1.President ordered bombing of Rainbow Warrior, spy chief says
2."Wise Use" in the White House
3.Free the Iraqi blogger
"If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used." - President Reagan's former interior secretary, James Watt (item 2)
Senhor Pereira's widow has received neither an apology nor compensation for his murder from the French Government. (item 1)
EXCELLENT ARTICLE:
It is an Insult to the Dead to Deny the Link with Iraq
Tony Blair put his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power
by Seumas Milne
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0714-27.htm
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1.Mitterrand ordered bombing of Rainbow Warrior, spy chief says
From Charles Bremner in Paris
The Times, July 11, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-1689202,00.html
FRANCOIS MITTERRAND ordered the sinking of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior, despite the late President's denials at the time, France was told yesterday.
Exactly 20 years after the bungled operation in Auckland harbour, a report by Admiral Pierre Lacoste, who at the time was head of the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, was published by Le Monde.
In Operation Satanic, as the DGSE called the plan, three teams of secret agents used explosives to sink the vessel as it was preparing to sail to observe French nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll in the Pacific. Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese photographer, died in the attack.
In a scandal that continues to haunt France's relations with Australasia, New Zealand arrested two DGSE officers who were posing as tourists. They were sentenced to long jail terms, but handed back to France in 1986.
M Mitterrand and his ministers denied any knowledge of Operation Satanic, which they put down to rogue agents. The President ordered an inquiry "to find out the truth". It whitewashed the Cabinet, but M Mitterrand sacked Charles Hernu, then the Defence Minister, and Admiral Lacoste.
In the admiral's memorandum, which, the newspaper said, was prepared a year after the attack but did not surface till this weekend, he wrote that M Hernu had ordered him to "neutralise" the Rainbow Warrior because it was vital for national defence to prevent the environmentalist organisation from disrupting the nuclear tests. "They are waging war against us. We cannot have scruples about such a vital subject," the minister told Admiral Lacoste.
The admiral wrote that he had sought confirmation from M Mitterrand that the risky operation had been authorised. The President received him on May 15: "I asked if he was authorising me to execute the project of neutralisation. He gave his agreement, stressing the importance that he attached to the nuclear tests. The authorisation was sufficiently explicit."
The admiral described how the Defence Minister had assigned GBP300,000 from secret funds for the mission, which was also approved by the Chief of Defence Staff. When the Greenpeace affair broke with the arrest of the French agents, M Mitterrand, Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister, M Hernu and senior staff denied any knowledge. "There was an easy way for them to find out from day one; they only had to summon me. Not only was I never summoned, but they always refused to let me (testify) when I asked," wrote the admiral. His report, with its first-hand account of the planning, confirmed longstanding suspicions that the late Socialist President must have been involved.
The sabotage was the first of a string of scandals that tainted M Mitterrand's presidency.
Yesterday Greenpeace held a rally in Paris to commemorate Senhor Pereira, who was 35 when he drowned in the sinking boat. He had returned to the vessel to save his cameras after a first explosion, intended to force the crew to flee before a second, more powerful charge holed the boat.
Senhor Pereira's widow has received neither an apology nor compensation from the French Government.
THE ADMIRAL'S ACCOUNT
March 19, 1985 Charles Hernu orders Admiral Lacoste to "prevent" Greenpeace from intervening against the Moruroa programme
May 15 President Mitterrand confirms the order to Admiral Lacoste
July 10 Rainbow Warrior is sunk in Auckland harbour
July 23 Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur of DGSE charged with murder
August 6 French Government denies any knowledge of operation
August 26 French inquiry finds no involvement by DGSE chiefs or Government
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2."Wise Use" in the White House
Yesterday's fringe, today's Cabinet official.
Fifteen years ago the anti-environmental "wise use" movement made a splash with its talk of timber wars, threats to shoot "jackbooted" park rangers and resource managers, and attacks on grassroots environmental activists. You don't hear much about wise use anymore, but that's not because the wise-users went away.
Far from it. Just as neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle long pushed their hawkish agenda from the sidelines before becoming key officials, veterans of once-discredited militant anti-environmental groups are now setting natural-resource policy for the Bush administration.
Wise use arose in 1988, combining property-rights activists with elements of the timber, mining, oil, and off-road-vehicle industries and a smattering of Reagan administration leftovers. Its original focus was the perceived threat that George H. W. Bush would follow through on his pledge to be "the environmental president."
Wise-use activists went on to confront the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and local environmental activists, sometimes with vigilante-style tactics ranging from telephone death-threats to arson and shootings. In Washington, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico, a number of wise-users even united with the militia movement
That alliance proved their undoing: Following the deadly 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by militia associates Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, wise use lost much of its industry backing and went into decline.
