The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its own citizens - Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja - is a familiar part of the debate over whether to go to war. According to a controversial article by Stephen C. Pelletiere, however, the facts surrounding that claim have been selectively presented and distorted. "I am in a position to know," he writes, "because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair." Pelletiere also suggests that water, rather than oil, may be the main resource at stake in the upcoming war. "We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. ... In the 1990s there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change. Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades - not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water."

The Federal Government of Australia has given the Hill & Knowlton PR firm a $300,000 contract to to promote a controversial national nuclear waste dump planned near Woomera in South Australia. Meanwhile, a green coalition has pledged 1 per cent of that figure from its comparatively small funds to launch a "counter-offensive." Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran supports the plan, even though only "a handful" of citizens have submitted comments in support of it. This isn't H&K's first nuclear client. They also handled some of the PR for Metropolitan Edison during its near-meltdown crisis at Three Mile Island.