Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: FAILURE TO FIND WEAPONS IN IRAQ LEADS TO INQUIRIES, 6/04/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june03/weapons_6-04.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Why did the United States go to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq?

2. What do you know about weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is the status of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

In the two months that U.S. troops have searched for weapons, they have found vehicles that may have been used as mobile chemical weapon labs, but they have not located any of the large amounts of dangerous materials Saddam was believed to have possessed.

2. Why are President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair being criticized?

Some politicians, even many who supported the war, want to know more about the intelligence-gathering that led to the reports and make sure the threat was not exaggerated to build support for a war that was already planned.

3. What is the CIA doing?

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is conducting an internal review of a top secret intelligence report issued last October that provided President Bush with his last overview of Iraq's weapons program before the war. In addition, the agency is preparing to turn over to Congress the underlying documents that were used to create the top secret report.

4. What was Tony Blair's response to critics?

"I stand absolutely, 100 percent behind the evidence, based on intelligence, that we presented people," Blair responded.

5. What does former United Nations chief weapons inspector Richard Butler believe about the weapons in Iraq?

Richard Butler believes that Iraq was in possession of WMD, but said he is not certain that weapons will ever be found. "Will they find them? I don't know if they will find them," Butler said in April. "The Iraqis could have destroyed them, or hidden them, or moved them across the border, for example, to Syria."

 

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war? Explain your reasoning.

2. How important is it that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war? Are there other reasons that could justify our going to war in Iraq?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.