U.S. Asks Ex-U.N. Inspector to Advise on Arms Search Apparently in a sign of dissatisfaction with the progress on the search for illegal weapons in Iraq, the Bush administration is turning to a former top United Nations weapons inspector to provide advice on how to more effectively focus the hunt, officials said today. David Kay, who led three arms inspection missions as the United Nations chief nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, has been named a special adviser to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, providing provide expertise on the best methods for scouring Iraq for illicit arms, the C.I.A. announced today. The surprise appointment of a former United Nations weapons expert follows a period in which the Bush administration frequently criticized the agency's inspection process as insufficient to penetrate Iraq's program of "denial and deception." The decision to have Mr. Kay report directly to Mr. Tenet, while search teams on the ground will be reporting to the Pentagon, will give the C.I.A. a higher profile in a hunt that has been dominated by the Pentagon. Comments by senior officials tonight indicate concern that the move will be viewed as a turf battle between the Pentagon and C.I.A. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/international/worldspecial/12WEAP.html

EU ends free Internet tax ride July 1, a new EU directive goes into effect requiring all Internet companies to account for value added tax, or VAT, on "digital sales." The law adds a 15 percent to 25 percent levy on select Internet transactions such as software and music downloads, monthly subscriptions to an Internet service provider and on any product purchased through an online auction anywhere in the 15-member bloc of nations. The VAT is nothing new for some Net companies. European dot-coms have been charging customers VAT since their inception. Their overseas rivals, though, have been exempt, making foreign companies an obvious choice for the bargain-hunting consumer. "It's a massive competitive disadvantage. It's good to see at last it being eroded," said David Melville, general counsel of U.K. ISP Freeserve, a division of French ISP Wanadoo. Freeserve has lobbied furiously for the past two years to get the loophole closed, saying its chief rival, AOL U.K., the Internet unit of AOL Time Warner, saved $249.7 million in tax payments over the years. AOL Europe has relocated its continental headquarters to tiny Luxembourg, one of the EU's cheaper tax regimes. Seattle-based retailer Amazon.com said the new tax regime will affect its auctions, plus marketplace and zShops operations where third-party new and used items are sold. In addition, VAT will now be charged on software downloads and the sale of e-books, Amazon said. "We'll go out shortly to our seller community about how these changes will impact fees we currently charge," Amazon spokeswoman Patricia Smith said. Online auctioneer eBay will swallow the VAT charge on behalf of consumers in a host of its smaller European operations such as France and Italy. But in the United Kingdom and Germany, its largest and most profitable European units, the company has raised fees to reflect the higher VAT charges.� http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-1014519.htmlOn

