

Justices Allow Drug-Cost Plan to Go Forward
Maine's innovative effort to reduce prescription drug costs for uninsured state residents by pressuring manufacturers to grant price rebates received the Supreme Court's qualified approval today.

The 6-to-3 decision lifted an injunction that has kept the Maine Rx Program from taking effect since the state's Legislature enacted it in 2000. The court's action is likely to shift the drug pricing debate away from the courts and back to the executive branch and the states.

Other states have been following the Maine case closely, with 29 states filing a Supreme Court brief on Maine's behalf. As prescription drug legislation has remained stalled in Congress, about half the states have started experimenting with ways to hold down costs for various groups of consumers.

Among these efforts, the Maine program was not only one of the earliest but also one of the broadest. While the program was intended primarily for the state's 325,000 residents who lack medical insurance, it set no income ceiling or other description of financial need. The program is theoretically open to anyone, although the state has proposed regulations to disqualify those who have prescription drug coverage.

Under Maine Rx, the state assumes the role of a pharmacy benefit manager and requires drug manufacturers who want to sell their products in Maine to negotiate rebates similar to those the manufacturers have accepted on drugs they sell through the Medicaid program, which provides medical assistance for the poor.

Since a state cannot directly impose price regulation, Maine gave the drug companies a powerful incentive to go along: manufacturers that did not cooperate faced having their products subject to a "prior authorization" procedure, under which the state's Department of Human Services would have to approve prescriptions case by case before pharmacies could dispense them.

For drugs prescribed through Medicaid, federal law permits states to use this pre-authorization procedure, which manufacturers, doctors, and patients all regard as onerous. Doctors and patients tend to seek alternatives to drugs for which pre-authorization is required. The industry argued in its lawsuit that by using the procedure for a purpose not directly linked to Medicaid, Maine had gone beyond its legal authority.

The state had not sought federal approval for its program, a fact the Bush administration stressed in urging the justices to invalidate it.

The court today declined to take that step, instead leaving the next move up to the state and the administration. "We cannot predict at this preliminary stage the ultimate fate of the Maine Rx Program," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a portion of the opinion that was joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.…
Full Text at
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=01-188&friend=nytimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/20/politics/20DRUG.html

Truth, Lies and Subtext
I've seen drunks, incompetents and out-and-out lunatics in the newsrooms I've passed through over the years. I've seen plagiarizers, fiction writers and reporters who felt it was beneath them to show up for work at all.

I remember a police captain who said of a columnist at The Daily News: "I didn't mind him makin' stuff up as long as I looked O.K. But now he's startin' to [tick] me off."

I was at NBC when some geniuses decided it was a good idea to attach incendiary devices to a few General Motors pickup trucks to show that the trucks had a propensity to burst into flames. That became a scandal that grew into a conflagration that took down the entire power structure at NBC News.

I've seen schmoozers, snoozers and high-powered losers in every venue I've been in. Most of these rogues, scoundrels and miscreants were white because most of the staffers in America's mainstream newsrooms are white. What I haven't seen in all these years was the suggestion that any of these individuals fouled up — or were put into positions where they could foul up — because they were white.

Which brings us to the Jayson Blair scandal. For those who have been watching nothing but the Food Network for the past few weeks, Mr. Blair was a Times reporter who resigned after it was learned that his work contained fabrications and plagiarized passages on a monumental scale. The truth and Jayson Blair inhabited separate universes. If there was a blizzard raging, Mr. Blair could tell you with the straightest and friendliest of faces that the weather outside was sunny and warm.

Now this would be a juicy story under any circumstances. But Mr. Blair is black, so there is the additional spice of race, to which so many Americans are terminally addicted.

Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/19/opinion/19HERB.html

Looting Is Derailing Detailed U.S. Plan to Restore Iraq
Long before President Bush ordered the attack against Iraq, the White House and the Pentagon drew up a plan for rebuilding and running the country after the war that was nearly as meticulous as the battle plan.

But over the past two to three weeks, the wheels have threatened to come off their vehicle for establishing the peace.

The looting, lawlessness and violence that planners thought would mar only the first few weeks has proved more widespread and enduring than Mr. Bush and his aides expected and is threatening to undermine the American plan.

Five weeks after Baghdad fell, Mr. Bush finds himself exactly where he did not want to be: forced to impose control with a larger number of troops and to delay the start of efforts to turn power over to Iraqis.

