From Talking Points Memo

I am a little surprised that the White House's new insistence on a joint private meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney hasn't elicited more notice.

In its Wednesday editorial the Times writes ...

Yesterday, Mr. Bush's lawyer told the [9/11] Commission that Ms. Rice would testify. And after months of unacceptable delay, the lawyer said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would also talk to the entire commission in private, not under oath. But the panel had to pay a price: it agreed, at the administration's insistence, that after Ms. Rice testifies, it will not call her back or ask any other White House official to testify in public. So the Times doesn't even mention the jointness issue or any problems it could raise.

Now, amidst all the stonewalling and foot-dragging and character assassination I guess this matter won't get top-billing. But just what is behind this demand -- to which the Commission has apparently agreed?

All the other arguments adduced for ducking the Commission investigators have had at least some conceivable constitutional basis, however weak: testimony in private, testimony not under oath, privilege for White House aides, etc.

(One might note that there will be no recording kept of this meeting -- just one sore-wristed Commission staffer allowed to take written notes of what is said by the ten Commission members, the president and vice president.)

In any case, clearly there cannot be any matter of constitutional precedent or principle involved in needing the president and vice president speak to the Commission together.

So, again, what's the deal?

Only three scenarios or explanations make sense to me.

The first -- and most generous -- explanation is that this is simply another way to further dilute the Commission's ability to ask questions. If, say, the meeting lasts three hours, that's three hours to ask questions of both of them rather than three hours to ask questions of each -- as might be the case in separate meetings.

That wouldn't be any great coup for the White House. But it would be one more impediment to throw in front of the Commission's work, which would probably be a source of some joy for the White House.

From here the possible explanations go down hill -- in every respect -- pretty quickly.

Explanation number two would be that this is a fairly elementary -- and, one imagines, pretty effective -- way to keep the two of them from giving contradictory answers to the Commission's questions. It helps them keep their stories straight.

(It's a basic part of any criminal investigation -- which, of course, this isn't -- to interview everyone separately, precisely so that people can't jigger their stories into consistency on the fly.)

The third explanation is that the White House does not trust the president to be alone with the Commission members for any great length of time without getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip. And Cheney's there to make sure nothing goes wrong.

These last two possibilities do, I grant you, paint the President and his White House in a rather dark light. But I would be curious if anyone can come up with another explanation for this odd demand.
-- Josh Marshall
- posted by Richard @ 9:01 PM

 

Bon Mots

The Washington Post's Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some of the 2003 winners:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
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- posted by Richard @ 8:22 AM

 

The Deal: Dr. Rice's Testimony, Executive Priviledge, and the 9/11 Commission

Of Privilege and Politics
NY Times Editorial
Published: March 31, 2004

President Bush finally agreed yesterday to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly and under oath to the panel investigating the 9/11 attacks. But Mr. Bush did the right thing only under intense political pressure and after he had already undermined the principles he claimed to be upholding. His reversal came with disturbing conditions attached, wrapped up in a volley of spin. All in all, it leaves the impression of a White House less interested in helping the 9/11 panel perform its vital task than in protecting the president's political flanks.

There is merit to the argument that Mr. Bush's nearest adviser on war, terrorism and other such momentous issues is entitled to some confidentiality. But if upholding that principle was the administration's concern, Ms. Rice was obliged in return to show public discretion. Instead, she became part of the president's re-election machine.

The regularity with which Ms. Rice has popped up on television talk shows has become a running joke. It's hard to claim the need to protect your privacy when you're spending as much time doing television interviews as Ms. Rice has recently. She has been leading the administration's attack on Richard Clarke, the former presidential adviser who has criticized Mr. Bush's record on terrorism.

While Bush administration officials have accused Mr. Clarke of lying to promote a book, the White House has worked to unseal Congressional testimony by Mr. Clarke that had been delivered with the same understanding of confidentiality that Ms. Rice claimed. And when the 9/11 commissioners attempted to fulfill their mandate from Congress by trying to resolve the differences between Ms. Rice's version of reality and Mr. Clarke's, the president balked at allowing her to testify as Mr. Clarke did, under oath.