In Israeli Gesture, a Tower Is Removed Near a Settlement As an opening gesture to comply with the new American-led peace initiative, Israeli soldiers drove to a hilltop here in the West Bank and tore down what the Israeli Army described as a watchtower adjacent to a settlement. The rusty tower looked unremarkable. But to the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, it was technically an "unauthorized outpost," one of 14 erected as adjuncts to nearby Israeli settlements that the army pledged today to destroy as part of Israel's commitment to the current peace plan, called the road map, between Israelis and Palestinians. To the angry Israeli settlers who live nearby, the downed tower was a frightening portent: that Mr. Sharon may be willing to bargain away the right they believe that Jews have to inhabit land in the West Bank and Gaza that was seized from Palestinians after the 1967 war. "This is the first step," warned Yudah Yifrach, 27, one of several hundred settlers who came here to protest the tower's removal. But to Palestinian leaders and critics of the settlements, the demolition of the tower showed just how little the Sharon government was actually willing to concede, at least now, in the early stages of the peace plan. At the same time, the army tore down two trailers � both, like the watchtower, empty of people � that constituted another outpost, called Neve Erez South, about 15 miles from here. The move against the outposts came after the Israeli Army demolished 13 Palestinian homes early today in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, including one belonging to a militant, Mussa Sakhawil, who helped carry out a shooting on Sunday that left four Israeli soldiers dead. By tonight, the army reported that it had dismantled five of the outposts, none of them inhabited. Of the 14 outposts scheduled for destruction in the next few days, 10 are uninhabited and so, critics argue, their removal is only the most tentative step toward complying with the peace plan. "It's a phony show that has no value," Nabil Abu Rudaneh, an aide to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said in a telephone interview tonight. Few issues present a greater challenge to the peace plan's success than the question of the roughly 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The plan now backed by the Bush administration has chosen to grapple first with that question through the phenomenon of outposts, which are difficult to define. For several years, Israeli settlers have been expanding the reach of their communities by erecting what they call outposts, usually on nearby hilltops. They generally consist of a few structures, some with water and electricity, put in place for various overlapping reasons, as a marker for future expansion or as retribution when Palestinians kill Israelis. Critics contend that some were built exactly for moments like this one: when a peace plan would require concessions that would chip away at the settlements. Many of the outposts are uninhabited. The first phase of the peace plan requires that Israelis � led by Mr. Sharon, a longtime supporter of the settler movement � dismantle all the outposts erected in the last two years since he came to power. Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, says 62 such outposts have been built since 2001, mostly in the West Bank. But Mr. Sharon's government puts the number closer to 100 and says that it will destroy only those outposts built without government authorization, a qualification not included in the peace plan itself. The dispute over what exactly constitutes an outpost was evident tonight as soldiers tore down the tower on a hill near the settlement of Ofra, which was founded near the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the mid-1970's. It also showed the complications for Mr. Sharon as he seeks to comply with the terms of the peace plan without alienating his core political constituents. On one hilltop is a community called Amona, founded three years ago and holding roughly 25 young Jewish families and their children. On another, until tonight, was the watchtower. Peace Now said it considered the houses and the tower part of the same outpost. The government apparently disagreed, dismantling only the tower and saying it had taken down a separate outpost. "The whole story is rather tricky," said Dror Etkes, who monitors settlements for Peace Now. "The government obviously has right now the interest to present itself as dismantling settlements. But I think what they are doing now is splitting existing outposts and giving them separate names." Until now, he said, his group considered the tower part of the outpost. "Obviously, they don't want to dismantle Amona, with 25 families very established." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/international/middleeast/10SETT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use �intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. "Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process." The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof. Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/international/worldspecial/07TRAI.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Duped and Betrayed Most media attention has focused on the child tax credit that wasn't. As in 2001, the administration softened the profile of a tax cut mainly aimed at the wealthy by including a credit for families with children. But at the last minute, a change in wording deprived 12 million children of some or all of that tax credit. "There are a lot of things that are more important than that," declared Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. (Maybe he was thinking of the "Hummer deduction," which stayed in the bill: business owners may now deduct up to $100,000 for the cost of a vehicle, as long as it weighs at least 6,000 pounds.) Less attention has been paid to fine print that reveals the supposed rationale for the dividend tax cut as a smoke screen. The problem, we were told, is that profits are taxed twice: once when they are earned, a second time when they are paid out as dividends. But as any tax expert will tell you, the corporate tax law is full of loopholes; many profitable corporations pay little or no taxes. The original Bush plan ensured that dividends from such companies would not get a tax break. But those safeguards vanished from the final bill: dividends will get special treatment regardless of how much tax is paid by the company that issues them. This little change has two big consequences. First, as Glenn Hubbard, the former chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers and the author of the original plan, delicately puts it, "It's hard to get a lot of progressivity at the top." Translation: wealthy individuals who get most of their income from dividends and capital gains will often end up paying lower tax rates than ordinary Americans who work for a living.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/opinion/06KRUG.html

>"The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."