The message that reached the White House from two recent meetings with potential Iraqi leaders, officials say, was that it would be foolish to start experimenting with democracy without making people feel secure enough to go back to work or school, and without giving them back at least the basic services they received during Saddam Hussein's brutal rule.

Senior administration officials said they had foreseen some problems, but not all. "You couldn't know how it would end," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a telephone conversation on Friday that he initiated. "When it did end, you take it as you found it and get at it, knowing the single most important thing is security."

Another senior administration official said the White House was surprised to learn how badly broken Iraq's prewar infrastructure was. "From the outside it looked like Baghdad was a city that works," the official said. "It isn't."

Mr. Bush's aides cautioned reporters before the war that even the best plans would have to be rewritten on the ground.

Those plans called for quickly returning Baghdad police officers to duty to maintain a semblance of order, and having Iraqi soldiers build roads and clear rubble. They envisioned cheering crowds and a swift restoration of electricity and other utilities. The quick establishment of a civilian Iraqi interim authority, officials said, would help demonstrate to a suspicious Arab world that America would not act as an occupier, as in Japan and Germany.

"We will in fact be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney said on March 16, three days before the war started.

But many of Baghdad's 10,000 police officers are just now trickling back. The Iraqi soldiers disappeared. No one in Washington anticipated the degree to which the chaos would undermine that central goal of presenting the United States as a liberator, senior officials said.

In fact, that instinct may have worsened the problem, senior officials said in interviews. Inside the White House, officials feared that if the looters were shot — the fastest way to send the message that the United States was intent on restoring order — the pictures on Al Jazeera would reinforce the worst images of America in the Arab world.

Within the administration, the backbiting has intensified. Some say Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general initially charged with the physical and political rebuilding of Iraq, moved too slowly.

The sense that General Garner's team got off to a slow start was reinforced when he and a small team of aides finally arrived in Baghdad in late April to discover that they had no functioning e-mail, no way for outsiders to reach them by telephone, no cars and drivers to get them around the city and no interpreters. Aides say those problems have since eased.

Moreover, General Garner clashed with his top administrator for Baghdad, Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen who has since left. "They were two very strong personalities, and they never came together as a team," said one senior official here.

But even critics of General Garner, who was replaced on May 7 by a career diplomat, L. Paul Bremer III, say he has been a victim of fierce infighting between the Pentagon and State Department over running postwar operations, and of a security environment he does not control.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/19/international/worldspecial/19POLI.html

Iraq's Slide Into Lawlessness Squanders Good Will for U.S.
It was another bad week for Karim W. Hassan, director general of Iraq's electricity commission.

Looters had already pilfered underground cables, carted off computers that regulate power distribution, stolen 25 of the guards' 30 patrol cars, emptied warehouses of spare parts, ransacked substations and shot up transmission lines across the country's electric grid.

Then, his men reported, armed bandits stole the only cable splicer in central Iraq, needed to repair countless vandalized electric lines.

On top of that, another group of gunmen stole his own car. The upshot: yet more delays in restoring electricity in this city, weeks after the war ended.

"Give me security," said Dr. Hassan, speaking for many Iraqis, "and I'll give you electricity."

The power company's problems are but one example of how Iraq's descent into lawlessness has stalled its return to normalcy, increased the costs of reconstruction and squandered much of the good will Iraqis felt for their new American overseers.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/international/worldspecial/18LOOT.html

Bored With Baghdad — Already
…when Saddam vanished, so did his police and government. This created a power vacuum that we were not ready to fill. This unleashed the looting, which Donald Rumsfeld blithely dismissed with his infamous line: "Freedom is untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." And so they did. Many pieces of Iraq's economic and governmental infrastructure — which the U.S. Air Force carefully spared with its smart bombs — were destroyed from the ground up by dumb looters or saboteurs, while we watched. Chaos is untidy. Freedom requires limits.

Drive around Basra and see what looters have done to just one institution: the 12,000-student Basra University. It looks like a tornado hit it. Looters have made off with all the desks and chairs, ransacked the library, and were last seen by my colleague Marc Santora ripping out window frames and digging up cables. Check out some of the factories around Baghdad, or many ministries, power plants, oil refineries, police stations, water systems. All have been hobbled by looting — which is why power is in short supply, phones don't work, and gas lines are a mile long.

