Sunday, October 05, 2003

 
Lies. Lies, Lies!!!!!: Newsweek to Reveal Details That Undercut the White House Line on the 'Plame-Gate' Leak

The spin is not holding. Facing two controversies--the Wilson leak (click here if you have somehow managed to miss this story) and the still-MIA WMDs--the White House has been tossing out explanations and rhetoric that cannot withstand scrutiny.

Let's start with the Wilson leak. In the issue coming out October 6, Newsweek will be reporting that after Bob Novak published a July 14 column containing the leak attributed to "senior adminsitration officials" that identified former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA operative, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell was contacted by White House officials who touted the Novak column and encouraged her to pursue the story about Wilson's wife. The newsmagazine also notes that, according to a source close to Wilson, shortly after the leak occurred Bush's senior aide Karl Rove told Hardball host Chris Matthews that Wilson's wife was "fair game." Matthews told Newsweek that he would not discuss any confidential conversation. (He told me the same weeks ago when I made a similar inquiry about this chat with Rove.) An anonymous source described as familiar with the exchange--presumably Rove or someone designated to speak for him--maintained that Rove had only said to Matthews it was appropriate to raise questions about her role in Wilson's mission to Niger. (In February 2002, Wilson had been asked by the CIA to visit Niger to check out allegations Iraq had been shopping for uranium there; he did so and reported back that the charge was probably untrue. In July, he publicly challenged the White House's use of this claim and earned the administration's wrath.)

These disclosures do not reveal who were the original leakers. (The Justice Department, at the CIA's request, started out investigating the White House; it has widened its probe to include the State Department and the Defense Department.) But these new details are significant and undercut the White House line on the leak. At a White House press briefing, Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary, repeatedly said that Bush and his White House took no action after the Novak column was published on July 14 because the leak was attributed only to anonymous sources. "Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper?" McClellan remarked.

He was arguing that a serious leak attributed to anonymous sources was still not serious enough to cause the president to ask, what the hell happened? And he made it seem as if the White House just ignored the matter. Not so. Mitchell's remark and even the Rove-friendly account of the Rove-Matthews conversation are evidence the White House tried to further the Plame story--that is, to exploit the leak for political gain. Rather than respond by trying to determine the source of a leak that possibly violated federal law and perhaps undermined national security ( The Washington Post reported that the leak also blew the cover of a CIA front company, "potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure"), White House officials sought to take advantage of it. Spin that, McClellan.

Newsweek is also disclosing that a National Security Council staffer previously worked with Valerie Wilson (nee Plame) and was aware of her position at the CIA. McClellan has indicated in his press briefings that the White House did not--and has not--acted to ascertain the source of the leak. But shouldn't Bush or chief of staff Andrew Card (if Card is not one of the leakers) have asked this person whether he mentioned Valerie Wilson's occupation to anyone in the White House? (I believe I know the name of this person but since he or she may be working under cover I am not at this point going to publish it.)

McClellan has had a tough time providing straight answers. At the October 1 press briefing, he was asked what Bush did after the leak first appeared. He replied by saying that "some news reports" have noted that Valerie Wilson's CIA connection "may have been well-known within the DC community." That hardly seems so. Her neighbors did not know, and Wilson maintains their close friends did not know. No reporter that I have talked to--and I've spoken to many covering this story--had heard that.

During that briefing, reporters wondered if Bush approved of the Republican campaign to depict Wilson as a partisan zealot lacking credibility. McClellan sidestepped: "The President is focused on getting to the bottom of this." The next day, he was once more asked whether it was appropriate for Republicans to be attacking Wilson. "I answered that question yesterday," he said. One problem: he hadn't. He also maintained that Bush "has been the one speaking out front on this." Not quite. For over two months, Bush had said nothing about the leak. And on this day, Bush met with reporters for African news organizations and joked about the anti-Wilson leak. When asked what he thought about the detention in Kenya of three journalists who had refused to reveal sources, he said, "I'm against leaks." This prompted laughter, and Bush went on: "I would suggest all governments get to the bottom of every leak of classified information." Addressing the reporter who had asked the question, Bush echoed the phrase that McClellan had frequently used in his press briefings and quipped, "By the way, if you know anything, Martin, would you please bring it forward and help solve the problem?"