Cloaks and Daggers On Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up. Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem �not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials � particularly in the Pentagon. One has to take the outrage among the spooks with a few grains of salt because the intelligence folks have been on the losing end of a power struggle with the Pentagon. But that's the problem: the Pentagon has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Bush administration, playing a central role in foreign policy and intelligence as well as military matters. "The basic problem here is that O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense] has become too powerful," noted Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency. One step came in the Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence � that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest � was deeply bruised. A commission led by Brent Scowcroft suggested two years ago that intelligence functions be consolidated under the director of central intelligence. It was an excellent idea � killed by, among others, Mr. Rumsfeld. "The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it." As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq � after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions. "He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line." That is not, of course, a capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A. officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/opinion/06KRIS.html

Another Attack in Central Iraq Kills Another U.S. Soldier Khalil Muhammad said he heard the explosion just after midnight. Within seconds, the sound of American rifle fire confirmed his fears. Hidden assailants early this morning had launched another attack on American soldiers in this restive Iraqi town 35 miles west of Baghdad, killing one American and wounding five. The dead soldier, whom military officials declined to identify immediately for privacy reasons, was the third American soldier killed in Falluja in the last 10 days. Five other American soldiers have been killed in central Iraq in the same period. Today's fatal attack comes at a crucial time for American commanders and the residents of this tense farming town of 600,000 people on the banks of the Euphrates River. After a series of almost weekly attacks on American forces here, United States commanders are adopting a get-tough approach in Falluja, a town that has emerged as a center of anti-American resistance in Iraq. Beginning this week, 4,000 soldiers from the Army's Third Infantry Division are to replace a 1,200-member armored cavalry squadron in the town. Military commanders hope that the increased American presence will quell the attacks. What occurs in Falluja in the next several weeks could set a precedent. American military might could either crush dissent in the area � or fuel it.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/international/worldspecial/06FIGH.html

Arafat Belittles Sharon's Offer on Settlements Shut out of a Middle East peace conference in Jordan on Wednesday, Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, dismissed a promised Israeli concession today, as skepticism on both sides and around the region vied with hopes for peace. On Wednesday, after meeting with President Bush in the port city of Aqaba, Mr. Abbas declared that the armed Palestinian uprising against Israel "must end." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised to begin dismantling "unauthorized outposts," a reference to some of the dozens of clusters of trailers set up by Jewish settlers on West Bank hilltops in recent years to strengthen Israel's hold there. But Mr. Arafat said today of Mr. Sharon, "Unfortunately, he has not yet offered anything tangible." Speaking to reporters at his compound in Ramallah, where Mr. Sharon has effectively imprisoned him for more than a year, Mr. Arafat said, "What's the significance of removing a caravan from one location and then saying, `I have removed a settlement?' " http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html

DeLay Rebuffs Move to Restore Lost Tax Credit Clearly irked at the mounting criticism of Republicans for the last-minute decision not to give the credit to minimum-wage families, Mr. DeLay said those who favored the increased credit had had their chance in the debate over the bill. "There are a lot of other things that are more important than that," Mr. DeLay said in a news conference today. "To me, it's a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don't pay income tax." Mr. DeLay's position puts him at odds with a growing number of Senate Republicans who have signed on to a measure that would extend the $400-per-child increase in the credit to many families making from $10,500 to $26,625. The Senate had approved the increase for those families last month, but it was removed in final negotiations with the House. Six Senate Republicans now support the measure, along with most Democrats. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/national/04TAX.html?pagewanted=all&position=

More News, Less Diversity There are, of course, millions of Web sites, and in theory they provide a diverse spectrum of viewpoints, which is one rationale for restrictions against any one company owning too many news outlets. In practice, however, almost all this diversity is ignored. Users may be able to choose from millions of sites, but most go to only a few. This isn't an accident or the result of savvy branding. It's because Internet traffic follows a winner-take-all pattern that is much more ruthless than people realize. Relying on links and search engines, most people are directed to a few very successful sites; the rest remain invisible to the majority of users. The result is that there's an even greater media concentration online than in the offline world. Our research on online political communities � analyzing three million pages on issues like abortion and capital punishment � shows a staggering degree of consolidation. For instance, although there are more than 13,000 Web pages on the subject of gun control, two-thirds of all hyperlinks point to the 10 most popular sites. In the case of capital punishment, the top 10 sites receive 63 percent of the total number of links on the topic. In every category of content we examined, more than half the Web sites have only a single link to them. The number of links to a Web site is correlated with the amount of traffic the site receives, since it determines a site's visibility on the open Internet: popular sites continue to acquire more links, making their predominance even more pronounced. The top 20 online news sites are owned by 16 large media companies. The top five sites get more traffic than the other 15 combined.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/opinion/02HIND.html