I am sure things will improve. But after traveling around central Iraq, here's what worries me: The buildup to this war was so exhausting, the coverage of the dash to Baghdad so telegenic, and the climax of the toppling of Saddam's statue so dramatic, that everyone who went through it seems to prefer that the story just end there. The U.S. networks changed the subject after the fall of Baghdad as fast as you can say "Laci Peterson," and President Bush did the same as fast as you can say "tax cuts."

They are not only underestimating how hard nation building will be with this brutalized people, but how much the looting and power vacuum have put us into an even deeper hole. We need an emergency airlift of military police officers, a mobile telephone system so people can communicate, and a TV station. And we need, as one U.S. general said to me, to "take that $600 million of Saddam's money we found behind that wall, go up in a helicopter and spread it from one end of the country to the other." We have to get the economy going.

Iraqis are an exhausted people. Most seem ready to give us a chance, and we do have a shot at making this a decent place — but not with nation building lite. That approach is coming unstuck in Afghanistan and it will never work in Iraq. We've wasted an important month. We must get our act together and our energy up. Why doesn't Mr. Rumsfeld brief reporters every day about rebuilding Iraq, the way he did about destroying Saddam?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/opinion/18FRIE.html

Suicide Bombings Are Condemned in Saudi Mosques
As they arrived in the torrid heat at Abu Bakr Mosque for the first Friday Prayers since this week's bombings, most worshipers seemed to expect that today's sermon would condemn the attacks as contrary to Islamic tenets. They were not disappointed, or in disagreement.

"I totally reject these attacks, and I don't think anyone in Saudi Arabia would approve them," said Khalid Ibrahim, 32, an elementary school teacher.

But Mr. Ibrahim added that the killing of 34 Americans, Saudis and others in the explosions at three residential compounds here in the Saudi capital on Monday night had to be placed in context.

"I see hundreds of our Muslim brothers dying in Iraq and Palestine," he said. "Part of the reason for these attacks in our country is retaliation against that injustice."

Such comments were echoed by a dozen other worshipers in an upper-class suburb in eastern Riyadh. Many cited the Koran as teaching that the killing of innocents, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, is not simply forbidden, but certain to lead to punishment in hell. They cited recent headlines to make the point of suffering by fellow Muslims.

In the holy city of Mecca, the imam of the Grand Mosque, Sheik Saleh bin Abdullah bin Humaid, condemned the bombings today as "criminal acts" and "an aggression, an act of killing, terrorizing others and destruction," as well as "bloodshed of protected souls."

In Medina, the imam of the Prophet Mosque, Ali bin Abdel Rahman al-Hudhaify, said that while Muslims were "required to punish any fellow Muslims who violate Islamic teachings," they should also ask the West "to punish those who commit terrorist acts against the Palestinians and to guarantee their right to live in peace and dignity in their homeland."

The imam at Abu Bakr Mosque here, Mazin al-Raji, said the attacks posed a test that separated believers from nonbelievers. Believers, he said, understood that the bombers were "mentally twisted and unstable" people whose conduct was also an act of treason against the state and against human nature.

But the imam also cited conditions in Chechnya, the Palestinian territories and Iraq, and warned that arresting people and suppressing their opinions could "create another reason for terrorism."

Taken together, these comments seem to suggest that while the bombings may have stirred a new resolve among Saudis to fight terrorism, there is a wide gulf between Riyadh and Washington on policy issues like postwar Iraq and the Middle East peace talks.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/17/international/middleeast/17SAUD.html

News: Fizzer worm spreads across the Internet
A very clever mass-mailing worm is spreading rapidly across the Internet.

Fizzer (w32.fizzer@mm) has many different components, each timed to trigger different processes, making it quite difficult to contain.

The worm spreads via e-mail and includes its own SMTP engine to bypass any security your e-mail client may have. Fizzer also spreads via Kazaa, a popular file-sharing application.

The worm establishes its own accounts on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and AOL Instant Messenger, in order to await further instructions from the virus author.

Fizzer attempts to disable any antivirus program running at the time of infection. Systems infected with Fizzer could be used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on other computers.

Fizzer includes a keystroke-logging Trojan horse, which can be used to steal passwords words and credit card information.

Because Fizzer spreads via e-mail and Kazaa, contains a keystroke-logging Trojan horse, and could be used in a DDoS attack, this worm rates a 7 on the ZDNet Virus Meter.

