What Went Wrong

“Bob, I’m sorry to wake you up.”

“That’s OK.”

“Bob, we have a hurricane.”

Over the next two days, as Andrew huffed up to Category 3, then Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, Bob Sheets rallied his staff, battened down the center, went on the tube to warn Floridians. About 1 a.m. one night last week, the wind screamed like a siren, and the entire 12-floor center off Old Dixie Highway began to shudder. The air conditioner broke. The electricity went out. Someone turned on a gas generator to get the computers back up. About 5 a.m., the anemometer clocked a gust of 164 miles per hour. With a shriek of tearing metal, the center’s radar unit, a spinning dish antenna inside a protective dome, blew off the roof-and disappeared into the maw of a Category 5 catastrophe.

Farther south, Tom McEvoy, a Coral Gables police officer, had taped the windows and pruned the trees of his Cutler Ridge house. With his daughter, Amanda, 6, his son Chris, 5, and his ex-wife, he decided to call Andrew’s bluff. The wind woke them, drove them downstairs. The first window blew, showering the living room with glass. They fled from room to room, the windows exploding all around them. Finally, all four, with their Rottweiler and a German shepherd mix, jammed into the bathroom. Frozen with terror, the kids crying, they sat through the night while Andrew, roaring like a bulldozer, noisily dismantled the house. When the howling stopped, they gingerly peered out at Cutler Ridge. What they saw walloped McEvoy’s mind: “It looked like an atomic bomb hit.”

The stories from Andrew’s ground zero summoned up a kind of terror the country had not felt since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Donna Beckham held her child in her arms, crooning softly, “Yes, baby, house broke,” as she sifted the aluminum scraps that had been their trailer. “In two hours, I lost my house, my job and my dog,” said her husband, Jerry. In the subdivision of Westbrook South, Chris Heagan had been crouched in a closet with his 9-month-old son, his wife and their 5-year-old daughter when five-foot chunks of metal began slicing by them. “You haven’t lived through anything until you find a trailer flying into your house,” he recalls. “There are no words to describe the fear.”

The tag on the front bumper of Kate Hale’s red Cutlass Calais said: BE HURRICANE PREPARED. As Andrew approached, the director of Dade County’s Office of Emergency Management had said a prayer: “Please, God, if this one is ours, help us all to do the best job. Help people listen.” She weathered the storm in a war room full of telephones connecting her to state, county, federal and private disaster-relief agencies. When the storm blew west over the Gulf of Mexico to Louisiana, she called the State Division of Emergency Management in Tallahassee and said, “Send us everything you’ve got.” Then she went out to the airport when President George Bush, Gov. Lawton Chiles and Wallace Stickney, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), arrived to inspect the damage. Three days later, still waiting for the help the politicians had promised at their photo ops, she called her own press conference. “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?” she asked. “We need water. We need people. For God’s sake, where are they.?”

A cri de coeur. A state of shock. A slow double take. In recoiling from the wrath of Andrew, the country absorbed a second jolt. President Bush said it was a bad idea to “play the blame game.” In at least one sense, everyone could agree with him about that. Andrew was what the insurance companies call “an act of God,” a happening for which no mere human can be held to account; and Force 5 hurricanes are so rare, one or two every century or so, that it’s no wonder people get out of practice at coping with them. Still, some unsettling questions remained. The president went to Florida and Louisiana to show that he cared. The political issue, of course, was not how he felt but how he performed. On that score, Americans seemed a bit confused. A NEWSWEEK Poll showed that by 54-27 percent, they approved of the way he handled Andrew. But by 57-35 percent, they also thought he worried more about the problems of people in Iraq and Bosnia than about Americans hit by hurricanes. The more significant issue ran far deeper. Caught within Andrew’s vicious centripetal whirl, had ordinary Americans pulled together-or flown apart?

Given the force of the storm, some distortions seemed inevitable. When the gusts hit 170 miles per hour, when debris starts shooting through your windows, when your roof lifts off and the rain cascades in, it destroys any sense of the normal. Mobile homes crumpled like beer cans, and conventional bungalows smashed into pickup sticks, symbolized how Andrew had made one zone of society come unglued. Disasters penetrate like lasers, revealing weaknesses beneath the smooth surfaces of a community. Andrew ripped an area where population outstripped social infrastructure. Mushroom development had brought cheap-jack construction. Building codes were pegged to lesser storms. “By cramming as many people as we did into this place, we were setting ourselves up for a tragedy,” says Carl Hiaasen, a Miami Herald columnist.

How much can the government do to see you through such moments? A week before the storm, Maj. Gen. John Heldstab, director of military disaster relief for the United States Army, began tracking Andrew as it blew west from Africa. He and a small staff of three officers began looking at what military equipment should be prepositioned in case the hurricane struck the American coast. Working from precedents set by earlier storms like Hugo, which did $5.6 billion damage on the East Coast three years ago, they compiled lists of items like rations, cots, blankets, tents, water, electric generators, transport planes and ‘dozers to remove debris. Among other things, the military had 63 million Meals Ready to Eat within airlift distance of Florida. The command team was ready to move a week in advance. As one Pentagon planner put it, “We were leaning so far forward our noses were on the ground.”

By the time the hurricane slammed into Florida, the Pentagon had set up a 24-hour-a-day special task force at the Army Operations Center. The idea was to coordinate relief supplies; but the first requests were routine: health teams, 234,000 MRES, some choppers, portable lighting equipment, flatbed trucks and bulldozers, communications equipment. By the end of Monday, state officials in Florida did not have a clear idea of the damage in south Florida. “Chiles was telling the federal government ‘We need your help’,” recalls one Pentagon aide. “We were saying, ‘Fine, it’s a big government. What do you need and where do you need it?”’ The civilians hesitated. Pentagon tacticians complain that it took 48 hours for state and federal officials to grasp the extent of the damage. “We had no idea what it was like in south Florida,” said one military planner. “Neither did the governor.”

The immediate problem was that FEMA, nerve center for the relief effort, appeared to have gone brain dead. Jimmy Carter set up the agency in 1979 to provide a single point of accountability for the federal government’s disaster response. Its duties were to train emergency workers, organize civil defense, plan for national emergencies and pay the lion’s share of relief costs when the president declared a disaster area. Under the Reagan administration, the agency focused on nuclear attacks, an ideological cast that undermined its capability to handle natural disasters. Critics say it became a dumping ground for paying off low-level political debts; scandals demoralized its staff. After the agency bobbled relief efforts during Hurricane Hugo, Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina was so furious he called FEMA “the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I’ve ever seen.” After Andrew, it lost two critical days before realizing how bad things were in Florida. “FEMA isn’t up to the job,” charged one outraged relief official. He added that he had to “bully them a hell of a lot” just to get anything done.

As Andrew bore down on Florida, the agency did manage to lumber into action. It activated an emergency operations center crammed with computers and maps; it notified 26 federal agencies and the American Red Cross to get ready; it immersed itself in a 27-page Federal Response Plan larded with appendixes. “The whole thing seems to have fallen apart,” said one disaster consultant. The agency was particularly proud of the 800 number it set up for Andrew’s victims. The device failed to impress survivors of Hugo in Charleston, S.C. “Excuse me? This is an improvement?” asked one of them. “And what about the victims whose homes were blown away?” In any case, callers registering losses and trying to locate missing relatives immediately tied up the toll-free line. By the end of the week a new message advised the desperate to consider phoning back in a few days if they had insurance or if their property was not extensively damaged; to call the nearest Red Cross office if the need was urgent; or to wait on the line, in which case, a busy signal greeted them.

Within the first day of the storm, the Pentagon was prepared to airlift supplies that were not requisitioned for another three days. Pentagon officials complained that the requests they got from Governor Chiles, funneled through FEMA, were for hurricane damage much less severe than what Andrew had actually inflicted. They added that FEMA should have been primed to figure out for Chiles what he needed in south Florida. Instead, one of them said, the agency “was still getting its act together as of Tuesday.” By Wednesday, General Heldstab saw that once FEMA and state officials pulled themselves together, they were going to draw heavily on the military. He alerted the U.S. Forces Command in Atlanta, which telephoned the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.

