The Technology Behind the Social Security Debate

baselinemag.com
The Technology Behind the Social Security Debate
By Larry Dignan

AARP runs television spots panning the idea of allowing tens of millions of U.S. citizens to establish private accounts for their retirement, as part of the federal Social Security program.

President Bush travels the country pitching these accounts as a way to modernize the system.

Meanwhile, think tanks are busy trying to weigh the policy implications of any Social Security tweaks.

But while debate still roars about whether the program is in danger of running out of money by 2041, as the Social Security Administration estimates, none of the aforementioned parties have pondered the technology investment needed to make private accounts a reality.

What would this information system look like? How long would it take to build a system to manage private accounts? What are the hurdles in data management?

"Those are big questions," says Virginia Reno, vice president of income security at the National Academy of Social Insurance, a think tank that examines social insurance policy. "I don't think many [people] are looking for answers."

Currently, the biggest idea about reforming Social Security revolves around allowing the 159 million workers currently covered to divert 2 percent to 4 percent of the 15.3 percent tax paid on income to private accounts.

The goal? Close a $4 trillion unfunded liability in current dollars through 2079.

In theory, these accounts would earn a better return than Social Security, whose assets will be depleted in 2041, according to the 2005 annual report from Social Security's board of trustees, released March 23.

Indeed, a report commissioned by President Bush on ways to strengthen Social Security, released in December 2001, didn't mention information technology once.

Mark Lassiter, press officer for the SSA (Social Security Administration), says pondering the technology needed to handle private accounts is "premature" given that the proposals are still being formed.

"In politics, you often decide what to do and then ask how to do it," says Dallas Salisbury, CEO of think tank Employee Benefit Research Institute. "It's as if the question of how to do it is not being asked."

One thing is certain: Social Security reform would require heavy lifting on the IT side. And Bush has said he wants private accounts in place by 2009. Hitting that target is increasingly unlikely.

"If the SSA built a system [for tracking private accounts] itself, it would take at least three to five years to build," says Marcus Fedeli, manager of federal opportunity products at Input, a consulting firm. "That's conservative. It could take three years just to design the system."

In the meantime, the key information management issues are:

Challenge: Designing the system

Fix: Limit options

When current Social Security processes are compared to what would happen if private accounts are adopted, the complexity becomes apparent.

Today, SSA systems account for a limited number of data inputs.

Is the beneficiary alive? What's the age? Are there dependents? Is there a divorce?

Once those questions are answered, they are matched to rules and formulas, and a check is sent.

Private accounts introduce moving parts.

What percentage of funds will be invested in a private account? Did the allocation change this quarter? Should the accounts be paid in an annuity if below a set level or taken in a lump sum? This information would probably be collected quarterly.

And money needs to go to accounts faster.

Currently, it can take 18 months to reconcile individual contributions to Social Security, Salisbury says.

That lag applied to private accounts means you could miss an entire bull market.

"It's impossible to do what has to be done," says Francis Cavanaugh, the first executive director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which was the agency responsible for administering the Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees. His tenure ran from 1986 to 1994.

The Thrift Savings Plan is often cited as an example of how private accounts in Social Security could work. The plan is like a 401(k) for federal employees.

The catch? You can't compare the two programs because Social Security processes millions more transactions, Cavanaugh said.

Launching a record-keeping system for the federal savings plan was easy compared to what would be required for private accounts, he says.

"Our system worked because I could rely on the agencies' systems and only had to deal with one employer—the U.S. government," Cavanaugh said. "Our challenge was getting all the agencies to work together and report data in a uniform fashion. We then built a record-keeping system that took it in."

According to Salisbury, building a system is daunting but not impossible.

To simplify the system, individual choice could be removed by making accounts mandatory, setting an allocation rate, say 3 percent of all Americans' salaries, and allowing one investment mix, say 40 percent in a stock fund, 40 percent bond fund and 20 percent cash.

"Voluntary accounts are harder because they allow choice," Salisbury says. "Every option makes the system more complicated. If accounts are mandatory with set options, you know the inputs."

Challenge: Manage the Data

Solution: Require Electronic Filing

Even if a system could be designed to handle the private accounts of potentially all of the 159 million people covered by Social Security, managing all the account information would be a huge procedure, says Input's Fedeli.

Why? Much of that data arrives on paper forms.

"You are talking stacks and stacks of paper. The principal challenge is collecting the information and then allocating the money," Salisbury says. "We assume the world is automated. It isn't."

Without an all-electronic system, processes could easily bog down.

Speaking before a House Appropriations subcommittee in February, SSA commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart said the agency is making progress with electronic filings, but still has a ways to go to become all-electronic.

For fiscal 2004, 60 percent of employee wage reports were filed electronically, up from 27 percent in 2001.

Barnhart added that the SSA is also encouraging online filing for benefits claims.

In fiscal 2004, 217,000 benefit claims were filed online, up from 148,000 the year before.

That lack of automation would magnify the problems with record-keeping if employers were required to report wages going into private accounts more frequently.

Today, half of employers in the United States report data on wages, employees and taxes paid annually.

Millions of small employers go bust and never pay Social Security.

With private accounts, small employers would have a fiduciary responsibility to get 2 percent to 4 percent of Social Security funds to a private account.

Meanwhile, private accounts would tax existing SSA systems. In 2005, the SSA projects it will pay $518 billion to 48 million beneficiaries, or 4 million checks a month.

The agency also processes 8 million claims for benefits, conducts 58 million transactions through its 800 -number and issues 140 million Social Security statements.

Private accounts would mean more statements and call volume.

"You'd get to billions of transactions quickly," Cavanaugh says.

Challenge: Managing the project

Fix: Set realistic time lines, up front

If the SSA and Congress work out the aforementioned information management issues, the real work begins: implementing the system.

To see the perils, look no further than the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board's Thrift Savings Plan.

In July, Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman blasted the board and American Management Systems, now known as CGI-AMS, for "a failed computer-programming project that wasted $36 million in federal retirement assets."

In 1997, AMS was contracted to build a record-keeping system to allow federal employees to track investments online.

Four years later, repeated delays and budget overruns produced an "almost useless" system, as stated in the report by Collins and Lieberman.

Materials, Communications and Computers Inc. was hired in 2001 and completed the project in 18 months at a cost of $33 million.

Fedeli says the SSA has a good track record with project management, but building a system to handle private accounts won't be easy.

The SSA's fiscal 2006 information-technology budget of $494 million is devoted to office automation projects such eDib, an electronic disability claim processing system.

Building a system to handle private accounts would be another ball game.

"I hope the SSA realizes its strengths and weaknesses," Fedeli says. "This project would be out of its specialty. There could be a lot of time and money wasted for a lot of work the SSA is not used to doing."

originally published April 1, 2005

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The $2 Million Dollar Flip-Flop

tompaine.com
The $2 Million Dollar Flip-Flop

From TalkingPointsMemo:

Several days ago, we linked to a post on the Center for American Progress blog that raised an important question for the 18 senators that voted for a 1991 amendment offered by former Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) to limit the interest rate credit companies can charge to 14 percent only to vote against an amendment offered by Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN) to the current bankruptcy bill that would have limited that rate to 30 percent.

Thinkprogress asked:

Why would 18 Senators, including co-sponsors of the original measure, vote for a tougher pro-consumer measure in 1991, and then vote against a weaker measure in 2005? Could it be that the more than $2 million these Senators took from the credit card/banking industry in the interim made them change their mind?

We offer the following list of those senators in case our readers wish to get an answer for themselves:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)
1991-1996 contributions from commercial banks: $88,900
1997-2002 contributions from commercial banks: $170,777


Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE)
1991-1996 contributions from commercial banks: $73,575
1997-2002 contributions from commercial banks: $33,675


Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MO)
1991-1996 Commercial Banks: $24,750
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $40,100

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM)

Spoke in favor of D'Amato Amendment during floor debate
1991-1996 Commercial Banks: $89,120
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $66,290

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $123,300


Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $183,102


Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS)
1991-1996 Commercial Banks: $70,575
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $80,800


Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $235,228


Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
1991-1996 Commercial Banks: $84,800
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $55,800


Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL)
1991-1996 Commercial Banks: $246,533
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $215,600


Sen. Arlen Specter(R-PA)
Co-sponsored the 1991 D'Amato amendment
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $105,225


Sen. John Warner (R-VA)
1997-2002 Commercial Banks: $43,800


Other Senators who voted for the D'Amato amendment, but against the Dayton bill (data on contributions from commercial banks unavailable):

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK)


Co-sponsored the 1991 D'Amato amendment

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT)

Sen. Herb Kohl(D-WI)

Sen. Pat Leahy(D-VT)

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)

-- Michael Negron

originally posted March 31, 2005

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AN INSECURE NATION: Guns for Terrorists

The New York Times
April 4, 2005
AN INSECURE NATION
Guns for Terrorists

If a background check shows that you are an undocumented immigrant, federal law bars you from buying a gun. If the same check shows that you have ties to Al Qaeda, you are free to buy an AK-47. That is the absurd state of the nation's gun laws, and a recent government report revealed that terrorist suspects are taking advantage of it. There are a few promising signs, however, that the federal government is considering injecting some sanity into policies on terror suspects and guns.

The Government Accountability Office examined F.B.I. and state background checks for gun sales during a five-month period last year. It found 44 checks in which the prospective buyer turned up on a government terrorist watch list. A few of these prospective buyers were denied guns for other disqualifying factors, like a felony conviction or illegal immigration status. But 35 of the 44 people on the watch lists were able to buy guns.

