Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

Runaway Raft on the Tigris.

President Bush unveiled his new "five-point plan" for Iraq during a speech at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and offered to destroy the Abu Ghraib prison if Iraqis want him to; the president also promised to give Iraq a modern prison system.¹ The Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that 1 in 75 American men were in prison or jail last year, and it² was reported that interrogators from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, went to Iraq last fall and trained military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison.³ Iyad Alawi, a doctor who has long been on the CIA payroll, was chosen to be the new Iraqi prime minister when "limited sovereignty" is handed over to an interim "caretaker" government on June 30, though⁴ American officials and the Iraqi Governing Council were still fighting over who would be the interim president.⁵ Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and other right-wing American allies of Ahmad Chalabi met with Condoleezza Rice to announce their displeasure at what they called the recent smear campaign against the Bush Administration's former favorite Iraqi.⁶ A Chilean court stripped former dictator Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution.⁷ The International Atomic Energy Agency said that looters have carried off whole buildings from Iraqi military and industrial sites,⁸ and police in Philadelphia found some children playing with a bazooka.⁹

Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the American public for help finding terrorists who he said are planning to "to hit the United States hard"; a number of officials criticized the announcement and said that the government had no new information about terror threats.¹⁰ The FBI sent out a warning of an "imminent" terrorist attack but then retracted the warning within a few hours.¹¹ A report by the General Accounting Office found that government agencies are engaged in at least 199 data-mining projects, 36 of which involve personal information taken from private sources.¹² The governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency in six counties because of the "potential danger" posed by demonstrators at the Group of 8 meeting.¹³ Russia ordered its border guards to be nice.¹⁴ Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel was still trying to convince his coalition to go along with plans to withdraw from part of the Gaza Strip, and he threatened to fire cabinet members, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, who oppose him.¹⁵ A British journalist who was arrested in Israel for talking to Mordechai Vanunu, the scientist who exposed Israel's nuclear weapons program, was released from custody and complained that he had been stuck in a dungeon with excrement-covered walls; Vanunu was released last month after 18 years in prison and has been ordered not to talk with foreigners.¹⁶ As part of a land-claim settlement with the Canadian government, the Inuit people of northern Labrador agreed to form a 28,000-square-mile autonomous territory called Nunatsiavut.¹⁷ Suspected Al Qaeda militants killed 22 people and took many hostages in an attack on the oil industry town of Khobar, in eastern Saudi Arabia.¹⁸ An Army Corps of Engineers email revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney's office "coordinated" Halliburton's multi-billion-dollar Iraq contract; Cheney has said that he had nothing to do with the contract, which was awarded without competing bids.¹⁹ A performer with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus fell to her death in front of an audience.²⁰ The New York Times published an extraordinary editors' note admitting that the newspaper had been manipulated by members of the Bush Administration and by Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi into running false stories (especially on the subject of Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) that advanced the administration's war agenda and had failed to follow up aggressively on many of those stories, and had failed, in those instances when it did follow up, to make prominent note of the fact that the stories were false. The retraction was published on page A10, where many readers would fail to notice it.²¹

A researcher at the University of Michigan found evidence that the large increase in asthma and allergies over the last twenty years has been caused by antibiotics.²² A Russian scientist died of Ebola fever, and authorities²³ in Texas killed 24,000 chickens after avian flu was found on a farm near Sulphur Springs.²⁴ The first U.S. case of West Nile virus in 2004 was reported in New Mexico.²⁵ Kirin Brewery Co. announced that it had genetically engineered a cow, which has not yet been born, that will be immune to mad cow disease.²⁶ Thirteen million pounds of raw almonds were recalled because of salmonella contamination.²⁷ MTV declined to air advertisements for Super Size Me, a documentary about a man who eats nothing but McDonald's food for a month, because it was determined that the ads unjustly disparage fast food.²⁸ Malibu banned smoking on the beach.²⁹ It was reported that Las Vegas is still growing.³⁰ Scientists discovered in a seven-year study that mice with the highest metabolic rates lived 35 percent longer, a finding that challenges the usual understanding of the relationship of metabolism and life span.³¹ China sent one of the Buddha's fingers to Hong Kong.³² Armin Meiwes, the famous German cannibal, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.³³ Doctors in Kentucky, who have been practicing face transplants on dead bodies, asked for permission to give a living person a new face.³⁴