Scientists Form Group to Support Science-Friendly Candidates

From The New York Times, Sept 28

Several prominent scientists said yesterday that they had formed an organization dedicated to electing politicians “who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.”

Organizers of the group, Scientists and Engineers for America, said it would be nonpartisan, but in interviews several said Bush administration science policies had led them to act. The issues they cited included the administration’s position on climate change, its restrictions on stem cell research and delays in authorizing the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception.

In a statement posted on its Web site (www.sefora.org), the group said scientists and engineers had an obligation “to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interest ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.”

The group’s organizers include John H. Gibbons and Neal Lane, who were science advisers in the Clinton administration, the Nobel laureates Peter Agre and Alfred Gilman, and Susan F. Wood, who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration last year to protest the agency’s delay in approving over-the-counter sales of the so-called Plan B emergency contraception.

“The issues we are talking about happen to be issues in which the administration’s record is quite poor,” Dr. Lane said. But he said the goal was to protect “the integrity of science” so that Americans could have confidence in the government’s science-based decisions.

Mike Brown, the group’s executive director, said it would be a 527 organization under tax laws, meaning that it could be involved in electoral politics, and that contributions to the group would not be tax deductible. He said it would focus its resources — Internet advertising, speakers and other events — on races in which science issues play a part.

The group is looking at the Senate race in Virginia between George Allen, the incumbent Republican, and James Webb, a Democrat; a stem cell ballot issue in Missouri; the question of intelligent design in Ohio; and Congressional races in Washington State, Mr. Brown said.

In what it described as a Bill of Rights for scientists and engineers, the group said that researchers who receive federal funds should be free to discuss their work publicly, and that appointments to federal scientific advisory committees should be based on scientific qualifications, not political beliefs. It said the government should not support science education programs that “include concepts that are derived from ideology,” an apparent reference to creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.

And it said the government should not publish false or misleading scientific information, something Dr. Wood said occurred when the National Cancer Institute briefly posted an item on its Web site suggesting that abortion was linked to breast cancer.

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Molly Ivins - R.I.P. Habeus Corpus (1215-2006)

Wednesday 27 September 2006

With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

Austin, Texas - Oh dear. I'm sure he didn't mean it. In Illinois' Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to "cut and run" on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. "I just could not believe he would say that to me," said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of "technical fixes" that were the point of the putative "compromise." It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue-this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The "heart attack" came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had "basically been pulpified," according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, "Let's give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him."

This gets passed on as "Don't touch the mayor unless he really screws up."

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as "We can't say anything negative about the mayor."

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration's first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to "examine and respond to" all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word "examine" and left only "respond to."

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words "outside the United States," which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has "has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." Quick, define "purposefully and materially." One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect's right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon "degenerates into a playground for sadists." But not unbridled sadism-you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving "severe pain" and substituted "serious pain," which is defined as "bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain."

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: "The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit."

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary-these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I'd like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

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The Fine Art of Declassification

It’s hard to think of a president and an administration more devoted to secrecy than President Bush and his team. Except, that is, when it suits Mr. Bush politically to give the public a glimpse of the secrets. And so, yesterday, he ordered the declassification of a fraction of a report by United States intelligence agencies on the global terrorist threat.

Mr. Bush said he wanted to release the document so voters would not be confused about terrorism or the war when they voted for Congressional candidates in November. But the three declassified pages from what is certainly a voluminous report told us what any American with a newspaper, television or Internet connection should already know. The invasion of Iraq was a cataclysmic disaster. The current situation will get worse if American forces leave. Unfortunately, neither the report nor the president provide even a glimmer of a suggestion about how to avoid that inevitable disaster.

Despite what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, have tried to make everyone believe, one of the key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies, was indeed that the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

It said Iraq has become “the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It listed the war in Iraq as the second most important factor in the spread of terrorism — after “entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination.” And that was before April, when the report was completed. Since then, things have got much worse. (The report was written before the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The authors thought such an event would diminish the danger in Iraq. It has not.)

Mr. Bush decided to release this small, selected chunk of the report in reaction to an article on the intelligence assessment that appeared in The Times over the weekend. As a defense of his policies, it serves only to highlight the maddening circular logic that passes for a White House rationale. It goes like this: The invasion of Iraq has created an entire new army of terrorists who will be emboldened by an American withdrawal. Therefore, the United States has to stay indefinitely and keep fighting those terrorists.