The encouraging news is that the G.A.O. report may be prodding Washington to act. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller III, has announced that he is forming a study group to review gun sales to terror suspects. In a letter to Senator Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat, Mr. Mueller said that the new working group would review the national background check system in light of the report. We hope this group will take a strong stand in favor of changes in the law to deny guns to terror suspects.

In the meantime, Senator Lautenberg is pushing for important reforms. He has asked the Justice Department to consider making presence on a terrorist watch list a disqualifying factor for gun purchases. And he wants to force gun sellers to keep better records. Under a recent law, records of gun purchases must be destroyed after 24 hours, eliminating important information for law enforcement. Senator Lautenberg wants to require that these records be kept for at least 10 years for buyers on terrorist watch lists.

Keeping terror suspects from buying guns seems like an issue the entire nation can rally around. But the National Rifle Association is, as usual, fighting even the most reasonable regulation of gun purchases. After the G.A.O. report came out, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.'s executive vice president, took to the airwaves to reiterate his group's commitment to ensuring that every citizen has access to guns, and to cast doubt on the reliability of terrorist watch lists.

Unfortunately, the N.R.A. - rather than the national interest - is too often the driving force on gun policy in Congress, particularly since last November's election. Even after the G.A.O.'s disturbing revelations, the Senate has continued its work on a dangerous bill to insulate manufacturers and sellers from liability when guns harm people. If it passes, as seems increasingly likely, it will remove any fear a seller might have of being held legally responsible if he provides a gun used in a terrorist attack.

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Bin Laden and Zarqawi: How a deadly deal was made

Newsweek

Terror Broker
Bin Laden needed a role in the Iraqi insurgency, and Zarqawi needed outside support. How a deadly deal was made.
By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau

April 11 issue - Hardly anyone was more surprised by Iraq's insurgency than Osama bin Laden. The terrorist chief had never foreseen its sudden, ferocious spread, and he was likewise unprepared for the abrupt rise of its most homicidal commander, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Bin Laden and his aides knew the Jordanian-born Palestinian from Zarqawi's Afghan days, but mostly as a short-tempered bully and a troublemaker. So in the late summer of 2003, unwilling to sit on the sidelines, bin Laden sent two of his most trusted men to assess the Iraqi resistance and carve out a leading role for Al Qaeda. "The resistance happened faster than we expected, and differently, so we were not prepared to assist and direct it," one of the two envoys later told a senior Tali-ban official. "The sheik sent me to see how we could help."

The Taliban man recently told the envoy's story to NEWSWEEK. He personally heard the account from the envoy, a top-ranking Qaeda member known as Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, at a meeting last December in western Pakistan. The Taliban official, who uses the name Zabihullah, is a liaison between his group and Al Qaeda. Many of the account's details are borne out by interviews with other well-informed jihadis. Officials familiar with U.S. intelligence, while refusing to discuss many of the story's specifics, confirm that its fundamentals are accurate.

The two bin Laden envoys traveled overland from Afghanistan separately. One never got to Iraq. Authorities in Iran later announced that they had apprehended the Egyptian-born Saif al-Adel, and he seems to be there still. Al-Iraqi did better. Those who know him say he fits in perfectly wherever he goes. Born in Iraqi Kurdistan about 1960, he rose to the rank of major in Saddam Hussein's Army before joining the jihad in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. He speaks not only Arabic but Urdu, Kurdish, the Waziri tribal dialect of Pashtu and a courtly form of Persian. In the palatial salons of the gulf states he has raised millions of dollars for Al Qaeda. But dressed for the part he can easily pass for a mountain tribesman. "He's just like any Afghan," says Zabihullah. "He doesn't have the arrogance and formality of other Arabs."

Al-Iraqi needed all the poise and charm he could muster for his mission to the insurgents. By the time he reached Iraq, in late 2003, Zarqawi had built a fearsome team of resistance fighters. The Jordanian considered himself to be the obvious choice for Al Qaeda's top man in Iraq. He was livid at the news that bin Laden had chosen al-Iraqi for the job. "I'm already here!" Zarqawi told al-Iraqi. "So why is the sheik sending someone else?"

No one but Zarqawi could see much mystery there. Zarqawi was widely disliked in Afghanistan. Even bin Laden was repulsed by reports of his vicious temper and gratuitous cruelty. In the late 1990s, commanding a unit of Arab irregulars near Afghanistan's Iranian border, the Jordanian terrorized local civilians and infuriated Taliban leaders. Mullah Mohammed Omar's men had just taken control of the area and were trying to win the trust of its mostly Shiite inhabitants. When Zarqawi wasn't busy persecuting Shiites, he wrangled with other Arabs and with the local Taliban chief.

Zarqawi had "a terrifying face," al-Iraqi recalled later. But the envoy said he knew at once that Zarqawi was exactly what Al Qaeda needed. "There is no —doubt that he is the best man to lead foreign and Iraqi insurgents in Iraq," al-Iraqi told bin Laden when he got back to the caves, according to Zabihullah's account. "He deserves our support." The envoy has made three trips to Iraq since then. Just before the last, in September, a London-based Arabic-language daily quoted Zarqawi as repudiating bin Laden and Al Qaeda: "I have not sworn allegiance to the sheik and I am not working within the framework of his organization." But after meeting again with al-Iraqi, the Jordanian proclaimed his loyalty to bin Laden and announced a new name for his terrorist group: "Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers." "I'm a loyal soldier and ready to sacrifice myself to the sheik, who is our leader," he told al-Iraqi.

Bin Laden replied by issuing an audiotape that praised Zarqawi's exploits and called him the "prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq." The tape instructed all Qaeda supporters to follow Zarqawi's orders. Bin Laden had already made his wishes known to Zarqawi via al-Iraqi. "My greatest wish is for you to keep the resistance alive and growing, to increase the number of local insurgents and give the Iraqis more decision-making powers," Zarqawi was told. "Make it as much of an Iraqi organization as possible." Bin Laden also urged his prince to widen the war against America: "We have to expand our attacks on the enemy outside Iraq."

The envoy is proud of his work. "I'm the person who broke the silence and solved the difficulties between Zarqawi and the Al Qaeda leadership," he told Zabihullah. Donations to Al Qaeda's coffers had dried up as bin Laden's top men were killed or captured. Now private money is once again flooding in. Bin Laden himself is looking more confident and relaxed—maybe too relaxed, al-Iraqi said. When he visited the Qaeda leader in November, the envoy noticed fewer checkpoints than previously along the trail. "The sheik has a new mentality and is more healthy," he told Zabi-hullah. On his last visit to Iraq, the envoy got an offer from Zarqawi: if life got too risky in the mountains along Pakistan's border, bin Laden would be welcome to take refuge with him among the insurgents in Iraq. The envoy politely declined. At present, the Qaeda leader seems to be doing just fine where he is.

With Mark Hosenball in Washington

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Typical al-Qaeda recruits Western educated

heraldsun.news.com.au
Typical al-Qaeda recruits Western educated

04apr05

THE typical recruit to al-Qaeda is Western-educated and has a wealthy, professional background, according to a new study.

The analysis of 500 members of Osama bin Laden's organisation has turned Western experts' presumptions about al-Qa'ida upside down.

Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist who conducted the study, said he assumed it would find that most recruits were poor and ill-educated.

"The common stereotype is that terrorism is a product of poor, desperate, naive, single young men from Third World countries, vulnerable to brainwashing and recruitment into terror," he said.

However, his study showed 75per cent of the al-Qaeda members were from upper-middle-class homes and that many were married with children; 60 were college-educated, often in Europe or the US.

Some, such as British-born terrorist Omar Sheikh, were educated at fee-paying schools before heading for Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya.

Sheikh, who has been sentenced to death in Pakistan for his role in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, attended Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan, and the fee-paying Forest school in east London.

Dr Sageman said most of the terrorists came from a small number of wealthy Arab countries, from immigrant communities in the West or from Southeast Asia. Few were from poor Islamic countries such as Afghanistan.

"Al-Qaeda was very selective at first in terms of who it recruited," said Dr Sageman, a former CIA officer who once worked with anti-Soviet mujaheddin fighters while based in Islamabad.

"If you look at the Saudis who have been killed while fighting for the organisation, you find the majority come from Riyadh, the capital, rather than poor rural provinces."

He said most grew up in caring families concerned about their communities.

The men in Dr Sageman's sample joined al-Qaeda at an average age of 26. About half grew up as religious children, but only 13 - mostly from Southeast Asia - attended Islamic schools.

The study is backed by Abdullah Anas, a former senior mujaheddin commander in Afghanistan who now lives in London.

"There is no question (but) that most of those who came to Afghanistan in the 1980s were from middle-class backgrounds - teachers, doctors, accountants or imams," he said. "Most came with their families."

But Dr Sageman and Mr Anas agree that more recent al-Qaeda recruits are likely to come from less privileged backgrounds.

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Former CIA Chief Disputes Warning Over Iraq Data

Yahoo! News
Reuters
Former CIA Chief Disputes Warning Over Iraq Data

By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former CIA Director George Tenet on Friday disputed that he was warned about problems with an Iraqi source just hours before Secretary of State Colin Powell argued the U.S. case against Iraq at the United Nations, using the source's information.

A presidential commission issued a scathing report on Thursday about U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that said the Bush administration relied on unsubstantiated intelligence from an Iraqi chemical engineer code-named "Curveball" that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs.

Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin issued lengthy statements on Friday saying they were not alerted before the war to concerns about the veracity of the Iraqi source, who was being handled by German authorities.

Powell pointed to the mobile labs as key evidence in his case against Iraq to the United Nations in February 2003, about a month before the U.S.-led invasion.

Despite declarations by the Bush administration about President Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq in what has been called a major intelligence failure.

At the center of the dispute is a phone call on the eve of the Powell speech.

A now-retired division chief from the CIA's clandestine unit told the presidential commission that Tenet called him at about midnight on the day before Powell's speech and during the conversation he told the CIA chief that there were problems with some of the foreign intelligence.

"CURVEBALL" INFORMATION

The division chief, who was not named, said Tenet was dismissive, that his reply in effect was "yeah, yeah" and that he was "exhausted," according to the commission report. The division chief said he was surprised when he heard Powell's speech to find the Curveball information was included.

Tenet on Friday said he called the CIA division chief in late afternoon or early evening but the phone call had nothing to do with Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs. "I have absolutely no recollection of the division chief saying anything to me with regard to problems with the foreign reporting," Tenet said.

He said the presidential commission's report was the first time he heard that the CIA division chief was told by a German liaison in September or October 2002 that the Iraqi source was considered "crazy," had a nervous breakdown and may be a fabricator.

"It is both stunning and deeply disturbing that this information, if true, was never brought forward to me by anyone in the course of the following events," Tenet said, listing nine instances including major reports, speeches, and congressional testimony on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

McLaughlin said he and Tenet were not alerted until late 2003 or early 2004 when an e-mail expressing skepticism about Curveball came to light in the course of internal reviews.

"This email was written in February 2003, and anyone wishing earnestly to impress us with doubts about Curveball could have simply laid this on our desks at any time. This did not happen," McLaughlin said.

originally published Apr 1, 7:26 PM ET

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U.S. Ignored Work of U.N. Arms Inspectors

washingtonpost.com
Panel: U.S. Ignored Work of U.N. Arms Inspectors

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer

Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories, and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas into the air above U.S. cities.

By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.

The work of the inspectors -- who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 -- was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war, according to the commission led by former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman.

But the commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access.

"U.N. inspectors are boots on the ground," said David Albright, a nuclear specialist who accompanied the International Atomic Energy Agency to Iraq in the mid-1990s. Albright and others think the IAEA should be given greater access in Iran, and returned to North Korea. It would be up to the agency's board, which includes the United States, to authorize increased powers.

The Bush administration tussled with inspectors before the Iraq war and maintains a hostile relationship with the IAEA, whose director, Mohamed ElBaradei, the United States is trying to replace this year. The administration also wants to shut down a U.N. inspection regime led by Hans Blix that was set up to investigate biological, chemical and missile programs in Iraq.

During more than two years of investigations in Iran, the IAEA has "been critical in uncovering their secret activities so we know the scope and the status of the nuclear programs and the problems," said Albright, who has exposed unknown nuclear sites in Iran and has followed the IAEA's work there. "There is a tremendous amount of detail that the intelligence community didn't have prior to the IAEA going in and intensifying the investigation."

The White House has not publicly presented intelligence to support its assertion that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, as it did with Iraq. Instead, it routinely points to the IAEA investigation, Iran's large oil reserves and the secrecy that surrounded Iran's nuclear program for nearly two decades.

The IAEA has not found evidence that Iran is using its nuclear energy program as a cover for bomb building, as the administration claims. But those findings have been dismissed by some members of the administration.

John R. Bolton, nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has called the findings "simply impossible to believe."

Jonathan Tucker, who was a bioweapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq during the 1990s, said inspectors have limited access and rely heavily on intelligence that can be provided by powerful countries such as the United States.

"What they can provide is ground truth and legitimacy. If you hope to persuade countries to impose sanctions or other measures on proliferators, the word of inspectors is valuable."

North Korea kicked out IAEA inspectors in December 2002, a move that deprived the intelligence community of a key avenue of information about the closed country. The lack of access to North Korea, which has been judged to have the capacity to build six to eight nuclear weapons, has been a source of frustration for the international agency.

But at the time of the IAEA's departure from Pyongyang, attention in Washington and in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, was largely focused on Iraq.

Months before U.S. troops attacked Iraq in March 2003, the IAEA challenged every piece of evidence the Bush administration offered to support claims of a nuclear program there, according to the commission.

In January, IAEA inspectors discovered that documents showing Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger were forged. But the CIA chose to stick to the claim for another six months.

Two years earlier, the IAEA disputed CIA claims that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes for a nuclear program. The IAEA assessment, which turned out to be accurate, was first shared with U.S. intelligence in July 2001, according to the authors of the presidential commission report.

Blix's U.N. group tested evidence supplied by an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball," whose tales of mobile bioweapons laboratories turned out to be fabrications, according to the report. Among Curveball's claims was that an Iraqi facility had been redesigned, with a temporary wall, to allow mobile laboratories to slip in and out undetected.

"When United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors visited the site on Feb. 9, 2003, they found that the wall was a permanent structure and could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the commissioners wrote.

"We offered eyes and ears," Blix said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We knew a lot about the country, we examined places, got intelligence tips about where to go and conducted 700 inspections at 500 sites in three months."

UNMOVIC also determined before the war that CIA claims about a fleet of pilotless Iraqi planes were incorrect. The unmanned aerial vehicles did not have the capability to deliver chemical or biological weapons and were probably designed for reconnaissance missions.

The Bush administration has prevented the IAEA from returning to Iraq since the invasion. UNMOVIC will likely be dismantled unless the United States agrees to turn it into an international inspection force for biological weapons and missile programs.

originally published Sunday, April 3, 2005; Page A06

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Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top

(Reader warning: some off-color language in this article)

news.independent.co.uk
Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top
Classified documents show the former US military chief in Iraq personally sanctioned measures banned by the Geneva Conventions. Andrew Buncombe reports from Washington
03 April 2005

America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib.

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries.

When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury.

The ACLU says the documents reveal that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was the result of an organised and co-ordinated plan for dealing with prisoners captured during the so-called war on terror that originates at the highest levels of the chain of command. It says that far from being isolated incident, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib that was revealed last year was part of a pattern.

"We think that the techniques authorised by Gen Sanchez were certainly responsible for putting into play the sort of abuses that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Amirit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, told The Independent on Sunday. "And it does not just stop with Sanchez. It goes to [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, who wrote memos authorising these sorts of techniques at Guantanamo Bay."

In the September 2003 memo, Gen Sanchez authorised the use of 29 techniques for interrogating prisoners being held by the US. These included stress positions, "yelling, loud music and light control" as well as the use of muzzled military dogs in order to "exploit Arab fear of dogs". Some of the most notorious photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib scandal showed hand-cuffed, naked Iraqi prisoners cowering from snarling dogs.

Six weeks after Gen Sanchez issued his memo, a subsequent directive banned the use of dogs and several of the other techniques following concerns raised by military lawyers. The ACLU says that at least 12 of the techniques listed in the memo went beyond the limits for interrogation listed in the US Army's field manual.

"Gen Sanchez authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," said Ms Singh. "He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable."

The Abu Ghraib scandal sent shockwaves around the world and further undermined US credibility in the Arab world. In the immediate aftermath, insurgents who captured and beheaded a US engineer, Nick Berg, said they had done so in retaliation for the abuse at the infamous prison west of Baghdad, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and tortured.

A number of low-ranking reservists have been charged over the abuse. An alleged ringleader, Charles Graner, 36, was convicted last January and sentenced to 10 years in jail. At his trial his lawyer, Guy Womack, claimed his client was being used as a scapegoat. "The government is asking a corporal to take the hit for them," he said. "The chain of command says, 'We didn't know anything about this stuff'. You know that is a lie."

When he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004, Gen Sanchez flatly refused approving such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false. "I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year," he said under oath. The ACLU accuses him of committing perjury and has asked the Attorney General to investigate. In a letter to Alberto Gonzales, the group said: "Gen Sanchez's testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation. This clear breach of the public's trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the Attorney General."

A number of investigations have been carried out into the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. While some have referred to a break-down in the chain of command, none have placed responsibility with senior officers or politicians.

Kathy Kelley, a spokeswoman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the new documents obtained by the ACLU showed a pattern of abuse by US forces. "It saddens me but I am not shocked," she said.

Gen Sanchez is currently commanding general of the US V Corps based in Germany. He has yet to comment on the release of the memo. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment.

The Pentagon originally refused to release the memo on national security grounds, but passed it to the ACLU after the group challenged it in court. Mr Rumsfeld last week dismissed suggestions that it had been withheld to save the Pentagon's embarrassment.

But the ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents in which the memo was contained was "evident in the contents", which included reports of brutal beatings and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of" prisoners.

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The Risk Not Taken

NY Times
April 3, 2005

The Risk Not Taken
By RICHARD DOOLING

Omaha

ELIOT SPITZER, the New York attorney general, has made a career out of spanking arrogant fat cats on the front page. We cheered when he busted those shifty stockbrokers for selling us shares of Enron and WorldCom, and we hailed him for exposing those money managers who sold our mutual fund shares on the cheap after 4 p.m. Eastern to influential big boys at our expense.

Then last year Mr. Spitzer went after insurance companies, and everybody applauded again. Of course! Talk about a target-rich environment! For weeks, we opened our newspapers eager to read about insurance companies finally getting put to hammer and tongs for not paying claims, for denying medical coverage to cancer patients because of pre-existing conditions, for issuing policies with 50-page declarations and addenda that carefully spell out all of the losses for which the companies will not pay.