Removal
Most antivirus software companies have updated their signature files to include this worm. This will stop the infection upon contact and in some cases will remove an active infection from your system. For more information, see Central Command, F-Secure, McAfee, MessageLabs, Sophos, Symantec, or Trend Micro.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1001062.html

The JavaScript Source: Calculators: Light Years Calculator
Ever wonder how far a light year is? This calculator script translates light years to miles.
http://javascript.internet.com/calculators/light-years-calculator.html

Economist.com | Iraq
In a sign that all is not well with the transitional government, Paul Bremer, a former State Department counter-terrorism chief, has been appointed to replace Jay Garner, a retired general, as Iraq’s top civilian administrator. In his first news conference after taking office at the start of the week, Mr Bremer promised on Thursday May 15th that restoring law and order would be his priority. Thousands of American-trained Iraqi police had been put on the streets of Baghdad, he said, and had detained 300 suspects in the past 48 hours.

Tensions remain high at the diplomatic level. On Thursday, America presented to the United Nations Security Council a new draft of its proposed resolution to lift sanctions against Iraq and to give America and Britain broad powers to run the country until an elected Iraqi government can take over. The new draft expands the role of a proposed UN envoy in Iraq but still leaves his duties vague. Thus it may not satisfy France, Russia and others who suspect that President George Bush may be backsliding on his promise of a “vital” role for the UN in rebuilding Iraq.

America wants sanctions against Iraq scrapped so the country can quickly resume trading with the rest of the world. But France and Russia have proposed only a temporary suspension, until UN inspectors have returned to Iraq and certified that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell, America's secretary of state, said on Thursday that America might agree to this, but he and Mr Bush's spokesmen retracted this immediately afterwards, saying America was not ready to make such a big concession. Until now, Germany has lined up with France and Russia in the “anti-war” camp. On Friday, though, Mr Powell met Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder and won his backing for a rapid end to sanctions: “We believe the sanctions no longer make any sense and that they should be removed as soon as possible,” Mr Schröder said afterwards.

Meanwhile, the debate about whether it was right to wage war on Saddam Hussein’s regime has not grown any quieter. The coalition countries cited two main justifications for the removal of Saddam: the threat his murderous regime posed to the Iraqi people, especially the Shia Muslims and Kurds; and the threat its development of weapons of mass destruction posed to international security.

On the first of these, plenty of evidence in support of the Americans’ claims has been unearthed—literally. This week, thousands of Iraqis have been searching for missing relatives in a mass grave discovered near the city of Hilla. The grave is not the first to be discovered since the fall of the old regime—officials in the southern city of Basra, for instance, have reported finding a pit containing around 1,000 bodies. But the Hilla find is certainly the largest so far. Local volunteers say the remains of up to 3,000 people have already been found at the site, where as many as 15,000 bodies may be buried. The corpses are thought to be those of political prisoners and their families, killed after a Shia uprising against Saddam’s Sunni Muslim regime in 1991. Human-rights groups estimate that up to 200,000 people could be buried in mass graves across Iraq.

The hunt for banned weapons has been less successful. In the run-up to war, Mr Bush insisted that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that it had also been trying to develop nuclear weapons. Saddam, he said, might seek to put these in terrorists’ hands if left in power. The disarmament theme was one to which American politicians and diplomats returned again and again during the Security Council debates before the war.

But the weapons haul has so far been meagre. Investigators have found no chemical weapons. Nor have they found fresh evidence of a nuclear programme. (Intelligence reports before the war that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials from Niger have been discredited). On the biological front, there has been a bit more progress. American forces have seized two trailers that they say could have been used as mobile germ-weapons labs, and tests are being carried out on them. Two of Saddam’s most senior microbiologists have also been arrested. One of them, Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azzawi al-Tikriti, dubbed “Dr Germ”, admitted producing anthrax and botulinum, but claimed that they were only developed as a deterrent against threats from Israel and that all of Iraq’s bioweapons were destroyed long ago.

