Libraries Planning a Meeting on Filters fficials of the American Library Assocation will call a meeting with the makers of Internet filtering software next month to voice concern over a federal law that requires libraries and schools to use Internet filters or risk losing federal money. The law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, was upheld last week by the Supreme Court after the librarians challenged the law on constitutional grounds. Judith Krug, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association, said that in the meeting, tentatively scheduled for Aug. 14, librarians will ask the companies to ensure that their software can easily be turned off and on again by librarians. The group will also demand that the companies reveal their database of blocked sites to libraries so they can determine which programs best suit the libraries' needs, or they may work with third parties to develop new filtering software. "If we can't get what we want from the filtering companies, I say let's make our own," Mr. Krug said. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/national/03LIBR.html

U.S. Troops in Iraq Detain 180, Reporter Wounded U.S. forces in Iraq detained 180 people in raids to stamp out resistance to their occupation as a reporter attached to an army unit became the latest casualty of the violence, the military said on Monday. Assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on Sunday night at an army patrol in the restive town of Falluja, around 50 km west of Baghdad, wounding the journalist who is now in stable condition in hospital, a statement said.� Three people were killed soon afterwards when their pickup truck drove into a military vehicle helping to evacuate the reporter from the area, the U.S. Central Command said. It did not identify the journalist or the dead people. The U.S. military, which has around 156,000 soldiers in Iraq, has launched several operations to stamp out the attacks. The latest, Operation Desert Sidewinder, began on Sunday with infantry soldiers backed by aircraft and armored vehicles. Troops from the U.S. Army's high-tech Fourth Infantry Division detained 32 people and seized weapons including 10 AK- 47 rifles and a mortar in the mission targeting areas north and east of Baghdad, once a bedrock of support for Saddam. The arms haul appeared meager in a country where most homes have at least one weapon. The area was quiet on Monday afternoon. Meanwhile, troops from the First Armored Division detained 148 people in Baghdad as part of Operation Desert Scorpion, which is aimed at stopping guerrilla attacks. Central Command also said troops had conducted 374 joint patrols with Iraqi police, resulting in 319 arrests for criminal offences.� News of the arrests came as Amnesty International expressed concern at the treatment of detainees in Iraq and called for an end to a ban on them receiving visitors and consulting lawyers.� It also called for investigations into consistent testimony from former detainees that troops had used excessive force during arrest or detention. U.S. officers say they have issued strict orders that all Iraqis must be treated humanely.� http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html

Before the Berlin Wall came down the former East Germany was known to be an industrial powerhouse. Every intelligence agency reported this, just as almost every agency reported Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. AI

Agency Disputes C.I.A. View of Trailers as Iraqi Weapons Labs The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today. In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report. The report on the trailers was initially prepared for the White House, and Mr. Bush has cited it as proof that Iraq indeed had a biological weapons program, as the United States has repeatedly alleged, although it has yet to produce any other conclusive evidence. In an interview with Polish television on May 30, Mr. Bush cited the trailers as evidence that the United States had "found the weapons of mass destruction" it was looking for. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed that assessment in a public statement the next day, saying that the accuracy of prewar assessments linking Iraqi trailers to a biological weapons program had been borne out by the discovery. Some intelligence analysts had previously disputed the C.I.A. report, but it had not been known that the C.I.A. report did not reflect an interagency consensus or that any intelligence agency had later objected to its finding. The State Department bureau raised its objections in a memorandum to Mr. Powell, according to Congressional officials. They said the memorandum was cast as a dissent to the C.I.A. report, and that it said that the evidence found to date did not justify the conclusion that the trailers could have had no other purpose than for use as mobile weapons laboratories.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/international/worldspecial/26WEAP.html

The Road to Oceania by WILLIAM GIBSON Walking along Henrietta Street recently, by London's Covent Garden, looking for a restaurant, I found myself thinking of George Orwell. Victor Gollancz Ltd., publisher of Orwell's early work, had its offices there in 1984, when the company published my first novel, a novel of an imagined future. At the time, I felt I had lived most of my life under the looming shadow of that mythic year � Orwell having found his title by inverting the final digits of the year of his book's completion. It seemed very strange to actually be alive in 1984. In retrospect, I think it has seemed stranger even than living in the 21st century. I had a valuable secret in 1984, though, one I owed in large part to Orwell, who would have turned 100 today: I knew that the novel I had written wasn't really about the future, just as "1984" hadn't been about the future, but about 1948. I had relatively little anxiety about eventually finding myself in a society of the sort Orwell imagined. I had other fish to fry, in terms of history and anxiety, and indeed I still do. Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system's designers. Orwell knew the power of the press, our first mass medium, and at the BBC he'd witnessed the first electronic medium (radio) as it was brought to bear on wartime public opinion. He died before broadcast television had fully come into its own, but had he lived I doubt that anything about it would have much surprised him. The media of "1984" are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today � technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society. Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information. Certain goals of the American government's Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness initiative may eventually be realized simply by the evolution of the global information system � but not necessarily or exclusively for the benefit of the United States or any other government. This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information. Had Orwell known that computers were coming (out of Bletchley Park, oddly, a dilapidated English country house, home to the pioneering efforts of Alan Turing and other wartime code-breakers) he might have imagined a Ministry of Truth empowered by punch cards and vacuum tubes to better wring the last vestiges of freedom from the population of Oceania. But I doubt his story would have been very different.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

