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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Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage

NY TIMES
April 3, 2005
Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage
By JIM YARDLEY and DAVID BARBOZA

XINGXIANG, China - The pipeline that pours young, eager workers into China's manufacturing juggernaut begins in the country's interior at vocational schools like Hunan Top Software.

So it is here in Ningxiang, a 10-hour drive from the factories on the southern coast, that clues can be found to a problem once thought inconceivable: The world's most populous nation, which has powered its stunning economic rise with a cheap and supposedly bottomless pool of migrant labor, is experiencing shortages of about two million workers in Guangdong and Fujian, the two provinces at the heart of China's export-driven economy.

For Wu Dongshan, the job placement coordinator at Hunan Top, the most obvious sign of change is that factory recruiters now come to him, a reversal from three years ago, when he would make the long drive to Guangdong with busloads of students desperate for work.

"We were begging the factories to hire our students," Mr. Wu said. "We had too many students and not enough jobs."

No one thinks China is running out of workers. But young migrant workers coveted by factories are gaining bargaining power and many are choosing to leave the low pay and often miserable conditions in Guangdong. In a nondemocratic China, it is the equivalent of "voting with their feet."

March is one of the most important hiring months for China's factories, yet some analysts believe that the current shortfalls are the beginning of a long-term trend that is already bringing wage pressures and could eventually erode China's position as the world's dominant low-cost producer.

"It's not the end of the great China manufacturing story," said Jonathan Anderson, the chief Asia-Pacific economist for UBS. "But you're no longer going to be talking about China having labor so radically cheap that it will capture all the investment flows. This is an opening for Vietnam, it's an opening for India and Cambodia."

The shift, which experts say will happen gradually, began last year and is a result of two decades of strict family planning, which has made China one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world.

"The number of people in the labor force is going to be going down for the next 15 years," said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. "This is a shift in demographics that is really good, not just for salaries but for work conditions."

China remains a country where migrant workers are routinely exploited. But after a decade of stagnant wages, these workers are showing more willingness to demand their rights. Last year, factory workers rioted and held strikes in Guangdong. Other workers just left.

They can do that because economic growth in other regions has created increasing competition for workers. Many are leaving Guangdong for the rival Yangtze River Delta region near Shanghai, where many factories offer higher salaries. Others are starting to find work in larger cities in interior provinces. Some are simply returning to the farm.

"If we go to work in Guangdong, we work hard all year round but we can't save much money," said Tang Xiaoliang, a migrant worker who toiled in Guangdong factories but has returned to his village near Hunan Top. "The pay is too low. Whoever pays higher, I will go there."

The choices made by workers like Mr. Tang can influence the world's global trading network, because every decision about factory building, jobs and wages in China can alter the price of a toy at Toys R Us or socks at Wal-Mart.

Here in Ningxiang, a growing city in Hunan Province, workers began migrating south to Guangdong and the surrounding Pearl River Delta for jobs in the 1980's. At the Hunan Top Software vocational school, a recruiter from one of Guangdong's biggest electronics plants visited in December and signed 197 students up for jobs. But right now, it is unclear how many will go.

For many of the teenage students, who start working as young as 16, migrating to Guangdong often begins as a great adventure, a chance for farmers' children to see the outside world. But students like Ruan Xihua, 17, have not decided if they will take the promised job. Ms. Ruan is a tiny, cheery young woman whose parents were among the first generation of migrant workers to go to Guangdong in the 1980's.

"They told me it was pretty hard," she said. "They told me they wanted me to study hard."

Ms. Ruan is also an only child who says she wants to find work closer to home in case she needs to care for her parents.

"Most of these families have only one child because of family planning," Mr. Wu said. "They don't want their child to be far away from home."

That is one reason that Hunan's fast-growing provincial capital, Changsha, is beginning to siphon some workers back from Guangdong. Zu Xian, 22, quit a factory job in Guangdong because the high cost of living prevented her from saving money. She now matches her old factory wage by selling cosmetics at a new shopping mall in Changsha, a job that allows her far more free time and far less stress.