Perhaps Bush needed a good chuckle after reading--or being briefed on--the testimony that chief weapons hunter David Kay was presenting that day to Congress. In an interim report, Kay had noted that his Iraq Survey Group had found evidence of "WMD-related program activities," but no stocks of unconventional weapons. Kay also had an interesting observation about the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMDs: "Our understanding of the status of Iraq's WMD program was always bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily caveated."

Wait a minute. That was not what Bush and his compadres had said prior to the war. Flash back to Bush's get-out-of-town speech on March 17, two days before he launched the war. He maintained, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal" weapons of mass destruction. Yet Kay was saying there had been "large uncertainties" in the intelligence. How does that square with Bush's no-doubt claim? It doesn't.

Kay's testimony is more proof that Bush misrepresented the intelligence. Regular readers of this column will know that Kay's remark were preceded by similar statements from the House intelligence committee and former deputy CIA director, Richard Kerr, who has been reviewing the prewar intelligence. Both the committee (led by Representative Porter Goss, a Republican and former CIA officer) and Kerr have concluded the intelligence of Iraq's WMDs was based on circumstantial and inferential material and contained many uncertainties.

Prior to the invasion, administration officials consistently declared there was no question Iraq had these weapons. On December 5, 2002, for instance, Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, said, "the president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it." But what had been that "solid_basis"? Intelligence "bounded by large uncertainties"?

Look at what Kay said about Iraq's nuclear weapons program:

"With regard to Iraq's nuclear program, the testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. They have told [the Iraq Survey Group] that Saddam Husayn remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point….

"Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material….

"Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

Compare this assessment to what Bush and Dick Cheney had said before the war. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush declared that Hussein was a threat because he had "an advanced nuclear weapons development program" in the 1990s. (Bush had failed to mention that the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported in 1998 that it had demolished this "advanced" program.) And Cheney on March 16 said, "we believe [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." His aides later said Cheney had meant to say "nuclear weapons programs."

But, according to Kay, the evidence so far collected indicates only that Hussein maintained a desire to acquire nuclear weapons and had not developed a program to satisfy that yearning. Kay later added that it would have taken Iraq five to seven years to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. So what was the evidence for Bush's and Cheney's assertions that the program was already revved up? By the way, Kay says his team has found "no conclusive proof" Hussein tried to acquire uranium in Niger. In fact, he reported that one cooperating Iraqi scientist revealed to the ISG that another African nation had made an unsolicited offer to sell Iraq uranium but there is no indication Iraq accepted the offer.

Kay also reported, "Our efforts to collect and exploit intelligence on Iraq's chemical weapons program have thus far yielded little reliable information on post-1991 CW stocks and CW agent production, although we continue to receive and follow leads related to such stocks." But before the war, the Bush administration had said flat-out that Iraq possessed chemical weapons. Did it neglect to pass along to Kay the information upon which it based this claim? (Actually, the Defense Intelligence Agency in September 2002 concluded there was no "reliable information" on whether Iraq had produced or stockpiled chemical weapons, but that did not stop Bush and his aides from stating otherwise.)

How did Bush respond to Kay's interim findings? He proclaimed they proved that he had been correct all along. The "interim report," Bush remarked, "said that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program spanned more than two decades. That's what [Kay] said....He's saying Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger."

Reality check: Bush had said that the main reason to go to war was because Hussein possessed "massive" stockpiles of unconventional weapons and at any moment could hand them off to al Qaeda (with whom Bush claimed Hussein was "dealing"--even though the evidence on that point was and continues to be, at best, sketchy). Now Bush is asserting that Hussein was a threat that could only be countered with invasion and occupations because he had weapons research programs that indeed violated United Nations resolutions but that had not produced any weapons. That's a much different argument. Bush, Cheney, McClellan, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others continue to deny they overstated (or misrepresented) the case for war. But the evidence is incontrovertible, and it keeps on piling up.

So all they have is spin. Bush changes the terms. McClellan, Rumsfeld, RIce insist that before the war everybody knew that Iraq had WMDs. Everybody, that is, except the folks putting together the intelligence assessments chockfull of uncertainties. When it comes to the Wilson affair, the White House ducks and covers, claiming it had no reason to react to the original anonymous-source leak, even though its officials (at the least) considered the leak solid enough to talk up to other reporters. And instead of confronting the ugly (and perhaps criminal) implications of the leak, the White House's allies in Washington lash out at Wilson, in a vicious blame-the-victim offensive, while Mister Change-the-Tone has nothing to say publicly about this. What if Wilson is a Democratic partisan? That does not excuse what was done to his wife.

