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Today's
Stories
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure, Yet? Bush, Security, Energy and Money
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
|
December
3, 2003
Feeling More Secure,
Yet?
Bush,
Security, Energy and Money
By STAN GOFF
Contrary to its assertions of deep concern about
the domestic security of the United States, the Bush administration
has substantially degraded "homeland security" since
September 11 while facilitating a massive transfer of public
and private wealth into the coffers of the energy industry. The
Bush administration, itself composed predominantly of energy
industry insiders, has cynically invoked (information) "security"
to conceal this degradation of domestic security, to attack government
and corporate whistleblowers, and to protect the enormous energy
conglomerates from accountability.
Associated Press, November 7, 2003:
Washington. The latest warning from the
Homeland Security Department that al-Qaida may be plotting an
attack is renewing calls for stricter security on cargo planes.
The department advised law enforcement
officials Friday night of threats that terrorists may fly cargo
planes from another country into such crucial U.S. targets as
nuclear plants, bridges or dams, Homeland Security spokesman
Brian Roehrkasse said.
Leon Laylagian of the Coalition of Airline
Pilots Associations security committee said the government must
take air cargo security as seriously as it takes air passenger
security.
Mark Hertsgaard, "Nuclear Insecurity,"
Vanity Fair, November 2003:
Over the past two years, the Bush administration
has talked tough about defending the United States against terrorism,
pointing to the September 11 tragedy to justify much of its domestic
and international political agenda, from invading Iraq to limiting
civil liberties to relaxing environmental regulations. But...
the Bush administration is in fact failing disastrously at the
practical job of keeping the American homeland safe from terrorist
attacks. In particular, the administration is doing worse than
nothing ... leaving serious flaws in the nuclear-security system
unrepaired, it is silencing the very public servants who are
trying to fix the problem before it is too late.
Argonne National Laboratory, for the
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1982:
[A] large commercial airliner striking
the reactor dome... would easily penetrate the reactor dome...
obliterate the reactor core's primary containment thereby immediately
releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere without
any chance of evacuation. Thousands of people would quickly perish
and thousands more would perish over time... the explosive force
of jet fuel exploding inside the containment dome would... convert
the containment dome itself into a bomb.
Tale of a Professional
(Government) Nuclear Terrorist
In a recent article in Vanity Fair, author
Mark Hertsgaard writes an account of Rich Levernier, a reluctant
nuclear whistleblower who was fired after 22 years with the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE), two years before he became eligible
for his pension.
Levernier coordinated mock-terrorist,
laser-tag commando attacks to test Department of Energy nuclear
weapons facilities for six years prior to the 2001 attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The facilities failed
to stop attackers in half the exercises, even when prior notice,
issued for safety reasons, eliminated the advantage of surprise.
Levernier pushed aggressively to upgrade
security at DOE for years, and was ignored until his persistence
was rewarded with a job termination and cancellation of his security
clearance.
The Levernier story is emblematic of
a Bush administration antagonism toward all whistleblowers, public
and private. That antagonism has vastly increased domestic vulnerability
to attack. The administration is deploying "homeland security"
concerns as justification to shield Bush-friendly corporations
from public security upgrade costs, to conceal backroom deals,
and to marginalize--and sometimes even criminalize--insiders
who speak their conscience.
Since this administration took office,
it has declared virtual war on whistleblowers.
Silencing the Witnesses
In May 2003, Special Counsel Elaine Kaplan
and deputy Tim Hannapel simultaneously resigned from the U.S.
Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that investigates
wrongdoing often reported by government whistleblowers. Kaplan
had overseen the transformation of the OSC from yet another toothless
watchdog into an agency that was as relentless in pursuit of
investigations as it was protective of its sources: especially
whistleblowers. The Project on Government Oversight called her
tenure a "virtual revolution." Her efforts ran headlong
into a heavily Republican Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that
has shown an implacable hostility to government and business
whistleblowers.