Still, FEMA’s executives and state officials dithered. Over the next 24 hours, they only asked the Pentagon to provide minimal aid: more air force C-5 flights to transport supplies, airlift controllers, a 500-kilowatt power generator, 20 portable light sets. FEMA finally had the Army Corps of Engineers contract out for $3 million worth of plastic roofing, power generators and potable water. But bureaucratic dawdling over contracts and deliveries stalled just about everything. In Florida, angry victims asked loudly how the United States could move so swiftly and sure in Kuwait and Iraq and so sluggishly in Dade County. Pentagon officers, furious, had to defend themselves after civilian politicians and agencies seemed willing to let the military take the blame.

The politics of the hurricane blew more wildly than any anemometer could measure. The storm found Jim Baker, the president’s top strategist, coming to the White House for the first day of his new job as chief of staff. At about the same time, the president was talking to reporters on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base before boarding Air Force One for campaign stops in New Jersey and Connecticut. He declared Florida a disaster area, expressed his sympathy, said that help from FEMA was on the way. Aboard the flight northward he called Baker. “I want to go,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours and I’ll check it out,” Baker replied. When the Defense Department reported that Miami’s Opa-Locka airport wasn’t secure, and the Department of Transportation said it couldn’t guarantee transport on the ground, Baker phoned Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood–Secretary Dick Cheney stayed on vacation–and Transportation Secretary Andrew Card. “We’re coming,” he said. “Make it happen.”

They did, and the president was able to step off his plane in Miami at 6 p.m., just in time for local TV to cover his arrival live. He had waited a week before going to Charleston after Hugo struck; Bill Clinton had beaten him to Los Angeles after the riots last May. This time he was first on the ground. He followed through two days later with a second quick trip to Louisiana. “The politics of disaster relief are amazingly straightforward,” explained Greg Schneiders, a Democratic political consultant who helped create FEMA during the Carter administration. “It’s an amalgam of ambulance-chasing and pork barrel. You show up, express your concern and promise money-and you will be rewarded with votes.” At first it looked like Andrew might give the president a boost in a state that has 25 electoral votes. He had arrived quickly; he looked compassionate. One campaign official joked that it wouldn’t be so bad if Andrew blew on up “to Kentucky and the rust-belt states” where Bush was behind in the polls.

The joke was callow-and it represented a miscalculation. The danger in the patronage of relief is that if something goes wrong, the president quickly shares in the blame. And things did go wrong. The first was a little belly-bumping match with Chiles, a Democrat. During the Miami stop the president offered Chiles federal troops several times. The governor, sensitive to old-fashioned political ideas like not truckling to Washington, and still out of touch with the full scope of the hurricane’s damage, turned him down. It took the two leaders four days to get troops in place. The wound up scapegoating each other in a running political skit that did nothing to polish either man’s image.

At sunrise on Wednesday, the full extent of the damage began to register at the White House Situation Room, the long, narrow place, half underground, crammed with electronic communications gear used during the gulf war. In time for Baker’s senior-staff meeting at 7:30 a.m., the sit team, according to one player, reported “a picture that describes much greater destruction than people originally thought.” By that time local officials were hotly attacking the administration. The president then sent Card to Florida to head a task force that would cut through the bureaucratic mess. Finally, one DOD strategist says, Card realized that the White House “didn’t have a clue about how bad things were down there.” Chiles, a good federalist, still believed he could handle the situation on his own. By noon Thursday the Pentagon still had received no orders. Then, in a conference call that linked Chiles, Card and Bush, the logjam broke. Within the next 24 hours 7,000 federal troops were in action. Over the weekend, the number rose to 14,500.

In Texas, Clinton was able to chuckle over a highly partisan sign that read: WHAT DO GEORGE BUSH AND ANDREW HAVE IN COMMON? THEY’RE BOTH NATURAL DISASTERS. But he chose to phone the governors of Florida and Louisiana rather than go there. “Obviously the bureaucracy got in the way,” he told NEWSWEEK. “We need to go back and sort out how it was done and how it could be done differently the next time. You need someone who can commit resources-not just FEMA-that’s what did not happen.” NEWSWEEK’S Poll showed Clinton leading Bush by 10 points (49-39). Riding a 10-point lead, he wasn’t making any foolish moves.

A more seasoned view came from Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston-the main victim of the last Big Blow. “The unnecessary slowness in responding after Hugo seems to have happened again,” he said. In Riley’s view, FEMA may be able to handle “long-haul matters of repair, reconstruction and insurance”; but he still finds the agency weak in handling emergencies that demand an immediate response. FEMA’s defenders said the agency was unfairly taking too much flak; that the storm was more than any government agency could have handled alone. While attention was focused on the Pentagon, other government agencies worked feverishly through out the week. The Public Health Service sent MASH-style medical units, the Army Corps of Engineers distributed more than 200,000 gallons of water and the Department of Agriculture gave out tons of surplus food.

Bush improved matters by appointing Card and getting troops on the move. But nexttime scenarios did nothing to comfort this-time victims. In the ruins, Charlie Myers, 65, stood holding a peach and a loaf of bread. “This is all I have left,” he said. What plans did he have? “Survive, buddy.”

4 dead

Worst damage on island of Eleuthera

At least 22 dead

63,000 homes destroyed

$20 billion in damage

1 dead

At least 44,000 homeless

More than 300,000 homes and businesses without power at height of storm

Damage of at least $300 million NEWSWEEK POLL

Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Bush has handled the emergency caused by Hurricane Andrew?

54% Approve 27% Disapprove

Do you think Bush is more concerned about the problems of people in places like Iraq and Bosnia than the plight of Americans like those affected by Andrew?

57% yes 35% No

Was the government as prepared as it could have been for the emergency?

39% yes 46% No

For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed 1,057 registered voters by telephone Aug. 27-28. Margin of error, +/- 3 percentage points for the Bush-Clinton race, 5 for other, questions. “Don’t know” and other, responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK POLL copyright 1992 by NEWSWEEK, Inc.

title: “What Went Wrong” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-10” author: “Maribel Campbell”

It was Monday, June 13, 1994, about 1:30 p.m., and O. J. Simpson sat in a small, windowless interview room on the third floor of Parker Center, the blandly modernist headquarters of the LAPD made famous by the cop show “Dragnet.” To get to the room, Simpson walked down a corridor lined with black-and-white photos of detectives from past years. If his interrogators made this case, their pictures might one day hang there, too: Det. Tom Lang and his partner Philip Vannatter, both veteran cops and members of the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide unit. In the early morning hours that Monday, the two detectives had taken over the investigation into what police already knew would be a high-profile case: the murders of Simpson’s former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman. It was Vannatter who cut to the chase: “O.J., we’ve got sort of a problem.”

“Mmm hmm,” Simpson murmured.

To the cops O.J. looked like he was up to his neck. “I know I’m the No. 1 target, and now you tell me I’ve got blood all over the place,” he said. For Lang and Vannatter it was a moment when the key was just about to slip into the lock. A suspect was in the cross hairs. Everything was pointing toward the usual suspect in a domestic slaying. As a prosecutor would later say, the evidence, including O.J.’s blood, began to resemble a “mountain.”

By any traditional accounting of crime evidence, that wasn’t much of an exaggeration. How, then, did the most publicized trial in American history end in such a stunningly swift and complete repudiation of the prosecution and the LAPD? How did the key drop, the case fail?

It wasn’t easy. It took a combination of bad luck and bad judgment. At several critical points, a NEWSWEEK examination shows, the state badly misread the jury and which factors would influence it. While the defense seemed to hit the right emotional buttons, the prosecutors listened with a tin ear. They insisted on emphasizing Simpson’s prior abuse of Nicole as the motive, when the jury couldn’t have cared less. They embraced rather than jettison former detective Mark Fuhrman. They shrouded a devastating pile of scientific evidence with impenetrable DNA-speak. They declined to offer the jury Simpson’s initial statement to the police. They pushed to get more African-American women on the jury on the mistaken belief they would be appalled by the charges.

This was an able, experienced, hardworking team that tried hard and lost badly. But it was also up against a wily defense team that approached the case like a political campaign, using heavy polling and focus groups. One such focus group rated the lawyers during the case–and every prosecution lawyer ranked lower than any of the main defense lawyers. It took another focus group to persuade Simpson, who was calling many of the shots, not to put maid Rosa Lopez on the stand; the focus group didn’t believe her.