The Reverse Robin Hood If you wanted a quintessential example of what the Bush administration and its legislative cronies are about, it was right there on the front page of The Times last Thursday: "Tax Law Omits $400 Child Credit for Millions." The fat cats will get their tax cuts. But in the new American plutocracy, there won't even be crumbs left over for the working folks at the bottom of the pyramid to scramble after. When House and Senate negotiators met to put the finishing touches to President Bush's tax bill, they coldly deleted a provision that would have allowed millions of low-income working families to benefit from the bill's increased child tax credit. It was a mean-spirited and wholly unnecessary act, a clear display of the current regime's outright hostility toward America's poor and working classes. The negotiators eliminated a provision in the Senate version of the tax bill that would have extended benefits from the child tax credit to families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625. This is not a small group. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the families that would have benefited include about 12 million children � one of every six kids in the U.S. under the age of 17. While the tax bill will lavish hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits on people higher up the income scale, it leaves this group of working families very ignominiously behind. And readers of yesterday's Times learned that another group of some eight million mostly low-income taxpayers � primarily single people without children � will also be left behind, getting no benefit at all from the president's tax cuts. Forget about trickle-down. The goal of this administration is to haul it up. The provision to extend the tax credit to more low-income families was the work of Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat who noted that half of all taxpayers in her state had adjusted gross incomes of less than $20,000. The full Senate approved the provision, but the negotiators knocked it out at the last minute, behind closed doors.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/opinion/02HERB.html

F.C.C. Votes to Relax Rules Limiting Media Ownership Federal regulators relaxed decades-old rules restricting media ownership Monday, permitting companies to buy more television stations and own a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same city. The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 -- along party lines -- to adopt a series of changes favored by media companies. �companies argued that existing ownership rules were outmoded on a media landscape that has been substantially altered by cable TV, satellite broadcasts and the Internet. Critics say the eased restrictions would likely lead to a wave of mergers landing a few giant media companies in control of even more of what the public sees, hears and reads. The decision was a victory for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has faced growing criticism from diverse interests opposed to his move toward deregulation. The FCC said a single company can now own TV stations that reach 45 percent of U.S. households instead of 35 percent. The major networks wanted the cap eliminated, while smaller broadcasters said a higher cap would allow the networks to gobble up stations and take away local control of programming. The FCC largely ended a ban on joint ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same city. The provision lifts all "cross-ownership" restrictions in markets with nine or more TV stations. Smaller markets would face some limits and cross-ownership would be banned in markets with three or fewer TV stations. The agency also eased rules governing local TV ownership so one company can own two television stations in more markets and three stations in the largest cities such as New York and Los Angeles. "The more you dig into this order the worse things get," said Michael Copps, one of the commission's Democrats. He said the changes empowers "a new media elite" to control news and entertainment. Fellow Democrat Jonathan Adelstein said the changes are "likely to damage the media landscape for decades to come." The rule changes are expected to face court challenges from media companies wanting more deregulation and consumer groups seeking stricter restrictions.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/business/02WIRE-FCC.html

Armour-piercing shards Unlike the precision-guided bombs and missiles that have also been deployed in Iraq, cluster bombs are designed to cause damage over a wide area. Each bomb separates above a target, releasing numerous small bomblets, covering an area of about 200 by 400 metres. When each of the bomblets near the ground, they explode and fire out armour-piercing shards. They are typically used against enemy vehicle convoys, artillery placements or troops. The US CBU-105 was recently upgraded with an on-board guidance system that can adjust for displacement by wind during the descent to a target, meaning they can be released from a higher safer, altitude. Failure rate "But some bomblets will fail to explode," says Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems. "You can't be absolutely certain that they're all going to fuse properly." A single US CBU-105 cluster bomb contains 40 bomblets and the British RBL-755 bomb contains 150. The military estimate is that about five per cent of bomblets malfunction. These unexploded bomblets not only present an immediate threat, say critics, but can lie like unexploded mines for many years. Amnesty International said in a statement: "If the US is serious about protecting civilians, it must publicly commit to a moratorium on the use of cluster weapons. Using cluster munitions will lead to indiscriminate killing and injuring of civilians." Keeping civilian casualties to an absolute minimum is politically crucial to the US and UK, who began their invasion to disarm Iraq in the face of substantial international opposition. Military spokespeople stress that cluster bombs will not be used in or near civilian areas. http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/iraq/article.jsp?id=99993588&sub=News%20update