Leaking and lying--these are not actions easy to explain away. Drip, drip, drip--that's the sound often associated with Washington scandals. But now it may also be the sound of the truth catching up to the propagandists and perps of the Bush White House. - Source

Join our mailing list! - Home - Contact

posted by Politica 9:19 AM

 
Thirty-Four Pages of Internal Enron Memoranda Detail Tryst Between Schwarzenegger, Ken Lay and Michael Milken: It Turns Out That Schwarzenegger Knowingly Joined the Hush-Hush Encounter as Part of a Campaign to Sabotage a Davis-Bustamante Plan to Make Enron and Other Power Pirates Then Ravaging California Pay Back the $9 Billion in Illicit Profits They Stole from its Citizens

It's not what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to the girls a decade back that should raise an eyebrow. According to a series of memoranda our office obtained today, it's his dalliance with the boys in a hotel room just two years ago that's the real scandal.

The wannabe governor has yet to deny that on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he had consensual political intercourse with Enron chieftain Kenneth Lay. Also frolicking with Arnold and Ken was convicted stock swindler Mike Milken.

Now, thirty-four pages of internal Enron memoranda have just come through this reporter's fax machine tell all about the tryst between Maria's husband and the corporate con men. It turns out that Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage a Davis-Bustamante plan to make Enron and other power pirates then ravaging California pay back the $9 billion in illicit profits they carried off.

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.

Now follow the action. One month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.

How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.

While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by … Ken Lay.

But Bush's boys on the commission have a problem. The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering," fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).

So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on each dollar they filched.

Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.

New Problem: the guy most likely to replace Davis is not Mr. Musclehead, but Cruz Bustamante, even a bigger threat to the power companies than Davis. Solution: smear Cruz because -- heaven forbid! -- he took donations from Injuns (instead of Ken Lay).

The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.

So think about this. The state of California is in the hole by $8 billion for the coming year. That's chump change next to the $8 TRILLION in deficits and surplus losses planned and incurred by George Bush. Nevertheless, the $8 billion deficit is the hanging rope California's right wing is using to lynch Governor Davis.

Yet only Davis and Bustamante are taking direct against to get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of the state by Enron, Reliant, Dynegy, Williams Company and the other Texas bandits who squeezed the state by the bulbs.

But if Arnold is selected, it's 'hasta la vista' to the $9 billion. When the electricity emperors whistle, Arnold comes -- to the Peninsula Hotel or the Governor's mansion. The he-man turns pussycat and curls up in their lap.

I asked Mr. Muscle's PR people to comment on the new Enron memos -- and his strange silence on Bustamante's suit or Davis' petition. But Arnold was too busy shaving off his Hitlerian mustache to respond. - Source

The Enron memos were discovered by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Los Angeles,
www.ConsumerWatchdog.org

Join our mailing list! - Home - Contact

posted by Politica 9:18 AM

 
Lies, Lies, Lies: Bush Promised That the Cost of Rebuilding Iraq Would be Paid for by Iraq's Own Oil Revenues. Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Later We Find Out That the Administration's Assertions Were at Odds with a Much Bleaker Assessment of a Government Task Force Secretly Established Last Fall to Study Iraq's Oil Industry

The Bush administration's optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials.

The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq's oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment — and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.

"The problem is this," L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: "The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade."

Similarly, Bush administration officials announced earlier this year that Iraq's oil revenues would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, which added to the impression that the aftermath of the war would place a minimal burden on the United States. Mr. Bremer now estimates that Iraq's total oil revenues from the last half of 2003 to 2005 will amount to $35 billion, running at a rate of about $14 billion a year.

The administration now plays down the report's findings.

Senior administration officials said that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz and Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, were aware of the oil group's overall mission, but that they could not say whether they knew of its specific findings.

"I think when it is all said and done," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, "prewar estimates that may be borne out in fact are likelier to be more lucky than smart."

Mr. Di Rita added that earlier estimates and statements by Mr. Wolfowitz and others "oozed with uncertainty."

Iraq's Most Valuable Asset

In the months leading up to the war, administration officials said little in public about oil, partly because they were "encumbered by fear" that their actions would be seen as helping the American petroleum industry, said one administration adviser. But behind the scenes, officials were studying how to handle Iraq's most valuable asset.

It was evident from much of the information they received that Iraq's oil was not a ready resource for reconstruction.