The Federal Circuit interpreted the whistleblower
protection in a way that raised the bar for protection only to
include whistleblowers whose information is "undeniable
and incontestable," a standard that is more appropriately
applied to court proceedings. The court granted the government
agencies themselves the "presumption of good faith,"
and wholly shifted an extreme burden of proof onto whistleblowers.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) bristled that
the Federal Circuit had "corrupted the intent of Congress"
which had crafted the 1990 Whistleblower Protection Act to shield
civil servants from retaliation who spoke out about suspected
waste, abuse, neglect, and malfeasance.
When federal judicial hostility to whistleblowers
was combined with the aggressive anti-whistleblower interventions
of the Bush executive branch, of which the OSC is a part, Kaplan
left the agency.
It is perhaps not surprising that prior
to her appointment to the OSC, Kaplan was deputy General Counsel
to the National Treasury Employees Union until going to the OSC
in 1998. Among the first targets of the Bush administration,
after it declared the "war on terror," were government
employee unions, particularly the whistleblower protection clauses
of their contracts.
The Bush administration began accelerated
planning for agency consolidation within the Department of Homeland
Security immediately in the wake of 9/11, a department where
one might assume that abuse, corruption, or neglect would be
a primary concern encouraging open-door policies for whistleblowers.
The door that opened, however, was the
exit. Now it might even be the entry to a jail cell.
Whistleblower protections were excised
from proposals for the Department of Homeland Security and the
newly formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). To
his great credit, Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa--breaking
ranks with many in his party--issued a call in 2002 to restore
whistleblower protection to all jobs and contracts.
"Government agencies too often want
to cover up their mistakes," said Grassley, "and the
temptation is even greater when bureaucracies can use a potential
security issue as an excuse. At the same time, the information
whistleblowers provide is all the more important when public
safety and security is at stake."
This was precisely Rich Levernier's intent
when he became a nuclear gadfly: to overcome bureaucratic inertia
that left weapons grade nuclear material vulnerable to theft.
President George W. Bush and Vice President
Cheney both have strong personal financial ties to energy companies.
This year Executive Order-13303 was issued. It repeals whistleblower
protection for employees who report human rights violations,
mismanage accounting, or falsify shareholder reports for companies
with contracts for Iraqi oil commerce. Chief among these corporations
is Halliburton, for which Dick Cheney was the Chief Executive
Officer before taking office, and from which he still receives
a six-figure annual check.
Another egregious example of this pattern
was the Ashcroft Justice Department's attempt to railroad Congress
to accept Patriot Act II, humorously called the Domestic Security
and Enhancement Act, in which the Bush administration managed
to slip clauses that undermine previous regulatory law, like
the Clean Air Act, by classifying data available to the public
on hazardous emissions. Nat Hentoff, in Bush-Ashcroft vs. Homeland
Security (Village Voice, April 18, 2003) details this bit of
trickery. He quotes Tim Edgar of the American Civil Liberties
Union, who points out that the Clean Air Act requires that "corporations
that use potentially dangerous chemicals must prepare an analysis
of consequences of the release of such chemicals to the surrounding
communities." In section 202 of Ashcroft's ploy, this public
oversight would have been summarily killed and even stating the
location of one of the facilities no longer under public scrutiny
would have become a felony. Edgar told Hentoff that "government
whistle-blowers who reveal any information restricted under this
section commit a criminal offense, even if their motivation was
to protect the public from corporate wrongdoing or government
neglect." This clause of the Domestic Security and Enhancement
Act, had the act passed (which it thankfully did not), would
have done nothing to increase public security, its clear intent
being to wrap a cloak of secrecy around corporate patrons to
enable maximization of profits while neglecting public safety
and health.
The primary beneficiaries of weakened
clean air regulation are energy companies.
Lies, Damn Lies, and
103 Dirty Bombs
A May 2003 report from NC WARN reveals
that there are nuclear facilities with far less protection than
nuclear weapons plants. Nuclear power plants contain immense
quantities of highly radioactive material, are already located
near large urban centers, and any one of them could be activated
as a "Predeployed Radiological Weapon" (a term coined
by Dr. Gordon Thompson, a nuclear security expert).