Israel Eases Palestinian Travel Limits The Israeli army announced it had lifted the two-week closure at midnight Saturday and would allow 10,000 workers to enter Israel on Sunday. The closure was imposed after a spate of suicide bombings. About 3,500 Palestinians holding valid work permits walked into Israel through the Erez crossing in Gaza on Sunday morning, according to Palestinian officials. Palestinians trying to cross a checkpoint between the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Bir Zeit were forced to leave their cars behind and walk four miles. During the Cabinet meeting Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said the military had foiled attempted terror attacks in recent days. Israeli agents stopped three cars packed with explosives trying to enter Israel in the past week, Mofaz said, according to the official who attended the meeting. Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib said Sunday the gestures had little impact on the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ``The continuous Israeli statements seem directed toward public consumption,'' he said. ``In practical terms, there hasn't been any change at all.'' http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder It has been, for Israel's settlers, a most unsettling week. First the Israeli government endorsed the idea of eventually creating a Palestinian state, giving qualified backing to an American-backed peace plan. Then Mr. Sharon criticized what he called Israel's "occupation" in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 war. This is a right-wing Israeli government, and Mr. Sharon is a visionary and engineer of the settlement movement, which since the war has moved more than 200,000 Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza. Yet in a conflict in which every word can be inspected for political freight, in which names for everything from the city streets to the violence itself are contested, Mr. Sharon has adopted a term � "occupation" � that is central to the lexicon of Israeli doves and Palestinians. For settlers, it was almost as though President Bush had described Texas as American-occupied territory.� Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder

The Bioweapons Enigma resident Bush may be convinced that two trailers found in Iraq were used as biological weapons labs, but the evidence is far from definitive. Referring to the two trailers in an interview with Polish television before he departed for Europe last week, Mr. Bush said the United States had found weapons of mass destruction and banned manufacturing devices in Iraq. Reports from the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency support that view, but they are based on inconclusive information. Intelligence analysts told reporters last week that the configuration of equipment in the trailers would not work efficiently as a biological production plant, is not a design used by anyone else and would not lead anyone to link the trailers intuitively with biological weapons. The intelligence officials took all that as a sign that the Iraqis were ingeniously clever in trying to hide the true nature of what they were doing from international inspectors. But the uncertainties leave open the disquieting possibility that the trailers might not be what the intelligence agencies think they are. It seems increasingly imperative, as this page has argued before, to get an authoritative, unbiased assessment from the United Nations or some other independent body. Intelligence officials say they are "highly confident" of their conclusions because of what they deem striking similarities between one of the trailers seized last month and a description provided three years ago by an Iraqi chemical engineer who is said to have managed a mobile weapons plant. Unfortunately, it is impossible for outsiders to judge the reliability of this source, whose information was described as "absolutely critical" to concluding that the trailers were biological warfare units. No traces of biological agents have been detected so far in the trailers, and search teams have yet to find the additional trailers that would be needed to convert the slurry produced by these trailers into usable weapons. The technical analysis simply argues that the trailers could be used to produce a biological slurry and that no other plausible use can be identified that would justify the high cost and effort of mobile production. Officials dismiss Iraqi claims that the units were intended to produce hydrogen as an unlikely cover story but acknowledge that trace amounts of aluminum, a residue of hydrogen production, were detected, in amounts they deem too small to be significant.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/opinion/01SUN2.html