A guide to where the case went wrong:

It was perhaps the most critical decision that prosecutors made: where to try Simpson. In sprawling Los Angeles, cases tend to be tried in courthouses closest to the crime. For Simpson that would have been in Santa Monica, an affluent, mostly white area, about four miles from Bundy. But the courthouse there had been damaged by an earthquake and its security was not adequate for the coming frenzy. Should Los Angeles D.A. Gil Garcetti move the case downtown, where control was better, access was more convenient, a grand jury was already sitting? He moved the case. But going downtown meant drawing jurors from surrounding neighborhoods. They tended to be black and Hispanic and not terribly well educated; that profile favored the defense. This was not a decision taken lightly. Garcetti might have tried for the Van Nuys courthouse, but the Menendez brothers were filling the pews. Or he might have bused in a jury pool from the white West Side, out by Rockingham, but that could well have sent his political career up in smoke. Garcetti, after all, had won his job after the previous district attorney lost the first Rodney King beating trial before an all-white jury.

The racial makeup of the potential jurors wasn’t the state’s only problem. It was little noticed that Judge Lance It to had also winnowed the jury pool to people who were often poorly educated or informed. To prevent bias, he eliminated potential jurors who admitted to watching TV and radio shows or visiting bookstores. But that tended to leave jurors who might be more easily swayed by the defense’s arguments and less able to ingest arcane scientific evidence. Donald Vinson, who had advised the prosecution as a jury consultant but was soon dismissed, says his analysis found that of the 307 potential jurors the “vast majority were predisposed to believe Simpson was innocent.”

It got only worse for the state. NEWSWEEK learned, for example, that three quarters of the final jurors replied on questionnaires that they believed that Simpson was unlikely to murder because he excelled at football.

Could prosecutors have done anything to get a better jury? Yes, but probably not enough to make a significant difference in the jury’s composition. Marcia Clark decided early on that African-American women would be more sympathetic to her argument that the motive for Nicole’s death was spousal abuse. Vinson counseled otherwise but he was largely ignored. The prosecution could have exercised more of its peremptory challenges to reject jurors perceived as pro-defense. But the U.S. Supreme Court itself had limited Clark’s hand. Ruling in 1990, the court held that prosecutors may not bounce potential jurors solely because of their race. To make matters dicier, defense lawyers Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran accused Clark of doing just that-and in the racial tinderbox of L.A., the prosecution backed off.

The defense conducted focus groups and surveys before jury selection and then throughout the trial. The research showed that Fuhrman was perhaps the most critical element that sank the prosecution case, according to Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the defense jury consultant, in the first public disclosure of the private research. How did the state get caught making this villain its witness? Garcetti insisted his office “did everything humanly possible to check out” Fuhrman before he testified, and found nothing negative. That’s a difficult case to sustain. As NEWSWEEK reported in March, Fuhrman told prosecutors in a mock cross-examination that he had made racist remarks in the past. They were also aware of racist statements he had made to psychiatrists in the early 1980s, when he filed for a disability retirement.

Clark didn’t help her cause with her sympathetic questioning or comforting arm on his shoulders after he testified. At least one government source thinks the state should never have called Fuhrman in the first place. “Without Fuhrman we might have had a hung jury,” he told NEWSWEEK.

Was this witness really necessary? Fuhrman, among the first officers at Bundy and Rockingham, was essential primarily to introduce the bloody glove that he testified he found at the Rockingham estate. And prosecutors wanted to wave that bloody glove in front of the jury because it matched the one found at Bundy. But it opened the door to Fuhrman’s racist remarks, charges of a cop conspiracy, and the devastating day when Simpson tried on the glove and it did not fit.

The state isn’t legally required to offer a jury a motive for a crime, but in this case it thought it had a pretty good one: Simpson’s history of beating Nicole led ultimately to her murder. The jury didn’t buy any of it– something the defense already knew it wouldn’t. Focus groups, according to Dimitrius, indicated that jurors wouldn’t be swayed by evidence that Simpson had physically abused his wife. So while the prosecution dramatically laid out pictures and tape recordings of the abuse incidents between Nicole and Simpson, the defense took the opposite tack–opting not to call some rebuttal witnesses.

Perversely, the state’s most damaging evidence–the DNA blood results–hardly mattered. Despite the astounding statistics linking Simpson to the blood, prosecutors presented the evidence in a lengthy and confusing way. Lisa Kahn, a deputy D.A., admits to perhaps putting on an “overly technical” DNA case, acknowledging that it was a defensive response to the anticipated attack from defense DNA lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Prosecutors weren’t helped either by a sloppy and inefficient LAPD crime lab and witnesses like criminalist Dennis Fung, who stumbled badly under cross-examination by Scheck. “They could have put James Watson [discoverer of DNA] himself on the stand and it would not have made a difference,” Neufeld said. Garcetti didn’t disagree, telling NEWSWEEK it was an “embarrassment” that the city didn’t provide enough money for “at least an acceptable if not a first-class laboratory. And now here it is. We’re paying. Big time, we’re paying.”

It was a monstrous error, and one that prosecutors now concede they brought on themselves. They realized it would backfire when they saw that Simpson was wearing a pair of latex gloves. Christopher Darden, who asked Simpson to try on the gloves, acted spontaneously and without any knowledge of whether the gloves would fit Simpson, according to one prosecution source. Clark has defended Darden but it remains unclear whether he alerted her before he turned to Simpson.

Prosecutors opted not to introduce Simpson’s statement to police, in which he talked about his finger bleeding and denied any complicity in the murder. John Martel, who consulted with the state on trial strategy, said he had hoped–wrongly, as it turned out–that withholding the statement would put pressure on Simpson to take the stand. That never happened, and the prosecution never got to confront Simpson.

This is all Monday-morning quarterbacking, of course. In the end, nothing may have made a significant difference. The Dream Team may have been too good, the jury too skeptical, the evidence too weak. But after a rout, questions need to be asked, for the prosecutors don’t stand up on their own. By word and deed, they represent The People.

title: “What Went Wrong” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “John Tooze”

Fifty-six seconds after clearing the plane for takeoff, the tower radioed an urgent warning: the rear of the aircraft was spouting fire. Marty and Marcot sent a terse reply: “Engine No. 2 is down.” There was no time left to cancel their takeoff. They had passed V1, the term pilots use for the precise point beyond which they cannot safely abort a flight and stop before the end of the runway. The Concorde lifted off, and the men in the cockpit told the tower they would try to land at Le Bourget, an old airport less than three kilometers to the southwest, mostly used by air shows and executive jets. They never got close. Near the historical village of Gonesse the Concorde plunged into a wood-frame motel that exploded into flames 100 meters high. Everyone aboard died, along with five people in the family-owned Hotelissimo. Most of the victims’ remains were burned beyond recognition.

A formal inquiry began immediately. Its findings could play a vital part in determining the future of the world’s 12 remaining airworthy Concordes, civil aviation’s closest approximation to the space shuttle. A detailed account of the disaster gradually emerged from flight recorders, eyewitness accounts and amateur photographs and videotapes. The abundance of film from numerous angles seemed to give the investigation a running start. Even after so many years in the air, no other plane has the Concorde’s mystique–or its allure for amateur paparazzi.

Officials soon ruled out suspicions of sabotage, but they still had more questions than answers. Investigators have uncovered disturbing hints that disaster could have been averted, NEWSWEEK has learned. Informed sources say burn marks on the runway and in the grass nearby suggest that the plane was on fire very early in its takeoff roll–well before it reached the V1 point. Eyewitness reports and amateur photographs appear to support that conclusion. One of the many questions investigators are now asking is whether there was any way the controllers could have warned of trouble sooner, possibly giving the pilot enough time to abort his takeoff.

The crash reverberated throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. Germany was hit especially hard. The passenger list had included 96 Germans, three of them children. Almost all were holidaymakers on their way to join a whale-watching cruise from New York to Ecuador aboard the luxury liner MS Deutschland. “Germany is shaken,” said Chancellor Gerhard Schroder at an ecumenical memorial service in Hanover. “Germany is speechless.” Bishop Josef Homeyer, a Roman Catholic, uttered a heartbroken prayer: “God, where were you in Paris? Why have you deserted us?”

