March 28,2003 Imagine an Army ...

Imagine an Army of 250,000 highly trained weapons inspectors. Imagine them equipped by high-tech fruits of defense research aimed at disarmament and weapons detection rather than mass destruction. Imagine an Army with 75 billion dollars to spend bringing clean water to every village in Africa. Imagine an Army that would make America loved throughout the world, instead of the thug and villain it is increasingly acting like.

The war of Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz, INC will cost us $75 billion just for the down payment, and is estimated by Yale economist Bill Nordhaus to cost the economy up to 1.6 trillion dollars in the long term. These costs are in excess of even the most pessimistic estimates of the cost of complying with the Kyoto protocol, put forth by the American Petroleum Institute. They are vastly in excess of more sound studies, which take into account technological innovation and the side benefits of energy conservation,.

The large expenditure for the Iraq war is doubly ironic in light of the flimsy evidence invoked to justify it. "Junk reasoning" is evidently OK when it comes to drumming up support for a war, but when it comes to fighting global warming the Bush Administration sets unrealistic and ever-increasing hurdles for scientific evidence to surmount before any mandatory action is deemed to be warranted. It would be nice if the administration applied the same exacting standards to their case for war. The vaunted link to Al Quaeda is acknowledged to be a tissue of lies. A supposed meeting between Iraqi agents and Al Quaeda reprentatives in Czechoslovakia turned out to be bogus, and a supposed Al Quaeda agent found visiting Iraq turned out to be an enemy of Al Quaeda who was in Baghdad only to get an artificial leg. In the search for banned Iraqi weapons, UN inspectors have referred to intelligence provided to them by the US as "junk." If Iraq still has banned weapons in hiding, the US certainly shows no signs of having evidence. An expanded weapons inspecton program would have been a much cheaper, safer and more diplomatically palatable way to turn up such weapons, if indeed they exist. Strategic planning for conduct for the war has suffered also from disregard for the facts. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was told by Turkish Foreign Minister Raser Yakis that Turkey could not support a military strike against Iraq. Nonetheless, Wolfowitz publically declared "Turkey's support is assured." Of course, it wasn't, and the war materiel waiting to offload at Turkey must now face a long trip around and through the Suez canal before it can be brought into play. The supposition that Iraqi troops would surrender en masse was based in part on intelligence from an Iraqi opposition leader, who has since turned out to be a con man, and disappeared from the scene. Powell's briefing to the U.N. was based in part on a British report that was touted as "high level intelligence." It was not; in fact it was cribbed from an outdated US PhD thesis, spelling errors and all, but with all the caveats and limitations edited out. Powell also introduced a document which purported to show an Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium from Nigeria; it turned out later to be a crude and childish forgery, which the CIA should easily have been able to detect. The chain of command, and the source of its advice, is littered with conflict of interest and corruption. Vice President Cheney's old company Halliburton is in line for sweetheart deals for the postwar reconstructio of Iraq. Arch-Hawk Richard Perle was recently forced to resign as head of an influential defense advisory panel on account of his business interests in the Middle East which stand to profit from war, and his contacts with arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi, to say nothing with his contracts with telecommunications giant Global Crossing. This was brought to light in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersch. Perle's response was to call Hersch a terrorist. Sorry, Seymour -- no free speech allowed. Did you think you were living in America?

March 6, 2003 Ideological litmus test for Bush science appointees

Sound science is the basis of sound policy, but the Bush administration does not want sound science. It wants ideologically reliable scientific advice that will not cause any inconvenience to the Administration's agenda. To an unprecedented extent, politics has been injected into the choice of scientific panel membership during the Bush administration. For example, the Secretary of Health and Human services has disbanded two panels concerned with genetic testing, because the advice of the panels conflicted with the religious views of certain political constituencies. Further, the Department has been packing environmental health advisory committees with scientists affiliated with polluting industries, even putting defenders of the lead industry on panels that are meant to set standards for childrens' exposure to lead. It just keeps getting worse. Recently, a distinguished professor of psychiatry who was being interviewed for a drug abuse panel was outright asked if he had voted for Bush. When he replied that he hadn't he was challenged with the statement, "Why didn't you support the president?" Where have we seen such thought control outside of a police state before? (See articles in Science magazine, 31 January 2003, and 25 October 2002)

March 3, 2003 No testing before missile defense deployment?