The Tax Bill's Final Indignity The tax bill that President Bush triumphantly signed into law on Wednesday is not just unfair, dishonest and economically unsound. It is also cruel to low-income families. In a last-minute revision, Senate and House negotiators dropped a provision that would have extended child tax credits to millions of these families. The stated reason was that the total cost of the bill had to be kept to an agreed-upon limit of $350 billion. This excuse is typical of the shifty argumentation that has accompanied this legislation from the start. Under the new law, which raises the child tax credit to $1,000 from $600, most families with children will receive a $400-per-child check this summer. It was never intended that the wealthiest families � or the very poorest families, making less than the minimum wage � would get the credit. As it turns out, however, millions of families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625 will not get it either. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, had insisted that the Senate version of the bill extend the enlarged credit to this particular group of working families, who have nearly 12 million children. The provision would have cost $3.5 billion, or exactly 1 percent of the advertised price of the bill. But because it would have helped push the tab above $350 billion, out it went. Set aside for the moment the fact that the official $350 billion figure is a phony. The real cost of the bill over 10 years will more nearly approximate $800 billion if all the provisions that are scheduled to "sunset" in the next few years are eventually made a permanent part of the tax code, as they almost certainly will be. But even if the cost of the bill were actually $350 billion, there were fairer ways to reach that target than by depriving low-income families of the tiny crumbs the bill gives them.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/opinion/30FRI1.html

ABCNEWS.com : Justice Dept. Lifts FBI Database Limits The Justice Department lifted a requirement � that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country's most comprehensive law enforcement database. The system, run by the FBI's National Crime Information Center, includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats. Records are queried increasingly by the nation's law enforcement agencies to help decide whether to monitor, detain or arrest someone. The records are inaccessible to the public, and police have been prosecuted in U.S. courts for misusing the system to find, for example, personal information about girlfriends or former spouses. Officials said the change, which immediately drew criticism from civil-liberties advocates, is necessary to ensure investigators have access to information that can't be confirmed but could take on new significance later, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. The change to the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was disclosed with an announcement published in the Federal Register. The Privacy Act previously required the FBI to ensure information was "accurate, relevant, timely and complete" before it could be added to the system.� Critics urged Congress to review the change, arguing that information in the computer files was especially important because it can affect many aspects of a person's life. "This is information that has always been stigmatizing, the type of data that can prevent someone from getting a job," said Marc Rotenberg of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When you remove the accuracy obligations, you open the door to the use of unreliable information." Critics have noted complaints for years about wrong information in the computer files that disrupted the lives of innocent citizens, and the FBI has acknowledged problems. In one case, a Phoenix resident was arrested for minor traffic violations that had been quashed weeks earlier; in another, a civilian was misidentified as a Navy deserter. The system "is replete with inaccurate, untimely information, but everybody does their best to keep it up to date," said Beryl Howell, former general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "That's a goal we shouldn't just throw out." In the change, the Justice Department said earlier restrictions on information "would limit the ability of trained investigators and intelligence analysts to exercise their judgment in reporting on investigations and impede the development of criminal intelligence necessary for effective law enforcement." http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030324_2121.html