Instead, Mr. Spitzer abruptly lost his common touch and announced that he was investigating something called "contingent commissions" in the commercial insurance business. Huh?

That was our first inkling that this man on horseback might be a Man of La Mancha on a windmill hunt. After all, commercial insurance companies involved in bid-rigging - and even those that aren't - have battalions of litigators on retainer to attack and defend, pillage and plunder one another's coffers, and hang their rivals' fiscal heads on spikes outside their gates. Aren't attorneys general supposed to be lawyers for us lawyerless little guys?

Now, instead of moving back down the insurance food chain where the rest of us suffer - I have some dependent health insurance claims I'd love to see paid - Mr. Spitzer has cast his eyes on the very summit: On April 11, he and other financial regulators will be questioning the Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffett, about possible financial manipulation at several giant international insurance companies, including American International Group and General Re, a subsidiary of Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. (Disclosure: I sometimes help write skits for the Omaha Press Club show, in which Mr. Buffett has occasionally appeared. His ad libs get bigger laughs than my scripts.)

Granted, a Spitzer-Buffett bout might bump Michael Jackson's trial off the top of the news hour for a day or two, and Mr. Spitzer must think big, because he wants to be governor. But now his reach has officially exceeded his grasp. Investigating insurance companies is one thing, but reinsurance companies? What the heck is reinsurance? And isn't questioning Warren Buffett about the reinsurance industry a bit like asking Stephen Hawking about black holes and white dwarfs?

Let's go to this newspaper's business section for an explanation of the skullduggery that transpired: "The issues under inquiry are whether reinsurance companies controlled by A.I.G. were treated as separate entities in order to help hide A.I.G.'s exposure to risk; whether reinsurance transactions are tantamount to loans that should have been so listed; whether assets and liabilities were swapped to smooth earnings; and, finally, whether A.I.G. used finite reinsurance to smooth earnings."

Uncross your eyes and note the distinct absence of outrage.

I'm certain that Mr. Buffett understands this finite reinsurance lingo, but I fear for Mr. Spitzer if it comes to a contest of reinsurance wits bandying provisos back and forth. My prediction is that the entire scandal will vanish when the regulators get to Page 782 of the provisions governing the reinsurance contracts, where Paragraph LXIXII(A)(4), Clause (iii), colors the word "risk" a murky shade of gray and renders the entire investigation a publicity stunt within the meaning of Paragraph XXXVI(B)(3), Clause (vii). But by the time that document is parsed, Mr. Spitzer will be in his fifth term as governor and thinking about running for president.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for a demagogue, but I'd rather have Mr. Spitzer start small and initiate a full-scale investigation into how an insurance company in St. Paul can issue a policy promising (with a perfectly straight font face) to pay for direct loss to a building resulting from the eruption of a volcano, and then three paragraphs later state that it will absolutely not pay for water damage from a frozen pipe. Just what sort of industry is it that thrives by taking our premiums and promising to pay us money, but only if we die?

If Mr. Spitzer started out by investigating regular old insurance companies first, he could use the experience as a kind of warm-up for the mind-numbing denial and bureaucratic obfuscation that will surely greet his foray into the reinsurance industry. He could still start right here in Omaha, if he liked, but instead of going after Mr. Buffett, Mr. Spitzer could take a look at an insurance situation closer to home: my own.

Here's an actual paragraph from my homeowner's insurance policy (issued by Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of Lincoln, Neb.): "If at the time of loss there are no detached structures, the limit of liability shown for Coverage B shall be added to the limit of liability under Coverage A. If the replacement cost of all detached structures totals less than the limit of liability for Coverage B, the excess amount shall be added to Coverage A, and the sum of the two shall be the company's limit of liability under Coverage A. However, this shall not increase the limit of liability for Coverage C or D."

While Mr. Spitzer is busy interrogating Mr. Buffett about finite reinsurance, the author of this infinitely unreadable paragraph is still running around the streets of Lincoln. Will he strike again? And who will protect us from his next inscrutable injustice?

Richard Dooling is the author, most recently, of "Bet Your Life," a novel about insurance fraud.

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Curveball the Goofball

NY Times
April 3, 2005

Curveball the Goofball
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

I had an editor once whose wife was in the Audubon Society. There were a lot of articles about birds in that newspaper.

I had an editor once who loved fishing. There were a lot of articles about fish in that newspaper.

Organizations organically respond to please the boss. Bosses naturally surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear.

When King Lear's favorite daughter spoke frankly to him, and refused to fawn like her sisters, she was instantly banished. Insincerity pays.

It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon.

As the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, put it: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Huh? That's like an investigation into steroids in baseball that looks only at the drug companies, not the players who muscled up.

We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn't find any.

This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not answered the basic question: How did the White House and Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in trouble for it? If your kid lied and hid stuff from you to do something he thought would be great, then wouldn't admit it and blamed someone else, he'd be punished - even if his adventure worked out all right for him.

When the "values" president and his aides do it, they're rewarded. Condoleezza Rice was promoted to secretary of state. Stephen Hadley, Condi's old deputy, was promoted to national security adviser. Bob Joseph, a national security aide who helped shovel the uranium hooey into the State of the Union address, is becoming an under secretary of state. Paul Wolfowitz, who painted the takeover of Iraq as such a cakewalk that our troops went in without the proper armor or backup, will run the World Bank. George Tenet, who ran the C.I.A. when Al Qaeda attacked and when Saddam's mushroom cloud gained credibility, got the Medal of Freedom.

Then the president appoints a compliant Democrat and a complicit conservative judge to head an inquiry set up to let the president off the hook.

Please, no more pantomime investigations. We all know what happened. Dick Cheney and the neocons had a fever to sack Saddam. Mr. Cheney and Rummy persuaded W., "the Man," that it was the manly thing to do. Everybody feigned a 9/11 connection. Ahmad Chalabi conned his neocon pals, thinking he could run Iraq if he gave the Bush administration the smoking gun it needed to sell the war.

Suddenly Curveball appeared, the relative of an aide to Mr. Chalabi, to become the lone C.I.A. source with the news that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile facilities hidden from arms inspectors and Western spies. Curveball's obviously sketchy assertions ended up in Mr. Tenet's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and Colin Powell's U.N. speech in February 2003, laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.

Curveball's information was used to justify the war even though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that Curveball did not speak English.

By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators."

But Curveball's crazy assertions had traction because they were what the White House wanted to hear.

The report warns the president to watch out for the "headstrong" intelligence agencies. If only the commission had concerned itself with headstrong officials at a higher level. Then its 601 pages would be worth reading.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

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Moralists at the Pharmacy

NY Times
April 3, 2005

Moralists at the Pharmacy

Scattered reports suggest that a growing number of pharmacists around the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or morning-after birth control pills because of moral or religious objections. Although the refusals are cast as important matters of conscience for self-described "pro-life" pharmacists, they have the pernicious effect of delaying, and sometimes even denying, a woman's access to medications that may be urgently needed. This is an intolerable abuse of power by pharmacists who have no business forcing their own moral or ethical views onto customers who may not share them. Any pharmacist who cannot dispense medicines lawfully prescribed by a doctor should find another line of work.

Incidents in which pharmacists have refused to dispense contraceptives or morning-after pills have been reported for well over a decade, but the number may be rising. By one count there were some 180 reports of refusals in a six-month period last year, some describing earlier incidents, and the number is likely to grow now that religious conservatives are flexing their muscles in many spheres of life.

An organization of antiabortion pharmacists is pushing for professional associations and state legislatures to adopt "conscience clauses" recognizing the pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense a drug or even refer the customer to a pharmacist who will; many pharmacy associations have already adopted such clauses. Several states have laws granting pharmacists the right to refuse, and legislators in at least 10 states are pushing similar legislation.

Meanwhile, legislators in other states are trying to force pharmacists to fill valid prescriptions, and Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, responding to a Chicago pharmacist's recent refusal to provide contraceptives to two women, issued a rule on Friday that pharmacies must fill contraceptive prescriptions without delay. The nationwide struggle was described in a Washington Post article last Monday.

The most responsible conscience clauses try to balance the rights of the pharmacist and the rights of the clients by insisting that steps be taken to ensure patient access to legally prescribed therapy, either through another pharmacist at the same store or through another pharmacy. That may seem at first blush like a reasonable compromise but it is a prescription for disaster in the real world.

To begin with, some pharmacists are so certain of their moral high ground that they berate, belittle or lecture their customers. They are not likely to be helpful in guiding patients to alternative supplies of medications that they deem evil. Worse yet, if this movement picks up steam, right-to-life groups in some areas may pressure one pharmacy after another to refuse service, leaving a diminished pool of pharmacies available to fill prescriptions for birth control purposes. It is disheartening that Wal-Mart, for some years now, has refused to stock the morning-after pill.

In rural areas there may not be another pharmacy nearby, so customers who are turned away may go without the medication or waste time finding another pharmacy. In the case of the morning-after pills, which work best in the first 12 to 24 hours after a sexual encounter, delay could render the treatment ineffective. Indeed, pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for morning-after pills are inadvertently strengthening the case for providing them as nonprescription medicines on the open shelves. Such availability would allow women to get the pills promptly without going first to a doctor and then to a potentially obstructionist pharmacist.