By that logic, the more the United States fights, the longer the war stretches on.

It’s obvious why Mr. Bush did not want this report out, and why it is taking so long for the intelligence agencies to complete another report, solely on Iraq, that was requested by Congress in late July. It’s not credible that more time is needed to do the job. In 2002, the intelligence agencies completed a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in less time. Mr. Bush also made selected passages of that report public to buttress his arguments for war with Iraq, most of which proved to be based on fairy tales.

Then, Mr. Bush wanted Americans to focus on how dangerous Saddam Hussein was, and not on the obvious consequences of starting a war in the Middle East. Now, he wants voters to focus on how dangerous the world is, and not on his utter lack of ideas for what to do about it.

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The Fine Art of Declassification

It’s hard to think of a president and an administration more devoted to secrecy than President Bush and his team. Except, that is, when it suits Mr. Bush politically to give the public a glimpse of the secrets. And so, yesterday, he ordered the declassification of a fraction of a report by United States intelligence agencies on the global terrorist threat.

Mr. Bush said he wanted to release the document so voters would not be confused about terrorism or the war when they voted for Congressional candidates in November. But the three declassified pages from what is certainly a voluminous report told us what any American with a newspaper, television or Internet connection should already know. The invasion of Iraq was a cataclysmic disaster. The current situation will get worse if American forces leave. Unfortunately, neither the report nor the president provide even a glimmer of a suggestion about how to avoid that inevitable disaster.

Despite what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, have tried to make everyone believe, one of the key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies, was indeed that the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

It said Iraq has become “the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It listed the war in Iraq as the second most important factor in the spread of terrorism — after “entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination.” And that was before April, when the report was completed. Since then, things have got much worse. (The report was written before the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The authors thought such an event would diminish the danger in Iraq. It has not.)

Mr. Bush decided to release this small, selected chunk of the report in reaction to an article on the intelligence assessment that appeared in The Times over the weekend. As a defense of his policies, it serves only to highlight the maddening circular logic that passes for a White House rationale. It goes like this: The invasion of Iraq has created an entire new army of terrorists who will be emboldened by an American withdrawal. Therefore, the United States has to stay indefinitely and keep fighting those terrorists.

By that logic, the more the United States fights, the longer the war stretches on.

It’s obvious why Mr. Bush did not want this report out, and why it is taking so long for the intelligence agencies to complete another report, solely on Iraq, that was requested by Congress in late July. It’s not credible that more time is needed to do the job. In 2002, the intelligence agencies completed a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in less time. Mr. Bush also made selected passages of that report public to buttress his arguments for war with Iraq, most of which proved to be based on fairy tales.

Then, Mr. Bush wanted Americans to focus on how dangerous Saddam Hussein was, and not on the obvious consequences of starting a war in the Middle East. Now, he wants voters to focus on how dangerous the world is, and not on his utter lack of ideas for what to do about it.

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Old Agonies, New Fury

It's not too late to salvage a rapidly deteriorating situation, diplomats say, but more troops will be needed.

MALEK DIN, Afghanistan Bravo Company knew its quarry was here, somewhere. The soldiers could hear Taliban fighters radio one another, tracking every step the Americans took through the rutted tracks, mud-walled compounds and parched orchards of the Afghan outback.

Yet in three tense, sweat-soaked days of blasting open doors, digging up ammo caches and quizzing tight-lipped villagers, the GIs never found a single Taliban fighter.

“They just hide their weapons and become farmers,” muttered one 10th Mountain Division officer, nodding at turbaned men glowering from the shade of a nearby wall.

Afghanistan has become Iraq on a slow burn. Five years after they were ousted, the Taliban are back, their ranks renewed by a new generation of diehards. Violence, opium trafficking, ethnic tensions and political corruption and anarchy are all worse.

The diversion of troops and resources to Iraq — including many assigned to hunt down Osama bin Laden — is seen by critics of the Bush administration as leaving the door open to a Taliban comeback.

Only 22,000 U.S. and nearly that many NATO-led troops are trying to secure a country half again the size of Iraq, where 150,000 coalition troops are deployed.

Suicide bombings have soared from two in all of 2002 to about one every five days. Civilian casualties are mounting. President Hamid Karzai has become unpopular.

