Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 27, 2003
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassination Policy: the
Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Recent
Stories
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
27, 2003
Retreat Under Fire
Bush's
Holy War in the Forests
By LACEY PHILLABAUM
Falling from Mt. Jefferson's vista to Oregon's
spectacular Metolius River, a tattered blanket of brown and black
forests still carpets the foothills of the Eastern Cascades a
year later. I see where towering flames must have jumped this
last free-flowing section of the last best salmon stream from
the Warm Spring Reservation, just where the river slows behind
the blighted Round Butte dam. I am bouncing over roads like washboards,
visiting the Deschutes National Forest's proposed 32 million
board feet post-fire timber salvage sale.
Each of the Deschutes River's four tributaries
flows through distinct aspects of Central Oregon's changeable
landscape, where East meets West, where valleys meet mountains
and the mountains, stark desert. The Upper Deschutes creates
the main flow, running south to north through scorched lava fields
and lunar aspen stands. Squaw Creek falls glacially and dramatically
from the feet of the Three Sisters mountains. The desert run
of the much abused Crooked River cuts a deep shaft through the
High Desert and Oregon's famed Smith Rock. But it's the Metolius,
with its spectacular spring, coppery Ponderosa-lined banks and
healthy fish runs, which was awarded Wild and Scenic status by
the feds and is best beloved by the locals. I daydream about
the spiritual place that is the now submerged confluence of these
prized rivers.
Now, George W. Bush comes here to tout
his Healthy Forest Initiative, just miles from the evidence that
his administration pushes logging before, during and after every
fire, deconstructing decades of hard-won environmental law.
President Bush tried to make the Metolius
River the backdrop for his stump speech in Oregon on August 21.
He intended to use a small thinning project near the resort community
of Camp Sherman to make the case for his Healthy Forest Initiative.
Behind the picture perfect backdrop and beyond the range of the
scripted soundbites, just downstream, however, a more representative
example of the Healthy Forest Initiative is this sale, the Eyerly
sale.
The Forest Service knew in 1996 that
this unroaded swath of forest was ready to burn. The Metolius
Late Successional Reserve (LSR) Analysis predicted, "In
ponderosa pine forests, where the historic fire-return interval
was eight to 12 years for low intensity fires and 150 years for
stand replacement fires, fire exclusion has increased the fire
return interval and increased the expected fire intensities."
The analysis called for all management to include prescribed
burning: "For the development and long-term maintenance
of late-succesional habitat in the Metolius LSR, the use of prescribed
fire should be encouraged. Harvesting, thinning and other vegetation
treatments should be designed to encourage the use of prescribed
fire." Management activity continued, but no prescribed
burns were carried out in conjunction, as required by the LSRA.
Almost inevitably, the forest burned.
Now, regeneration begins. Fireweed and ceonothus hold the precious
but damaged soil to the ground. Some of the soil is loosened
four or five inches deep on 60 degree slopes above 10 or so tributaries
of the Metolius. Logging above these rugged, steep and already
denuded streams won't benefit the protected critical habitat
of the bull trout.
Weighing in at a hefty 35 million board
feet, the Eyerly sale is as large as the sales of the 1990s.
It would log in an inventoried roadless area, protected Late
Successional Reserve (set aside for Northern spotted owls) and
in bald eagle nesting habitat. Under the Healthy Forest Initiative,
the Eyerly sale could be broken up into segments and categorically
excluded from environmental review, curtailing the Forest Service's
administrative review process. Typical of this illegal rush,
the Sisters Ranger District hopes to auction the Eyerly forests
for logging this fall, even though a draft environmental review
has yet to be released. Work crews have marked the trees to be
cut before the environmental assessment has even been drafted
or opened to public comment. The fluttering blue flags marking
cut areas in the scorched trees signal that my days bumping down
these washboarded roads have been in vain. I drive home.
Wholesale logging of old growth on public
land is a foregone conclusion under the Healthy Forest Initiative.
Bush tried to highlight a fire-prevention thinning project, but
you don't have to look far to see the bigger picture. Even from
his convoy of five double-bladed Chinook helicopters, Bush couldn't
quite see it that way during the 15 minutes that he toured the
latest fire before dashing off for a round of golf.
Bush never came any closer than those
helicopters to the Metolius River. Wednesday night, the night
before his visit, impenetrable dark clouds blocked our view of
the Cascades from Smith Rock. Billowing, sudden gusts of wind
cooled another 100 degree day. We conjectured wildfire, but storms
seemed imminent. The extreme atmospheric changes from streaky
red sunset over blue sky to foreboding blackness felt Biblical.
The acrid taste of barely distinguished smoke and an unclear
haze along the skyline confirmed a new fire. Forcing Bush's tactical
retreat from Camp Sherman to the Redmond Airport, this chance
fire seems both omen and answer to my prayers.
Lacey Phillabaum,
editor of an agricultural newspaper, In Good Tilth, and former
editor of the Earth First! Journal, lives in Bend, Oregon. She
can be reached at: lacey@tilth.org
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|