One expert consulted by the government, Amy Myers Jaffe, who heads the energy program at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, said her group concluded in a report last December that "oil revenues would not be enough and that the expenses of reconstruction would be huge."

In addition, United Nations reports dating back to the late 1990's documented the deterioration that occurred in Iraq's oil system as a result of trade embargoes, which curtailed Iraq's access to technology and equipment.

The administration's examination of the subject began last September when Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, asked an adviser to oversee plans for Iraq's oil industry in the event of war, according to a Pentagon official involved in the project.

The result was the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group, whose existence has not been previously disclosed. It drew on the expertise of government specialists including the Central Intelligence Agency and retired senior energy executives. It planned how to secure the oil industry during the war and, afterward, restoring it to its prewar capacity.

The task force's job was not to make a direct assessment of how much money the oil industry could contribute to rebuilding Iraq. But determining Iraq's actual oil production capacity was important. First, it could help other administration officials gauge how much revenue might be generated for the reconstruction effort. Second, the administration was concerned that it did not want to be seen as profiting from invading an oil-rich nation and giving oil production levels a boost.

The task force concluded that although Iraq's stated production capacity was just over 3 million barrels per day, the system was only producing 2.1 million to 2.4 million barrels, panel members said.

"I think most people would agree that the 2.4 was a little high and the average for 2002 was 2.1," said a Pentagon official on the task force who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The "condition of the Iraqi oil infrastructure was not particularly good," the official said. "That would be evident to anybody who realized the country had been under U.N. sanctions for many years."

The United Nations produced reports on Iraq regularly from 1998 to 2001. The documents painted a picture of a troubled system and cited the need for improvements, some of which are now being proposed by Mr. Bremer, like the $125 million repair of the Qarmat Ali water plant in the south.

In April, when Vice President Cheney was asked about Iraq's oil during an appearance before newspaper editors, he cited higher numbers rather than the task force's more sober findings.

While noting that Iraq's oil fields were in "bad shape," Mr. Cheney said, "With some investment we ought to be able to get production back up on the order of 2.5, 3 million barrels a day, within, hopefully by the end of the year."

An aide to the vice president said recently that those estimates were "consistent with prewar capacity," but could not say whether Mr. Cheney was aware of the task force's different assessment.

An Optimistic Vision

The administration was also optimistic when it came to public estimates of Iraq's oil revenues.

Shortly after the war began in March, the administration's budget office provided Congress and reporters with a background paper on Iraq. It said that Iraq would "not require sustained aid" because of its abundant resources, including oil and natural gas.

On March 27, Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told the House Appropriations Committee that his "rough recollection" was that "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years."

Testifying in the Senate that same day, Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that "when it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayers we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government." He noted that the war's costs were not knowable, but he also said an important source of money for reconstruction would flow after the United States worked "with the Iraqi interim authority that will be established to tap Iraq's oil revenues."

At the outset of the war, the administration had asked Congress for $62 billion for Iraq, which included $1.7 billion for reconstruction and $489 million for oil-related repairs.

In a televised interview in late April, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the United States Agency for International Development, the group overseeing Iraq's reconstruction, said that amount was "it for the U.S." He said any other reconstruction money would come from elsewhere, including other countries and future "Iraqi oil revenues," which he predicted at "$20 billion a year."

In an interview this week, Mr. Natsios said he had based those comments on "the discussion in the interagency process at the time," adding, "That's what the Office of Management and Budget was telling us."

Trent Duffy, a budget office spokesman, said this week that "the administration was very clear that the $1.7 billion in initial reconstruction was for the beginning stages and that it was necessary to get a better understanding of the fuller, comprehensive needs going forward."

Last week, appearing again before the Senate committee, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I don't think I did misjudge" Iraq's oil capacity. According to current projections, he said, the country's oil revenues will grow to $12 billion next year from $2 billion this year; they should reach $19 billion in 2005 and $20 billion in 2006.

"So, their oil revenues will be contributing," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Yet Mr. Bremer, in his remarks to legislators two weeks ago, said that for the next two years, whatever revenue was reaped from oil production would not exceed the cost of Iraq's day-to-day operating expenses. In 2005, he said, there would be a surplus of only $4 million to $5 million.

As for Mr. Cheney's projection in April that oil would produce as much as $20 billion a year, a Cheney aide said last week that "there was much more extensive damage due to looting and sabotage, so we're not going to get there when the vice president anticipated."