"We just build," a cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying. A cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying that Israel would continue to build new homes, without fanfare, at existing Jewish settlements. Under the peace plans affirmed earlier this month by Mr. Sharon and Mr. Abbas, Israel must freeze building at formal settlements and tear down small settlement outposts that have gone up without government authorization during the past two years. Israel has taken down 11 of the settlement outposts in the past two weeks, though an almost equal number of new ones have gone up, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements. Despite the stipulation in the peace plan, Mr. Sharon has made clear that he opposes a freeze on building at the nearly 150 formal settlements where more than 200,000 settlers live. Mr. Sharon told cabinet ministers there was no need to advertise every time a building permit was issued. "We just build," a cabinet official quoted Mr. Sharon as saying. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/23/international/middleeast/23MIDE.html?pagewanted=print&position=

The War in Iraq and International Humanitarian Law Frequently Asked Questions on Occupation (FAQ) Last updated on May 16, 2003) The following FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) analyzes international humanitarian law with respect to belligerent occupation. It does not attempt to cover the issue of occupation comprehensively, but focuses on those issues that might arise during the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies. Key Sections Belligerent Occupation Security in Occupied Areas Looting and "Shoot on Sight" Orders Occupation and the Rights of the Local Population Occupied Population's Well-Being and Health Law and Administration in an Occupied Territory Prisoners of War and Detained Civilians Public Officials in an Occupied Territory Property and Resources of the Occupied Territory End of Occupation http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/ihlfaqoccupation.htm

Letter To The Editor -- Both Sides Want Security In his June 9 front-page story about five Israeli soldiers being killed by Palestinian gunmen, Glenn Frankel mentioned that the attacks were the first by militant groups since the peace summit in Aqaba, Jordan, on June 4. These also were the first attacks since the spate of suicide bombings on May 17, 18 and 19. However, the Israeli army continues to kill Palestinians. In the 17 days during which no Israelis were killed (May 19 to June 7), Israeli soldiers killed 27 Palestinian civilians. Last month 14 Israelis were killed (12 by bombings), and 61 Palestinians were killed; in April, it was 10 Israelis and 66 Palestinians killed. Until Israel can go 17 days without killing a Palestinian, how can one expect Palestinians to stop killing Israelis?� http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52869-2003Jun12.html

Inmates Released from Guant�namo Tell Tales of Despair Afghans and Pakistanis who were detained for many months by the American military at Guant�namo Bay in Cuba before being released without charges are describing the conditions as so desperate that some captives tried to kill themselves. According to accounts in the last three months from some of the 32 Afghans and three Pakistanis in the weeks since their release, it was above all the uncertainty of their fate, combined with confinement in very small cells, sometimes only with Arabic speakers, that caused inmates to attempt suicide. One Pakistani interviewed this month said he tried to kill himself four times in 18 months. An Afghan prisoner who spent 14 months at the camp, at the American naval base at Guant�namo, described in April what he called the uncertainty and fear. "Some were saying this is a prison for 150 years," said Suleiman Shah, 30, a former Taliban fighter from Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. None of those interviewed complained of physical mistreatment. But the men said that for the first few months, they were kept in small wire-mesh cells, about 6 1/2 feet by 8 feet , in blocks of 10 or 20. The cells were covered by a wooden roof, but open at the sides to the elements. "We slept, ate, prayed and went to the toilet in that small space," Mr. Shah said. Each man had two blankets and a prayer mat and slept and ate on the ground, he said. The prisoners were taken out only once a week for a one-minute shower. "After four and a half months we complained and people stopped eating, so they said we could shower for five minutes and exercise once a week," Mr. Shah said. After that, he said, prisoners got to exercise for 10 minutes a week, walking around the inside of a cage 30 feet long. In interviews at their homes, weeks after being released, he and the freed Pakistani detainee talked of what they said was the overwhelming feeling of injustice among the approximately 680 men detained indefinitely at Guant�namo Bay. "I was trying to kill myself," said Shah Muhammad, 20, a Pakistani who was captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, handed over to American soldiers and flown to Guant�namo in January 2002. "I tried four times, because I was disgusted with my life. "It is against Islam to commit suicide," he continued, "but it was very difficult to live there. A lot of people did it. They treated me as guilty, but I was innocent." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/international/asia/17PRIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

In Israeli Gesture, a Tower Is Removed Near 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. 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. 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.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/international/middleeast/10SETT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Iraqi Leader Asks U.S. to Stop Military Sweeps Adnan Pachachi, a respected elder Iraqi statesman encouraged by Bush administration officials to enter postwar politics here, criticized the United States military today for its increasingly aggressive operations in Iraq and said they should be suspended while an interim Iraqi government is formed over the next month. Mr. Pachachi said that military sweeps through civilian areas with mass arrests, interrogations and gun battles, intended to suppress the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military command, were inflaming sentiments against the American and British occupation. He predicted that if such sweeps continued, they would be "exploited by the Baathists," and he added, "It would be much better if we didn't have these operations." Mr. Pachachi, a former foreign minister who returned to Iraq last month after more than 30 years of exile, emphasized that he supported allied efforts to re-establish security in the country. But he expressed concern about the marked escalation of allied assaults through civilian areas, where guerrilla raids have attacked troop convoys or checkpoints and left 10 American soldiers dead in the last three weeks. "These incidents will not help to pacify the country," he said, referring to the military operations. "For now, the quieter it is, the better" for the postwar political process, he added.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/international/worldspecial/15IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=

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=