Washington

Pentagon adviser: U.S. erred with WMD claims

The top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the Bush administration erred by building its public case for war against Saddam Hussein mainly on the claim that he possessed banned weapons.

The comment by Douglas J. Feith, in an interview with The Associated Press, is a rare admission of error about Iraq by a senior administration official. Feith, who is leaving after four years as the undersecretary of defense for policy, said he remains convinced that President Bush was correct in deciding that war against Iraq was necessary.

“I don’t think there is any question that we as an administration, instead of giving proper emphasis to all major elements of the rationale for war, overemphasized the WMD aspect,” he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.

The administration claimed the now-deposed Iraqi president possessed mass-killing chemical and biological weapons and cited them most prominently as justification for attacking.

No such weapons have been found. In March, a bipartisan presidential commission said U.S. spy agencies were “dead wrong” in most of their prewar assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

San Francisco

Appeals court overturns ban on Canadian beef

A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the ban on imports of Canadian cattle, throwing out a lower court’s ruling that renewing the imports could spread mad cow disease in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture was not immediately available to comment on when it would allow imports of Canadian cattle to resume. The imports were banned in May 2003 after a cow in Alberta was found to have mad cow disease.

The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a Montana judge who blocked the USDA from reopening the border in March, saying it “subjects the entire U.S. beef industry to potentially catastrophic damages.”

The justices said they would issue another ruling soon explaining their rationale.

The decision came a day after the Justice Department urged the appeals court in Seattle to reopen the border to imports. Justice Department attorney Mark Stern said lifting the ban is based on “good science” and would not result in the “infestation in American livestock.”

Washington

DeLay: Action on Social Security unlikely until fall

Congress will not move on President Bush’s desire to overhaul Social Security before this fall, key Republican leaders said Thursday.

“There are additional ideas relating to retirement savings building support within this House,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas said just minutes after the chamber recessed for the week. “I expect that the House will focus on these issues in the fall.”

The announcement came several hours after senators cut short a planned Social Security strategy session, filing out of a Capitol meeting room for a series of votes without an agreement to return or when to meet again.

“There are competing demands for the time of senators and House members, so work will probably continue well after the August recess,” said a statement issued afterward by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Finance Committee.

Washington

Rehnquist to stay on court, if health permits

Squelching rumors of his retirement, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said Thursday he will continue heading the Supreme Court while battling thyroid cancer. “I’m not about to announce my retirement,” he said.

“I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement,” Rehnquist, 80, said in a statement first disclosed by The Associated Press and later confirmed by the court. “I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits.”

Rehnquist issued the statement hours after being released from an Arlington, Va., hospital after being treated for two days with a fever.

His declaration scrambles an unsettled situation on the high court for the second time in less than two weeks. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor unexpectedly stepped down earlier this month at a time when the White House, the Senate and outside groups had been preparing for the chief justice to leave the court.

Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Sunday shuttle launch a long shot for NASA

NASA’s first step in trying to figure out what caused a fuel gauge to fail shortly before liftoff and keep space shuttle Discovery grounded is about as low-tech as it gets: The Wiggle Test.

The only way NASA can launch the shuttle on Sunday – the earliest option – is “if we go in and wiggle some of the wires and find a loose connection,” deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said Thursday.

He called Sunday “a really optimistic good-luck scenario” and not very credible. NASA’s first mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster could be delayed well into next week or even September, depending on the extent of repairs needed.

NASA has set up 12 engineering teams around the country that are trying to pinpoint the problem and come up with a repair.

NASA is up against the clock. If Discovery isn’t flying by the end of July, the shuttle must remain grounded until September to ensure a daylight liftoff for good camera views, a requirement for spotting any damage to the shuttle at launch. That’s one of the many changes called for by the Columbia accident investigators.

Harrisburg, Pa.

Evolution back in court as textbook targeted

In a case that reopens the decades-old debate into the teaching of evolution in public schools, attorneys for 11 York County, Pa., parents on Thursday sought to depict the authors of the textbook “Of Pandas and People” as motivated by religion, not science.

In a pretrial hearing here in federal court, the plaintiff’s attorneys said an early draft of the textbook on intelligent design – the theory that the universe is too complex to have developed without some purposeful designer – had used the term “creation.”

The lawyers also produced a letter written by the book’s publisher, Jon Buell, that said intelligent design could serve as an alternative to evolution that would alleviate the deep hostility toward Christian views of how the world came to be.

Buell, who is seeking to intervene in the case to defend himself and the book, said that he does not have a religious agenda and that the documents have been taken out of context.

Attorneys argue that the teaching of intelligent design in public schools violates the separation of church and state. A series of court rulings has said that evolution can be taught because it was science, while creationism cannot because it is religion.