"Many people come back," she said. "They had stayed for too long and didn't have a better future. It's boring work. And there is not time to study or improve yourself."

Changsha is far from the only urban center competing with Guangdong for labor. Many workers are going to the booming Yangtze River Delta region, a hotbed of entrepreneurship powered by thousands of textile, electronics, software and automobile manufacturers.

Economists say the Yangtze Delta region, which encompasses coastal Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces, as well as Shanghai, is already beginning to rival Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta for manufacturing supremacy in China. Factory life can be bleak in the Yangtze Delta, but many manufacturers are raising pay and improving conditions.

At Zhongce Rubber, one of China's largest tire makers with about 5,000 employees, the company has begun construction of a new factory building. It will have free or subsidized food and housing for workers. The company also has raised the average worker's salary to $150 a month - above what most factories pay before overtime in Guangdong.

"Our company is doing very well, so we have to pay better," said Jiang Sheng Nian, a manager. "We feel that increasing salaries are inevitable."

Guo Ren, a rosy-cheeked 21-year-old woman from rural Anhui Province who now works at the tire company, first worked in an electronics factory in the city of Dongguan, in Guangdong. She earned about $50 a month, making chips that operate computer mouses, and lived in cramped dorms with strict curfews because of rising crime rates.

"I left Dongguan because it wasn't very safe and the living standards were not high," said Ms. Guo, who now earns close to $150 a month doing odd jobs at Zhongce.

Despite its problems, Guangdong is still a manufacturing powerhouse. In Guangdong and Fujian, the combined shortfall represents about 10 percent of the total migrant work force in those provinces.

Even so, the local authorities are taking action. Officials in different Guangdong cities, as well as the adjacent special economic zone of Shenzhen, are competing with one another to raise their local minimum wage. In early March, Shenzhen announced that it would raise its minimum to $83 a month from $74.

Factory operators, who have been experiencing worker shortages for more than six months, are also worried. Some withheld wages from migrant workers who went home for the Lunar New Year holiday in an effort to ensure they returned by March. In early March at the Sanhe Employment Center, a job fair in the manufacturing city of Baoan, billboards were filled with leaflets advertising thousands of openings at local factories.

"Some companies can't find workers for days," said Li Biyang, a recruiter at the job fair, who said smaller factories faced the worst problems. "Many small factories have bad management and bad working conditions. They aren't attentive to workers."

But many of the larger factories are scarcely better. Sheng Kehua, 22, plans to quit her job at a sprawling electronics factory in Baoan at the end of March. She works six days a week, 11 hours a day and earns, with overtime, about $118 a month. She lives in company dorm with 13 other workers.

"The boss always says we will try to work on that," Ms. Sheng said of requests for improvements. "But every time, nothing happens."

Factories covet young, female workers like Ms. Sheng because they are considered better at assembly line work and more docile than young men. In the past, these workers were largely cut off from the outside world, but now they use text messages or e-mail to check with friends at other factories about wages and treatment.

"I checked the Internet and learned that the pay level in Shanghai is better than here," Ms. Sheng said. Of the 30 workers who arrived with her three years ago, only 7 or 8 remain at the factory.

Zhao Weinan, who heads an association of Taiwanese-owned manufacturers in Dongguan, said factories once were very picky, setting age limits for new hires and often prohibiting workers from being married.

"In the old days, a company would just put a poster up, and you needed security to stop people from pouring in," Mr. Zhao said. "Now, you can post 100 notices and not find enough people."

He said Guangdong manufacturers operated on thin profit margins and could not raise salaries too high. "If you raise salary, you raise production costs," he said.

And if wages keep rising, he said, some companies could face a fate familiar to many manufacturers in the United States - they would have to move to a country with cheaper workers.


Jim Yardley reported from Ningxiang, Shenzhen and Guangdong for this article, and David Barboza from the Yangtze Delta region and Guangdon.