France was stunned as well, not only by the devastating human toll but also by the abrupt loss of one of the country’s proudest national symbols. “The Concorde was for France what the Apollo space program was for the United States,” says Pierre-Henri Messiah, marketing director for Dassault Aviation, builder of the Mirage jet fighter. While NASA was leaving boot tracks on the moon, France and Britain joined the space age in their own way, teaming up to create the world’s only faster-than-sound airliner. And long after the Americans gave up their spendthrift gallivanting, the Concorde kept on flying–until last week. Air France immediately suspended service on its five remaining Concordes while investigators tried to piece together what brought down Flight 4590. “What crashed at Gonesse was also a beautiful dream,” editorialized the daily Liberation, “swift and shimmering, like the wings of a Concorde.”

British Airways temporarily grounded its fleet of seven Concordes for inspection. On the very morning of the crash, Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune was reporting that British Airways and Air France had found cracks in some Concordes’ wings. Investigators say the tiny flaws are no worryif they stay tiny. And Flight 4590’s plane came out clean when its wings were searched for cracks. Regular flights to and from Heathrow Airport have resumed. Government officials in London say British Airways found no problems after thoroughly checking out its Concordes. The Londoners claim the French are keeping their planes grounded merely for “political reasons” until a “decent interval” has elapsed. The French say they are only being prudent. What is certain is that Concorde bookings on British Airways have slowed since the crash. The British say their regular ridership will eventually calm down and return to precrash levels. Still, they concede that the Concorde’s charter-tour traffic may have been permanently hurt.

In an instant the Concorde’s safety record plummeted from one of the finest in the business to one of the worst. The aviation industry tabulates aircraft safety by “hull loss” accidents per million “cycles.” A cycle is one complete flight, from takeoff to landing, and a hull-loss accident is one in which the plane is destroyed. Most contemporary passenger jets, such as the Boeing 737, have records in the ballpark of 1.5 hull-loss events per million cycles. Until last week, from the first prototype model’s maiden test flight in 1969, no Concorde had ever crashed. But that record is scarcely as impressive as it may sound. Based on figures published over the years by France and Britain, American statisticians say the world’s entire fleet of Concorde aircraft has logged 80,000 cycles at most since its commercial debut in 1976. Compare that with the world’s most-traveled passenger craft, the 737, which flies 80,000 cycles or more every week.

While the air industry pondered its safety records, Germans wept openly for their lost friends and family members. Most of the passengers were local celebrities and prominent business executives. Many thought they were headed for the vacation of a lifetime. Margret and Klaus Frentzen, schoolteachers from the Rhineland town of Monchengladbach, in cabbage-farming country, had spent years saving their pfennigs for the honeymoon they had never been able to afford. Their three children stayed home. Another couple aboard was Fritz Charton, 52, and his wife, Marion, 47. They used to be farmers in the communist east. Then the wall came down, and suddenly their little farm outside Berlin was prime real estate, worth more than in their wildest dreams. Wolfgang and Helga Schnitter, 66 and 59, made their fortunes the same way. But they hated to brag. Rather than talk about the fancy tour they had planned, they told neighbors: “We’re visiting a health spa.”

In Paris the investigators sifted the facts. The French government says the flight’s first problems appeared in the plane’s inboard left engine, the same one that had its thrust reverser fixed. The plane was lifting into the air when the engine quit and could not be restarted. At the same time the outboard left engine, No. 1, temporarily lost thrust. The aircraft should have been gaining both speed and altitude at this point, but instead it was barely holding steady. The crew tried without success to retract the landing gear. They were airborne just under a minute when No. 1 lost power again. The plane banked sharply to the left and crashed. A trail of scattered aircraft debris marked the entire length of the flight path.

Examiners are especially interested in shreds of tire collected from the runway. Evidence from the wreckage shows that at least one tire blew out, apparently on the left main landing gear, according to NEWSWEEK’s sources. The blown tire’s mate on the same “truck” assembly was recovered intact, but the French say another tire may have blown. The Concorde’s tires have caused problems numerous times before. In one white-knuckle incident 21 years ago a tire blew on takeoff from Washington. The shrapnel damaged an engine and the plane’s fuel system, which is also contained in the wings, but the pilot managed to put the plane down safely. A British Airways Concorde blew out six of its 10 tires landing in New York in August 1987. The string of close calls led the Concorde’s owners to switch suppliers in the mid-1980s, and the plane has been on Goodyear tires ever since. A U.S. expert says there have been no tire problems on Concordes visiting America for a decade or more. But the Concorde’s high-speed takeoffs and landings, 30 percent faster than subsonic airliners, subject the tires to extreme heat and unpredictable stresses all the same.

Aviation experts caution against premature conclusions. At the moment, however, investigators seem to be focusing most closely on a theory that the crash may have resulted from a cascading series of equipment failures. A blown tire could have thrown fragments of rubber or shattered bits of landing gear into the engine or the wing. The shrapnel could have severed fuel or hydraulic lines or even caused the engine to disintegrate. The fire at the rear suggests a rupture in the fuel system from flying debris.

Even so, people close to the investigation say they cannot yet rule out alternative explanations. It is still within the realm of possibility that something went wrong during the thrust-reverser repairs just before takeoff, although U.S. experts consider it unlikely. A British source has said that the tire debris on the runway may not be from the Concorde at all. Late last week France asked Goodyear for technical details that should help to settle the question. There has been talk of designing a new system to warn the Concorde’s crew when there’s a blowout.

Whatever the cause, the result was like a bad dream for everyone who witnessed it. People who live and work near de Gaulle are accustomed to the thunder of the Concorde. “We didn’t need church bells to set our watches by,” says Marie-Dominique Maisonnier, a schoolteacher from Gonesse, where scheduled flights almost always passed over the town at around 11:20 a.m. and 6 p.m. “It was part of our lives.” But witnesses say that Flight 4590 sounded wrong–it was “dull” or “hollow.” Virginia Dorize, a 23-year-old graphic designer, has an office near the runway. The strange noise made her spring up from her desk. Through her office window she saw the plane lifting off amid plumes of fire.

Willy Corenthin, 29, a local electrician, heard the roar and saw the takeoff from his car on local highway 902, between the airport and Gonesse. The Concorde was spouting flames and flying too low. The plane started to turn. Corenthin assumed the pilot was trying to avoid hitting the town, but aviation experts say the plane was probably uncontrollable at this point. The left wing was on fire. As the plane banked, it fell. “It did not dive,” says the electrician. “It dropped straight down.” He was watching from almost a kilometer away when the jet hit the motel. He ran toward the scene, he says, “but with the smoke and the flames, there was no way.”

Michele Fricheteau had just let most of her staff go on break at Hotelissimo. They were preparing for a large group of English musicians who were to check in that evening. A few employees kept working: two Polish interns, a maid from Mauritius and a newly hired student from Algeria. The sound of the approaching SST was even more deafening than usual. “Damn,” the motel keeper said to herself, “the Concorde is really pushing things today.” A moment later, flames seared her face and arms–but she escaped alive. The four employees died, along with a fifth victim who was not immediately identified. Late last week Fricheteau, arms wrapped in bandages, led a memorial procession of about 1,000 mourners as they laid wreaths near the motel’s ruins. “We have lost everything,” she said.

