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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBL who wrote (36104)	2/27/1999 3:16:00 AM
From: JBL	Respond to of 67261

Sudanese Businessman Plans Suit Against U.S. Owner of Bombed Plant Seeks Frozen Assets By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 26, 1999; Page A03 A Saudi businessman whose pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was destroyed by a U.S. missile attack last August is launching a legal counterattack with a lawsuit contending that the Treasury Department unlawfully froze $24 million in his bank accounts immediately after the missile strike. Saleh Idris, a Sudanese-born magnate who purchased the El Shifa plant in Khartoum last April, was set to file the suit in U.S. District Court here today, associates said. The suit alleges that the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control froze his funds on deposit in London without designating him a terrorist or declaring he is linked to a designated terrorist, as the law demands. Controversy has swirled around the El Shifa attack ever since 13 cruise missiles slammed into the facility Aug. 20, 13 days after U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed. Senior Clinton administration officials have provided elaborate justification for the attack--saying the plant played a role in chemical weapons production--but criticism has mounted at home and abroad from those who argue the administration made a mistake in its haste to strike back against international terrorism. "We think that they are seeking to position Saleh Idris as someone connected to terrorism without any basis or evidence at all in order to justify the attack on the plant," said Mark J. MacDougall, one of Idris's lawyers at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. "We know of no evidence connecting Saleh Idris . . . to any form of terrorist organization." Steven R. Ross, another Akin Gump lawyer representing Idris, said the case Idris plans to file today "is not about whether the U.S. should or should not fight terrorism. It's about how, if the U.S. government makes a mistake, it should stand up and admit that mistake and not ruin an innocent person's life." A senior administration official responded that "it is our belief that there is a link between Mr. Idris and Mr. bin Laden, and it's the administration's judgment that we have to use all the tools available to undermine the effectiveness of [bin Laden's] terrorist organization." In launching the cruise missile attacks against El Shifa and against camps in Afghanistan run by exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, they said they targeted the Khartoum plant as a chemical weapons facility with links to bin Laden. They subsequently admitted that they did not know at the time of the attack that El Shifa was owned by Idris, who purchased the facility four months before it was destroyed. But U.S. officials now say bin Laden, who has been charged with engineering the embassy bombings in Africa, has ties to the plant's former and current operators. As criticism mounted in the attack's immediate aftermath, U.S. officials also took the unusual step of disclosing that the CIA had obtained a soil sample from the plant grounds containing EMPTA, a known precursor of deadly VX nerve gas. Idris, an entrepreneur and former bank executive at the National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, has fought back in an attempt to clear his name. He has hired Thomas D. Tullius, chemistry department chairman at Boston University, to take a complete set of soil samples at El Shifa to show that he never made chemical weapons there. The samples, including specimens gathered from the plant's destroyed laboratory and its septic tank, were tested at three European laboratories and contained no VX precursors of any kind, according to Tullius. But the lawsuit Idris plans to file today against the Treasury Department represents the first concrete step he has taken to regain use of assets frozen by the U.S. government. Loss of the pharmaceutical plant could be the source of a second lawsuit, associates have said. Idris' lawsuit says that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze $24 million of his assets through a one-page letter sent four days after the missile strike to the Bank of America. The letter stated that Idris's assets "are blocked pending investigation of interests of Specially Designated Terrorists" named by U.S. officials. But the government has never designated Idris as a terrorist or provided any evidence linking his assets to bin Laden, according to MacDougall and Ross. Without such a declaration, they say, the Treasury Department has no legal basis to freeze Idris's funds. Stanley J. Marcuss, a Washington attorney who has written extensively on the government's powers to freeze terrorists' assets, said the Office of Foreign Assets Control "has tremendous powers in this area and a lot of latitude" to freeze assets, but only after it has officially designated someone as a terrorist. Seizing Idris's assets without such a declaration, he said, would be "quite unusual." "An interesting question for OFAC would be, why isn't he on the list?" Marcuss said. "That's not a difficult thing to do. It can be done with the stroke of a pen."