Today wise-use veterans and their lawyers and lobbyists are back, working for the son of the president they once detested. Among prominent appointees in the administration with wise-use backgrounds is Interior Department secretary Gale Norton, who began her career at the Mountain States Legal Foundation back when it billed itself as the "litigation arm of Wise Use Mountain States was the brainchild of Reagan's notoriously anti-environmental Interior secretary James Watt. (After being forced to resign, Watt told a group of ranchers that "if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.")
[Former] Department of Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman also has roots in the movement. As a lawyer in California, Veneman represented wise-use activists opposed to a federal conservation plan for the Sierra Nevada. Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, is a former lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a stalwart member of the wise-use coalition, while her undersecretary for natural resources, Mark Rey, was a timber lobbyist and featured speaker at wise-use events through the late 1990s.
Back in its heyday, the movement put forth a 25-point "Wise Use Agenda," which at the time was dismissed as right-wing fantasy. It included a call to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to log Alaska's Tongass National Forest, to gut the Endangered Species Act, and to open up public lands to motorized recreation. These and other wise-use bullet points now frame Bush administration environmental policy.
Drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge has been a constant preoccupation, and the Tongass was opened to wide-scale logging last December. The Endangered Species Act has been continuously undercut. Secretary Norton reversed a plan to ban snowmobiles from several national parks, instead increasing their numbers. She also directed the Bureau of Land Management to find ways to expedite coal, oil, and gas development on 250 million acres of public lands.
The Wise Use Agenda also called for privatizing the national parks and handing them over to people "with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney." Norton has promoted "outsourcing" thousands of National Park Service jobs to the private sector to provide "better delivery of services to the public."
"I wish we could take credit for that, but we can't," demurs wise use's founding ideologue Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise. "Dick Cheney sits on my board of directors, but we're not pen pals. Sometimes you just put something out there long enough and it gets picked up, despite what you do."
One victory wise use will take credit for goes back to the early days of the Bush administration, when it appeared the White House might appoint John Turner as Interior secretary. Turner had been head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under the elder Bush, and was a fishing buddy of Dick Cheney's.
But he was also president of the Conservation Fund, a "non-membership, non-advocacy" land preservation organization, so wise use considered him a "land-grabber" aligned with "the Rockefeller Family Foundation and their financing of the environmental left," according to Chuck Cushman of the American Land Rights Association. Cushman (known to his admirers as "Rent-a-Riot") organized an anti-Turner campaign; the angry protest spooked the Bush White House, and Turner's name was replaced by Gale Norton's.
"They caved, they blinked," says wise-use founder Arnold. "Cheney's probably angry at us, but who cares? Norton is a friend."
This spring, wise use again stepped in to block the Senate from ratifying the Law of the Seas treaty, an innocuous framework agreement for ocean management and marine protection. With broad support from the Navy, oil companies, the White House, and environmentalists, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had voted 19””0 to take the agreement to a final vote.
Then wise-use veteran Henry Lamb, former head of the so-called Environmental Conservation Organization (a group founded by developers opposed to wetlands protection) got involved. His new group, Sovereignty International, claimed that the Law of the Seas treaty was a plot to undermine the United States by establishing a "blue hull" United Nations navy (from which presumably to launch the black helicopters of militia-movement fantasy).
Lamb's group got Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma to call a hearing regarding "national security concerns" over the treaty, leading Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to put off the vote until after the presidential elections so as not to alienate Bush's supporters on the far right.
While traditional wise-use paranoia still proves effective, its rhetoric is softening. Where once leaders like Arnold railed against environmentalists ("We're out to kill the f s. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy environmentalism once and for all"), today's wise-use veterans like Interior secretary Norton take a softer tone. "We have in many ways reached the limits of what we can do through government regulation," she blandly asserts. Now that they occupy the seat of power, the wise-use movement no longer needs its blowhards and bullies as it quietly and effectively implements its radical agenda.
David Helvarg is author of The War Against the Greens (revised and updated 2004, Johnson Books) and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign
http://www.bluefront.org
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3.Free the Iraqi blogger
Steve Bell, Dahr Jamail, Lori Price (www.legitgov.org) have signed the petition for the arrested Iraqi blogger, Khalil Jarrar. - see his website at http://secretsinbaghdad.blogspot.com/
Please sign the petition for his release
Free Khalid Jarrar Now!!! Petition
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/820522461?ltl=1121677971
for further information:
More info on Khalid:
Another Casualty in Rumsfelds Information-war
Mike Whitney
July 17, 2005
http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=13797&s2=18