The elite ranks of Air France’s 33 Concorde flight officers grieved for their comrades. Capt. Edgard Chillaud, who trained Marty on the Concorde and the Airbus 340, liked him from the start: “He was immediately seen as a good fellow to work with. Good pilot. Good skills.” Two decades ago Marty became a national hero when he windsurfed across the Atlantic. His copilot, Marcot, was one of the most experienced Concorde fliers in the air. “He could have elected to be a captain on a short-haul aircraft years ago,” says Chillaud. Eventually he could have worked his way up to command his own Concorde. But he couldn’t bear to be parted from the aircraft even temporarily. “It’s like a car,” says Chillaud. “If you get into a Formula 1 car, it also has a steering wheel, a shift, an engine and wheels. It is the same. But it’s different.” Even before last week’s crash, officials at Air France and British Air were saying the Concorde may have only a decade of service remaining. There may never again be a plane quite like it.

title: “What Went Wrong” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Kevin Warfield”

Instead, the GOP gained seats in both the House and Senate, giving them control of Congress and the legislative agenda. Results from the governors’ races provided the only good news, with Democrats unseating GOP governors in Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania, areas seen as critical to President Bush’s chances at securing a second term. Democrats also captured formerly Republican or independent-held governorships in Kansas, Maine, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Wyoming. But Republicans still claimed victory in the majority of governor’s races, including Florida, where Bush’s brother Jeb clinched a second term. All in all, it was a dismal day for Democrats. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett spoke with well-known Democratic political strategist and talk-show host James Carville about what went wrong.

NEWSWEEK: What happened to the Democrats?

James Carville: I guess you could say we got our arses kicked. I think it’s that their people felt like they had a reason to vote. Our people did not feel like they had a reason to vote. Ergo, they got more votes than we did.

You don’t think Democratic voters had a reason to vote? What about the risk of the GOP taking control of Congress if they didn’t?

I just think they really weren’t given a reason in many instances. Well, they were given various reasons to vote, but no compelling reason. I think that we ceded a lot of issues.

Like what?

Economic issues, issues of corruption, Iraq, environmental issues. You name it. We never presented an alternative. We sounded like we were kind of carping.

Were you surprised by the results?

I’d say I was mildly surprised but not shocked. To be honest, but for Paul Wellstone’s funeral, we would have won in Minnesota and probably Missouri. That would have given us a tie (in the Senate). It’s not as shocking as it could have been, though. America is getting ready to learn a lesson, and that is that very minor shifts in voting can produce policy earthquakes. And, stand by, because the policy earthquakes are coming.

What do you see coming?

You just name it.

Go right ahead.

You can see unbelievably rapid loosening of environmental regulations and fundamental restructuring or attempted restructuring of both the tax code and the Social Security system, and you’re going to see a PAC right-wing federal judiciary, and you’re going to see an administration and a Congress that is 100 percent representative of corporate interest. You’re going to see a diminution of any protection for workers or anything like that. You’re certainly going to see a huge legislation passed and signed to limit products’ liability, defects in products and medical malpractice. You name it. All of that is coming.

So why did Democratic candidates not bring all this up to motivate supporters to get to the polls?

I don’t know. If you listened to these Democratic candidates out there, they were just going to give you a prescription-drug benefit. Look, I had a debate with Newt Gingrich and it was easy to say what we could do. First, you fire all these incompetents that are running economic policy. Second, you get a tax cut now. You do this. You do that. But in retrospect, I think the strategy was that if you took a lot of issues off the table, then you could get the races to even and then field them.

Which race results were most surprising? Was Walter Mondale’s loss in Minnesota a surprise?

No, that was kind of even going in. I guess Colorado was a surprise [Democrat Tom Strickland lost to Republican Sen. Wayne Allard]. I thought we had a real good chance of winning, and we didn’t even come close. The rest were all close. We came closer than some thought in Missouri [Rep. Jim Talent narrowly defeated Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan in their Senate race]. Minnesota was not a surprise, just a disappointment. Maybe Georgia [Max Cleland lost a second term in the Senate to Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss] and North Carolina [where Elizabeth Dole beat Erskine Bowles], too, were a little surprising. There’s a difference between a disappointment and a surprise. But Colorado was both a surprise and a disappointment.

What message did voters send out in this election?

It’s kind of funny with the party now because there will be a lot of symposiums and retrospectives, a lot of scratching their heads and asking “What happened?” I like all of this second-guessing and finger-pointing. I love that process, you know. [Laughs.] I think the voters sent a message to the parties. I think Republicans sent a message that, hey, we like our guys. They sent a very clear message. You’ve got to acknowledge that. But Democrats sent a big message too by sitting on their hands saying, “Get in the game here, guys.”

Are Democrats hearing that message?

I think they do, they’re hearing it pretty good now.

title: “What Went Wrong” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-27” author: “Kara Glidden”

But at 4:06 p.m., ET, something caught Swan’s eye on the big screen at the front of the room. He noticed a large amount of power flowing from New York toward Ontario through the transmission lines–underground and overhead cables. That wasn’t so unusual. A power plant must have gone down. But seconds later, something happened that he’d never seen be-fore. The 800-megawatt surge reversed course and began hurtling back toward New York, like some giant ectoplasmic monster on a rampage. Emergency sirens began to wail through the facility–klaxons not unlike the sirens from “Star Trek.” Just outside the control room, the operator’s chief executive, William Museler, was finishing up a budget report when his room went dark. He rushed through the secure doors into the control room, where what he saw remind-ed him of a “science-fiction movie,” he recalled to NEWSWEEK. People were standing up in stunned silence as they gazed at the power board. Normally, there would be a couple of illuminated red lines represent-ing downed transmission lines. But now most of the board was flashing. “This is the big one,” said one dispatcher.

Generators all over had shut down to ward off the surging megawatt monster, which could overload and burn them out. “No one had ever seen this before, and it happened instantaneously,” said Museler, who had lived through Hurricane Gloria in 1985, which took down 750,000 customers. His heart sinking, he asked one of his employees, “Find out if New York City has gone dark.” It had. Museler says he thought to himself: “This is my worst nightmare.”

He wasn’t alone. Faster than most humans could respond, power grids across the region began “islanding” themselves, disconnecting automatically from the overloaded system. Generators clicked off in a cascade of shutdowns that darkened New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest rust belt and much of Ontario. In seconds, North America had suffered the worst blackout in its history. In about nine seconds, 61,800 megawatts were lost, and as many as 50 million people were abruptly left without power. Fortunately, it was still daylight. In Michigan and Ohio, the governors called out the National Guard to distribute water; the troops rolled out trucks known as water buffaloes to provide fluids at airports and public parks (two gallons per person and you had to bring your own container). Agriculture specialists worked the phones, trying to get generators to farmers to enable them to milk their cows. Other officials called hospitals to see if they needed more diesel fuel to run their emergency power engines. Gas lines spilled out onto highways, snarling traffic. “It’s like Mad Max out here,” said one Detroit resident.

New York City simply shut down all at once. At 4:09 p.m., three minutes after Swan first noticed something was wrong, a rush-hour-packed subway car carrying Richard Warren, an investment banker hoping for an early weekend, lurched to a stop. The lights soon went out, and the August heat grew overwhelming. Cut off, people talked in frightened tones of terrorism. “This woman kept yelling ‘Help! Help! People are dying down here!’ It was a little intense,” Warren recalls. The police arrived two hours later and escorted the passengers, who wielded their cell phones as flashlights, through the dark, rat-infested tunnel and up to daylight at Union Square. The stranded subway riders joined tens of thousands of other New Yorkers who suddenly turned into refugees, tracking their way home across the Brooklyn Bridge or bivouacking for the night by tunnels and bridges in scenes reminiscent of 9/11.

For many, the first minutes of the Great Blackout of 2003 were haunted by those memories of nearly two years ago. Across the country in San Diego, President George W. Bush was on brief respite from his month-long Crawford, Texas, vacation, lunching with troops at the Marine Air Corps Station in Miramar before heading to a fund-raising dinner. Just as White House chief of staff Andrew Card had leaned over to Bush in the middle of a public event to tell him of the terror attacks on 9/11, Card’s deputy, Joe Hagin, now bent over to tell the president about the massive blackout. The traveling White House learned –about the blackout “simultaneously” as the news was breaking on TV because their cell phones began ringing incessantly. Hagin checked in with the White House Situation Room and the Homeland Security operations center, asking if the blackout was the result of terrorism. “I think everyone’s first conclusion was this was terrorism,” said Homeland Security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

In fact, federal investigators ruled terrorism out within the first 45 minutes–perhaps prematurely. True, there was no detectable physical intrusion; nor had terrorist hackers left the usual cyber footprints. But despite the initial reassuring signals to the public, during an emergency conference call with senior officials at 5:30 p.m., the CIA “put on the radar” the possibility that there might have been some terrorist tampering. Informants and interrogations of terror suspects have led the CIA to believe that Al Qaeda is seeking to target power grids to produce just the widespread chaos witnessed Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK. Last year the FBI concluded that terrorists are eagerly surveying weaknesses in power grids through Internet connections in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan. Even if they had no role in this episode, many worry that the Blackout of 2003 provided them with a perfect case study.