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Before the Fall

NY Times

April 2, 2005

Before the Fall

The recent rally of the United States dollar notwithstanding, the greenback has nowhere to go but down. But the Bush administration is betting that foreign investors will continue to invest huge sums in this depreciating currency. How huge? Last month, the government reported that the United States' deficit in international transactions, mainly trade, reached an unprecedented $666 billion in 2004, a 24 percent increase from the 2003 level and, at 5.7 percent of the economy, about two to three times what most economists consider sustainable.

The administration expects foreigners, mainly Asian central bankers, to keep plugging the trade gap because buying American securities increases their exports. It is also assuming that foreign central banks won't risk the losses in their dollar reserves that would occur if they started shunning dollar-based investments. In brief, the United States is betting that it's too big - in other countries' eyes - to fail.

The dollar's current uptick is just a breather in its overall downward trajectory. It's due largely to the United States' higher interest rates, which lure foreign investors away from euros and into dollar-based investments. But what will happen when the Federal Reserve stops raising rates? Here's a hint: When one Federal Reserve governor suggested recently that rates might peak at a lower level than analysts expected, the dollar promptly slid.

The dollar also drew some of its recent momentum from a government report last month that showed the United States attracted $91.5 billion in net foreign capital in January, easily covering that month's near-record trade deficit, $58.3 billion. That allayed concerns, at least temporarily, about the United States' continued ability to finance its debt on favorable terms. But hedge funds were responsible for much of January's investment, and that clouds the picture.

In general, private investment - as opposed to investment by foreign governments - is an encouraging sign because private investors seek out the best opportunities, while foreign governments often pour money in simply to prop up the dollar. But hedge funds are different; they are often short-term investors that can move out of dollars as quickly as they move in. Given the unreliability of those inflows, and the enormous borrowing needs of the United States, the country will be dependent on foreign government lenders for a long time.

That's a precarious position. To close its trade gap, which must be financed by foreigners, and its budget gap, most of which is covered by foreign investors, the United States will need to attract a projected $1 trillion in 2005 alone - an unprecedented sum. At the same time, however, the Bush administration is relying on a cheap dollar to correct the nation's trade imbalance. So far, the trade deficit has only grown, even as the dollar has fallen. A further decline this year of about 20 percent would probably be needed to begin to have a real impact.

There is gathering evidence that foreign central bankers are seeking to avoid the losses that future dollar investments seem to threaten. Recently, financial markets have been unsettled by comments from Japan, South Korea, India and Russia about diversifying away from dollars. And this week, a tough-talking China vowed not to allow its economic decisions to be dictated by any other country, a statement that was a rebuff to the United States.

If the world's central bankers accumulate fewer dollars, the result would be an unrelenting American need to borrow in the face of an ever weaker dollar - a recipe for higher interest rates and higher prices. The economic repercussions could unfold gradually, resulting in a long, slow decline in living standards. Or there could be a quick unraveling, with the hallmarks of an uncontrolled fiscal crisis. Or the pain could fall somewhere in between. If foreign reluctance to buy Treasury bonds pushed up long-term interest rates, mortgage rates would follow. If the economy is in a housing bubble, as many analysts believe, higher mortgage rates would pop it, with dire results for homeowners' balance sheets and the overall health of the economy.

The dollar is heading down, no matter what. To mitigate the potential harm, the administration and Congress should deliver on budget discipline - far beyond the lip service that's been offered so far - to limit the amounts the United States needs to attract in loans and pay in interest. The administration should also try to forge cooperation among America's trading partners to manage the dollar's decline. Unfortunately, government leaders aren't poised to do either of those things, though action, not attitude, is what the country needs.

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Pentagon Redirects Its Research Dollars

NY Times

April 2, 2005
Pentagon Redirects Its Research Dollars
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.

Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.

The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.

"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."

University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency's new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.

The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress's decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.

In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa's stinting on basic research in computer science.

"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."

University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.

Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign.

The shift at Darpa has been noted not just by those researchers directly involved in computing technologies, but by those in other fields supported by the agency.