By law, weapons systems are required to be tested before deployment, to prove that they actually work. In the latest development in the headlong rush toward deployment of a ballistic missile defense, the Bush administration is seeking an exemption from this requirement, and wishes to deploy a system without carrying out testing. Of what conceivable use is a hugely expensive system that couldn't be counted on? Evidently, the administration does not want any scrutiny of its missile defense program. Independent review of past tests has revealed severe flaws in the system, and even falsified claims for successful interceptions. To head off further embarassments of this sort, the Administration is refusing to release future test results to the public. Just keep 'em in the dark, and make 'em pay. (See article, Chicago Tribune)

Jan 29, 2003 Healthy Forests or Wealthy Timber Barons?

The playbook for the Bush war on the environment is taken straight from the other George -- Orwell, that is. Do you want to relax air pollution regulations? Then just call it "Clean Skies." Do you want to reduce protection of forest ecosystems? Just call it "Healthy Forests." Both Orwellian phrases got some play in yesterday's State of The Union address, though they were pretty much buried among the general warmongering. The Bush "Healthy Forest" plan in fact represents a major rollback of 25 years of progress in sound management of forests for multiple. use. The plan consists of a series of administrative actions by the Forest Service, and portions consist of an attempt to get by administrative fiat what couldn't be passed openly by Congressional action during the previous Congress. The first action introduces sweeping changes in the implementation of the National Forest Management Act. It overturns a policy introduced in May, 2000 formulated in consultation with an independant Committee of Scientists. The 2000 policy was an important step forward, as it for the first time established sustainable forestry practices and ecosystem health as a priority in forest planning, on an equal footing with short-term economic interests. The Bush policy rolls back the clock, and ignores the scientific advice provided to the Forest Service. It puts short term logging interests back in the drivers' seat, in front of mixed use and sustainable forestry. In formulating the revision, the administration did not convene a Committee of Scientists, and indeed did not seek independant scientific opinion of any sort. The breach is so blatant that even 11 House Republicans wrote a letter of protest on Dec. 16, asking for a National Academy of Sciences review of the new regulations. The Bush revisions make scientific consultation an optional part of the forest management process. Even more seriously, the new regulations bypass the National Environmental Policy act, and categorically excludes new forest plans, amendments and revisions from the requirement that Environmental Impact Statements be performed. This represents a major assault on the Environmental Protection Act, which has been the cornerstone of environmental protection for decades, through administrations both Republican and Democrat. The gutting of ecosystem protection is completed by a provision allowing local forest managers to bypass the requirement that any changes in management plans protect viability of populations of threatened or endangered species. If this revision had been in effect in the 1990's, Pacific Northwest forest managers would have had it in their power to decide that the Spotted Owl could be allowed to be driven to extinction, for the sake of continued timber harvests. The final part of the assault (for now) is a forest thinning proposal that masquerades as forest fire prevention. This proposal categorically excludes forest thinning projects from environmental assessments, and sharply limits public input and scientific review of forest thinning actions. It goes beyond what is needed to the brush and deadwood that can feed fires. It allows logging of healthy trees and old growth to proceed unimpeded in the guise of fuel reduction, and yet fails to concentrate thinning efforts where it is most needed -- near human habitation. The new regulations would allow the building of "temporary" logging roads for the so-called thinning operations, but says nothing about how such roads would be decommissioned or the environment restored afterwards.

Jan. 7, 2003 Public lands opened to more roads. Other holiday sneak attacks

Today the Interior Department issued rules that could open millions of acres of public lands to paved roads and highways. In essence the ruling removes obstacles for roadbuilders claiming a right of way under the 1866 law R.S. 2477, dating back to the days of grizzled old prospectors on donkeys opening up the West. The rules fly in the face of an explicit moratorium placed by Congress on any R.S. 2477 changes without congressional consent. Under the new ruling, the Interior Department intends to allow paved roads to be built in an additional 231,000 acres of the Grand Canyon National Park, which will be removed from wilderness consideration. Developers are also salivating over the prospect of a paved road through Denali, allowing a posh resort to be built there. Two other rules were issued as a part of this same holiday sneak attack. One allows companies to label tuna "dolphin-safe" even if the tuna are caught with nets that endanger dolphins. The other rule is an EPA action that would exempt about 17000 power plants and other facilities from having to install pollution control equipment when upgrading. This last is the final shoe dropping in the "new source review" drama, commented upon in earlier items.

