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To: Sully- who wrote (46444)	1/15/2002 11:14:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Remember Colombia Monday, January 14, 2002; Page A16 The Washington Post IT NOW LOOKS AS though the Bush administration may have to devote some real attention in the coming year to a key Latin American ally, Argentina, which has suffered an economic meltdown and is in danger of political collapse. But if it would like to head off yet another Latin American crisis, it would do well also to increase its effort in Colombia, a large and troubled nation of 42 million where a once-active U.S. policy has been on virtual autopilot for the past year. Colombia's battle with insurgent groups of the left and right, which during 2001 killed at least 3,000 people, has been cast in a new context -- at least for the United States -- by the events of Sept. 11. After all, three of the Colombian groups are on the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations, and one recently was caught collaborating with Ireland's IRA. Nevertheless, the Bush administration has insisted on preserving an unrealistic policy it inherited from the Clinton administration, by which the United States supplies hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and training to the Colombian army in the name of combating narcotics trafficking but refuses to support military operations against the guerrillas -- even though the extremists are themselves deeply involved in the production of cocaine. Though both the administration and Congress are properly concerned about the army's record of human rights violations, the real point of the policy has been to limit U.S. involvement in a fight against extremists who routinely use terrorism to weaken a democratic and pro-American government. Such logic was typical of U.S. foreign policy before Sept. 11; now it seems glaringly out of place. Officials point out that Congress has appropriated more than $2 billion in aid to Colombia in the past several years, part of a larger Plan Colombia intended to curtail the growing and processing of coca and deprive the insurgents of their sources of support. Colombian President Andres Pastrana has tried to couple that stick with peace negotiations with the militants and has allowed the largest organization to maintain its own Switzerland-sized enclave. But both initiatives are failing. Despite extensive fumigation of coca fields this year, there is no sign Colombian cocaine production -- or even overall coca planting -- has decreased. The peace talks have produced no results, while the kidnappings, massacres and other criminal acts by the militants -- especially those of the right -- have mounted steadily. On Saturday Mr. Pastrana announced a breakdown in talks with the leftist guerrillas; he has given them until today to vacate their enclave, and ordered the army to retake the zone. That could herald the beginning of a substantial escalation of the military conflict in the coming months. Colombia meanwhile is heading toward a spring presidential election likely to produce a successor to Mr. Pastrana who is committed to a tougher approach. But whether or not the war escalates, the Bush administration needs to revitalize U.S. engagement with Colombia. The government should be helped and encouraged to speed up judicial reforms and aid to farmers, and more pressure should be applied -- as it has been already -- for a break between the military and the right-wing paramilitary groups. The administration also should abandon its attempt to distinguish counternarcotics from counterinsurgency aid to Colombia. If the United States can support governments and armies battling extremists in Central and Southeast Asia, as it has recently begun to do, it ought to be able to give similar aid to an embattled democratic government in Latin America. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

To: Sully- who wrote (46444)	1/15/2002 11:27:02 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Democrats Ponder How Wide a Net to Cast January 15, 2002 THE RESPONSE By STEPHEN LABATON The New York Times WASHINGTON — Seven months ago, when he took over as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman said he would examine the "serious allegations" raised by a colleague from California about the relationship between the Enron Corporation (news/quote) and one of its chief Washington regulators. But other than seek a report from the General Accounting Office on a narrow aspect of the issue, the Governmental Affairs Committee never issued any subpoenas or held any hearings on the political ties between the regulators and companies that included Enron. Last week, as the administration disclosed a series of conversations between top officials and the company during Enron's dying days, Mr. Lieberman was part of a chorus of Democratic lawmakers questioning the effectiveness of the same regulatory apparatus he said he would be examining last year. Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, has gone even further, saying that the calls from the Enron executives last fall to members of President Bush's cabinet should have prompted the officials to begin an investigation and do something to protect the company's employees. Mr. Waxman has not spelled out what, precisely, the government could have done, and a senior aide said today that the congressman's staff was researching what authority the regulators actually have that could have permitted them to intervene. "The most logical thing they could have done, at a minimum, was to initiate a preliminary investigation," said Philip M. Schilaro, Mr. Waxman's chief of staff. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, has sought to frame the Enron case in terms of lost pensions and jobs. The comments of Mr. Waxman and Mr. Lieberman reflect the balancing act for the Democrats, and is part of a debate under way within the party about how aggressively it should proceed. Since no evidence has yet surfaced that shows that any administration official intervened improperly to save Enron from the perils of bankruptcy, some Democrats have fallen back on being critical of the administration for not being forceful enough in its overall regulation of the company. But other Democrats, fearful that premature accusations could wind up damaging their credibility, are counseling that the criticism of the administration stay relatively muted until more facts are known and it becomes more clear that what seemed at first glance to be a corporate scandal is really also a political one. Their view is a recognition that there is little that the government can do to prevent fraud at the corporate level in advance of its actually occurring. And some top party officials are advising lawmakers to lie low and not appear to be overly partisan, but frame the issue in terms of lost jobs and workers who lost their pensions. Both Mr. Waxman and Mr. Lieberman have sought to frame the Enron case in terms of lost pensions and jobs as they emerge as two of the company's leading critics in Washington. Outlining his objectives, Mr. Lieberman said today that the investigation by his committee would cast a broad net, examining both the decisions by members of the federal government and Congress that may have contributed to the Enron debacle. Mr. Lieberman said the examination last year of the regulators "focused on the immediate crisis in electricity and availability and prices in California." "Now, obviously, we look back at that in a stark new light, which is the collapse of Enron and a whole series of victims, in particular shareholders, who lost their life savings," he said. He added that the challenge will be conducting an investigation that is both aggressive and nonpartisan, particularly since Enron was a significant political donor that gave to so many lawmakers, including Mr. Lieberman. "When you've got a company that's hands are in so many different places in our political system and then it collapses and hurts so many average people," he said, "you have to ask whether there were sins of omission, things that the government could have done to stop this from happening."