Back in Washington, the new multibillion-dollar counterterror machine put in place so painstakingly since 9/11 began dutifully lumbering into action. At the new Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge–a cabinet secretary only since March 1–rushed into his office just after 5 p.m. to face his first major test. He called Card and “assured the president we were coordinating communications at all levels,” said a Homeland Security official. (The president had been extremely frustrated on 9/11 when he became disconnected, especially from calls with Vice President Dick Cheney at the White House, and ordered a top-to-bottom revamping of secure communications.) Homeland Security mobilized several emergency response teams to assist with telecommunications and other demands. NORAD, the continental air-defense system inside Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, ordered two more F-16s out of Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida to patrol the East. “Our level of tolerance is so low we’re always at the edge of being prepared to launch,” NORAD spokesman Doug Barton told NEWSWEEK.

Meanwhile, at the epicenter of the collapse in Albany, New York Gov. George Pataki descended into his hardened command center, an old civil-defense bunker four floors beneath the ground. Behind a blast partition, the governor paced in his wood-paneled office, occasionally stepping out to pepper his aides with questions: “Is Long Island online yet?” “Is Westchester County online yet?” Pataki grew irritated as the minutes and hours passed and power–which energy executives assured him would be back shortly–was still not restored, said an aide who talked to him. In one dicey moment, Pataki recalled to NEWSWEEK, officials had to rush a second backup generator to the neonatal unit at Stony Brook University Hospital after the first backup went down. “We were told after ‘65 and ‘77 that this wasn’t going to happen again,” Pataki said Saturday. “And it did. And that is very upsetting. We still want to know why it happened, why it cascaded. The systems that were supposed to act as firewalls did not, and we need some answers.”

Pataki isn’t the only one asking these questions. To most Americans, the vast blackout seemed nearly inexplicable: what in the world did power stations in Ottawa have to do with New York or Cleveland? Many Easterners and Midwesterners seem not to have realized that over years of restructuring their regional power, companies had merged generation capacity to become part of the largest infrastructural system on the continent. A power-sharing network stretching from Miami to Manitoba had become, in effect, a single electrical circuit.

For decades this system had worked well. Electricity grids in Canada and the United States, for example, link up at 37 major points so the two countries can trade significant quantities of power. When one utility has a shortage, it simply buys power from a neighboring utility. But this network had also grown a very soft underbelly: an old transmission grid of underground and overhead power lines stuck back in the 1950s and ’60s. Experts knew these ancient cables couldn’t handle the rapid surges of the new power-trading economy. A federal security official told NEWSWEEK that by 9 p.m. Thursday, 80 percent of the generators that had been knocked out during the blackout were running again at capacity–but transmission lines could handle only 20 percent of the output.

For years experts have warned of too little investment in a transmission grid that had become more complex than anyone knew. One complicating factor was deregulation. In the 1990s, many utilities were broken up, separating transmission businesses from the generators that produce electricity. Today the system is dominated by independent operators in a market-driven system–and “a broken link between generation planning and transmission planning,” says Steven Taub of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

No one stepped in to fix the problem, in part because no one operator was directly responsible and could see benefits to building power lines for other regions. Even the public bears some of the blame: no one wants to pay the higher rates demanded by the old utility monopolies. And citizens’ groups have made local approval of new transmission lines very difficult.

It’s unclear whether Washington can find the way–or has the will–to overhaul the system; as the lights came up, the Bush administration and leading Democrats were too busy with the city’s favorite pastime, the blame game. But they at least achieved consensus in praising the government’s response.

Homeland Security’s Johndroe called the blackout a “test case” of the system, and the results were in: state and local officials had taken the necessary steps to be prepared for massive emergencies. Department officials gingerly reminded reporters of their widely ridiculed calls for homeowners to stock up on water, duct tape and other provisions. “One of those items was batteries,” a DHS official noted Friday. “Yesterday cell phones didn’t work. So you could listen to the radio.”

Especially in New York, the night of 8/14 marked a striking contrast to previous outages. There were no riots of the kind that crippled the city in the big blackout of 1977. Overall, officials logged 800 elevator rescues, 80,000 calls to 911 and a record 5,000 emergency medical service calls, but almost zero hysteria. A senior New York Police Department official said that between the time the power went out on Thursday afternoon until 6 o’clock Friday morning, New York police recorded only 305 arrests–somewhat lower than the department records on a normal evening.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg–playing a lower-key version of the role his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, perfected after 9/11–held more news briefings in a day than he has in months. Open-shirted and perspiring, he urged New Yorkers to remember their elderly neighbors and pets. They seemed to. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Bloomberg contrasted New Yorkers’ composure this time with that of 1977. The difference? “Communications worked, coordination worked,” he said. “The other thing that is different from the ’70s is that people wanted to make the city work. There is a feeling among the people, a temper of the times, if you will, of cooperation and getting along.” As of Friday morning, despite constant complaints from localities and states that they get too little aid from the Feds, there was only one request for assistance from Washington, Bush told reporters. Bloomberg had asked for a generator from the Defense Department. Pataki later said he would request disaster aid.

Despite the back-patting, troubling questions hung heavy in the damp August air: how is it that Homeland Security experts, until now, had paid so little attention to the grid’s vulnerabilities–despite warnings that went all the way to the president’s desk? “This was not supposed to happen,” a senior U.S. Security official said to NEWSWEEK. Department officials believed that, since the big blackout of ‘65, the electricity-transmission system was supposed to have been redesigned with safeguards that would make such disruptive incidents impossible.

Another vexing problem: will there ever be a good way to evacuate New York City? August 14 was also an uncomfortable reminder that whatever threat we’re getting ready for, it may have little to do with what actually happens. Consider: most post-9/11 urban-evacuation plans depend on public transportation, but that went out in a blink last week. Though the mass departure from New York City came off smoothly, if sweatily, “this tells you clearly that it’s very, very difficult to evacuate millions of people in a short period of time,” said James Kallstrom, a former FBI agent in charge of New York who now advises Pataki. “You can’t change the laws of physics.”

Most important, what really went wrong? On that one, there were plenty of theories to go around. On Friday morning, Mayor Bloomberg asserted, apparently based on information supplied by the power company, that the event had started in Canada. The office of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, in turn, apparently leaked word to media in hard-hit Ottawa that the blackout might have been triggered by a lightning strike on a major transmission line in upstate New York. By Saturday, industry officials were increasingly convinced that the problem that led to the blackout originated somewhere in northeastern Ohio. “We are now trying to determine why this situation was not brought under control after the first three transmission lines relayed out of service,” said Michehl Gent, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the agency formed after the last great Northeastern blackout, in 1965, to prevent another such breakdown. Industry sources say they believe the lines Gent was referring to are operated by First Energy, a transmission company based in Akron, Ohio, that has recently faced legal and financial problems. A spokesman for First Energy confirmed that company facilities in northern Ohio had suffered several mishaps during the afternoon of the 14th. These included a tree falling on one of the company’s heavy-duty 345-kilovolt high-tension lines and “tripping off” a generator at a company plant in Eastlake, Ohio. Industry sources said another 345kv line may have been so overloaded with electricity that it sagged into a lower-voltage cable below it on the pylon, shorting out the circuit. (A company spokesman acknowledged that one of its lines could have sagged.) But First Energy spokesman Ralph DiNicola told NEWSWEEK that the company believed its equipment had coped with all these failures, which were “not unusual on a warm summer day.” He said that First Energy “had no indication there was a major problem” until lights began blinking off elsewhere.

Gent and others hope reforms to the grid system may come soon–and that new teeth to enforce the performance demands of operators will be pushed through as part of a giant energy bill now stuck in conference on Capitol Hill. But there are other problems. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants to give all electricity suppliers equal access to power lines–a plan that’s supposed to give consumers the cheapest electricity available, even if it comes from generators in other regions. But power companies and politicians in the South and West have vigorously opposed the plan, contending that it would force prices higher in their usually low-cost regions.