June 8, 2003: Four billion dollars a month, chaos, and no WMD

The long silence is not because the Bush administration hasn't been up to it's usual dirty tricks. Far from it, they've been busy lying about the war in Iraq, pillaging the Clean Water act, pushing for the development of dangerous and destabilizing new American nuclear weapons, ignoring the threat of North Korean nukes, and censoring mention of global warming in the recent EPA state of the environment report. The list, sadly, is far from comprehensive. Your correspondent gets tired and depressed, and sometimes can hardly work up the strength needed to write, when the news is so unfailingly bad. In this item, I'll feature the continued debacle in Iraq. In the run-up to the war, the Administration angrily dismissed claims from within the military that over 100,000 American soldiers will need to be kept in Iraq in the long term just to keep order. Well, now we're several weeks into what was supposed to be the great renaissance of the Iraqi people, and we have about 143,000 soldiers there who Donald Rumsfeld says will have to stay there "for the forseeable future." At a time when schools in Oregon are closing early for lack of money, and the Republicans say we can't afford adequate prescription medicine coverage for senior citizens, we are paying four billion dollars each and every month to keep soldiers in Iraq. That doesn't count the cost of reconstruction of the country, nor the $80 billion appropriated for the conduct of the war itself. Strangely, all the countries that we offended in the run-up to the war are not eager now to help pay or contribute troups to help clean up the mess Bush created. Especially not as word finally begins to get around about the extent Bush and Blair fabricated the case for an immediate threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

This week, continuing revelation of the extent of the deception in Bush's cheerleading for the war, the Administration finally admitted that the claim that Iraq had tried to purchase Uranium ore from Niger were based on bogus intelligence. Bush isn't owning up, but there's in fact ample evidence that the intelligence was known all along to be bogus, even as it was being incorporated in Bush's state of the union address and in Colin Powell's testimony to the UN. Greg Thielman, who resigned from the stratgeic and military affairs office of the State Department last September declared, "I believe the Bush Administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Joseph C. Wilson stated that he was sent to Niger before the war to check out claims about the attempted Uranium purchase. He reported back that the claims were probably fraudulent. The Administration ignored his investigation, and kept using the supposed purchase attempt in its justifications of the war. So, the costs are mounting up, and one wonders just exactly we were supposed to be getting in exchange for the billions we are spending, and why it was exactly so urgent to take on just this massive committment at just this time.

Bush accuses those who criticize the trumped-up WMD case of trying to "re-write history." Bush says that toppling Hussein was equally justified all along by humanitarian grounds regardless of the WMD case. This would come as a great surprise to those who heard the ceaseless doomsaying about the immediate threat posed by Iraq's supposed weapons, and the claims about the "pinpoint intelligence" which pointed to the existence of thousands of tons of chemical weapons, supposedly ready to deploy in "45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed in a dossier later admitted to be based on uncorroborated intelligence. The top US Marine Commander in Iraq now says that the intelligence was "simply wrong." This will come as no surprise at all to Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors, who repeatedly tried to act on the supposedly "pinpoint" intelligence, only to find it worthless junk. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as much as admits that the WMD case was just settled on as a convenient pretext for war. "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz said in an interview with Vanity Fair. We are still waiting to understand exactly why we did go to war.

The idea that we went to war to save the Iraqi people from suffering is hard to credit, given that we passed up the opportunity to intervene in much more serious humanitarian crises. In the Congo, over a million civilians have perished in the wake of anarchy and civil war, and some semblance of order was kept only by a small and inadequate contingent of French troops (yes that's the same French that Bush accuses of spoiling his show in Iraq, the same ones that are held up to ridicule in America's right-wing press). Liberia also suffers, and the US is only now getting around to sending (grudgingly) a puny contingent of troops to alleviate the situation. While we're at it, shouldn't we be doing something about the mess in Nigeria? One is left with the highly uncomfortable impression that this war was a matter of looking "tough" (sure scared the North Korean's didn't it?), about doing something military just because it could be done, about winning support in the next Presidential election, and about distracting Americans from the dismal state of domestic affairs. Perhaps also there is some element of personal grudge here, and even of witless fixed ideas -- sticking to a pointless program just because it feels resolute to do so. Any way you look at it, it stinks like year-old fish, and makes one long for the relatively harmless pecadillos of the Clinton years.