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My Big Fat C.E.O. Paycheck

NY Times
April 3, 2005
EXECUTIVE PAY
My Big Fat C.E.O. Paycheck
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH

THE spectacle of once-respected corporate titans doing perp walks - Martha Stewart, Bernard J. Ebbers, Richard M. Scrushy, the list seems endless - has pretty well tarnished the title of chief executive. But it has done little, it seems, to scratch the gilt from the corner office.

In fact, the boss enjoyed a hefty raise last year. The chief executives at 179 large companies that had filed proxies by last Tuesday - and had not changed leaders since last year - were paid about $9.84 million, on average, up 12 percent from 2003, according to Pearl Meyer & Partners, the compensation consultants.

Surely, chief executives must have done something spectacular to justify all that, right? Well, that's not so clear. The link between rising pay and performance remained muddy - at best.

Profits and stock prices are up, but at many companies they seem to reflect an improving economy rather than managerial expertise. Regardless, the better numbers set off sizable incentive payouts for bosses.

With investors still smarting from the bursting of the tech bubble, the swift rebound in executive pay is touching some nerves. "The disconnect between pay and performance keeps getting worse," said Christianna Wood, senior investment officer for global equity at Calpers, the California pension fund. "Investors were really mad when pay did not come down during the three-year bear market, and we are not happy now, when companies reward executives when the stock goes up $2."

Even when companies reported modest increases in executive pay, it was often because they shifted from stock options, which are listed as compensation as soon as they are doled out, to outright stock grants to be paid - and accounted for - down the road.

Of course, corporations have been wrestling for decades with ways to link pay to performance, with little success. In the 1980's, they tried tying cash bonuses to rising sales or earnings, only to find that the payouts encouraged executives to make decisions that yielded short-term results - and, often, longer-term disasters.

In the 1990's, companies tried stock options, figuring that they would be the best way to tie the executives' fortunes to those of shareholders. Instead, they prompted some managers to time decisions to pump up the stock just when their options vested. Bonuses and options at Tyco and Enron, for example, did little to prevent widespread accounting frauds at either company.

The secret to linking pay to performance remains elusive. Net income at Eli Lilly fell 29 percent and its return to shareholders dropped 17 percent last year, but its chief executive, Sidney Taurel, saw his pay go up 41 percent, to $12.5 million.

Similarly, Sanmina-SCI, the electronics contract manufacturer, has lost money in each of the last three years, and its shareholders' total return fell 27 percent last year, but the pay of its chief executive, Jure Sola, jumped to $15 million from $1.2 million in 2003.

SOME paychecks remained robust even if at first blush they looked reduced. Net income at Merck fell 15 percent last year, and total shareholder return dropped 28 percent. The summary compensation tables in the proxy show the pay of the chief executive, Raymond V. Gilmartin, dropping 39 percent, to $5.9 million from $9.6 million.

But Mr. Gilmartin may find it easy to recoup the perceived loss. He got far fewer options last year, but he is participating in a new long-term performance plan that will give him $2.7 million worth of shares next year if he meets earnings targets - and double that amount if he exceeds them by a set amount. He gets the shares even if the stock price does not rise by a dime. And the payments won't show up until the 2007 proxy.

Conversely, Apple Computer had a stellar 2004, yet Steven P. Jobs, its chief executive, was paid exactly $1 for his efforts. Why? Apple paid him in advance - in 2003, it gave him $75 million worth of stock.

Shareholders are not giving up on tying pay to performance. But now they seem less focused on how executives are paid and more concerned about exactly what they do to earn it.

"It's easy to manipulate stock price. It's even easier to manipulate earnings," said Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at the Corporate Library, an investment research firm specializing in corporate governance. He, like others, is pressing companies to set pay based on measures that are harder to fudge, like return on capital employed.

Directors, meanwhile, are spending more time scrutinizing auditor reports and management strategies, looking for just such fudging. And for that, they've been rewarded. Pearl Meyer's data show that average total compensation of directors at 200 large companies probably topped $200,000, up from an average of $176,000 the previous year.

"Directors are meeting more often, so their meeting fees are up," said Jannice L. Koors, a Pearl Meyer managing director, "and there's clearly a sense that the liability they face, both personally and professionally, has increased, and thus warrants more pay."

Inflated pay for deflated performance has become ever more rankling to shareholders, many of whom are still scrambling to recoup the losses they suffered after the stock market imploded in 2000.

Few begrudge Daniel A. Carp, the chief executive of a newly revitalized Eastman Kodak, his $2,172,988 bonus this year, which brought his total compensation to about $4.4 million. But they are likely to squawk about the rich pay package - $7 million in salary and bonus, 5 million options and nearly $27 million worth of restricted stock - that Blockbuster awarded to John F. Antioco, its chief executive. After all, Blockbuster lost $1.25 billion last year.

Pay inflation will not end soon because companies are afraid to lose talent, said Ira Kay, who runs the executive pay practice at the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide.

Still, companies are rethinking the different pieces that make up a pay package. Many, for example, are reigning in common safety nets for chief executives - like contractual promises of huge severance if the company is acquired, or even if the C.E.O. is fired for incompetence.

They are also increasingly trying to link pay packages - most specifically, the size of bonuses, or the conditions attached to the vesting of restricted shares - to actual corporate performance, particularly total return to shareholders. "Finally, companies are focusing on the performance part of the pay-for-performance equation," Ms. Koors said.

Examples are easy to find. When net income at Aramark, a food services company, slid 13 percent, total pay for Joseph Neubauer, its chairman and chief executive, fell 20 percent - and his bonus shrank 47 percent. When net income at Unisys, the computer maker, plunged 85 percent last year, Lawrence A. Weinbach, then its C.E.O., got no bonus and saw his overall pay drop by 17 percent.

An even starker example is the arrangement for John R. Alm, who became chief executive of Coca-Cola Enterprises, the soft-drink bottler, in January 2004. His contract stipulates that he will lose all his restricted stock if he is no longer at the company when his shares vest in five years. More significantly, he will forfeit all the shares if the stock price has not climbed 10 percent at vesting time, and he will lose half of them if it has not increased by 20 percent.

Still, many shareholders are not satisfied. Reviewing C.E.O.'s pay - and how company boards' compensation committees set it - is at the top of the to-do list for many institutional investors and shareholder activist groups, now that they have succeeded in making companies more forthcoming about revenue, profits and other financial results.

"Whether compensation committees are effectively linking pay to performance is now a major corporate governance concern," said Martha L. Carter, a senior vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises big investors.

Only one concern - the proliferation of stock options - has abated. A new regulatory requirement to expense options, combined with a sluggish stock market that made many of them valueless in 2000 through 2003, has caused a stampede away from options. Several compensation consultants say they expect that options will soon represent less than 30 percent of total compensation, down from more than 60 percent today.

Not all alternatives are being warmly received. Shareholders decry plans that do not use "hard" measures of performance, such as total return to shareholders. For example, few are applauding Microsoft's two-year-old decision to grant restricted stock on the basis of customer satisfaction and market share, or Disney's plan to tie compensation to performance against the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

Shareholders do want companies to adopt "claw back" provisions that force executives to repay bonuses paid for results that later must be restated, a situation that has kept Qwest, for one, in the news this year.

They are also resisting rich change-of-control clauses that provide windfalls to any C.E.O. whose company is acquired, even if that chief gets a high-ranking job at the new company. The $95 million or so that James M. Kilts will probably receive as a result of selling Gillette to Procter & Gamble is raising ire even among those who laud his performance as Gillette's leader.

They also decry "pay for failure" contracts that heap riches on dismissed chiefs. Carlton S. Fiorina, for instance, left Hewlett-Packard with a severance package that included $14 million in pay, a $7.38 million bonus and $21.1 million in additional compensation from restricted stock holdings and pension payments.

Shareholders complain about how difficult it is for outsiders to glean such things as the tax implications of deferring executive compensation or the worth of supplemental retirement plans and other forms of "stealth compensation" that do not readily leap off the proxy. "The way the proxies are now, you can't really figure out how anyone, even Carly, got paid," Ms. Wood of Calpers said, referring to Ms. Fiorina.

Ms. Carter of Institutional Shareholder Services concurred. "Companies have simply got to do a better job of disclosing total pay packages, and how they play out in different scenarios, such as the C.E.O. being fired or the company being acquired," she said.

In January, for the first time, institutional shareholders, led by Calpers, invited top compensation consultants to a meeting in New York to discuss their concerns - and to persuade the consultants that they were part of the problem.

A TOP complaint was that the consultants feed data to compensation committees piecemeal, reporting what other companies are offering in supplementary pensions one day, the trend on bonuses a few days later, the value of stock options a week after that. The directors, in turn, set the different components of their own chief executive's pay package in equally disjointed fashion.

Consultants acknowledge the problem, and larger firms have begun to add up total compensation, both for peer-group companies and for the client's proposed pay package. "They used to only ask us for information about direct pay, because they got data about benefits and perks from others," said Pearl Meyer, chairwoman of Pearl Meyer & Partners. "But compensation committees are now taking a more holistic approach to executive pay, so we are now giving them all of the information."

Governance experts say the full board increasingly wants a better handle on compensation committee deliberations. Many directors fear that they will all be held accountable for egregious pay packages.

"The Dick Grasso situation has made a lot of directors more cognizant of the need to get the total picture, see how all the pieces - the base salary, restricted stock, options, perks, retirement benefits - add up," said Eleanor Bloxham, president of the Corporate Governance Alliance, a consulting firm in Westerville, Ohio.

She was referring, of course, to the brouhaha that arose when directors at the New York Stock Exchange said they were ignorant of the full extent of the pay package they had approved for the exchange's former chairman, Richard A. Grasso.

