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To: T L Comiskey who wrote (51972)	5/23/2002 2:27:27 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

The Man Behind The Memo [Maybe he should be running the FBI <G>] By Mary McGrory The Washington Post Thursday, May 23, 2002 He must be a pretty reprehensible fellow. You saw him leaving a long, black car with tinted windows, heavily chaperoned by FBI Director Robert Mueller and enveloped by escorts who spirited him up the Capitol steps. You'd have thought that Kenneth Williams was some kind of a mobster. But he is an FBI agent from Arizona, and the only thing he did wrong was to be right last July about the possibility that Osama bin Laden was using U.S. flight schools to train terrorists. It is not a crime to put two and two together, although you can never be sure with Attorney General John Ashcroft. Williams had a secret two-hour session with the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday evening and was on Capitol HIll yesterday for more closed-door sessions. We never saw his face. The Phoenix warning is a profound embarrassment to the intelligence bureaucracy, and Williams is probably lucky to have his job. Let us hope we get the chance to see and hear him. Dot-connectors are hard to find. Nobody is saying that if his memo had been circulated, the tragedy of Sept. 11 would have been averted. The most dastardly Democrat has not even thought of accusing Bush of dereliction of duty. From the moment the memo surfaced, Republicans have been shrieking that it is unpatriotic to dwell on the past. President Bush got off a good line about second-guessing being second nature in Washington. But he was pretty steamed that anyone would think he had not done everything in his power to protect the American people. Vice President Cheney wheeled the heavy artillery through the Sunday television shows and fired warnings that filled the air for the holiday weekend: No one, it seems, is safe -- apartment house dwellers, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, subways, barbecue pits, trains. Cheney was both stern and matter of fact. His message to a bewildered nation read, "You want warnings? We'll give you warnings." Brutally, he changed the subject from the scary past to the scary future. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did exactly what Republicans would have done in her husband's time in office. She took to the floor and cited a headline in the New York Post, "BUSH KNEW." All she said was that her constituents wanted to know what he knew and when. The administration landed on her. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer castigated her, and from Budapest came a blast from her successor, Laura Bush, who was on tour. Nobody was surprised that Williams's warning was not heeded or even shared with other agencies. The FBI is notorious for hiding information: At Boston's Logan Airport, where the World Trade Center assassins took off, the bureau refused to share its watch list with state troopers responsible for airport safety. The bureau pores over its data like a miser in his cave with his treasure. It is a prima donna of government bureaus, accustomed for almost 50 years to a doting press and public. The CIA, which should have been told and wasn't, is also dysfunctional. Overfunded and undersupervised, it has severe identity problems, which have been aggravated in two Bush administrations. It was Bush the Elder's favorite bureaucracy, and the incumbent is equally fond, striving always to find ways to make the spooks look good and elaborately forgiving them for their colossal failure of Sept. 11. Republicans point out that it is not George Bush's job to sift through batches of warnings and reports. It isn't; it's the CIA's. But the president made the people who should have been analysts into warriors, and they have turned up all over Afghanistan in combat roles. The first U.S. casualty was a CIA man, who first came to our attention as the interrogator of John Walker Lindh. I happened to be in New York this week as it was trying to digest the news that it may face another ground zero. The city was immaculate, not a candy wrapper in the streets, and somewhat quieter than before it was called upon to be the wonder of the world for its endurance and resilience. "We were just beginning to relax," sighed a Gothamite. The new mayor, Mike Bloomberg, fits the new mood. He tends to understatement, which the city finds restful; he's not compulsive like his driven predecessor, who whirled through the city in pursuit of trouble. Bloomberg rides the subway without fanfare and with two security men. Rudy Giuliani's heroic performance is not forgotten, but it is less talked of. Now, apparently, all's to do again. Says Michael Shapiro, Columbia assistant journalism professor, the timing of the proliferating warnings "discomfits" him. The Bush administration is getting criticism for its handling of past events. That just struck him as "too coincidental," Shapiro said. People don't know whom to believe. They might listen to agent Williams. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (51972)	5/24/2002 1:07:45 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Bank Questioned Enron's India Project May 23 9:35pm ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Enron Corp. piled pressure on the U.S. Export-Import Bank to expedite financing for a power project in India, drawing fire from bank staff who questioned its long-term viability and how the funds were used, according to documents dating back to the mid-1990s. Former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay made a personal appeal in 1994 to the head of the Export-Import Bank to push through the energy trader's request for $336 million in financing for the $2.9 billion Dabhol power project, citing its "importance ... to the United States, as well as the companies involved." But behind the scenes, bank officials complained in e-mails about Enron's "attitude" and questions whether the company could make the Indian power project work. Other documents, citing a 1993 review by the World Bank, called the power project "unviable." "I have been involved in a lot of transactions and come in contact with any number of poorly behaved people..., but I think that Enron's attitude and demeanor in this transaction has been extraordinarily bad and very counterproductive," an Export-Import Bank official said in a November 1994 e-mail. The e-mail was one of thousands of documents released by the Export-Import Bank on Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request detailing the agency's negotiations in the 1990s with now-bankrupt Enron to finance the project. Enron -- President Bush's biggest financial backer in the 2000 campaign -- filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 2 amid revelations of losses from off-the-books partnerships. Government documents released in January showed that Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration intervened with Indian officials last year as part of a coordinated effort to salvage the Dabhol plant. The second phase of the project was nearly complete when construction was halted last June after its sole customer, the nearly bankrupt local utility which is also a shareholder, fell $240 million behind in payments. The largest gas-fired plant in the world, Dabhol is bankrupt Enron's largest asset in Asia and most valuable property still on the block. Nearly 30 banks and government-run financial agencies lent $1.9 billion to help build the plant, which is 65 percent owned by Enron . General Electric , privately-owned U.S. contractor Bechtel Corp., and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, the provincial Indian utility, also hold stakes in the project. In a March 1994 letter, Lay and executives from GE and Bechtel appealed to Kenneth Brody, then chairman of the Export-Import Bank, to expedite $336 million in financing. "We are requesting your help in making whatever special arrangements are needed internally to truly ensure that the June time frame can be met," they wrote. Eight months later Export-Import Bank officials bitterly complained in e-mails and hand-written notes that Enron was threatening to "pound on the table and complain to others at the bank" to get the agreement drafted. "I have real trouble imagining how they are going to function in India on a long-term basis," one official wrote in a November 1994 e-mail. Three months later, Lay sent a note to Brody thanking him for his "personal involvement" in rushing the financing through. In the same letter, Lay thanked the Export-Import Bank staffers who had challenged the deal in November. "Recognizing that your team is stretched very thin and does not receive the kind of rewards they might in the private sector, this level of sustained effort warrants special appreciation," Lay wrote in January 1995. Later that year, however, staff at the Export-Import Bank raised concerns about the way Enron was tapping the funds. In addition, a Maharashtra government report, dated July 1995 and stamped "secret," complained that the project lacked transparency. "The conduct of the negotiations shows that the sole objective was to see that Enron was not displeased... In fact, the entire negotiation with Enron is an illustration of how not to negotiate," the government report said.