Yesterday, Mr. Bush's lawyer told the commission that Ms. Rice would testify. And after months of unacceptable delay, the lawyer said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would also talk to the entire commission in private, not under oath. But the panel had to pay a price: it agreed, at the administration's insistence, that after Ms. Rice testifies, it will not call her back or ask any other White House official to testify in public.

The White House's initial refusal to allow Ms. Rice to testify and its cynical use of a confidential adviser as a public accuser would have been bad enough. But they fit an unpleasant pattern. This president has repeatedly abused his executive privilege while seeking to hide behind it, starting when Mr. Cheney invoked that privilege to gather business executives in secret to draft the administration's energy policy.

President Bush may be right in holding that this battle has harmed his important, but limited, right to executive privilege. If so, the wounds were self-inflicted.
- posted by Richard @ 10:18 PM

 

Internet Hoaxes, Chain Letters, et al

Note: Over the past few years we have all received numerous emails which consisted of some hoax, whether it was the "Nigerian Oil", "Madlyn Murray O'hair vs FCC", "Poor Girl Cancer Victim" or other warning or appeal that the sender forwarded to our email box, many times with the name or email address of a friend attached.

For a fuller introduction to the range of these emails, we have the CAIC webpage that speaks to the matter in plain language.

However, my take on this has more to do with several factors only marginally addressed in that article, which I refer to as the "Hook, Line, and Sinker" email messaging system. First, is the "hook" where the email author makes a statement that the reader responds to; usually about the primacy of Christian based activities such as prayer in the school, religious programming, or indecency on the airwaves. Lately we have seen this include an opposition to "partial birth abortions", "gay marriage", and other controversial social issues.

The "line" attempts to suggest a fault with current activities, address a perceived need, cast blame on some entity, or in some other manner substantiate the thesis of the "hook".

The "sinker" is the appeal, where the chain letter or hoax email recipient is encouraged to add their name to a list to be forwarded to someone, who it is suggested, can provide a solution, or to forward the original message to their email buddies for their edification and combined action.

It seems these emails depend on two related phenomenon: a) the veracity of the "hook" requires a Judeo-Christian religious bias, and b) the recipient is expected to acknowledge a responsibility to address this matter in an evangelical manner. Whereas the "line" almost always includes an appeal to authority, narrowly selected.

But what is most striking is the "sinker" component. It is almost impossible to believe that anyone in a position of power would grant favored status to an email with 10,000 signatures attached over one with 10 signatures. A legally valid petition requires a confirmable signature which is not provided by affixing one's name to an email list of names. Any moderately skilled spammer can spit out a list of a million names with mostly matching email addresses in short order. Any auditor attempting to verify signatures on an email chain letter would throw in the towel long before getting to Signature # 100.

On the other hand, when ten thousand people send a personal letter or non-templated email to a legislator the import will be several orders of magnitude greater than an email containing ten thousand signatures. That should be obvious; but perhaps something else explains the "pile-on" chain letter phenomenon. Two likely explanations might very simply be standard features of group dynamics, such as: affixing a signature indicates an acceptance of the "hook, line, and sinker", or an acknowledgement that their individual voice carries little weight unless used in combination with other voices, or is an attempt to indicate support in the least threatening manner possible.

The Website: chainletters.net, lists 1,148 chain letters in current circulation. By topic they include: 141 dealing with money, 111 dealing with sex, 84 dealing with church or prayer, 15 dealing with President Bush, and 2 dealing with tolerance. Not exactly the distribution one would expect, or perhaps it is exactly what one would expect.

- posted by Richard @ 9:09 PM

 

Mao's "Three Rules and the Eight Remarks"

The Complete Treatise on Guerilla Warfare by Chairman Mao"

Rules:
All actions are subject to command.
Do not steal from the people.
Be neither selfish nor unjust.

Remarks:
Replace the door when you leave the house.
Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.
Be courteous.
Be honest in your transactions.
Return what you borrow.
Replace what you break.
Do not bathe in the presence of women.
Do not without authority search those you arrest.

"Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live. "

Note: This is the biggest difference between guerilla fighters of the past and the newer crop of Islamic fundamentalist fighters: the former considered non-combattants as one of the main sources of their power, and worked to ingratiate themselves into the fabric of the common man's daily lives. Al Quieda operatives consider all who are not "pure, or like us" as legimate targets. They routinely execute captives who have surrendered. Their stated goals are not compatible with international codes of human rights, but rather depend on ancient religious laws and practices that relegate vast segments of society to inferior social standing, while granting their followers favors and virtues completely at odds with socialist or democratic principles.
- posted by Richard @ 7:34 PM

 

How Europeans See the USA

What Do Europeans Like and Dislike about the United States?

New five-country survey of Western European adults shows few dislike Americans or the United States but most dislike President Bush and his foreign policies.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. and LONDON, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

When people think about foreign countries their views are generally not all positive or all negative. They usually see both good things, which they like, and others, which they dislike. This is certainly true of European attitudes to the United States today.

When people in the five largest European countries think of the United States, they tend, on balance, to feel positively about the American people, American films and television programs, the quality of life in America, and how Americans do business. On the other hand, large majorities of Europeans have negative opinions of President Bush, U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and of recent American foreign policy. So the phrase "anti-American" is capable of many meanings and is potentially misleading.

This ability to differentiate is particularly strong when Europeans consider the people, as compared to leaders and government policies of the United States.

-- Only 13% of these Europeans, on average, have negative opinions of the American people, and only 33% have negative opinions of the United States.

-- Fully 70% have negative opinions of President Bush; 69% have negative opinions of U.S. policies in Iraq, and 62% have negative opinions of American foreign policy since 2000, when President Bush came to power.

Other aspects of the United States which are viewed positively, on average, by pluralities in the five countries are:
-- American films and television (48% positive, 22% negative);
-- The quality of life in America (45% positive, 21% negative); and
-- "How Americans do business" (37% positive, 24% negative).

On the other hand, majorities of Europeans in the five countries have negative opinions not only of U.S. foreign policy and President Bush but also of American food (56% negative, 17% positive). We suspect that this is strongly influenced by perceptions of American fast food chains that are, of course, pervasive across Europe.

These are some of the results of a poll conducted online by Harris Interactive and its European subsidiary HI Europe between February 27 and March 4, 2004 among 2,637 adults in Great Britain; 2,547 in France; 1,273 in Germany; 2,407 in Spain; and 1,301 in Italy. It should be noted that the survey was completed just before the bombing in Madrid that killed more than 200 people.

Most Americans are proud of traditional American values, American justice and the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore many Americans believe that other people share these favorable opinions and look up to the United States, its
freedoms and its system of government as a "shining city on a hill."

The reality is rather different in the five European countries surveyed. Only a quarter of these Europeans hold favorable views of American justice and governmental systems. Using the averages across the five countries,
pluralities hold negative views of American courts and systems of justice (by 41% to 26%) and of the American system of government (by 40% to 26%). Attitudes to American values are less negative but not strongly positive.
A modest 34% to 30% plurality rates American values positively. Here, as in other questions, there are big differences among opinions in the five countries. In general, the Italians have the most positive views of the American system of government (50% positive, 20% negative), of American values (44% positive, 23% negative), and American justice (44% positive, 23% negative). The Germans and French are the most negative on these two criteria.

The average results for the five countries are based on very different responses in each country. In general, the Italians and, to a somewhat lesser extent the British, have the most positive attitudes to the United States, while the French and the Germans are the most negative. Spanish attitudes toward the United States (as measured just before the recent Madrid bombings) mostly fall somewhere in the middle, closer to the five-country averages. Some exceptions to this pattern are that the Spanish people feel as positively as the British and Italians toward the American people, American multinational companies and American movies and television.

- posted by Richard @ 6:53 PM

 

911 days between WTC and Madrid Attacks
Al-Jazeera - 3/17/2004 5:09:00 PM GMT

Coincidence? There was exactly 911 days between the World Trade Centre attacks on 9/11 and the recent bombings in Madrid that left hundreds dead. What do you think, is this a coincidence or is someone trying to tell us something.
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Spanish police probing the deadly Madrid train bombings found the fingerprints on Saturday of two leading suspects.