Several companies are voluntarily disclosing much more pay information to their shareholders. These companies have replaced what Ms. Koors called "the standard proxy boilerplate" - a statement that pay was set competitively - with fuller descriptions of how boards derived the packages they awarded.

The proxy for Becton Dickinson, for example, included a summary table that laid out the value of total compensation. Honeywell's proxy listed the value of perks like legal fees and personal use of corporate planes and cars. Siebel Systems has promised investors that next year it will begin disclosing the operational and stock-price hurdles that management must scale for restricted shares to vest.

"The companies know that new disclosure rules are coming, so they want an 'attaboy' from shareholders for being ahead of the curve and doing it voluntarily," Ms. Koors said.

Slowly but steadily, companies are responding to shareholders' clamor for pay packages to reward long-term thinking, too. This year's proxies show that companies increasingly insist that executives and directors hold about five times their pay in stock, thus making it harder for them to cash in on any short-term lift in the company's fortunes.

Cardinal Health, for the first time, is requiring its chief executive to hold shares equal in value to five times his salary, and its directors to hold the equivalent in shares of four times their annual retainer. Cendant this year increased its ownership rule for its chief executive to six times salary, from five.

"Companies are basically saying to their chiefs, 'We want to keep you on the hook, to make sure that you are not benefiting from a short-term gain that is not sustainable,' " Ms. Koors said.

EXECUTIVES who do not lead the company down a profitable path may find it harder to develop other ways to cash in.

Thomas J. Neff, the chairman of American operations at the executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, says he has seen a move away from grants of restricted shares that automatically vest after three or five years. In their place, companies are giving shares that vest only if the company hits preset goals for book value, total return or other measures the board deems crucial to success.

Mr. Neff says that fewer companies are agreeing to automatically vest all options or restricted shares if the chief leaves and that many now offer one or two years of compensation, maximum, upon departure, a sharp drop from the three to five years of pay that used to be routine. "Boards are no longer routinely letting the C.E.O.'s lawyer draft the contract," he said.

Several companies have clearly learned from past mistakes. The contract of L. Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco International called for an immediate payout of about $135 million if he was dismissed, and a retainer of $3.4 million annually for the rest of his life. His voluntary resignation released Tyco from the terms of the agreement, but directors clearly are cognizant of how expensive fulfilling the contract terms could have been.

Tyco's new severance policy limits compensation to twice the executive's base salary and bonuses at the time of termination. In a merger or change-of-control situation, departing executives would receive up to 2.99 times their base salary and bonus. And Tyco now awards stock options that are priced higher than the share price on the day of issue.

Directors are less likely to clamp down on the pay of newly recruited bosses. Consider the package for C. John Wilder in his first year as the TXU Corporation's chief executive: $1 million in salary, a $16 million bonus and $37 million in long-term incentives.

Newcomers have boards at a negotiating disadvantage, compensation experts say. Because they took a gamble by switching jobs, most successfully insist on either a hefty sign-on bonus in cash and stock, or a soft landing - that is, rich severance - in case they fail.

Both eventualities get shareholders' dander up, but experts say the boards have little choice.

"You need to supercharge the offer," Mr. Neff said, "to create an incentive for a person to come in."

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Few See Gains From Social Security Tour

NY TIMES
April 3, 2005
Few See Gains From Social Security Tour
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

WASHINGTON, April 2 - Midway through their 60-day coast-to-coast blitz to promote fundamental revisions in Social Security, President Bush and others in his administration have been unable to pry loose any Democratic senators from the solid wall of opposition.

As a consequence, Republican lawmakers are beginning to doubt whether the president can succeed in establishing individual investment accounts under Social Security.

After appearing with the president on Wednesday at a Social Security rally in Iowa, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of that state and chairman of the Finance Committee, said, "There is not the significant momentum it takes to get a bill through the Senate."

In a separate interview, Mr. Grassley, who supports individual accounts and whose position makes him the most important senator on the issue, said he planned to put Social Security legislation before his committee in July but added, "The president may not succeed in as clear-cut a manner as I might have hoped."

Some Republicans who met with constituents on Social Security during the two-week Congressional recess, which ends Monday, reported that the president and his allies had managed to convince many people that the solvency of Social Security was in jeopardy and that the program needed to be overhauled.

But many Republicans said their constituents were wary about individual accounts as the best solution.

"Having just held 15 town meetings in my state," said Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, whose district includes Cedar Rapids, where the president spoke, "I think it is clear that the solvency concern is taking root. It is also clear that support of personal accounts has maybe slightly increased, but opposition has hardened substantially."

Mr. Leach, who flew back to Washington with Mr. Bush on Air Force One and who said he was "open to the possibility of personal accounts," questioned whether the president could overcome the united front presented by the Democrats.

Democrats, Mr. Leach said, "look at this as their chance to take control of Congress."

Whatever the reason, people who have worked on Capitol Hill for generations said they could not remember a time when Democrats in the Senate were so unified.

Except for Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who says he has not made up his mind, every Democratic senator is committed to opposing diverting Social Security taxes into individual accounts.

"We have continued to stay together," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, "because the president's plan is so flawed."

Under Senate rules, no legislation can be brought to a vote without approval of 60 senators. There are 55 Republicans in the Senate. So even if all of them backed Mr. Bush's plan, he would still need five more votes.

In the House, where passage of legislation requires only a simple majority, Republican leaders could probably win passage of a Social Security bill by invoking party discipline.

But these leaders say they want the Senate to vote first on the issue to avoid a difficult and unnecessary vote in the House if Senate approval is not possible - to avoid, in other words, what is known in Congressional cloakrooms as being B.T.U.'d.

The term refers the situation in 1993 when House Democratic leaders used all their might to persuade wavering Democrats to vote for President Bill Clinton's unpopular plan to place a tax on energy based on the number of British thermal units produced. The plan barely passed in the House but was then immediately shelved by the Senate and never considered again. Republicans won control of the House in the next election, and many Democrats attributed their defeat to their ultimately unnecessary vote on the energy measure.

In an interview published this week in National Journal, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said that even if Social Security legislation could pass through the Senate and House this year, there might not be time to negotiate a final bill until next year.

Administration officials say they are undaunted and still expect to win the fight. "We're at the halfway mark of our 60-day tour and well beyond our events goal already," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said on Friday. "The national dialogue that the president called for in the State of the Union is well under way, and Social Security has been elevated to the top of the national political debate. We're making real progress."

On March 2, Mr. Snow began a campaign he called 60 Stops in 60 Days to promote the president's Social Security goals. Since then, the Treasury Department said, administration officials have participated in 108 events in 32 states, including more than 40 town meetings with senators and representatives.

Mr. Bush had 12 Social Security rallies in March, Vice President Dick Cheney 4 and Mr. Snow 10.

The Republican National Committee calculated that Republican House members held more than 500 town meetings over the recess in which Social Security was discussed, and several Republican senators had similar events.

The two sides in the debate stepped up their television advertising over the Congressional recess.

Supporters of the president ran advertisements comparing the Social Security system to the Titanic and others showing a ticking stopwatch counting down the time until Social Security goes broke.

But there is a split among Republicans. The Club for Growth, which raised more than $20 million last year to support Republican candidates, is running a commercial criticizing Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, because he has proposed legislation for individual accounts under Social Security that would include a tax increase.

AARP has advertisements on cable channels and in more than 200 markets comparing the administration's Social Security restructuring to the flattening of a house because the kitchen sink is clogged.

A group of veteran Democratic operatives including Jim Jordan, Senator John Kerry's first campaign manager in last year's presidential race, and Harold Ickes, President Clinton's political adviser, plan to begin television commercials next week against the president's plan.

Glen Justice contributed reporting for this article.

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Daily Intelligence Briefings Are Vague, Officials Say

NY TIMES

Daily Intelligence Briefings Are Vague, Officials Say
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, April 2 - The small group of top government officials who read the President's Daily Brief, a summary of the most timely and critical intelligence on threats to the United States, told a presidential commission on intelligence that they find the highly classified document of little value, according to the commission's co-chairmen.

The officials told the commission that they read the brief, known as the P.D.B., mainly for "defensive" purposes, Charles S. Robb, a former Virginia senator and governor, and Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, said in an interview on Friday.

"They knew that was going to drive the president's schedule on a given day, and they had to be prepared for that reason," Mr. Robb said. "I cannot recall any particular current or former official saying that they believed the P.D.B. was in and of itself that valuable to them. It was more of a defensive reading of the document."

The comments suggest that the grave shortcomings of the daily briefs before the Iraq war, detailed as part of the commission's sweeping 601-page indictment of the nation's intelligence agencies, have not been remedied despite efforts in recent months by the Central Intelligence Agency to improve them. Asked about how the briefs have changed and whether they were still "more alarmist and less nuanced" than the underlying information warranted, as the commission concluded, the White House refused to comment.

Questions about the commission's critique and how the process has changed, directed to Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, went unanswered. His spokesman, Frederick Jones, said the White House did not want to discuss a "privileged presidential document."

Since taking over from Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Hadley has said to his staff that he is disappointed in how prewar intelligence was handled and that he wants improvements. But the White House's refusal to describe the changes to the daily brief left some experts inside and outside the administration wondering whether the system is different from the one the commission so roundly criticized. It is a potent issue, because these days the briefs carry the latest intelligence on nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, the activities of Al Qaeda and emerging threats elsewhere around the world.

