[ OUR OPINION ]

Iraq uranium blunder
should prompt inquiry

THE ISSUE The CIA director said his agency OK'd the text of the speech by President Bush that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa when analysts considered the intelligence to be unreliable.

PRESIDENT Bush was wrong in citing British intelligence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa, but the flaw in his State of the Union address in January does not mean he deliberately misled the American people. Nor does it mean that the United States lacked a basis for going to war against Saddam Hussein's regime. However, the blunder damages the credibility of U.S. and British intelligence, creating a risk in citing intelligence reports to support future policies.

This debacle should prompt CIA Director George Tenet's resignation and a full inquiry by Congress. It should not cause the American people to conclude that the Bush administration fabricated evidence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. United Nations weapons inspectors had determined that Iraq had large amounts of chemical agents and anthrax in the mid-1990s and refused to account for them since then. Whether Iraq could reasonably be assumed to possess such weapons should no longer be an issue.

In his address to Congress and the American people, Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." No mention was made that the CIA had tried last September to persuade the British to abandon the conclusion. Although the CIA had reports of Iraq trying to buy uranium from three African countries, it warned the State Department that it questioned the accuracy of Niger being involved and reports about the other two countries were "sketchy," according to the Washington Post.

Early drafts of the speech did not give the source of the information as Britain and did specify Niger as a nation where Iraq sought to buy a form of uranium known as yellow cake. After changes were made -- apparently to add Britain and delete Niger -- the CIA cleared the speech.

Now Tenet says, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president." He admitted in a written statement on Friday that "this was a mistake."

Seven days after Bush's speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell made his presentation for military action in Iraq to the United Nations Security Council. He made no reference to intelligence about Iraq seeking to buy uranium from an African country. Powell says he decided the intelligence was not sufficiently reliable. Powell should have been candid about his skepticism.

---

BACK TO TOP
|

Court should protect
marijuana prescriptions

THE ISSUE The Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court for permission to strip prescription licenses from doctors who recommend marijuana to patients.

FRUSTRATED in its attempt to block the use of marijuana for medical purposes, the Justice Department is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to punish doctors who prescribe it. The department claims that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration should be allowed to revoke prescriptions licenses from physicians who recommend marijuana to their patients, even though Hawaii and eight other states allow marijuana for medical uses. The high court should maintain its previous stance that federal drug agents should not be allowed to usurp states' traditional role in regulation of doctors.

The Bush administration's frustration reached the boiling point last month when a federal judge in California sentenced Ed Rosenthal, a prominent advocate of medical marijuana, to a single day in jail for the felony conviction of cultivating and distributing the substance. Jurors in Rosenthal's trial had been denied information about the purposes of Rosenthal's marijuana and were outraged when they learned of those facts after the trial.

Solicitor General Theodore Olson is challenging a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked the punishment or investigation of physicians who tell patients that pot could help them. A policy put in place during the Clinton administration requires revocation of federal prescription licenses of doctors who recommend marijuana.

Attorney General John Ashcroft used a similar tactic last year in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine Oregon's law allowing physician-assisted suicide. He maintained that a doctor's lethal prescription to a terminally ill patient violated the federal Controlled Substances Act's requirement that drugs be used for a "legitimate medical purpose." In a majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the task of safeguarding "liberty interests" associated with that issue should be entrusted to the "laboratory" of the states.

The same can be said of states that allow physicians to prescribe the use of medical marijuana to relieve their patients' pain from AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma and other illnesses. Those benefits were confirmed in a 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, commissioned by then-President Clinton.