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Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

World Bank slams corruption in aided Indian healthcare projects NEW DELHI (AFP) — The World Bank has exposed serious fraud in Indian healthcare programmes it has funded and said New Delhi had agreed to help stamp out corruption, officials said Saturday. Serious lapses in auditing, malpractice and corruption were found in five healthcare programmes launched between 1997 and 2003, it said, adding that the projects were jointly funded by donors, India and the World Bank. A "detailed implementation review launched by the World Bank and the Indian government in 2006 found serious incidents of fraud and corruption in the five...

Don't ever say the Bush administration doesn't take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which...

Having knocked off Paul Wolfowitz as president, the forces of the status quo at the World Bank now have another target in their destructive sights: The corruption fighters at the bank's Department of Institutional Integrity. New President Robert Zoellick will soon have decisions to make. As we reported at the time, the fight over Mr. Wolfowitz had little to do with his girlfriend and everything to do with his anti-corruption efforts. That truth is now coming into sharper relief, as a showdown looms over a series of reports about, and by, the bank's anti-corruption unit. Senior bank officials are especially...

Washington, D.C. - Michael Maloof was back in the game. He and another Pentagon aide, David Wurmser, drove the short distance from the Pentagon to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It was early October, a good season in Washington, but Maloof’s nerves were on edge during the scenic ride along the tree-lined George Washington Parkway. snip Maloof was a legend within the Pentagon circle that tracked arms proliferation. His office was obscure, but it performed a crucial national security function. snip The Pentagon wanted years of intelligence reporting on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other potential targets in the war...

WASHINGTON - Robert Zoellick, President Bush's former trade chief and No. 2 diplomat, appeared certain to win approval as the World Bank's next president. The World Bank's 24-member board scheduled a closed-door meeting Monday to take up Zoellick's nomination, which was put forward by Bush. No other countries nominated candidates. Zoellick would succeed Paul Wolfowitz, who will step down on June 30, ending a stormy two-year tenure at the poverty-fighting institution. Wolfowitz courted controversy from the start because of his role in the Iraq war when he was deputy defense secretary. However, it was his role in arranging a hefty...

Some good may yet come from the successful putsch by the staff of the World Bank against Paul Wolfowitz. A great deal of good, in fact. Not that we should cheer the ability of an overpaid staff, besotted with anti-war fervour, to zap its president, first by urging him to resolve personally the conflict created by his girlfriend’s employment at the bank, and then by attacking him for doing just that. But this cloud has more than one silver lining. The first is that it finally made President Bush realise that he has been too attentive to those who advise...

We've ranted, raved and in general made a nuisance of ourselves over ex-President Jimmy Carter but allow me one more rant. Because this benchmark for how not to govern actually accuses Bush of being the worst President ever! A title he holds solidly and only Saddamn himself could take it away. Plus Hillary books tell us of more scandal that we should elect this witch to lead us and an intriguing update on the Wolfowitz story plus a pic of the woman behind it all.

LONDON (Reuters) - The former head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, who resigned in a row about his companion's promotion, said on Monday he had been forced to quit because emotions at the organisation had become "overheated". In a BBC interview, Wolfowitz defended his record as the bank's president, saying he was proud of what he had achieved during his two years in the job. Wolfowitz, resigned on May 17 but had fought hard up to the last hour to clear his name of any charges of misconduct after a bank panel found he broke several bank rules by...

WASHINGTON -- The White House is starting to draw up a list of potential nominees to lead the World Bank, and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a heart surgeon who has traveled widely in Africa, is getting especially close scrutiny for the job. Also receiving long looks are Treasury Deputy Secretary Robert Kimmitt and Robert Zoellick, the former U.S. trade representative now working at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to individuals familiar with White House deliberations.

PAUL Wolfowitz has really had a bad couple of weeks. He not only lost his job, he lost his girlfriend, too. Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, was pushed out as president of the World Bank over a controversial pay and promotion package he arranged for his brunette girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza. Sources say Riza, a brilliant feminist with a promising diplomatic career, was upset by all the publicity and the implication that she was getting ahead with the help of a powerful man. "She was furious about the embarrassment," said one source. Last week, Wolfowitz bowed...