The nine-member commission found that the quality of the intelligence agencies' reporting on threats suffered from the same shortage of reliable sources that plagued the reporting on Iraqi weapons. So the commission's finding that the P.D.B. "likely conveyed a greater sense of certainty" than the data warranted is still very much a concern, Mr. Robb and Judge Silberman said.

The quality of the brief may be particularly crucial in this administration because by the accounts of close aides and intelligence officials, President Bush is extremely interested in what the spy agencies tell him. He has been described by aides as asking frequent questions, sometimes calling in C.I.A. officers for direct briefings. A senior intelligence official sits on the staff of the national security council to act as an intermediary, and to demand more information.

But none of that questioning pierced through the huge errors in the Iraq intelligence, the commission concluded. It said the briefs "left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources." Some administration officials say Mr. Bush now demands to see some of the backup sourcing, but they could not say how often he hears dissenting views, and Mr. Hadley's office would not comment on that issue.

Mr. Bush receives an oral briefing each morning from 8 to 8:45 on foreign intelligence and domestic security. The C.I.A. briefer is usually accompanied by the agency's director, currently Porter J. Goss.

Contrary to his image in some circles as a man with little appetite for detailed study, Mr. Bush asked early in his presidency that the brief be expanded and delivered in a loose-leaf notebook to include more than just the 10 to 15 pages of finished intelligence analyses on current topics.

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, as it is formally called, reviewed about two years of the President's Daily Briefs in the period before the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It found the reports were "disastrously one-sided," giving the president a "daily drumbeat" of sensational headlines.

They noted that Mr. Goss has said that preparing, studying and delivering the daily brief takes as much as six hours a day. Although Mr. Bush has said the newly appointed director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, will become his "primary briefer," Mr. Robb and Judge Silberman said they thought that would distract Mr. Negroponte from his main task of overseeing the 15 intelligence agencies and coordinating their work.

The commission chairmen suggested that intense competition among the intelligence agencies and their divisions to get their own reports into the president's brief often skewed the document.

In response to the commission's searing criticism, the agencies have begun to defend themselves. One former senior intelligence official said Saturday that "a little-known secret" of the commission's critique was that it borrowed heavily from the C.I.A.'s own internal review of the Iraqi weapons failure, conducted from July 2003 to May 2004.

The official said that since the review was completed last year, the team of analysts and editors who compile the brief each night have tried to make changes along the lines the commission recommends. Headlines are less sensational and "more neutral," the official said, and alternative views of other agencies are included more often.

But the former official said that taking a longer-range view of world developments, as the commission recommends, is not easy. "The daily mission eats your lunch," he said. "Policymakers ask dozens of questions every day that have to be answered within 24 hours."

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A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War

NY TIMES
April 3, 2005
A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal.

The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have a fundamental design flaw that could cause them to explode with far less force than intended.

Although the government has denied that assertion, officials have disclosed that Washington is nevertheless considering replacing the W-76 altogether.

"This is the one we worry about the most," said Everet H. Beckner, who oversees the arsenal as director of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Some arms-control advocates oppose the 10-year overhaul program, saying it could produce not only refurbishments but also deadly new innovations. They like the replacement option even less, saying it could prompt the government to conduct underground detonations that would undo the global ban on nuclear testing and start a new arms race. Moreover, some argue that nuclear weapons are dinosaurs that have little use in American military strategy and that it makes no real difference if the W-76 is ineffective.

"That's why people are so passionate about this," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

The W-76, developed in the early 1970's for destroying large targets like military bases, now sits packed in clusters of up to eight atop hundreds of missiles in a dozen nuclear submarines. While the exact figures are secret, federal officials and private weapons experts agree that it is the nation's leading weapon by virtue of sheer numbers. The experts say that of 5,000 active warheads in the arsenal, 1,500 are W-76's. Each is meant to be about seven times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The W-76's importance is rising as the nation's nuclear force relies more on submarines and less on bombers and land-based missiles. "It's by far the most numerous" warhead, said Hans M. Kristensen, a weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that monitors nuclear trends. "It's the workhorse in terms of targeting."

Several factors lie behind the current worries and repair plans. The W-76 is one of the arsenal's oldest warheads. As warheads age, the risk of internal rusting, material degradation, corrosion, decay and the embrittling of critical parts increases.

The overhaul to forestall such decay is scheduled to go from 2007 to 2017. In all, it is expected to cost more than $2 billion, say experts who have analyzed federal budget figures.

Questions also surround the weapon's basic design. Four knowledgeable critics, three former scientists and one current one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which designed the W-76, have recently argued that the weapon is highly unreliable and, if not a complete dud, likely to explode with a force so reduced as to compromise its effectiveness.

Federal officials, while denying that, disclosed in interviews that the warhead is being considered for a new program that intends to replace old warheads with more reliable ones. Congress and future administrations would have to approve a replacement for the W-76.

Officials would give no estimate for that endeavor's cost or length of time. But they acknowledged that they have carefully weighed the W-76's potential problems and the alternatives for fixing them.

"I've spent a lot of personal time on this," said Dr. Beckner, of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The W-76, and its troubles, were born during the cold war, when American bomb makers sought to win the arms race with designs that made nuclear arms lightweight, very powerful and in some cases so small that a dozen or more could fit atop a slender missile.

Where most nuclear powers had to make do with weapons that were ponderous if dependable, the W-76 epitomized the American edge. It was a hydrogen warhead - known as thermonuclear because a small atom bomb at its core worked like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Standing shorter than a man, it had undergone an extraordinary degree of miniaturization.

"It was the tightest design we had," said one top nuclear scientist who did not want his name used for fear of retaliation for releasing confidential information. . "They crammed in everything with a shoehorn."

Tensions ran high, especially for senior designers like Charles C. Cremer, the leader of thermonuclear design at Los Alamos. In 1974, as W-76 plans took shape, Mr. Cremer committed suicide.

Richard L. Morse, a physicist at the weapons laboratory who directed advanced concepts for bomb design as well as a separate group devoted to laser fusion, said in an interview that much tension centered on the weapon's so-called radiation case. In usual fashion, it was to be made of uranium, which is nearly twice as heavy as lead.

Leaders at Los Alamos wanted the case to be as lightweight as possible, so they envisioned it as extraordinarily thin - in places not much thicker than a beer can (albeit with plastic backing for added strength).

Its physical integrity was vital. The case had to hang together for microseconds as the exploding atom bomb generated temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, forcing it to emit radiation that kindled the thermonuclear fire. If the case deformed significantly or shattered prematurely, the weapon would fail, its thermonuclear fuel unlit.

From 1978 to 1987, about 3,400 W-76's rolled off the production line, said Mr. Kristensen, of the defense council. The design was considered so good that Britain made a variant of the W-76 for its submarines.

Even with their seeming success, arms designers continued to do underground tests to determine how cases would behave in the first milliseconds after the atomic blast. But in 1992, after the cold war, the United States joined a global moratorium on nuclear tests. It was no longer possible to detonate weapons to check their reliability.

In secret, experts and officials say, debate on the W-76 began almost immediately after the test ban; suggestions included an alternative design that would thicken the radiation case and give the new warhead a much longer life. By 1995, the work had become formalized in a joint effort between the Navy and the nation's nuclear weapons complex.

As the test ban persisted, American nuclear officials singled out the W-76 as the first warhead to undergo precautionary scrutiny. The program employed teams from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, its archrival. Usually, the meetings were cordial.

But a vocal dissenter emerged. It was Dr. Morse, who had left Los Alamos in 1976 for the University of Arizona but returned in 1996 and aided the W-76 assessment.

Dr. Morse specialized in scientific explanations for the complex flows that curl through the extraordinarily hot gases known as plasmas, which lie at the heart of an exploding nuclear weapon. His main goal was to help scientists develop a giant laser that, in lieu of an atomic match, would fire on a tiny radiation case surrounding an even tinier pellet of hydrogen fuel, releasing a burst of nuclear energy. Heat from such miniature hydrogen bombs was envisioned as one day being used to make electricity.

But Dr. Morse found that nature had erected tricky barriers to that goal. In particular, he documented how a form of turbulence known as Rayleigh-Taylor instability (named after the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Geoffrey Taylor) could perturb the expanding plasma of the very hot radiation case, forming waves, ripples and whorls that blocked ignition of the thermonuclear fuel. He also found that extremely small variations in the case were responsible for the onset of turbulence, making it hard to eliminate.

In 1996, Dr. Morse brought similar analyses to bear on the W-76's thin case, arguing that it would probably fail. He said that for decades, officials had swept the issue under the rug and that Mr. Cremer, the designer, had struggled with the problem.

In an interview, Dr. Morse said he was soon "disinvited" from the evaluation and left Los Alamos for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. But he added that concerns about the W-76 only grew.

Dr. Beckner disagreed. He said the joint review found that the W-76 "looks like a pretty good weapon."

Even so, the government began preparing for an extensive refurbishment of the warhead in a bid to extend its life by 30 years. The planning started around 2000 and foresaw the installation of new fuses, electronics, batteries, cables, valves and the conventional high explosives that light the atomic match. It also sought to increase the warhead's accuracy and flexibility in targeting.

In 2003, amid preparations for the refurbishment, Dr. Morse once again sought to stir debate. He says he felt compelled to do so because of the W-76's rising importance to the nation's nuclear forces.

At a secret meeting in March 2004 at Los Alamos, Dr. Morse led four critics who laid out their concerns to lab and federal officials, including Dr. Beckner. Dr. Morse characterized the discussion as acrimonious.