On September 11, 2001, the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees security at all 103
nuclear power plants in the United States, issued a public statement
that nuclear power plants were designed to sustain an aircraft
attack like those that had just destroyed the World Trade towers.
This was a lie. Ten days later, when confronted from several
quarters with information to the contrary, the NRC admitted that
the statement was not true.
As it turns out, the Argonne National
Laboratory/NRC studied the question of the impact of a large
commercial airliner in 1982. Their own results (published as
NUREG/CR-[REDACTED] pp. 61-65) contradict the September 11 claim.
"[A] large commercial airliner striking the reactor dome...
would easily penetrate the reactor dome... obliterate the reactor
core's primary containment thereby immediately releasing massive
amounts of radiation into the atmosphere without any chance of
evacuation. Thousands of people would quickly perish and thousands
more would perish over time... the explosive force of jet fuel
exploding inside the containment dome would...  convert the containment dome itself into
a bomb." Impartial security experts as well as 27 state
attorneys general, now agree that the spent fuel pools at nuclear
plants present an equally devastating and far more easily accessible
target than the reactors. The results from a reactor core melt
would be more acute, while the result of burning waste fuel would
take longer to materialize, but both scenarios are unthinkable.
The nation's 103 nuclear power plants
have packed the waste fuel from each reactor into water-filled
cooling pools like sardines. In addition to the threat of intentional
activations of these cesium-bombs for malicious motives, accidental
loss of cooling will also cause a pool fire, which Brookhaven
National Laboratory estimates could cause--depending on the location
and conditions--up to 140,000 cancer deaths, $500 billion in
off-site property damage, and contamination of thousands of square
miles.
This nightmare scenario can be rendered
moot by simply re-racking these waste fuel assemblies back to
the original design distance, where air convection can prevent
self-ignition. Unfortunately, few elected officials want to confront
the nation's powerful utilities about their irresponsible behavior,
and the putative Nuclear Regulatory Commission has its leadership
appointed by people who win elections with generous contributions
from the very utilities that continue to gamble with public safety
to protect profit margins.
The NRC's September 11 lie, that nuclear
plants could withstand aerial suicide attack, was recanted and
replaced with yet another lie. On September 21, while admitting
that an aircraft could destroy a nuclear plant after all, the
NRC spokesperson said that the nuclear industry was unprepared
for this contingency because "nobody conceived of this kind
of assault."
In fact, the federal government, including
the NRC, had been considering the possibility of just such an
attack since 1994, after the Algerian "Armed Islamic Group"
hijacked an Air France plane with the intention of flying it
into the Eiffel Tower--a plot that was foiled because none of
the hijackers knew how to pilot a plane. Later asymmetric warriors
corrected that deficiency, as we were to find out in 2001.
In Spring of 2003, when a study developed
at Princeton showed the vulnerability of spent fuel pools to
attack and its consequences, Commissioner Ed McGaffigan of the
NRC issued a memorandum to his staff directing them to discredit
the study; not to review the study to determine its merits and
weaknesses, but to "discredit it deeply." That study,
in fact, had been strongly validated in Princeton's peer review
process.
At around the same time, the Electric
Power Research Institute (EPRI), a nuclear industry public relations
consortium, issued a report purporting to show that nuclear plants
would withstand a suicide pilot attack. Neither McGaffigan nor
the NRC criticized this report that was quickly exposed by the
scientific community and the media as little more than a fraud.
Nor did McGaffigan or the NRC even once take the nuclear utilities
to account for repeating the false conclusions of the EPRI study
in public in order to rebut community concerns about nuclear
risks.
In a recent exchange of correspondence
with Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety engineer David
Lochbaum, McGaffigan admitted that the NRC deliberately stood
back while the EPRI falsifications were propagated by the industry.
Lochbaum, responding to the Department of Homeland security alert
that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack cargo planes to hit
nuclear plants, confronted McGaffigan with the contradictory
reaction of the NRC. Why did this commission try to discredit
a scientifically valid report and simultaneously stand by while
the industry repeated the dangerous EPRI deception to the public?