To: Sully- who wrote (46444)	1/15/2002 3:15:36 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Both parties stub toes on scandal... By Thomas Oliphant The Boston Globe Staff 1/15/2002 WASHINGTON THE ENRON CORP. scandal has now gone through its initial spin cycle, with the following political fallout: The Bush White House has followed the well-trodden path of its modern predecessors and drawn attention to itself while trying to draw attention away from itself. The Democrats are faring only a little better. The Democratic National Committee is playing politics shamelessly, but that act itself is keeping it from being taken seriously. Party figures in the Senate, like their Republican counterparts in the House, decided well in advance of last week's feeding frenzy to treat Enron as one of those rare business scandals that easily engages the public and not as a governmental story as long as the evidence doesn't make it one. When Joe Lieberman and Carl Levin begin public airing of this astonishing tale of duplicity, it is Enron and its see-no-evil accountants who will be in the cross hairs, not President Bush or top members of his administration. The decision last month to follow the evidence instead of partisan impulse was easy to make precisely because the senior Democrats understood that the dirty and double dealing already resonates deeply with the public. The need to bite tongues, however, will remain huge, as witness the silliness over the weekend by party operatives pushing the Bush part of the story or attempting overdrawn metaphors. The perception of the scandal in the White House was basically that it is a business affair, albeit a huge one, and a mess that initial evidence indicated did not involve a single official, much less the president, in a culpable act. The subsequent problem arose out of an effort to make a great virtue out of that neutral fact. And it was compounded by the classic error of releasing information piecemeal instead of wholesale, in violation of one of the oldest of scandal culture rules - namely, that the released whole is always less than the sum of its individually released parts. People forget quickly, but the frenzy of the last several days grew out of the rapidly spreading word on Jan. 9 that the various probes of Enron and accountant Arthur Andersen had gone from regulatory and civil to criminal. That major development persuaded Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Commerce Secretary Dan Evans that perhaps Bush should be told about conversations they had or knew about with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay as the company was foundering last fall. Their story is that he was told on the morning of Jan. 10, with the rest of us getting the word later in the day. White House decision-making is often by its nature seat-of-the-pants, but initial word of the conversations with O'Neill and Evans was accompanied by almost a boast that the whole point was that with Lay obviously fishing for help to preserve what remained of the failing company's credit rating, the officials had done absolutely nothing - exactly what they should have done. Nice try, but that bit of spin revealed the extent to which this conservative bunch is fixated on the boardrooms and capital markets and to which ordinary investors and workers are an afterthought. It should not have taken too many minutes for White Houses operatives to realize that the impending bankruptcy under mysterious circumstances of the country's seventh largest firm might prompt an administration to mobilize on behalf of innocent victims and not to just make sure the financial fallout was manageable. The administration proceeded to compound its goof by heartlessly arguing through O'Neill that it had no obligation to do so. The inept White House communications/political empire only made things worse by dripping the news on successive days - first that there had been additional contacts between Enron President Greg Whalley and a senior Treasury official and then that Evans had told Card about the contacts. And Bush himself hurt the cause with a false claim that Lay had backed Ann Richards over him in the 1994 Texas campaign for governor and given her more money. In politics, you pay for these mistakes. The first consequence is that the administration's efforts to keep under wraps the records of Vice President Cheney's dealings with the company on energy policy have become politically untenable. The second is that the House GOP leadership's long efforts to block a vote on campaign finance reform are in the process of being abandoned. Before the fallout gets worse, Bush might want to consider showing as much concern for the victims of this massive fraud as the public does. Off the current facts, this is no scandal; but it is a test. ______________________________________ Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. This story ran in the Boston Globe on 1/15/2002.

To: Sully- who wrote (46444)	1/16/2002 12:41:27 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Some Arthur Andersen clients: American Cancer Society Bath Iron Works Bertucci's Boston Financial Group Boston Gas Company EG&G, Inc. Filene's GenRad GTE Government Systems Haemonetics Corporation Hitchcock Clinic, Inc. MediSense, Inc. Omni Hotels Corporation Pioneer Group, Inc. Purity Supreme, Inc. Sheraton Corporation Thermo Electron Corporation XTRA Corporation The Hartford Office Bridgeport Hospital C&S Distributors' Inc. Canberra Industries Carlingswitch Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company Connecticut Natural Gas Corporation Dairy Mart, Inc. Esstar Holdings, Inc. General Dynamics Hartford Whalers Hockey Club Hospital of St. Raphael ITT Hartford Insurance Group Key Trust Company Northeast Utilities Norwich Savings Society Savings Bank of Manchester Stanhome, Inc. The New York Office List of Selected Clients BBDO Worldwide, Inc. Benetton, Inc. CARE Christian Dior Colgate Palmolive Company Columbia Gas System, Inc. Continental Grain Company Crossland Federal Savings Estee Lauder Inc. FAO Schwartz Gucci Hearst/ABC/Viacom Entertainment Hershey Foods Corporation Hilton Hotels International Paper Company ITT Corp. Johnson and Higgins Kennedy, Joseph P. Foundation and Trusts King World Productions Lazard Freres Leslie Fay Liz Claiborne Merck & Co., Inc. Mitsubishi Capital, Inc. Mutual of America Life Insurance Association National Football League Film/Properties News Corporation -TV Guide -FSI Division -Fox Television Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Regency Cruises Rockefeller Family & Associates Intercontinental Hotels Salomon Inc. Sheraton Corporation Sunbeam Oster Texaco Turner Construction Wertheim Schroder & Co. Inc.