ECO-TERROR
U.S. Plan For Iraq's Future Is Challenged: Top Republicans as well as Democrats have been smarting for months over what they view as highhanded treatment by the White House and the Defense Department on a range of fiscal issues. While there is overwhelming support on Capitol Hill for the way Bush and Rumsfeld have conducted the war, the peacetime arrangements for Iraq outlined in Bush's emergency spending package met with near universal rejection.
In what members said was an unprecedented move, Bush asked for the $2.5 billion reconstruction fund to be appropriated to the White House itself, presumably to be distributed through the Pentagon. A memo prepared by senior GOP staff for the House Appropriations Committee noted that the arrangement would erect a "wall of executive privilege [that] would deny Congress and the Committee access to the management of the Fund. Decision-makers determining the allocation... could not be called as witnesses before hearings, and most fiscal data would be beyond the Committee's reach."