Counterpane: Crypto-Gram: April 15, 2003 National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Database Accuracy Last month the U.S. Justice Department administratively discharged the FBI of its statutory duty to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. This database is enormous. It contains over 39 million criminal records. It contains information on wanted persons, missing persons, and gang members, as well as information about stolen cars, boats, and other information. Over 80,000 law enforcement agencies have access to this database. On average, there are 2.8 million transactions processed each day. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires the FBI to make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the records in this database. Last month, the Justice Department exempted the system from the law's accuracy requirements. This isn't just bad social practice, it's bad security. A database with more errors is much less useful than a database with fewer errors, and an error-filled security database is much more likely to target innocents than it is to let the guilty go free. To see this, let's walk through an example. Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty." Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly. Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million. Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100. The differences between examples 2 and 3 are striking. In example 2, one person is erroneously arrested for every 100 people correctly arrested. In example 3, one person is correctly arrested for every 100 people erroneously arrested. The increase in error rate makes the database all but useless as a system for figuring out how to arrest. And this is despite the fact that, in both cases, almost no guilty people get away because of a database error. The reason for this phenomenon is that the number of guilty people is a very small percentage of the population. If one in ten people were guilty, then a 0.0001% error rate would mistakenly arrest one innocent for every 100,000 guilty, and a 1% error rate would arrest approximately one innocent for every guilty. And if the number of guilty people is even less than one in ten thousand, then the problem of arresting innocents magnifies even more as the database has more errors. Now this is a simple example, and the NCIC database has far more complex data and tries to make more complex correlations. And I am assuming that the error rate for false positives are the same as the error rate for false negatives, and there aren't any data dependencies that complicate the analysis. But even with these complications, the problems are still the same. Because there are so few terrorists (for example) amongst the general population, a error-filled database is far more likely to identify innocent people as terrorists than it is to catch actual terrorists. This kind of thing is already happening. There are 13 million people on the FBI's terrorist watch list. That's ridiculous, it's simply inconceivable that a number of people equal to 4.5% of the population of the United States are terrorists. There are far more innocents on that list than there are guilty people not on that list. And these innocents are regularly harassed by police trying to do their job. And in any case, any watch list with 13 million people is basically useless. How many resources can anyone afford to spend watching about one-twentieth of the population, anyway? That 13-million-person list feels a whole like CYA on the part of the FBI. Adding someone to the list probably has no cost and, in fact, may be one criterion for how your performance is evaluated at the FBI. Removing someone from the list probably takes considerable courage, since someone is going to have to take the fall when "the warnings were ignored" and "they failed to connect the dots." Best to leave that risky stuff to other people, and to keep innocent people on the list forever.� http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0304.html#7

Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution The Bush team's vision for a postwar Iraq was founded on the dreams of exiles and defectors, who promised that Iraqis would shower American troops with flowers. Now, with the crowds shouting, "No to America; no to Saddam," and most Iraqis already referring to the American "occupation," the Bush administration seems puzzled. The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. In particular, the dogged nationalism of the Iraqis that forced imperial Britain's departure in 1932; and, more recently, the events in 1979 after the downfall of the secular regime of the shah of Iran. A big argument among American officials had been over the future of the secular Baath Party, with the pragmatists advocating a mere "head transplant" of the top leadership while keeping the body intact, and the ideologues proposing outright destruction. Events, however, ignored the debate in Washington, and the Baath disappeared altogether. So too have the military and most of the police. This vacuum is reminiscent of what happened in Iran in February 1979. The 440,000-strong military of the pro-American shah disintegrated quickly, as did the police force and the Savak, the notorious secret police. Into that vacuum stepped the Islamic Revolutionary Komitehs, run by Shiite clerics operating from the local mosques. The Komitehs took over not only law enforcement but also such essential chores as distributing heating oil to households in wintry Tehran. Many groups took part in toppling the shah; but it was the nationwide religious network and the unified actions of the mullahs that enabled them to to become his successor. A similar pattern has emerged in Iraq, particularly in the Shiite-majority south and the Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. Over the centuries, as members of a community that was discriminated against and repressed, the Shiites learned to find comfort in religion and piety to a much greater extent than the ruling Sunnis. In recent decades, Shiite clerics devised clandestine networks of communication that even Saddam Hussein's spies failed to infiltrate. Eschewing written messages or telephones, they used personal envoys who spoke in code. In the wake of Iraq's collapse, this messenger system has proved remarkably efficient. The Shiites, however, are not uniform in their outlook. Religious loyalties are divided between Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, an Iranian-born cleric living in Najaf, and the Tehran-based Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, leader of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Yet they are united in their demand, endorsed by predominantly Shiite Iran, that the Americans leave soon. The supreme council has a 10,000-man army, armed by Iran, and controls many Iraqi towns near the Iranian border. By contrast, the Free Iraqi Forces loyal to Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the American-sponsored Iraqi National Congress, has only about 600 men at arms. The Pentagon made a show of airlifting Mr. Chalabi's men into the April 15 assembly of Iraqi politicians convened by the American pro-consul, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. But the attendance of a mere 80 delegates (the supreme council, previously part of the American-sponsored official Iraqi opposition, boycotted), along with a noisy anti-American protest by 20,000 demonstrators, showed the weakness of Washington's hand.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/opinion/23HIRO.html