"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at the University of Notre Dame.

The concerns are highlighted in a report on the state of the nation's cybersecurity that was released with little fanfare in March by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Darpa has long focused on long-term basic research projects with time horizons that exceed five years, the report notes, but by last year, very little of Darpa's financing was being directed toward fundamental research in the field.

"Virtually every aspect of information technology upon which we rely today bears the stamp of federally sponsored university research," said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the advisory panel. "The federal government is walking away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg."

As a result of the new restrictions, a number of computer scientists said they had chosen not to work with Darpa any longer. Last year, the agency offered to support research by Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was one of the small group of researchers who developed the Arpanet, the 1960's predecessor to today's Internet.

Dr. Kleinrock said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship.

Darpa officials, who declined repeated requests for interviews, disputed the university researchers. The agency, which responded only in writing to questions, contended that the criticisms leveled by the advisory committee and other researchers were not accurate and that it had always supported a mix of longer- and shorter-term research.

"The key is a focus on high-risk, high-payoff research," Jan Walker, a Darpa spokeswoman, stated in an e-mail message. Given the threat from terrorism and the demands on troops in Iraq, she wrote, Darpa is rightly devoting more attention to "quick reaction" projects that draw on the fruits of earlier science and technology to produce useful prototypes as soon as possible.

The Pentagon shift has put added pressure on the other federal agencies that support basic information technology research.

At the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation, the number of research proposals has soared from 2,000 in 1999 to 6,500 last year. Peter A. Freeman, its director, said that the sharp rise was partly attributable to declines in Pentagon support.

"Darpa has moved away from direct funding to universities," Mr. Freeman said. "Even when they do directly fund, some of the conditions and constraints seem to be pretty onerous. There is no question that the community doesn't like what the head of Darpa has been doing, but he has his reasons and his prerogatives."

The transformation of Darpa has been led by Anthony J. Tether, a Stanford-educated electrical engineer who has had a long career moving between executive positions at military contractors and the Pentagon.

Last year, Dr. Tether's new approach led to a series of cutbacks at a number of computer science departments. Program financing for a Darpa project known as Network Embedded Sensor Technology - intended to develop networks of sensors that could potentially be deployed on battlefields to locate and track enemy tanks and soldiers - has been cut back or ended on as many as five university campuses and shifted instead to traditional military contractors.

"The network has now become as vital as the weapons themselves," Dr. Tether said in an appearance before the advisory committee last year, testifying that secrecy had become more essential for a significant part of the agency's work.

That has created problems for university researchers. Several scientists have been instructed, for example, to remove previously published results from Web sites. And at U.C.L.A. and Berkeley, Darpa officials tried to classify software research done under a contract that specified that the results would be distributed under so-called open-source licensing terms.

"We were requested to remove all publicly accessible pointers to software developed under the program," said Deborah Estrin, director of embedded network sensing at U.C.L.A. "This is the first time in 15 years that I have no Darpa funding."

At Berkeley, Edward A. Lee, who was recently named chairman of the computer science department, agreed not to publish a final report at Darpa's request, even though he told officials the data had already become widely available.

Despite the complaints, some pioneering researchers support the changes being driven by Dr. Tether and say they are necessary to prepare the nation for a long battle against elusive enemies.

"There are pressures and demands on Darpa to be relevant," said Robert Kahn, a former Darpa administrator who is now president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. "People think it should stay the same, but times have changed."

Still, a number of top scientists argue that the Pentagon's shift in priorities could not have come at a worse time. Most American companies have largely ended basic research and have begun to outsource product research and development extensively even as investments in Asia and Europe are rising quickly.

And many computer scientists dispute Darpa's reasoning that fighting wars demands a shift away from basic research. During the Vietnam War, they say, Darpa kept its commitment to open-ended computer research, supporting things like a laboratory in the hills behind Stanford University dedicated to the far-out idea of building computing machines to mimic human capabilities.