McGaffigan claimed to Lochbaum that the
NRC had publicly criticized the EPRI study, but this writer has
searched in vain for a single instance of this alleged criticism.
McGaffigan claimed that this "lost" criticism was issued
to acknowledge weaknesses in nuclear plants, and that the NRC
attacked the Princeton study because it was "overstated."
Yet in the same breath, McGaffigan told Lochbaum that the NRC
opted not to rebut the EPRI study because it might "call
al Qaeda's attention to soft spots." Either the NRC publicly
criticized the EPRI study or it did not. Commissioner McGaffigan
told at least one lie during his exchange with Lochbaum.
And yet again, "security" was
cited as a reason for reducing public accountability and sustaining
inaction.
Black Hats & Cruise
Missiles
While European nuclear plants began in
the eighties to harden their own plants--especially spent fuel
storage--against aircraft crashes, accidental or intentional,
the NRC made a conscious choice not to impose this financial
hardship on the U.S. nuclear industry. The basis upon which the
NRC evaluates the security posture of a nuclear power plant is
something called the Design Basis Threat (DBT), a scenario upon
which all security mandates are predicated. The NRC failed to
upgrade the DBT to include an aircraft attack after the 1994
Algerian hijacking, even though as early as 1982 the agency acknowledged
a crash could convert a nuclear plant into a hellish catastrophe.
The DBT for attack that it continued to use was a scenario where
only three armed intruders on foot attempted to gain access to
the plant.
This brings us back to the story of Rich
Levernier, a career expert in testing the defenses of nuclear
weapons facilities. Nuclear weapons sites are given a far higher
level of protection than commercial power plants. Nuclear power
plants are not authorized to use (as nuclear weapons facilities
do) automatic weapons, and power plants cannot employ (as weapons
facilities can) relaxed standards regulating the use of deadly
force. Nuclear weapons facilities have SWAT-like teams and far
more robust external barrier and sensor systems. Nuclear power
plant security personnel are barely trained above the level of
mall security guards. When surveyed, some of these personnel
have openly stated that if they are out-gunned, and if faced
with a determined attack they would likely "run like hell."
Given that September 11 involved a minimum
of 19 attackers, and given that Levernier's "black hat"
mock terrorist teams, who are all ex-military, used teams of
ten or more people who succeeded in stealing weapons grade material
from the more  heavily guarded nuclear weapons
facilities in half of the canned exercises, it is safe to assume
that the DBT of three terrestrial attackers for commercial power
plants was inadequate.
NRC Chairman Richard Meserve claimed
after 9/11 that the risk of attack at power plants was "too
speculative" to warrant upgrading the DBT. Bush administration
NRC Chair Nils Diaz, who replaced Meserve in 2003, was forced
by public pressure to act. But the NRC did so grudgingly, and
the minimal changes in the DBT (reportedly from three attachers
to five) are now classified and unavailable to the very public
whose safety is at stake. This seems to infer that the federal
government, far from enhancing the physical security of people
in the United States, is using post-9/11 security-state measures
to preserve and protect private sector negligence.
The alarming fact is that in the real
world--with the element of surprise that actual attackers would
have--a trained and committed force of fewer than ten people,
with nothing more than what they could carry on their backs,
could breach the security of a U.S. nuclear power plant almost
one hundred percent of the time and demolish either the spent
fuel pools or the reactor--or both.
Of course, the NRC has altogether refused
to include any one of various air attacks in the revised DBT.
On November 7, 2003, the Associated Press
reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had information
that led it to believe elements of the al Qaeda network were
planning to hijack cargo aircraft outside the United States and
fly them into nuclear power plants. Apparently "al Qaeda"
figured out that there is no need to transport a radiological
weapon into the United States, when 103 of them are already deployed
around the country, invariably near urban centers.
What the Department of Homeland Security
apparently has not figured out is that it is likewise not necessary
for attackers to hijack airplanes outside the country to activate
the huge "dirty bombs." The U.S. General Accounting
Office (GAO) released a report in September 2003 that showed
70 general aviation aircraft had been stolen inside the United
States within the last five years. That is an average of 14 aircraft
a year. These are small planes at short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL)
airfields.