To force the power industry to take responsibility for its own system, even some of those allied with the Bush administration who once championed deregulation now say some rethinking is in order. “In the past, those companies had to invest in transmission because it was part of their business model,” says Andrew Lundquist, who served as executive director of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. “Now they’re uncertain if they are going to own it at all. I’m not saying the deregulated model is bad, but they need certainty. They need to get through this.”

For power-industry workers like Steve Swan, a 17-year veteran, there wasn’t much time to consider those larger issues last week. On Friday, Swan and his fellow workers, downing pizza slices and Dunkin’ Donuts on the fly, spent all day getting New York’s power grid back online. For Swan, it must have been one of the most fulfilling experiences of his life. But now that he’s been part of history, he may be happy to be just a utility geek again.

title: “What Went Wrong” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Jon Parraga”

No writer likes to be disturbed. But so much was going on at the time: the United Nations was demanding greater access to Saddam’s palaces, George W. Bush had declared Iraq part of an “Axis of Evil,” the United States was pushing for war. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who routinely consulted Saddam about U.N. demands, found that his boss was often distracted by his latest literary effort. When the subject did turn to weapons, the dictator seemed dangerously out of touch. As early as 2000, Saddam became convinced there was a loophole in United Nations resolutions–that long-range missiles were proscribed only if they were loaded with weapons of mass destruction. All of Saddam’s top aides knew better, but they were terrified of contradicting the dictator. The illegal missile program went ahead.

Saddam’s rich fantasy life extended to another weapons program. David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group tasked with finding Iraq’s WMD after the war, told NEWSWEEK that Saddam was obsessed with building a system that could shoot down U.S. stealth aircraft. He “kept handing out money,” says Kay, to scientists and military officers who claimed to be developing new techniques for spotting stealth planes. Many of the schemes were Potemkin projects that existed largely in the imaginations of the officials promoting them. Saddam would give away new cars to the inventor with the most ingenious idea; the more elaborate the invention, the fancier the car. Scientists and officials involved in wacky programs shared payoffs or tacitly blackmailed one another to ensure their programs weren’t exposed as empty shells.

Saddam’s real masterwork–the edifice of fear that had ensured his power for decades–was decaying beneath him. An air of decadence and decline had spread among the elite, and small to middling officials were trying to take what they could for themselves. But nobody could tell the dictator, because virtually everyone was implicated.

It seems that nobody told President Bush or his senior advisers, either. Saddam was more than just evil, according to their intelligence, he was also a master of control and deception. He had fooled U.N. inspectors for a decade. Now he had resumed production of chemical and biological weapons, and he was also trying to purchase parts for a nuclear-weapons program. Defectors were telling of labs hidden under Saddam’s palaces. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which represented Washington’s best available analysis, concluded that “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction [WMD] programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions,” that it had “invested more heavily in biological weapons” and that “most analysts” believed that it was “reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Even the French and Germans believed that Saddam had WMD.

“It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment,” Kay stammered before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “And that is most disturbing.” With perhaps 85 percent of the Survey Group’s work done, Kay said it was likely that no WMD would be uncovered. His team did find evidence that Iraq was working to develop the poison ricin, and he warned of “unresolved ambiguity” about other Iraqi programs. Too much evidence had been destroyed and looted in the early days of the war, he said. But in Kay’s mind, the absence of evidence should not obscure a larger fact: Iraq was a monumental intelligence failure.

How did it happen? The United States spends more to run spy satellites and supersecret listening devices than the gross domestic products of many countries, yet it didn’t have a clue as to what was really going on inside a sanctions-racked dictatorship it was about to attack? A new Senate Intelligence Committee report, lambasting the CIA for major “errors in judgment,” suggests that America’s mastery of high-tech gadgetry is part of the problem, and Kay thinks much the same. The United States has become so dependent on what it can detect from a distance that it no longer does the dirty, painstakingly slow business of gathering human intelligence well. But that is only part of the story.

Kay himself believes that in order to get the full picture, an independent panel needs to investigate. He was very careful not to blame the administration–there were no accusations of “sexing up” the intelligence. On the contrary, he absolved policymakers of any misjudgments, and said he still supported the war. (Britain’s Tony Blair got a similar reprieve last week, when the much-anticipated Hutton report found him innocent of making a 2002 WMD assessment “more exciting.”) But intelligence is never gathered or assessed in a political vacuum, and leading Democrats will be sure to demand that any investigation extend to the White House.

The clamor for heads to roll has already begun. Democratic hopeful John Kerry last week called for CIA Director George Tenet to be fired, and he was seconded by Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the Iraq war. “If you’re in the Navy and you’re the captain of a ship that runs aground, you’re responsible,” Graham told NEWSWEEK. “I believe in the principle of accountability.”

But the White House is, for now anyway, loath to scapegoat Tenet, a loyal soldier if ever there was one. (The CIA itself says its assessments were done with “professionalism and integrity,” and believes WMD may still be found.) Nor did top officials immediately embrace the call for an independent commission. But with Bush insisting that he wanted “to know the facts,” the seeming contradiction appeared untenable: NEWSWEEK learned late last week that the White House was moving toward endorsing the idea of a “presidential blue-ribbon panel” of elder statesmen and WMD experts. Officials had begun putting out feelers to possible chairs. Such an inquiry will have to examine, at least, whether direct or indirect pressure was placed on American spies to produce particular results. It will also have to examine the reluctance of spymasters to admit what they didn’t know, and when they didn’t know it.

Some proponents of the war now argue that analysts were relying on outdated information. Saddam did have a hidden weapons program, this argument goes, but must have gotten rid of it after U.N. inspectors were recalled in 1998. But this doesn’t quite fit the facts. NEWSWEEK has learned of two separate American government panels whose members concluded, back in 1998, that reports of Saddam’s secret programs were based on suspicions, not hard data.

The first panel was an independent group of a half-dozen members, most of them distinguished scientists, called the Arms Control & Non-Proliferation Advisory Board. One of ACNAB’s pursuits was to examine what was known about Iraq’s weapons programs. Panel members got access to CIA materials, and were able to quiz the analysts. What they found, according to three members reached by NEWSWEEK, was that the CIA’s intel on Iraqi WMD was largely speculative. “There were suspicions, hints, but nothing hard,” says one member. “The agency analysts’ basic argument was: ‘Saddam must be hiding something, or why would he be putting his people through all this?’ " The absence of hard evidence was so striking, in fact, that panel members recall discussing “the Wizard of Oz theory: that the whole Iraq WMD program was smoke-and-mirrors, and Saddam was just a little guy behind a curtain.”

Donald Rumsfeld himself led the second such investigation of Iraq’s weapons program that year. The brief of his congressionally appointed commission was to assess the potential ballistic-missile threat to the United States from hostile powers. What is not generally known about Rumsfeld’s commission is that it also reviewed current intelligence about the WMD various countries might be able to pack in their warheads. “The commission’s findings on Iraq’s WMD didn’t materially differ from what ACNAB had concluded,” says a panel member familiar with both reports. Rumsfeld spokesman Larry DiRita says, “The commission based its conclusions regarding WMD on the prevailing [intelligence] assessments.”

Still, powerful suspicions persisted. These centered mainly on vast stockpiles of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for. Saddam had tons of anthrax, VX nerve agents and other deadly materials before the gulf war, and his regime would never produce documents showing they had been destroyed. Given Iraq’s long history of deception, it seemed clear Saddam must have been hiding something. But this inference was questionable. Most of the alleged stocks of anthrax and VX were perishable, and would have degraded to uselessness. And in 1995, the most senior defector to emerge from Iraq–Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of WMD–told debriefers that Iraq had destroyed “all weapons and agents.” The phantom stockpiles nonetheless served a useful purpose to those who wanted to keep Saddam in a box. As long as Iraq was incapable of refuting the existence of the VX and anthrax, it was easy to argue that sanctions should remain in place.

But if Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private–even outside the country–and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn’t that the sensible option?

