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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (1947)	5/6/2003 5:39:32 PM
From: jackhach	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10965

Nicholas Kristof: Why truth matters By Nicholas D. Kristof Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Posted: 6:23 AM EDT (1023 GMT) When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You &#! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant." But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about." I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world. Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit. Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said. Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again." "In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said. "The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated." The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom. Nicholas D. Kristof is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

To: calgal who wrote (1947)	5/6/2003 5:46:41 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Fed Leaves Rates Unchanged Tuesday, May 06, 2003 The U.S. Federal Reserve (search)'s policy-setting panel, as expected, left short-term interest rates unchanged at its regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday, but opened the door to a possible rate reduction in the future in the event that business conditions take a turn for the worse. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (search) and his Federal Open Market Committee (search) colleagues opted for now to keep the federal funds rate (search) at 1.25 percent. The funds rate is the interest banks charge each other on overnight loans and is the Fed's primary tool for influencing economic activity. Holding the funds rate steady means that commercial banks' prime lending rate (search) -- the benchmark for many consumer loans -- will also remain at 4.25 percent, the lowest level since May 1959. With the uncertainty brought about by the Iraq war dissipating, most of Wall Street expected the central bank to keep to the policy sidelines. In a Reuters survey, 20 of 22 dealers in U.S. government debt that do business directly with the Fed were expecting no change in policy. However, the Fed sent a signal that its stands ready to lower rates. The Fed identified the greatest risk facing the economy as a further weakening in economic activity. This stance positions the central bank to reduce the funds rate in an effort to bolster economic growth should the economy show signs of backsliding, economists say. The Fed's next meeting is June 24-25. At the Fed's previous meeting on March 18, policy-makers said that given all the uncertainties surrounding the Iraq situation at that time, they could not gauge risks on the economy going forward -- something they normally do at each meeting. The vote was unanimous. "The committee believes that ... the balance of risks to achieving its goals is weighted mainly toward weakness over the foreseeable future," the Fed said. Both the funds rate and the prime rate, which move in lockstep, were pushed down to their currently low levels on Nov. 6. That marked the Fed's first rate cut of 2002 and its 12th since January of 2001, when the central bank began an aggressive rate-reduction campaign in a bid to rescue a seriously distressed economy. Tuesday's Fed decision comes as the postwar economy is struggling to get back on firmer footing. The end of the war in Iraq hasn't produced an economic boom -- as some had hoped. Consumers' confidence in the economy -- which had sunk under war worries -- rebounded in April, an encouraging sign. But businesses -- still not feeling unsure about the strength of economy's recovery -- are wary of big investments in capital spending and in hiring. That's a major factor hurting the economy's ability to get back to full speed. While the weak state of manufacturing and rising unemployment is disappointing, the Fed said that "the ebbing of geopolitical tensions has rolled back oil prices, bolstered consumer confidence and strengthened debt and equity prices." President Bush, mindful of the political price his father paid in 1992 for a weak economy, wants Congress to approve another round of tax cuts that he argues would help bolster economic growth and create jobs. The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 6 percent in April as businesses cut jobs for the third straight month. The economy has lost one-half million jobs in the last three months, a decline usually associated with recessions. The worsening job climate is troubling because it could make consumers -- the main force keeping the economy going -- more cautious, economists say. Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report. URL:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86111,00.html