Cursory research shows that the most
common light aircraft in the United States is the Cessna Skyhawk.
A Tomahawk Cruise Missile is a precision
weapon that can hug the earth, evade radar, travel to a range
of 600 miles, and deliver up to 1,000 pounds of high explosive
onto a target. A Cessna Skyhawk has a range of 687 miles, can
carry a payload up to 675 pounds, and likewise can hug the contours
of the earth to evade radar and deliver its payload with pinpoint
accuracy.
These general aviation aircraft then,
with the simple addition of a committed pilot prepared to die
and 500 pounds of high explosive, could be employed as a "poor
person's Cruise missile."
In a different report, the GAO recently
released a sharp criticism of the NRC's nuclear power plant security
program, stating not only that the system was inadequate to ensure
genuine security, but that "aspects of its security inspection
program reduced NRC's effectiveness in overseeing protection
of the nation's plants."
The GAO pointed out that:
. the NRC's force-on-force exercises
are completely unrealistic,
. the NRC had no centralized system to
upgrade industry security,
. NRC inspectors (whose numbers have
been dramatically reduced by the Bush administration) now classify
many security lapses as "non-cited violations."
The latter problem is particularly troubling,
because it gives credence to the suspicion (alluded to above)
that understating the threat at nuclear plants is the intent
of the NRC. This would be consistent with a longstanding NRC
tendency to prioritize the financial health of nuclear utilities
above all other concerns, including public safety.
Cooking the Books
The "non-cited violation" is
among several changes that the NRC has implemented in the reporting
of security and safety compliance failures by nuclear utilities.
These formerly documented lapses are simply no longer written
down. These changes have consistently resulted in fewer industry
violations being reported without any actual improvement in security
performance by the utilities. It is logical to assume then that
minimizing the numbers of violations reported is the actual intended
goal of NRC procedure.
In response to criticisms that the NRC
is loosening oversight just at the moment when tighter control
is called for, Richard Meserve, the chairman of the NRC after
9/11, claimed loosened regulations were merely "better analytical
tools" that let the NRC "assess the risks and make
judgments in a more precise way than we were before. And where
we believe things were overly conservative and unnecessary or
imposing an undue burden, we back off." (emphasis added)
It is very difficult to understand how
(1) muzzling whistleblowers, (2) concealing security criteria
from public scrutiny and accountability, and (3) "backing
off" on reporting security violations are consistent with
this administration's rhetoric about "homeland security."
Since September 11, state and local emergency
services budgets have been stripped bare, National Guard troops
have been sent to Iraq, reservists who worked in local police,
EMS, and fire departments have been subtracted from net manpower,
the entire northeast was blacked out, California burned, children
across Southwest Asia and North Africa wear Osama bin Laden t-shirts,
and Iraqis are more and more often naming their newborns Saddam.
Perhaps the most substantial threat to
U.S. domestic security, aside from breeding millions of new enemies
with international arrogance and lethal military provocations,
is bureaucratic obfuscation.
Homeland Insecurity
When whistleblowers in the U.S. government
point to serious flaws in our current security posture, they
are not rewarded with bonuses and promotions and their insight
acted upon to correct the flaws. The Bush administration has
been more ruthless than any executive branch since the McCarthy
era at punishing them and railroading them out of government
service.
The Joseph Wilson case demonstrated the
lengths to which this administration will go to punish any government
employee who dares to tell the truth if it has embarrassment
potential. Wilson exposed the Niger uranium deception that was
used to further justify the invasion of Iraq. A "White House
official" (probably Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff
"Scooter" Libby) retaliated against Wilson by telling
the press that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
This exposure forced her to be brought in from the field and
permanently demolished any chance she can ever again operate
in her former capacity, ironically enough, specializing in weapons
of mass destruction.
Rather than increase the security of
people inside the United States, this administration has used
9/11 as a pretext for imposing secrecy--under the guise of national
security--to protect big business, particularly nuclear power,
from regulatory mandates that would heighten safety and security
measures.