Reassessing Revenues

The public revenue estimates made in the spring were in line with the very top range of projections made by the Pentagon task force.

According to the Pentagon official who served on the task force, its projections for yearly oil revenues were $25 billion to $30 billion "in the very best case, no sabotage and little or no battle damage," and about $16 billion in the "worse than best case."

The worst case was no revenue for a few years, if there was "major sabotage and some significant battle damage."

Last December the Baker Institute estimated that even if there was no war damage, "Iraq's total oil revenues would still only likely average around $10 billion to $12 billion annually."

Yet even after the war, some officials in Washington seemed to cling to an optimistic view of Iraq's oil production.

In July, Mr. Wolfowitz told a group of senators that production had reached "over a million barrels per day." Although Iraq was having electrical power problems, Mr. Wolfowitz said the oil was flowing "because we brought in portable generators to provide electricity" and planned to bring in more.

But Philip Carroll, a retired petroleum executive and the senior American oil adviser in Baghdad, said in an interview that Iraqi oil production "experienced a terrible month in July because electrical problems cut us back to half of what we should have produced." Those problems, including the need to import considerable fuel, he said, led him to arrange new generator leases in late July.

Mr. Carroll said that although gross production for the week of July 25 was a million barrels a day, 350,000 barrels had to be injected back into the ground, because of a lack of storage or distribution infrastructure.

An aide to Mr. Wolfowitz said he believed that the oil information came from a briefing and that Mr. Wolfowitz's testimony was "sober and nuanced."

Once the war ended, and United States officials gained access to Iraq's oil records, they got a more complete picture.

"When we actually got their production figures for 2002, we were able to make a distinction between productive capacity and what they were actually producing," said Gary Loew, an Army Corps of Engineers official, reducing their capacity figures by 20 to 25 percent.

That reduction roughly corresponded to the Pentagon task force's cuts before the war began. - Source

Join our mailing list! - Home - Contact

posted by Politica 9:15 AM

 
Lies, Lies, Lies: Cook Says, 'Blair admitted to me that Saddam had no usable WMD'

Tony Blair privately admitted that Saddam Hussein could not attack British or United States troops with chemical or biological weapons two weeks before Britain went to war against Iraq, Robin Cook alleges today.

The claim by the former foreign secretary that the Prime Minister misled Parliament and committed Britain to an illegal war is made in his memoirs, which he sold to The Sunday Times for a reputed £400,000.

Mr Cook recalls how he was given an intelligence briefing on Iraq by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who has since given evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Mr Cook said: "The presentation was impressive in its integrity and shorn of the political slant with which No 10 encumbers any intelligence assessment.

"My conclusion at the end of an hour is that Saddam probably does not have weapons of mass destruction in the sense of weapons that could be used against large-scale civilian targets."

Two weeks later, on March 5, Mr Cook discussed the Scarlett briefing with Mr Blair. Mr Cook told Mr Blair he doubted Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could strike strategic cities, but he might have battlefield weapons which could be used against British and US troops. "[Blair replied]: 'Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use.' "

Those remarks appeared to contradict directly the assertion in the September Iraq dossier that Saddam could make his WMD ready for use in 45 minutes - the claim at the centre of the allegations by the BBC that led ultimately to the death of Dr David Kelly, the Government's weapons expert who killed himself shortly after appearing before the Commons foreign affairs select committee.

Mr Cook continues: "There were two distinct elements to this exchange that sent me away deeply troubled. The first was that the timetable to war was plainly not driven by the progress of the UN weapons inspections. Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix [the chief UN weapons inspector] might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion.

"The second troubling element to our conversation was that Tony did not try to argue me out of the view that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances."

Mr Cook also discloses that Mr Blair told him the US President George W Bush wanted to go to war in September last year, but was restrained by Mr Blair from doing so.

Mr Cook also discloses details of Cabinet discussions at which ministers raised serious concerns about the looming conflict. However, more surprisingly, Mr Cook claims that Gordon Brown, previously thought to be a sceptic about the war, delivered a "long and passionate statement of support" of the Prime Minister's strategy at a Cabinet meeting on March 13.

As Mr Blair flew home last night from an EU summit in Rome, a Downing Street spokesman said: "The idea that the Prime Minister ever said that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD is absurd." - Source

Join our mailing list! - Home - Contact

posted by Politica 9:13 AM

 
Real US Unemployment Rate is 9.7%: "Many of the people who do have jobs are working only part-time. According to the Labor Department, if you add all the workers "marginally attached" to the labor force -- out of work and not looking for work -- to all those working part-time and those unemployed and looking for work."

