The Fog of False Choices

A New York Times Editorial

After five years, we're used to President Bush throwing up false choices to defend his policies. Americans were told, after all, that there was a choice between invading Iraq and risking a terrorist nuclear attack. So it was not a surprise that Mr. Bush's Oval Office speech Sunday night and his news conference yesterday were thick with Orwellian constructions: the policy debate on Iraq is between those who support Mr. Bush and those who want to pull out right now, today; fighting terrorists in Iraq means we're not fighting them here.

But none of these phony choices were as absurd as the one Mr. Bush posed to justify his secret program of spying on Americans: save lives or follow the law.

Mr. Bush said he thwarted terrorist plots by allowing the National Security Agency to monitor Americans' international communications without a warrant. We don't know if that is true because the administration reverts to top-secret mode when pressed for details. But we can reach a conclusion about Mr. Bush's assertion that obeying a 27-year-old law prevents swift and decisive action in a high-tech era. It's a myth.

The 1978 law that regulates spying on Americans (remember Richard Nixon's enemies lists?) does require a warrant to conduct that sort of surveillance. It also created a special court that is capable of responding within hours to warrant requests. If that is not fast enough, the attorney general may authorize wiretaps and then seek a warrant within 72 hours.
Mr. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales offered a whole bag of logical pretzels yesterday to justify flouting this law. Most bizarre was the assertion that Congress authorized the surveillance of American citizens when it approved the use of "all necessary and appropriate force" by the United States military to punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks or who aided or harbored the terrorists. This came as a surprise to lawmakers, who thought they were voting for the invasion of Afghanistan and the capture of Osama bin Laden.

This administration has a long record of expanding presidential powers in dangerous ways; the indefinite detention of "unlawful enemy combatants" comes to mind. So assurances that surveillance targets are carefully selected with reasonable cause don't comfort. In a democracy ruled by laws, investigators identify suspects and prosecutors obtain warrants for searches by showing reasonable cause to a judge, who decides if legal tests were met.

Chillingly, this is not the only time we've heard of this administration using terrorism as an excuse to spy on Americans. NBC Nightly News recently discovered a Pentagon database of 1,500 "suspicious incidents" that included a Quaker meeting to plan an antiwar rally. And Eric Licchtblau writes in today's New York Times that F.B.I. counterterrorism squads have conducted numerous surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, on groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group.

Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the power to spy on Americans. Fine, then Congress can just take it back.

www.nytimes.com

What Lost Iraq?

By Ted Rall

Most Americans were unaware that we had botched Afghanistan; most still are.

I watched the Pentagon send in a miniscule 8,000-troop complement where, according to its top strategists, at least half a million occupation soldiers (stationed for at least 20 years) would have been needed to control the nation's roads, pacify the provinces and establish the security essential for building an economy and political system. Banditry and looting soon made the average Afghan nostalgic for the security that accompanies tyranny. On the other hand, since U.S. soldiers quickly gained a reputation for shoving, kidnapping, robbing and even torturing innocent Afghans, perhaps their small number was a good thing.

If Afghanistan was a dry run, I observed at the time, there was little reason to expect that Iraq would turn out less disastrously. But no one, especially not the newspaper editors who'd been conned into supporting the Fourth Afghan War, wanted to hear that argument.

Four years later, little has improved. Most Afghans, Peter Baker wrote recently in The Washington Post, "still grind out the subsistence lives they did under the Taliban." Women still wear the burqa. "Corruption is widespread," The Week reports. "Outside Kabul, the country functions like a group of independent fiefdoms from the Middle Ages." Ordinary Afghans "are angry at the continuing war, the widespread malnutrition, and the snail's pace of progress."

As I'd feared he would, Donald Rumsfeld deployed the same low-rent approach to Iraq. There were too few troops to secure the Iraqis or themselves. As inexperienced weekend warriors shot up carloads of civilians from rooftops above invisible checkpoints, it soon became apparent that our forces were undereducated, poorly trained and excessively preoccupied with their own safety.

The Americans' cultural insensitivity, often beyond the point of brutality, transformed people grateful to be liberated into insurgents in a matter of months.

Now even the hawks say that Iraq is lost. "The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," admitted Representative John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), a Vietnam vet who sparked the serious debate Congress ought to have held back in 2002--when he voted for the war. "It is time to bring them home."

Thomas Edelman, whose letter to the editor appeared in the New York Times the same day Murtha's speech rocked the House of Representatives, articulates the last logical reason not to cut and run. "Regurgitating the notion of 'dancing Iraqis throwing flowers before American tanks' has no merit when the brutal enemy to be defeated assumes with good reason that it is bound to win. All it has to do is to wait us out," he wrote.

True, Iraqi resistance factions would wait for us to leave before turning on each other. Then again, isn't that what they're doing now? Edelman again: "The rhetoric of aspersions cast on our leaders for having deliberately misled us; the repeated dangling of terrible mistakes; and the rumblings about the impatience of the American people not only give the terrorists hope but also convince them that what is in their minds a weak and contemptible society of 'infidels' lacks the fortitude to see its mission completed."

He's partly right: If the United States could prevail against its fearsome Axis foes in World War II, it could surely beat--even after countless errors of omission and commission--a rag-tag assortment of ad hoc cells of moonlighting jihadis. But if wealth, education and weaponry were the sole determining factors in war, we would have won Vietnam. What was missing was political will.

Edelman's plea for compartmentalization is appealing, but we can't separate the way we went into Iraq from the challenge we face now. Winning a war requires a politically unified society, something the United States hasn't enjoyed since 1945. Since then our fractured nation has been unable to summon the unity to issue a formal declaration of war, much less win one. Bush-era America is highly fractured. Because the Administration can't count on most citizens to help, it has had to fight its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the cheap.