"It was a verbal mud-wrestling match," he recalled. The lab and federal officials "would not be candid with us. We told them things they didn't know. It was very, very disappointing."

In contrast, Dr. Beckner said the meeting and subsequent analyses left him with "high confidence that this nuclear weapon is a good design, was built properly and will function if required."

In early July, news reports in New Mexico began to describe the dispute, and the director of Los Alamos days later scheduled a secret lab symposium to review the "technical challenges" to understanding how radiation cases act in the first microseconds of a nuclear blast, according to a synopsis of the planned meeting.

As the number of news reports grew, officials denied that there was any problem with the W-76. They cited a history of detonations of the weapon at the Nevada Test Site.

In late November, the dependability issue emerged nationally as Congress approved a small budget item that began a new weapons design effort known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Its goal is to have weapons scientists design a new generation of nuclear arms that are more reliable and more durable, reversing the cold war trend of making small, lightweight, powerful weapons. If possible, the effort is to proceed without nuclear testing.

Dr. Beckner, of the nuclear administration, said the W-76 is a candidate for redesign. The current work to extend the warhead's life, he said, could expand to include more fundamental design changes. "That is not the plan at present, but that could happen," he said, adding that he could not discuss the issue of thickening the radiation case.

Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said a thicker, heavier case for the W-76 might force compensating cuts in the weight of the weapon's hydrogen capsule. And that, he added, would reduce the weapon's overall force.

Dr. Morse applauded the new federal interest. "What's out there in those boats," he said, "is at best unreliable and probably much worse."


Sandra Blakeslee and Kenneth Chang contributed reporting for this article.

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In Boston, Mourning Is Tinged by Criticism

NY TIMES
April 3, 2005
In Boston, Mourning Is Tinged by Criticism
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, April 2 - Jack Connors, a prominent member of this city's large Roman Catholic community, has a resonant memory of Pope John Paul II's visit to Boston in 1979. Throngs of people descended on Boston Common for a public Mass, many waiting for hours in a torrential rain.

"I was drenched," Mr. Connors said. "My kids wanted to know why are we here. We should have known it was a sign that we were in for some stormy weather."

It is the kind of anecdote that crystallizes the complex feelings many here have toward Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday at the age of 84. It is a sense of awe and affection mixed with disappointment at his handling of the clergy sexual abuse crisis that exploded in Boston three years ago and continues to reverberate here.

"Am I angry with him? No," Mr. Connors said. "He was a good man and did what he thought was right. But regrettably, there wasn't as much thoughtfulness and oversight as one might hope for."

Similar reactions were common this weekend as many of the two million Catholics in and around Boston struggled with how to reconcile the respect and warmth they felt for John Paul with what they saw as too little attention paid too late to the problem of sexually abusive priests. In particular, there was criticism that when Cardinal Bernard F. Law was forced out of his position as Boston archbishop because of the scandal, he was not chastised or demoted, but was named archpriest of one of the four basilicas under Vatican direction in Rome, St. Mary Major Basilica.

"I think that it's fair to say that John Paul had kind of a love affair with Boston from the time he was archbishop of Krakow and he made a trip here," said Dr. James E. Post, a Boston University professor who is president of Voice of the Faithful, a lay Catholic group that formed in response to the sexual abuse crisis. Adding to Boston's sense of connection with the pope, he said, was the appointment of Boston's former mayor, Raymond Flynn, as American ambassador to the Vatican in the mid-1990's. "There was always a perception of a warm relationship between the people of Boston and the Holy Father."

But, Dr. Post said, "His behavior in response to the sex abuse crisis disappointed many Catholics. He seemed very reluctant to remove Cardinal Law or accept Cardinal Law's resignation. His personal relationship with the cardinal seemed to stand in the way of his being willing to address the problems of the archdiocese."

Dr. Post said Boston Catholics appreciated some of what the pope eventually did, including meeting with American cardinals about the crisis.

"But when he brought Cardinal Law back to Rome and gave him the appointment at Mary Major, that was more than puzzling - it was deeply disturbing to Catholics in Boston," Dr. Post said. "It seemed that he was being rewarded for bad behavior, and run-of-the-mill ordinary Catholics just saw this as de facto an insult to the people of Boston."

The Rev. Walter Cuenin, pastor of Our Lady Help of Christians in Newton, one of dozens of priests who signed a petition seeking Cardinal Law's resignation in 2002, said he, too, felt that the pope's legacy in Boston was mixed.

In some ways he had a major, positive impact, Father Cuenin said, like his "outreach to the Jewish people," which encouraged substantial interfaith cooperation in Newton, a Boston suburb with many Jewish residents.

And Father Cuenin credited the pope for replacing Cardinal Law with Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, who quickly moved to pay financial settlements to sexual abuse victims who had sued the church.

But, Father Cuenin said: "For some Catholics, the sex abuse crisis, the way it was handled, the cover-up by the bishops, and then the appointment to Rome of Cardinal Law was not well received and remains a sore spot. There was a lot of feeling that the Vatican was somewhat distant from the crisis, and didn't seem to appreciate what was going on here. I think people would have felt better had Cardinal Law resigned from his ecclesial duties as all the priests involved in the sex abuse crisis had to do."

He added that the fact that Cardinal Law would be able to vote for the next pope, when Archbishop O'Malley cannot because he is not yet a cardinal, "is difficult for a lot of people."

Not every Catholic here shared such feelings.

"I think especially now, people of goodwill have a sense of admiration and loss," said Peter Meade, executive vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. "The man has accomplished so much, and I would hope people would let him be at peace."

But Bernie McDaid, who said he was abused by the Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham, was one of those wrestling with conflicting feelings. Father Birmingham, who died in 1989, was accused of molesting dozens of boys.

"I do not dislike the pope personally - he's probably a good man - but as far as this issue is concerned, there's been so much misunderstanding and fear," said Mr. McDaid, who along with a group of victims sought a meeting with the pope two years ago, and instead met with a Vatican official in Rome.

"They raped and robbed my soul, and there's almost a shame and a fear to acknowledge this and deal directly with this issue," he said. "I certainly felt stonewalled all the way up from the Boston diocese to Rome. I don't want to come off as callous and full of malice. But I had personally hoped that this pope would have been the one to come out publicly on this issue."

Dr. Post said he hoped that the next pope would "recognize that the sex abuse crisis worldwide is not over," and he added that there needed to be a "restoration of the church's moral integrity."

Father Cuenin said he expected that the new pope would be "a little more moderate, and perhaps someone who's not going to be pope for a long time."

"They have a saying in Italy now that the new pope will be old, Italian and not like to fly," he said. "Sometimes a shorter papacy is desired so the church can shift gears a little bit. And there is another saying that after a thin pope, you need a fat pope."

At a Mass at the Gate of Heaven Parish in South Boston shortly after the pope's death was announced, Deborah Hayes, 49, a parking attendant from South Boston, said the pope could have done more to help the archdiocese after the sexual abuse crisis and should not have reassigned Cardinal Law to Rome.

"I don't agree with it," Ms. Hayes said. "It was a reward, and there shouldn't have been a reward. If anything there should have been some jail time."

But another parishioner, Nancy Menjin, 44, of South Boston, who recalled watching the pope in a parade during his 1979 visit, said John Paul did all he could during the sexual abuse scandal.

"He's so far removed from here," she said. "I think more should have been done here at home. It's a long way from Rome."


Katie Zezima contributed reporting for this article.

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At Least 20 U.S. Troops Wounded in Attack on Iraqi Prison

NY TIMES
April 3, 2005
At Least 20 U.S. Troops Wounded in Attack on Iraqi Prison
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sunday, April 3 - Using suicide car bombs and an array of weapons, scores of insurgents made the biggest assault yet on the American-controlled Abu Ghraib prison on Saturday evening, American military officials said. At least 20 American soldiers and marines were wounded.

Forty to 60 insurgents attacked the prison from opposite directions, but were repelled by the Americans in a pitched battle that lasted for 30 to 40 minutes, the officials said. They added that they knew of only one insurgent who had been killed, but said it was almost certain the guerrillas suffered additional casualties.

The assault appeared to be an attempt to break prisoners out of a part of the center that is controlled by Iraqi security forces, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for the American detainee system in Iraq.

The assault was so intense that the American troops at the prison called in three Apache attack helicopters and a Marine infantry company, the colonel said. The marines quickly secured the area around the prison. Of the 20 Americans hurt, 18 had only minor wounds, Colonel Rudisill said.

The attack was the latest in a recent pattern of large, well-organized bands of guerrillas battling American forces.

On March 23, American troops helped Iraqi forces overrun a lakeside training camp of scores of insurgents northwest of Baghdad. Four days earlier, an American convoy fended off an ambush by 40 to 50 insurgents southeast of the capital.

The Americans are holding 3,446 detainees in Abu Ghraib, where eight American soldiers were charged last year with prisoner abuse. Iraqi security forces are also holding prisoners there, though Colonel Rudisill said that he did not know how many the Iraqis had in custody.

The attack began after 7 p.m., when a suicide car bomber tried ramming into the northeast corner of the prison, the colonel said. Insurgents there then opened up with small arms and mortar fire. At the southwest corner, another suicide car bomber exploded, followed by more guerrilla fire.

On Saturday morning, a car bomb exploded at a police station in the town of Khan Bani Saad, 10 miles north of Baghdad, killing four policemen and one civilian and wounding three policemen and a civilian, the Interior Ministry said.

Also on Saturday, the American military said a marine was killed the previous day by small-arms fire in Ramadi.

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