Multilaterals: If there's one lesson to be learned from the exit of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, it's that the World Bank needs reform even more than do its Third World customers. Wolfowitz focused much attention on the World Bank's clients, talking up poverty eradication, corruption-control and forging ties with more reform-minded leaders on the African and Asian continents. These things all sound nice in the press but they have little to do with banking. In that, Wolfowitz was remarkably short on reforming how the Bank itself works. As he leaves, it remains a bloated, entrenched bureaucracy defending its privileges...

It's the sort of story that causes me puzzlement. So I read up on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank Mess. Goodness, why is Dubya throwing him under the bus? Why does the World Bank get to continue it's blatant corruption? And some thoughts on the Senate's immigration bill. Again, folks, they pee upon our feet and tell us it's raining.

Did Paul Wolfowitz lose his job as president of The World Bank Group because he didn't listen to its top lawyer? Roberto Dañino, the bank's former general counsel, thinks so. Dañino says that Wolfowitz prevented him from reviewing an employment contract for the president's girlfriend that was more lavish than what the bank's ethics committee had actually approved. Had he seen the contract, Dañino says, he would have sent it back for revision, and Wolfowitz might have held onto his job. "I tell my children all the time: When you make a mistake, it's not so much the mistake you...

When I was assigned to the U.S. Pacific Command in the mid-1980s, we military officers would often discuss the ambassadors in our theater of operations – a huge area embracing more than 30 countries and most of the Pacific -SNIP- One name came up constantly as one of the best -SNIP-: then-U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz. He understood the culture, the people and the special circumstances of the world’s most populous Muslim country, and he did a superb job in dealing with that country within the context of U.S. national-security interests. Understand, then, my wonder over the last few...

There are a lot of things that are different now [that the U.S. occupies Iraq], and one that has gone by almost unnoticed – but it’s huge – is that … we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. “In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think...

In the end, it was hoping for too much to imagine that Paul Wolfowitz would get a fair shake at the World Bank. For better or worse, the former U.S. deputy secretary of defence and "architect" of the Iraq war is one of the world's most widely loathed individuals outside the Fifty States. It should have been apparent to the Bush administration that such a polarizing appointee would be savaged by the forces of European institutional inertia and featherbedding upon the slightest pretext. But we would hate for anyone to hear us defending Mr. Wolfowitz and say, "There goes the...

For two of Paul Wolfowitz's most prominent critics, Mark Malloch Brown and Ad Melkert, the war over the World Bank presidency could not have come at a better time. Whatever else the ousting of Wolfowitz has achieved, it has done plenty to distract from the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal that just four months ago was threatening to engulf the United Nations agency piloted for the past eight years first by Malloch Brown and now largely by Melkert. That agency is the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP, and especially in light of the U.N. system's sudden interest in ethics, it deserves...

For two of Paul Wolfowitz's most prominent critics, Mark Malloch Brown and Ad Melkert, the war over the World Bank presidency could not have come at a better time. Whatever else the ousting of Wolfowitz has achieved, it has done plenty to distract from the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal that just four months ago was threatening to engulf the United Nations agency piloted for the past eight years first by Malloch Brown and now largely by Melkert. That agency is the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP, and especially in light of the U.N. system's sudden interest in ethics, it deserves...

PAUL Wolfowitz is a good man brought down by a shabby, politicised witch-hunt. The terms under which he was forced to deal with his partner when he joined the World Bank may well indicate that he was set up for a fall. Wolfowitz tried hard to avoid personnel issues surrounding his partner. He sought advice, and followed it. The spouses of other executives had been allowed to keep working at the bank but the hostility to Wolfowitz, which is a displaced enmity for US President George W.Bush, exacerbated by Wolfowitz's exotic name and reputation as an architect of the operation...