Two years ago, the U.S. economy was just entering its third -- and probably last -- quarter of recession, and the unemployment rate was just beginning to climb.

Two years later, the jobless rate is still climbing.

In fact, U.S. unemployment rose to its worst level in nine years in June as businesses cut thousands of jobs, the government said Thursday.

Unemployment rose to 6.4 percent from 6.1 percent in May. That's the highest level since April 1994. Economists on average had expected a jobless rate of 6.2 percent, according to a Reuters poll.

In addition, non-farm payrolls fell by 30,000 jobs for the month, the report said, after losing a revised 70,000 jobs in May.

Payrolls have fallen year-over-year for 23 straight months, according to Labor Department data, extending the worst stretch for the labor market since World War II.

Usually, by this point in the recession-recovery cycle, the jobless rate should be on its way back down. The last time it rose two years after the last quarter of a recession was in 1982, when the economy was just climbing out of a deep, prolonged slump.

Today's economy, too, seems to be climbing out of its own slump -- but it probably won't be enough to create many new jobs any time soon.

"We're looking for increases in employment, but because the labor force is growing 1 percent a year, we need 125,000 new jobs per month to stabilize the unemployment rate," said Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America and one of the best economic forecasters of the past 17 years, according to a recent Federal Reserve study. "We see the unemployment rate drifting slightly higher and lingering higher for the next year."

The real unemployment picture
And the unemployment rate, though relatively low by historical standards, may actually understate the labor market's woes.

For one thing, many unemployed people have simply quit looking for work, meaning they are not counted as part of the "labor force" and thus are not counted in the Labor Department's calculation of the unemployment rate. If the economy improves, many of these "discouraged" workers -- 482,000, by the department's last count -- will likely start looking for work again, and the unemployment rate will rise.

Meanwhile, 1.9 million people have been unemployed 27 weeks or more, meaning many of them have exhausted their unemployment benefits. According to research by Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors, 43.2 percent of all unemployed workers have exhausted their benefits -- the highest rate in more than three decades.

"Despite the fact that the unemployment rate remains low relative to prior economic downturns, the burden on the unemployed population has been the most severe, by one measure, since at least 1972," Chan said.

Furthermore, many of the people who do have jobs are working only part-time. According to the Labor Department, if you add all the workers "marginally attached" to the labor force -- out of work and not looking for work -- to all those working part-time and those unemployed and looking for work, the unemployment rate rises to 9.7 percent.

Not included in this group are the untold number of people who have had to take lower-paying jobs because they can't find work in their chosen profession. That trend, combined with all the slack in the labor market, has conspired to slow wage growth. That, in turn, could hurt consumer spending, which fuels more than two-thirds of the world's largest economy.

Lost signs of a rebound?
There had been some hopeful signs for the labor market lately, with new claims for unemployment benefits shrinking to just above 400,000, the benchmark level indicating labor market weakness.

And monthly job-cut announcements tracked by Chicago outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas fell in June to their lowest level in 31 months.

However, these numbers simply mean that employers have finally stopped cutting jobs. They've yet to show any inclination to hire more workers.

In its latest report , weekly unemployment claims Thursday spiked to 430,000 in the week ended June 28, from a revised 409,000 the prior week, and much higher than economists' forecasts for 412,000 new claims.

"U.S. employers are still void of the business confidence needed to increase their employment projections for the third quarter," Manpower Inc.'s CEO Jeffrey Joerres said last month. "Employers have expressed uncertainty in hiring intentions in recent Manpower Employment Outlook Surveys, but this quarter represents the weakest job outlook in 12 years."

The Manpower Inc. survey of the third-quarter hiring plans of 16,000 U.S. employers showed only 20 percent planned to add workers -- a lower percentage than the second quarter, and lower than the third quarter of 2002.

And a Conference Board survey of help-wanted advertising showed job listings fell in eight of nine regions, and the private research group's "Help Wanted Index" was lower than it was a year ago.

"Consumer spending remains the mainstay of this weak economic recovery. With tax cuts enacted, the consumer is likely to continue hanging in there," said Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein. "But a real recovery, including a slowdown in layoffs and the opening of new jobs, is far more dependent on recovery in (business) investment than on stronger consumption growth." - Source

Join our mailing list! - Home - Contact

posted by Politica 9:12 AM