This has led to a situation in which
public health and safety, and most paradoxically security against
attack, has actually been degraded under the pretext of "homeland
security."
White House counter-terrorism advisor
Rand Beers resigned in disgust with the administration in March
saying, "They're making us less secure, not more secure.
As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done."
A recent Project on Government Oversight
(POGO) study of mock attack evaluations at nuclear plants showed
that "in the months leading up to a mock attack test, the
utilities hire security-training consultants and additional guards
to improve their security posture and chances of success. Even
a nuclear industry representative acknowledged that utilities
spend 'millions of dollars' getting ready for the tests."
Even with this massive and artificial preparation, in which some
guards were worked in repeated 14-hour shifts, the plants failed
the exercises 46% of the time.
POGO executive director Danielle Brian
commented, "This dumbed-down test cannot offer any assurances
of adequate security."
In a rational system, the regulators
(NRC) would be grateful to those who pointed out this serious
security flaw, and even reward them for creating the opportunity
to correct it before a tragedy occurred.
The NRC, however, claiming POGO was violating
security, directed them to retract publication of a letter to
NRC Chairman Nils Diaz that outlined POGO's security concerns.
On the Bush administration's coziness
with the nuclear power industry, Nevada Senator Richard Bryan
said, "Bush is so close to the nuclear industry that when
you turn off the lights he glows in the dark."
Bush administration perks for energy
companies are hardly surprising when the Bush cabinet and the
contributors to the Bush 2000 election campaign are taken into
account.
Stacking the Energy
Deck
The Natural Resources Defense Council
called the Bush cabinet an "Energy Industry Dream Team."
Newsweek opined in May 2001, "Not since the rise of the
railroads more than a century ago has a single industry [energy]
placed so many foot soldiers at the top of a new administration."
The real nuclear power story however
is the Bush "Energy Transition Advisory Team" (ETAT).
It has 48 members, and 14 of them are from nuclear utilities,
led by Joe Colvin, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Nevada
Representative Shelley Berkley said that the ETAT "reads
like the who's who of the nuclear power industry." Thirty-four
of the 48 members of the ETAT gave personal campaign contributions
to the Bush presidential campaign. One top member who was the
biggest single contributor to the Bush campaign was then-CEO
of Enron, Kenneth Lay. Lay was quietly eased aside after the
huge energy trading company was exposed as one of the biggest
criminal enterprises in history, and one that wiped out the life
savings of tens of thousands of people.
It is little wonder that nuclear utilities
(all of which are also coal utilities), along with the petroleum
sector, have done so well under the Bush administration. They
run it.
"It appears to me," quipped
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, "we have the [energy] industry
directing policy."
The Bush administration's public relations
people have spun out a series of Orwellian narratives implying
that the energy needs of American society are synonymous with
the financial imperatives of the huge holding companies that
now own most public utilities, that nuclear energy is cheaper,
safer, and cleaner than all fossil energy (it is none of these),
and that emotional rhetoric about homeland security somehow suggests
that this is an administration that is showing a genuine material
commitment to public safety.
On Saturday night, November 15, 2003,
the Bush administration secretly slipped new provisions into
their execrable so-called Energy Bill that included a 1.8 cent
per kilowatt-hour nuclear production tax credit that could cost
taxpayers over $7.5 billion, according to the Nuclear Information
Resource Service. Previously existing subsidies and public support
of nuclear energy amounts to almost $4 billion a year now, with
a cumulative total of $140 billion since the industry began,
making nuclear generated electricity the most expensive in existence.
NIRS spokesperson Cindy Folkers sardonically
remarked, "Apparently the Bush Administration only upholds
free market principles when it isn't inconvenient for their campaign
contributors."
But the most remarkable aspect of the
new provisions is that they gut terrorism protection provisions
written in the original House-passed bill, and "repeal a
ban on exporting highly enriched uranium to other countries,
increasing the chances that nuclear reactors could be hit by
terrorists, or that nuclear bomb material could fall into terrorist
hands," said Folker.