Getting inside Saddam’s head isn’t easy–the man is famous for miscalculating on a catastrophic scale–but the most likely explanation is the most simple: transparency is the enemy of all dictators. Saddam ensured his continued rule by keeping his many enemies–foreign and domestic–off balance. None could be allowed to know all his secrets, because in Iraq, what you didn’t know, you feared. So Saddam wanted to open his regime enough to ensure sanctions were lifted, but not so much that he stood naked before the world.

This wasn’t mere paranoia. The CIA had tried to orchestrate a coup in 1996, and the U.N. inspection teams were infiltrated by U.S. and British agents. When President Bill Clinton attacked Iraq in Desert Fox two years later, several bombs hit very specific “leadership targets,” including the offices of Saddam and his chief of staff. In recent years some of Saddam’s closest relatives had turned against him, including Hussein Kamel, who defected with another son-in-law and revealed many of Iraq’s WMD secrets. (The two defectors inexplicably returned to Iraq, and Saddam immediately had them murdered.) Fear was Saddam’s most effective ally. So the dictator often hinted that he had WMD, even as he was trying to persuade the world he was clean.

Once U.N. inspectors left Iraq, Saddam’s malevolent history and intentions took on even greater significance, because the CIA was suddenly cut off from a critical source of information. (Kay calls the data produced by UNSCOM inspectors the CIA’s “crack cocaine.”) In February 2000, Tenet told Congress that the United States had no direct evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its WMD programs, “although given its past behavior this type of activity must be regarded as likely.” Iraq had begun to rebuild parts of its chemical infrastructure “for industrial and commercial use,” he said, and had also “attempted to purchase numerous dual use items.”

Thin gruel. So how did the agency make the leap from suspect intentions to bold claims of existing WMD programs two years later? The impact of September 11 on policymakers and analysts is undeniable. At the first meeting of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board after 9/11, there was consensus that the United States should take out two regimes: Afghanistan and Iraq. It was deemed necessary to show American power, and Saddam was the perfect target. It’s not clear how fast this view took hold within the White House, or when exactly the intelligence community digested it. What is clear is that to fight a pre-emptive war, you need evidence of a significant threat; suspect intentions alone are not sufficient.

At about this time, Iraqi defectors started to play a bigger role in the revelation of Saddam’s resurgence. The media played a part here, too. Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress funneled defectors to the press, which reported claims of clandestine weapons programs. These claims, often disputed by CIA analysts, nevertheless got picked up by the Pentagon’s intel shop, which passed them on to the White House. And the CIA was already under fire. It had failed to connect clues that could have foiled the biggest attack ever on the mainland United States. So officials like Alan Foley, the CIA officer who had the Iraq WMD portfolio inside the agency, knew they couldn’t afford to underestimate another threat.

In comments to NEWSWEEK, Foley denied reports that he had been bullied by anyone in the White House: “I don’t think I was pressured at all,” he said. That may well be true, yet people who dealt with Foley during the run-up to war say they were struck by the lack of substance behind his assessments.

Prior to the invasion, the White House convened a series of working groups, and Foley was on the one that dealt with the threat posed to U.S. forces by Iraq’s alleged WMD stocks. More than one member of the high-level group groused that it was extremely hard to get Foley to reveal exactly what the agency had on Iraq’s WMD. U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix had the same problem. All he could get from the CIA was a list of sites that were already well known–from the United Nations’ own inspection teams. At Central Command, this lack of hard information produced real problems. The Pentagon needed to know where Saddam’s WMD stockpiles were, and what exactly was inside them, so they could plan to destroy them. After intense pressure, the CIA finally produced what one top administration official touted as “the crown jewels”–satellite photos of buildings. But the CIA admitted that it didn’t know what was inside the buildings. “I’m coming to the conclusion that the agency really knew very little, but didn’t feel it could admit that to anyone,” says an insider deeply involved in one of the internal probes into the mess.

A CIA analyst frames it differently: “We said nothing that we knew to be untrue. But we did extrapolate.” But to what extent, and why? That’s where the question of political pressure comes in. Senior officials may not have bullied analysts, but they certainly made their expectations well known. They made a sport out of dissing U.N. assessments (which turned out to be the most reliable of all), and the Pentagon even set up its own secret war-planning bureau called the Office of Special Plans. “It was a more-nuanced form of pressure,” says Greg Thielmann, a former top official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Most skepticism about U.S. claims now centers on the astonishingly assertive 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. The report itself was cobbled together in three weeks–and thudded on congressional desks just 10 days before the crucial vote authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. Very few NIEs ever see public print, but key portions of this one did, and certainly influenced public debate. More disturbingly, perhaps, the declassified version was stripped of important caveats and footnotes.

Remember the aluminum tubes presented as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program? It’s now clear that the real experts in the United States’ own nuclear-weapons program, at the Energy Department, fiercely challenged the CIA’s assessment that the tubes were designed to build centrifuges. Remember the Iraqi drone aircraft that Colin Powell told the United Nations could be used to deliver bioweapons agents? When previously classified chunks of the NIE were released in July 2003, it was revealed that experts in Air Force intelligence regarded the idea of mini-UAVs’ dispensing bioagents as nonsense. Remember the mobile bioweapons labs, which Vice President Dick Cheney cited yet again just two weeks ago as evidence of Saddam’s WMD program? It seems they were made to generate hydrogen for weather balloons. Kay has called a CIA report endorsing the bioweapons theory “premature and embarrassing.” (The CIA still stands by the report.)

President Bush declared last week that he welcomed a debate with Democrats over the war. “I’m absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do,” Bush said during a visit to New Hampshire two days after the Democratic primary. “And I look forward to explaining it clearly to the American people.” Yet the fact that the president feels the need to re-explain the war–nine months after he declared an end to major hostilities–is an acknowledgment that he has a potential problem. A senior administration official acknowledged as much, saying that Bush must demonstrate–particularly to military families–that he “is as sure today as he was before the war that this was the right decision… He doesn’t have any doubt.”

Inevitably, some doubts are emerging on the battlefield. In a recent letter home, a reservist with the 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard told friends and family that violent days had become strangely ordinary. In the past week he and his buddies had faced RPG and mortar attacks, “even a car bomb in the area.” But that was unexceptional: “It has been just another set of days going by. Most of us don’t know what day it is anymore, the concept of a ‘workweek’ and a ‘weekend’ are as foreign to us as the Moon.” The soldier then proudly told how his unit had uncovered “a large weapons cache” in the town of Ar Ramadi, adding parenthetically “(still no WMD, sorry).” Irony turned to cynicism: “On the subject of WMD, we once did a raid on a place where we heard they may have been storing ‘mustard gas,’ [and] being the patriots that we are and always out to prove our Commander in Chief’s allegations, we geared up in our chemical suits and stormed the place. It turned out to be a restaurant… but they did have mustard, and some guy there had gas.”

Dark humor–at the expense of commanders, even the commander in chief–has always been as much a part of war as blisters and bad food. But still, there’s a new danger here. American politicians told soldiers they had to fight–to die, if necessary–for a particular reason. That reason was a threat to the American homeland. Now the best piece of evidence about that threat may have been an illusion. The message is muddled, at a time when the country is being asked to gird itself for a long, expensive and bloody occupation. If the cynicism grows, and seeps back home, the whole Iraq enterprise could be undermined.

The Bush administration will focus on other justifications for the war. Many of them are reasonable: Saddam was an evil tyrant, and the world is better off without him; it was necessary to show other rogue nations that from now on, ambiguity about WMD is no longer acceptable; countries that aren’t transparent about their programs and intentions need to know they will suffer, regardless of what those programs are, or were. The Bush team will point to Libya’s new openness about its WMD, and recent cooperation by Iran and Pakistan, to bolster its case.

But if for no other reason than to restore American credibility, an unbiased review of the Iraq intelligence process may be vital. Yes, regime change was a Clinton policy aim, but it was the Bush team that came to office vowing to be “forward leaning.” After the attacks on September 11, Bush himself outlined a new doctrine of pre-emption, a resolve to strike first–and ask questions later–“when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” But now the cloud over American intelligence makes pre-emption all but untenable. Who will believe the next American official who goes to the United Nations wagging a vial of fake anthrax, arguing that North Korea or Iran or some other “rogue state” needs to be taken out before it attacks first? More worrisome still, the next dire warning may well be right.