“The Americans made promises that they haven’t carried out, like bringing security, rebuilding the country and eradicating poverty,” said Nasir Ahmad, hawking secondhand clothes in Kabul’s main bazaar. “Karzai is an irresponsible person. He is just a figurehead.”

Senior U.S., European and Afghan officials, diplomats and military commanders said it’s not too late to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist base camp again. But containing the crisis will require more troops, attention and energy.

“The challenge we face is not of a military nature,” Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said on Sept. 21. “The critical task at this stage is strengthening the government of Afghanistan, developing the economy and building Afghan civil society.

The Pentagon had planned to withdraw some U.S. forces, but Eikenberry, now sees no cuts before next year.

If American and NATO forces left, warned Police Gen. Gullam Jan, “the Taliban would come back in a week.”

James Dobbins, who was President Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said the administration dismissed European offers of a major peacekeeping force after the U.S. intervention and quickly began shifting military assets to invade Iraq.

The White House “resisted the whole concept of peacekeeping,” said Dobbins. “They wanted to demonstrate a different approach, one that would be much lower cost. So the decision to skimp on manpower and deploy one-fiftieth the troops as were deployed in Bosnia was accompanied by a decision to underplay economic assistance.”

He noted that Congress wasn’t asked for reconstruction money until a year after Afghanistan was invaded. “Much of the money didn’t show up for years. And not only were the actual sums relatively small, but with the failure to establish even a modicum of security in the countryside, there was no way to spend it.”

Bush acknowledged Tuesday that the Taliban and other extremists “have tried to regain control, mostly in the south of Afghanistan. And so we’ve adjusted tactics and we’re on the offense to meet the threat and to defeat the threat….

“I know there’s some in your country who wonder or not — whether or not America has got the will to do the hard work necessary to help you succeed,” Bush told Karzai at the White House. “We have got that will, and we’re proud of you as a partner.”

The majority of Afghanistan’s 31 million people oppose the Taliban, which banned women from working and girls from attending school, enforced a puritanical form of Islamic government that included public floggings and executions, and fought a bloody civil war in the mid-1990s with the country’s Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek minorities.

But the Taliban scattered the warlords and established a kind of peace in much of the country, however repressive. Now, many yearn for a return of the security that the radicals provided.
Many Afghans also have grown disgusted with Karzai, who rarely leaves his heavily fortified palace in Kabul.

“The insurgency is developing all over,” warned Zia Mojaddedi, a senior member of Karzai’s national security council. “It is still not lost. They are not strong. But we are weak. We are corrupt.”

While the Taliban uprising has been focused in the southern homeland of the ethnic Pashtuns, their reach and that of allied Islamic groups and criminal gangs now extend to more than half the country.

In the southeast, troops face daily ambushes and hidden explosives. Operations end up building sympathy for the Taliban among the conservative Pashtun.

“Four or five times the Americans have searched my house,” Mohammad Akram, a wizened cleric, complained in one village. “They shoot at us. If the Americans have proof that I am with the bad guys, show me the proof. The Americans dishonor our homes.”

He waved at about 200 villagers. “The Taliban and al-Qaida are probably here right now. These people will support them because the government has done nothing for them.”

Lt. David Patton agrees that the Taliban are probably there. His unit found itself fighting for its life in the area a week earlier. “They basically trapped us. I had nine guys and it was a two-hour firefight.”

Since January, 158 U.S. soldiers and troops of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force have died, against 130 in 2005. Perhaps 1,500 Afghans died as well.

The administration notes how Afghanistan now has a democratic constitution, and elections have been held for president, parliament and provincial councils.

Reconstruction has gone forward in the north, center and west, where the Taliban strike but aren’t entrenched. Some 6 million children attend school, more than 1,800 miles of road have been built, and electricity, irrigation, bridges and health clinics are going in.

But in the south, the International Security Assistance Force is unable to kick-start reconstruction because of the fighting.

Until the international force arrrived, no more than 3,000 U.S. troops were deployed there. Instead, most Pentagon manpower focused on hunting al-Qaida along the border with Pakistan.
The result has been “to a large degree a vacuum,” said a senior official with the international force. “When the Taliban was pushed out (in 2001), they were neither replaced by effective government, nor were they replaced by alternative security forces. NATO is now dealing with the consequences of previous failures in policy.”