Conclusion
The first step toward understanding what
this administration is doing is to connect the energy-security
nexus dots. The stakes are incredibly high on many accounts.
This report has attempted to show the connection between putative
national security measures and what appears to be a massive assault
on environmental, health, safety, and security oversight any
time genuine oversight threatens the expansion of already-substantial
energy sector profits.
This is an administration that has shown
an alarming willingness to use national security as a pretext
for going after its political enemies and undermining constitutional
protections of freedom of assembly and speech, including the
scapegoat roundups of thousands of immigrants without due cause.
The same people who call these racist roundups an issue of homeland
security willingly deploy the pretext of national security to
erase corporate accountability and even to criminalize truth-tellers
on behalf of private companies.
Given the administration's penchant for
demonizing opponents of its domestic and-or foreign policies,
and the symbiotic relationship between this administration and
the private energy sector, they could well change their name
from the Bush administration to "Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft, Inc."
Their corporate logo could be a giant panopticon eye in the background
with an oil well, a smokestack, and a cooling tower in the foreground,
and the emblazoned red, white, and blue motto: Patriotism For
Profit! Public Safety for Sale!
A starting point in any campaign to reverse
the dangerous direction of domestic and foreign policy with regard
to energy is to continue to confront the most dangerous and expensive
form of that energy: nuclear power. The immediate concern must
be plain security, and this is a tremendous political vulnerability
of the Bush administration policies, precisely because there
is such a glaring mismatch between word and deed coming out of
Washington. So the fight to harden nuclear power facilities,
heighten security, thin the spent fuel pools, and bunker in the
dry storage modules remains a high priority, even for those who
want to decommission all nuclear power facilities. Whether plants
are running or not, the waste material must be secured for many
generations. So much for those who argue that we should abolish
the state!
The issue of nuclear risk reduction is
embedded in the framework of a much larger question about the
whole Bush energy agenda. That agenda, when subjected to close
scrutiny, is one of the most egregious instances of social and
environmental vandalism in memory. Environmentalists, nuclear
watchdogs, labor unions, consumer advocates, civil libertarians,
campaign finance reformers, corporate welfare opponents, anti-sprawl
activists, public health advocates, fuel efficiency advocates,
transportation reformers, those who want genuine domestic security,
and many other organizations and advocates share a common interest
in fighting back against this so-called energy plan when it is
inevitably resurrected.
The Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft Homeland Energy
Plan was a disaster in the making. It needs a stake driven through
its heart.
Andrew McKillop, a founding member of
the International Association of Energy Economists, said in 1998,
"Energy ... is certainly linked to, or behind almost any
international event, crisis, war, military adventure or environmental
catastrophe that we are forced to witness almost any day."
One wonders whether he was staring into a crystal ball. Four
years later, the Bush administration's energy wars have destabilized
the globe and husbanded a proliferation of hostile, committed,
and dangerously sophisticated non-state actors. Meanwhile, the
Bush administration's symbiotic relationship with energy profiteers
at home is lowering our ability, behind a veil of official secrecy,
to protect the public from this increasing hostility.
Early in the morning of September 11,
2001, 19 men boarded airplanes as people who worked at the World
Trade Center reported in for an average day, never considering
that history was about to lethally converge on them. We might
have learned something about international provocation, bureaucratic
complacency, and political arrogance. This administration apparently
has not.
Stan Goff
retired from the United States Army in 1996 having served since
1970. He is a veteran of eight conflict areas from Vietnam to
Haiti, and author of two books: Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft
Skull Press, 2000), and Full
Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
(Soft Skull Press, 2004). His assignments included the 173rd
Airborne Brigade, the 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Ranger Battalion,
2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special Forces
Operational Detachment-Delta, 3rd Special Forces Group, and 7th
Special Forces Group. He also taught small unit tactics at the
Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and Military Science
at the US Military Academy at West Point. He has performed vulnerability
assessments on chemical weapons and nuclear weapons facilities,
including force-on-force exercises. Goff is now a security analyst
for North Carolina Waste Awareness
and Reduction Network. He can be reached at: ncwarn@ncwarn.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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