John McCarthy founded the Stanford artificial research lab in 1964, helping to turn it into a wellspring for some of Silicon Valley's most important companies, from Xerox Parc to Apple to Intel.

"American leadership in computer science and in applications has benefited more from the longer-term work," Mr. McCarthy said, "than from the deliverables."

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E-Mails Reveal Fraud in Nuclear Site Study

NYTimes.com

E-Mails Reveal Fraud in Nuclear Site Study
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: April 2, 2005


WASHINGTON, April 1 - Government employees studying whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be a suitable place to bury nuclear waste acknowledged in e-mail messages to each other that they had made up details about how they had done their research in order to appear to meet quality standards, according to some of the messages made public on Friday.

Some of the frank exchanges included instructions to erase them. The Energy Department, which is trying to open a waste repository at the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, disclosed the existence of the e-mail messages two weeks ago. On Friday, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform released dozens of pages of the messages.

One analyst wrote that a computer program had generated data he could not explain, so he withheld it from the quality assurance department, known as QA.

"Don't look at the last 4 lines. Those are a mystery," wrote the scientist, who the subcommittee said was an employee of the United States Geological Survey, a part of the Interior Department. "I've deleted the lines from the 'official' QA version of the files."

"In the end I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used," he wrote. The message was dated November 1999.

B. John Garrick, the chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a group of independent experts established by Congress to monitor the Energy Department, said that it was too soon to draw conclusions but that "it is disturbing to see such loosely framed discussions between scientists."

Before releasing the messages, the subcommittee removed the names and titles of the senders and the recipients, and deleted other words that made the full context of some of the messages difficult to ascertain. But the theme was that employees were performing work they did not believe would meet standards set by the quality assurance inspectors, and were sometimes falsifying their work in ways that they believed would satisfy the inspectors.

In a message dated April 22, 1999, a scientist wrote that he did some calculations by hand and that the computer program he wrote, presumably to do those calculations, "is not in the system." He wrote that he feared he would be "taken to the cleaners" by the inspectors because his work did not refer to an established procedure laid out in a scientific notebook, and he asked if he should create such a notebook "and back-date the whole thing??"

The author of another message noted in January 2000 that he could not document the way certain work was done. "I can start making something up, but then the (deleted) projects will need to go on hold," he wrote.

In an e-mail message in March 2000, a government worker wrote that he did not know when software he had used had been installed. "So I've made up the dates and names," he wrote. "If they need more proof I will be happy to make up more stuff, as long as its not a video recording of the software being installed."

The chairman of the panel that released the messages, Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, pointed out that the Energy Department and the White House had repeatedly said that their recommendation of the Yucca Mountain site was based on "sound science."

"If the project has been based upon science, and the science is not correct, it puts the whole project in jeopardy," said Mr. Porter, a longtime opponent of Yucca Mountain plan. "I believe these e-mails show science is not driving the project; it's expedience to get the job done."

In a well-done scientific investigation, he said, the methods used to derive predictions about crucial factors like water infiltration should be transparent and reproducible.

A lawyer who represents the State of Nevada, Joseph Egan, said that after reading the messages, "you can't even say it's wrong; you have to say it's not reliable."

"You don't know how badly they've fudged this stuff," Mr. Egan said.

Some of the correspondents explicitly discuss problems and say they do not believe that they make any material difference to the ability of the mountain, a volcanic structure on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, to hold the waste for thousands of years.

But the issue of quality control is crucial to the Energy Department because to open a repository, it must win the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has scuttled some projects because of quality assurance problems. In one case in the 1980's, the commission forced the owners of a nuclear reactor to abandon their project, after they had spent nearly $2 billion and when the reactor was said to be 98 percent complete, because of questions about whether some welds had been made properly and inspected adequately by qualified inspectors.

The subcommittee on the federal work force, which released the e-mail messages, plans to hold a hearing on Yucca Mountain on Tuesday. The witnesses include several prominent opponents, including Gov. Kenny Guinn of Nevada and Senator Harry Reid, also of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

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