The guerrillas assassinate officials and pro-government Muslim religious leaders, undermining the efforts to extend Kabul’s authority. Anyone suspected of informing or even not sharing the Taliban’s radical vision of Islam is at peril.

Large sections of the nation’s main highway have become unsafe, and at least 300 schools are burned or closed.

Guerrillas appear openly in Kandahar, the Pashtun spiritual and cultural capital. Taliban suicide-bomber cells have infiltrated Kabul.

They and their leaders operate from Pakistan, aided by al-Qaida, radical Islamic parties and even elements in Pakistan government who want to keep Afghanistan weak.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insists he’s doing everything possible to crack down but has never arrested any Taliban leaders.

As in Iraq, the U.S. exit strategy for Afghanistan hinges on building the army and police.
The Afghan army has about 30,000 troops who participate in operations with U.S. and international forces. But they lack basic equipment — helmets, radios and armored vehicles — and rely on U.S. and other foreign funds for their salaries.

Police issues are worse.

“If a Talib comes across the border and encounters the police, he says, ‘Here are 5,000 Afghanis (about $100). We are going to fight the infidels. We have weapons and rockets. Take this 5,000 Afghanis and get lost,’ ” Mojaddedi said.

Desertions, Taliban infiltration, massive equipment theft, nepotism, low pay, incompetence, recruiting woes and corruption have forced reform of the Afghan National Police to grind to a halt, said Jan, Mojaddedi and U.S officials involved.

“Many of the people of Afghanistan are on the fence right now,” Marine Gen. James Jones, NATO’s top commander, said. “If military action is not followed by visible, tangible, sizable and correctly focused reconstruction and development efforts, then we will be in Afghanistan for a much longer period of time than we need to be.”

Some pertinent data points:

22,000 U.S. forces; NATO forces add 20,000 and the Afghan army adds 30,000
12,000 Taliban’s estimate of own strength
1,600 Estimated civilians dead this year
158 Allied soldiers killed this year, up from 130 in 2005
15 Missouri and Kansas casualties since 2001

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Duty in Iraq gets extended

One combat team must stay 46 more days, and another group will be sent back early.

By DREW BROWN
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON For the second time in two months, an Army unit in Iraq has seen its tour of duty extended. It was the latest sign of the strain that more than three years of combat have put on the force.

About 4,000 troops with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based in Giessen, Germany, will see their tour of duty extended by 46 days, the military announced Monday. The unit was supposed to end its 12-month combat tour and return home in mid-January 2007, but will now begin its redeployment in late February.

The extension was implemented to ensure that soldiers with the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, will have at least 12 months at their home base of Fort Stewart, Ga., before they return to Iraq for the third time in January 2007.

Also, the 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Texas, will deploy to Iraq 30 days earlier than planned.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the changes were in order to maintain 15 combat brigades in Iraq. Last week Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, said that the U.S. military would have to maintain as many as 147,000 troops in Iraq through next spring.
U.S. military commanders had hoped to reduce the number of U.S. troops to less than 100,000 by the end of this year, but increasing violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims has dashed those hopes.

“What these decisions reflect is the flexibility that the United States military has to adjust to a changing environment and a changing situation,” Whitman said.

A congressional staffer briefed on the development said that the Army was moving up the deployment of the 1st Cavalry Division troops by a month so that the 172nd Stryker Brigade’s deployment wouldn’t be extended again. But an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Carl Ey, said the two developments weren’t necessarily connected.

This marks the third time that U.S. forces have been notified that they’d have to stay in Iraq beyond their original return date. The first time occurred in December 2004, when more than 12,000 soldiers and Marines were told that they would have to stay for two additional months in order to bolster security for Iraq’s parliamentary elections. The second was the Stryker Brigade extension in July.

Last month the Marine Corps announced that it would recall as many as 2,500 inactive reservists, the first time the Marines have recalled inactive reservists to duty since the 1991 Gulf War.

To reach Drew Brown, send e-mail to dbrown@ mcclatchydc.com.

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Rice challenges Clinton on terror record

NEW YORK - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged former President Clinton's claim that he did more than many of his conservative critics to pursue Osama bin Laden, and she accused President Bush's predecessor of leaving no comprehensive plan to fight al-Qaida.
"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said Monday during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post.

The newspaper published her comments Tuesday, after Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday" in a combative interview in which he defended his handling of the threat posed by bin Laden and said he "worked hard" to have the al-Qaida leader killed.