Police also recovered detonators and traces of dynamite inside the house near Morata de Tajuna, 20 miles southeast of Madrid, Spanish media reported. The fingerprints found in the house were from Jamal Zougam and Abderrahim Zbakh, two Moroccans considered prime suspects in the bombings, which killed 190 people and wounded more than 1,800, radio station Onda Cero and Spanish national television reported.

Zougam and Zbakh, who were arrested in the first week after Spain's worst terror attack, are being held on charges of mass murder. Spanish court documents have linked Zougam to members of an al-Qaida cell in Spain. A French private investigator told The Associated Press that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to al-Qaida and suspected of heading a terrorist network in Iraq, is now believed to have been the brains behind the Madrid railway attacks.

Jean-Charles Brisard said Spanish officials told him some suspects held in the March 11 attacks were in contact with al-Zarqawi as recently as a month or two before the bombings. Brisard is a recognized expert on Islamic terrorism. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on the issue and has strong connections with police investigators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Spanish investigators believe six or seven of the 18 people now in custody in Spain helped plan the Madrid attacks and that al-Zarqawi was behind the plot, Brisard said. Authorities have analyzed a videotape found in Madrid in which a man claiming to speak on behalf of al-Qaida said the group carried out the Madrid attacks in reprisal for Spain's backing of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Police believe the attackers used the Spanish house, discovered a week ago, to prepare the explosives and stuff them into knapsacks, media reports said. The Interior Ministry did not answer calls seeking confirmation Saturday.

Police have arrested 21 people since the bombs ripped through four commuter trains during morning rush-hour. Twelve of the 21 suspects have been charged with mass murder or belonging to or collaborating with a terrorist group. Three former suspects have been released and another six suspects will go before a judge at the National Court next week.

Also Saturday, Judge Del Olmo lifted the solitary confinement order he imposed on nine of the 12 suspects charged, Onda Cero said. Three detainees, including Zougam, have not had access to lawyers or family since being arrested March 13, two days after the bombings. No official at the jail or Interior Ministry could be contacted to confirm the report. No explanation was given for the lifting of the confinement order.

The national news agency Efe said Del Olmo visited the jail Friday with some witnesses of the bombings for a recognition lineup of the detainees. There were no details on the result of the lineup. The probe has spread to Germany, which, along with Spain, is believed to have been a key staging ground for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In Germany, police raided an apartment Thursday in Darmstadt where a Moroccan suspect arrested this week in Madrid stayed briefly last year. The 28-year-old man, who was not identified, is suspected of membership in a foreign terrorist organization, a prosecutor said. But German officials said they had no evidence the Madrid attacks were planned or prepared in Germany.

Morocco, the native country of at least nine of the suspects, reported its first arrests in the case, although a senior official said they had not yielded significant information.
- posted by Richard @ 8:56 PM

 

The Richard Clark Affair

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth
Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 3:22 PM PT

Clarke: a credible critic

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.

First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he's too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, "Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack."

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn't mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush's secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department's politico-military bureau. (Bush's NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we'll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel—not a point the Bush family's political savior is likely to make in an election season. (For details on this unwritten chapter and on why Clarke hasn't talked to me for over 15 years, click here.)

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument—made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS's 60 Minutes and PBS's Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission—is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden's propaganda—that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country—and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke's charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan's, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, designated Clarke as the "crisis manager;" he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating—in some cases, directing—the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they're nothing new. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron Suskind's* The Price of Loyalty, Bush's top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann's new book about Bush's war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke's importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, "Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank." At the same time, the paper denies—again, contrary to the book—that he was demoted: He "continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism."

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn't a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton's NCC, he ran the "Principals Committee" meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals' meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke's book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn't need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here's how Clarke describes those meetings:

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. ... We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was "very close" to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point "that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda."

Here's how Clarke describes that exchange:

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies' Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

- posted by Richard @ 8:28 PM

 

Call to Indict Sharon Ignites Political Storm
By JAMES BENNET
NY Times International
Published: March 29, 2004

JERUSALEM, March 28 — Israel's state prosecutor cast a shadow over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday when, the Israeli news media reported, she recommended that the attorney general indict him on charges of taking bribes from a developer.
- posted by Richard @ 7:40 PM