After 2000 most Americans told the CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that Bush had not won "fair and square." After 2004, the pollsters found, "the nation seemed nearly as divided as it had been in Bush's first election." How can he convince the half of the country that considers him an illegitimate usurper to risk their lives, or those of their sons and daughters? How can he get them to tighten their belts for a real war effort--one with sufficient troop strength to win?

Bush might have earned Democrats' loyalty after the disputed 2000 election by convening a sort of national unity government, one that recognized the deep and even ideological divide in the electorate, appointed Democrats to key cabinet posts and ruled from the center. Bush's radical-right policies and appointees, coupled with his habit of impugning his critics as traitors, instead increased the alienation of those who thought he'd cheated. "Not my president," the bumper-sticker read. And not their war.

The Republicans' decision to forego consensus made it easy to start their war. It also made it impossible to win.

www.tedrall.com

Pennsylvania Governor Urges Bush To Launch 'Manhattan Project' for Energy

By Lynn Garner / BNA Daily Report for Executives

Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell (D) sent a letter Dec. 1 to President Bush urging him to show "strong leadership" by launching "a modern day Manhattan Project" that would create large-scale alternative fuels projects and reduce reliance on crude oil.

Rendell used a speech at the National Press Club to outline his idea, called the American Energy Harvest Plan, which he is urging Bush to adopt on a national scale. The federally funded Manhattan Project led to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.

Rendell's plan would rely on the federal government's enormous purchasing power to provide the certainty that Wall Street is seeking before committing millions of dollars to big alternative energy projects.

The federal government spends about $10 billion a year on energy purchases and is the nation's largest energy buyer.

Rendell outlined what he has done at the state level in Pennsylvania as an example of what could be accomplished on a national scale by leveraging the purchasing power of states and the federal government.

"The execution of this plan does not require new federal revenue and it would not add to our country's deficit. But it does require strong leadership," Rendell wrote in his letter to Bush.
Rendell said in his speech that if his American Energy Harvest Plan is adopted on a national scale, the result would be a significant reduction in oil imports.

Oil imports currently are 59 percent of total U.S. supply and are projected by the Energy Information Administration to climb to 66 percent by 2015. Rendell claims his plan would lead to a reduction in oil imports to 53 percent in a decade. "Clearly we won't be done, but we will have taken a huge step in the right direction," Rendell said.

Rendell's plan builds on a state initiative unveiled Nov. 28 called EDGE, or Energy Deployment for a Growing Economy, which promotes advanced coal gasification technology. Coal would be gasified to produce many products, such as synthetic gas used to make chemicals, synthetic natural gas to heat homes, transportation fuels, and electricity.

The state's electric utilities, facing $15 billion in costs to upgrade older coal-fired power plants to meet federal clean air regulations, would have a grace period to keep the older plants running without updated controls if the utilities agree to upgrade or replace those plants with the more efficient gasifiers by Jan. 1, 2013.

Rendell has written to Department of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson asking them to grant waivers to "leapfrog" the installation of conventional pollution controls such as scrubbers on older power plants.

Among the main points of his national energy plan are:

1. Producing 2.5 million barrels a day of fuel, such as diesel and synthetic gas, from 50 clean coal gasification plants

2. Adopting a federal alternative energy portfolio standard to produce 1 million barrels a day from biofuels, 10,000 megawatts of electricity from solar energy, and 100,000 megawatts of electricity from wind power

3. Requiring one-third of federal and state fleet vehicles to be hybrids, conserving half a million barrels of oil per day.

These goals could be accomplished by 2015, Rendell said. He criticized the congressional leadership and the Bush administration for not supporting a national renewable portfolio standard for electricity generation during the energy bill debate earlier this year.

Pennsylvania last year adopted an alternative portfolio standard that will require 18 percent of all retail electricity in the state to come from renewable sources within 15 years. Approximately 20 states have similar renewable energy programs, but there is no national standard.

Rendell said he was spurred to do something after realizing that Pennsylvania companies "are sending $30 billion a year outside our state," and sometimes outside the country, to buy energy. More of that energy should be home grown, he said.

Here are the details of Rendell’s proposal that have already been adopted in Pennsylvania:

The nation’s first waste coal-to-diesel fuel plant. It will produce diesel and jet fuels and generate enough electricity to power more than 40,000 homes. The state pledged to purchase 10 million gallons from the plant for 10 years and organized a consortium of private fuel purchasers to do the same.

An economic stimulus program of $2.3 billion in government capital that is strategically investing in Pennsylvania industries, including $15.6 million in loans and grants for the development of the first windmill blade manufacturing plant in the nation. Gamesa, a world-renowned Spanish firm, agreed to open a U.S. manufacturing facility with Pennsylvania’s investment.

An investment to stimulate the development and the use of biofuels. The state provided capital support for a state-of-the-art biofuels injection facility. Every year the plant will replace 3.2 million gallons of foreign oil in the state’s diesel supply with domestically produced bio-fuel.

A plan to build new state-of-the-art clean coal fired electric generating facilities. The plan, called EDGE – Energy Deployment for a Growing Economy – is a unique partnership to support Pennsylvania’s manufacturing firms by providing low-cost, cleaner fuel, and furthering the state’s solid leadership in creating homegrown energy solutions. The initiative promotes advanced coal gasification technology that gasifies coal to produce an array of products, including synthetic gas, which can be used to make chemicals and consumer products, synthetic natural gas to heat homes, transportation fuels or electricity.

Setting energy efficiency standards for the state government fleet, including cutting out the gas-guzzlers and directing fleet managers to purchase smaller and higher fuel-efficient cars and mandating 25 percent of the fleet of SUVs and light trucks be hybrids.

www.bna.com