"That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," Clinton said in the interview. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try."

Rice disputed his assessment.

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.

Rice took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., which also owns Fox News Channel.

In the TV interview, Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job" and asked: "I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, 'Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?' I want to know how many people you asked, 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?'"

He was referring to the USS Cole, attacked by terrorists in Yemen in 2000, and former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke.

Rice said Clarke "left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security."
The interview has been the focus of much attention - drawing nearly 1.2 million views on YouTube and earning the show its best ratings in nearly three years.

Rice questioned the value of the dialogue.

"I think this is not a very fruitful discussion," she said. "We've been through it. The 9/11 commission has turned over every rock and we know exactly what they said."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., defended her husband. "I just think that my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take this," she told Newsday on Monday.

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Blunt opts for new plan

The governor blames the attorney general for foiling a proposal to fund a building boom.
By KIT WAGAR
The Star’s Jefferson City correspondent

With the specter of lawsuits hovering over the deal, Gov. Matt Blunt on Monday dropped his effort to force the partial sale of Missouri’s student loan agency.

Blunt’s office said he would support a new plan that would ask the legislature to approve the transfer of $350 million from the independent student loan authority to the state to finance a building boom at state universities.

The decision was a sharp about-face by Blunt, who has insisted for eight months that his plan to go it alone and push the deal through the board of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority was legal and financially sound.

Blunt’s spokesman, Spence Jackson, said the change of heart was prompted by the possibility of board members balking at approving the latest deal. Their reluctance stemmed from concern that they would be sued by Attorney General Jay Nixon or others, Jackson said.
Nixon had warned board members in a Sept. 6 letter that state law required the loan authority’s assets to be used only to help students obtain low-cost college loans. His staff also warned board members that they could be held liable for violating their fiduciary duty if they took action not in the loan authority’s interest.

In announcing his reversal, Blunt sounded a defiant tone, blaming Nixon for foiling his plan. He called Nixon’s objections politically motivated, reckless and irresponsible.
Jackson went even further, saying Nixon’s “narcissistic obsession with legal threats has board members rightly in fear of his abuse of office.”

In a low-key statement, Nixon emphasized his twin demands: public participation in any divestiture of loan authority assets and a comprehensive analysis of any proposal to ensure that the plan is legal and would not leave the loan authority bankrupt.

“Sending the MoHELA proposal back to the General Assembly for consideration provides the necessary opportunity for public input,” Nixon said. “It is essential that the legislature also demand the analysis that was promised on the impact of this deal on Missouri families’ access to higher education.”

Blunt’s plan has gone through a half-dozen versions in efforts to answer Nixon’s complaints that the plan could raise the cost of student loans, that it represented an illegal transfer of a nonprofit agency’s assets and that it could bankrupt the loan authority.

Blunt’s latest plan attempted to address the financial concerns by shrinking the amount of money the loan authority would transfer. The legal concerns were addressed by calling the transfer a “cooperation agreement” among state agencies rather than a gift to the state.
But the latest plan has been unraveling slowly ever since Blunt unveiled it Aug. 28. Details in the agreement kept changing, and Nixon again criticized the way the plan was developed without public comment.

The plan was scheduled to be approved by the loan authority’s board Sept. 8. But it was pushed back to Sept. 27 after several board members expressed concerns about the possibility their vote could violate their duty to the loan authority.

Three board members abruptly resigned last week. Blunt replaced them, but it put the new members in the position of voting on a multibillion-dollar transaction after being on the board less than a week.

Greg Steinhoff, director of Missouri’s Economic Development Department, said the new plan makes the cooperation agreement effective only upon approval of the legislature. Lawmakers would grant approval by changing state law to expand the loan authority’s mandate to include the payments required under the new plan.

That is the course that Nixon had recommended since early this year. But Blunt administration officials insisted that their change of direction was not an acknowledgment that Nixon was right. Such a move would simply insulate board members from unfounded accusations that they had violated their duty, they said.

“It’s an acknowledgment that Nixon’s bullying tactics scared some board members, and we are taking action to protect them against a school-yard bully,” Jackson said.

To reach Kit Wagar, call (816) 234-4440 or send e-mail to kwagar@kcstar.com.

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Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat by Mark Mazzetti

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.
Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”
That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”
On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.
It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.
Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.
The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

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"Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat by Mark Mazzetti" >>