Ms Taha would say that, wouldn’t she? And yet, there is clearly a sense of disappointment among American officials that they still do not have a powerful “smoking gun”. When the war started, the American military drew up a list of 19 top weapons sites. By May 11th, all but two had been searched and found to contain no weapons of mass destruction. Officials in Washington, meanwhile, continue to insist that the search has barely begun. They were probably not best pleased when, on May 13th, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank that had helped set the pro-war agenda, accepted that banned weapons were unlikely to be found in large quantities. “The absence of chemical weapons was a big surprise,” said Gary Samore, an Iraq expert at the IISS.…
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1779639

Mind the Gap
The Senate debate over President Bush's tax plan has focused so far on the plan's short-term effects, like whether a reduction in the dividend tax will help the stock market. While economic stimulus is important, Congress and the president should also take up an issue with far more consequence for America's long-term growth and stability: economic inequality.

According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 40 percent of American families earned 18 percent of the national income in 1970, but by 1998 they earned only 14 percent — and that figure could fall to 10 percent before too long. On a global scale, too, inequality is a problem. Per capita gross domestic product in India in 2000 was only 7 percent of that of the United States, and for China the figure was 11 percent. Such a difference could increase the possibility of greater inequality within America.

The prospect of worsening inequality is truly frightening, but in the present political environment, there appears little that can be done. In fact, Washington can act now to help prevent inequality from worsening. Without making any changes in tax rates, it could reform the tax system so that it automatically prevents economic inequality from getting any worse.

The tax cut passed two years ago was fairly conventional. Tax rates and brackets were mostly indexed to the Consumer Price Index. President Bush's current tax plan proposes some minor adjustments in this plan that accelerate the tax reductions.

This basic framework for tax law doesn't make much sense. Instead, future tax brackets and rates should be contingent on the extent of future inequality. Tax law should be based on a principle that might be called inequality insurance: the taxes would be collected in such a way as to insure that the level of inequality, after taxes and transfers, does not exceed the levels present when the law was enacted. If such indexing were put in place today, the brackets and rates would adjust whenever inequality worsened beyond today's levels.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/15/opinion/15SHIL.html

The China Syndrome
A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."

Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors — the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire — which includes Fox News and The New York Post — is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service — which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated — from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.

Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or — for another example — Israel.

A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership" — owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market — will be lifted.

The plan's defects aside — it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people — what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.

And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/opinion/13KRUG.html

New Study Finds 60 Million Uninsured During a Year
Members of Congress, administration officials, lobbyists and advocates often cite the Census Bureau when they declare that 41 million people have no health insurance.

But in a new report today, the budget office said the bureau's figure "overstates the number of people who are uninsured all year," while significantly understating the number who are insured for only part of the year.

The report said 57 million to 59 million people, "about a quarter of the nonelderly population," lacked insurance at some time in 1998, the most recent year for which reliable comparative figures were available.

At the same time, the budget office said, government surveys suggest that the number of people uninsured for the entire year was 21 million to 31 million, or 9 percent to 13 percent of nonelderly Americans.

The widely used figure from the Census Bureau is based on interviews conducted by the government, as part of the Current Population Survey, in March of each year. The questions about insurance are meant to identify people who were uninsured for all the prior calendar year.

But the budget office said that many people "report their insurance status as of the time of the interview, rather than for the previous calendar year as requested."

The new research confirms what some economists and health policy experts had suspected for years: that it is difficult to count the uninsured because people are continually losing and gaining coverage, and they do not always understand the questions asked in government surveys.

…Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, said: "The report underscores how big a crisis our country is facing. On any given day, more than 40 million Americans live with the prospect of facing financial ruin in order to pay for their health care, or going without care altogether."

One question the budget office addressed was how long people go without coverage when they are uninsured. For some, the experience is relatively brief. But others go more than two years without insurance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/health/13HEAL.html

Six Log: A Proposal: RSS for Weblogs
On Scripting News, Dave writes:

We could establish a profile of RSS 2.0 and implement strict compliance with that profile in the major blogging tools.

This has been followed by a discussion of the issues on Sam's weblog, with a lot of discussion over whether the core profile should be based on RSS 1.0, 2.0, or whether it's really necessary at all.

What we need is a profile of RSS specific to weblogs: "RSS for Weblogs".

RSS 1.0 and 2.0 are designed for extensibility, and can be used to represent non-weblog data. Currently they're really only being used for weblogs/news feeds, and Dave has said in the past that RSS is intended only as a news/syndication format. But the point of making RSS extensible is so that new features can easily be added, and new types of data can be represented.…
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/05/10#letsGetReadyNow
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1393.html
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/09/23#When:8:59:58PM
Six Log: A Proposal: RSS for Weblogs