To: JBL who wrote (36104)	2/27/1999 11:19:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Reading between lines of latest scandal tale Media coverage of Juanita Broaddrick's story speaks to a changing definition of 'news.' Alexandra Marks (marksa@csps.com) Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor NEW YORK News, as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary, is "information about important or interesting recent events." So how did Juanita Broaddrick's allegation about a sexual attack that she says occurred 21 years ago - an event that was never reported to any authority, was recently denied in a legal affidavit, and may be impossible to ever substantiate - how did that come to the sudden attention of the nation's media during the past week? The answer, say many media critics, is that in today's hotly competitive media environment the definition of news is not what it used to be. In fact, some say, the media's handling of Mrs. Broaddrick's allegation against Bill Clinton may have finally obliterated any traditional notion of what constitutes "news." Such notions have been eroding for some time, under pressure of intense competition brought by a proliferation of media outlets and fueled by the Internet's gossip mongers. But the Broaddrick story is serving to redefine news, especially for much of the national press. "If journalists believed that news by definition was something that had to be serious and had to impact people's lives, the Juanita story would not be in the paper," says Marvin Kalb, a media analyst at Harvard University. "But since news today merely has to titillate, appeal to the curiosity factor - sex - then Juanita is the story." Others argue that the seriousness of the allegation does constitute news in the traditional sense, particularly because Broaddrick's story was a factor in several House members' decision to vote to impeach President Clinton. Still others say it reaches that threshold because it reflects on the president's character. But media critic Ed Fouhy says the most interesting fallout from the debate could be about the media themselves. "It's been a lesson in the differences among news organizations, and the values and news standards that they have," he says. "And that has played out in public, when it usually plays out in private." Editors and producers around the country this week debated, argued, and in some cases agonized over how to handle the story that had lived quietly in the media's shadows as rumor and innuendo since 1992. Broaddick's allegation was first revealed publicly as part of an extensive legal filing last spring by Paula Jones's lawyers. NBC News' Lisa Myers then reported on the allegation in detail. But Ms. Myers wanted more - an interview with the mysterious woman who had come to be known as Jane Doe No. 5. Myers regularly called and pleaded, finally landing an interview in January, at the height of the impeachment trial. Nbc News then sat on the story, checking and cross-checking facts, it says. But Matt Drudge, the media's Internet nemesis, got wind that NBC was holding the interview and began beating the cyber-drums, indignant that such an explosive allegation had not aired. Then Robert Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal's decidedly anti-Clinton editorial page (The Columbia Journalism Review once called it "Bartley's Believe It or Not"), heard on CNN that NBC was holding its story. Mr. Bartley bypassed his news editors and sent columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz to interview Broaddrick. And so last Friday, in the guise of an editorial piece about NBC's decision to hold the story, The Wall Street Journal laid out in detail Broaddrick's allegation. The wire services picked up the story, and so did The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. The Post followed the next day with a front-page story that characterized the allegation as "sensational yet ancient and unproven." "When I read that, I thought, 'So what's it doing on the front page?' " says Professor Kalb. With the genie out of the bottle, White House lawyer David Kendall issued a statement denying that Mr. Clinton had ever assaulted Broaddrick. That gave the story an official patina, and many regional papers ran wire-service stories about the president's lawyer's denial. But many also refrained from publishing anything about it. The San Jose Mercury News only mentioned it Wednesday in a short piece about NBC's decision to finally air the interview, which it did that night. Managing editor David Yarnold said the story lacked corroboration and had too many holes to rush into print. "We also asked how we would handle it if it was a local story. So often, the national stories get treated differently - our values can get challenged," says Mr. Yarnold. The New York Times held off running the story until Wednesday as well. Then it ran a story about the unusual route the allegation took before becoming public - laying out in detail the unsubstantiated charges. The editors said they felt it was "news" because it was a factor in the impeachment debate. Steve Brill, founder of media watchdog Brill's Content, finds good and bad news in the handling of the Broaddrick allegation. He does not believe that the story passes the test as "news" by any definition. But he's encouraged by the fact that there are a host of alternative news organizations that "can drop a dime on NBC" if it holds a legitimate story. "That's very good," says Mr. Brill. "The downside of that is that we've all been in a situation where an editor holds a story for very legitimate reasons, and the person who's done the story conjures up all kinds of conspiracy theories, when in fact it's just not a good story. Then you have to be vigilant about your reporting."