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Today's Stories December 15 / 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh A People's Penny for the Magna Carta December 14, 2007 JoAnn Wypijewski The Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him John Ross Iraqi Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax Jacob Hornberger Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? Allan Nairn "Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes Dave Zirin The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners Dave Lindorff The First Cut is the Deepest Misty MacDuffee Toxic Grizzlies Ben Terrall What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine? Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi Prerequisites for Peace Website of the Day Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"   December 13, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Shrinking the Dollar from the Inside-Out Mike Whitney Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding Ron Jacobs Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy Norman Solomon The USA's Human Rights Daze Peter Morici The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch Sandy Mayes Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia Franklin Lamb The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling? Jacob Hornberger Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It Nadim Rouhana An Interloper in My Own Land Dave Zirin On Pigskin and Petrol Website of the Day Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support! December 12, 2007 Allan Nairn US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian Phones Alan Farago How Sprawl Eats Its Young Ray McGovern Torture, Lies and Videotape Winslow T. Wheeler The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts Evan Jones The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell Doom for the US Farm Belt James Petras An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers Joel Hirschorn The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine Joshua Frank Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention Sherry Wolf Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul Dan Bacher Survey of a Fish Graveyard Website of the Day Men Eating Bugs   December 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn What's Really Happened During the Surge? Diana Johnstone The Next Kosovo War Paul Craig Roberts It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution David Macaray Impasse in Hollywood Ralph Nader Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs Andy Worthington Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result Martha Rosenberg No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers Steve Champion / Anthony Ross Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams Kim Nicolini Tangled Up in Dylan Michael Dickinson Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent Website of the Day A Charming (and Worthy) Pitch December 10, 2007 Uri Avnery How They Stole the Bomb From Us Debbie Nathan The Perils of Journalism and Child Porn JoAnn Wypijewski Is There a Left Here Left? If So, What Can It Do? Steve Kelly Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness Donna J. Volatile Welcome to the Revolution   December 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Coup Against Bush and Cheney Brenda Norrell Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists Saul Landau The Ruins of Empire R. F. Blader A Rape in Every Drink? Ray McGovern Spinning Iran's Centrifuges Allan Nairn Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in Indonesia Linn Washington, Jr Spotlight on Death Row Paul Craig Roberts When Will Bush Come Clean?   December 7, 2007 Sean Penn Piano Wire Puppeteers Arthur Versluis Mining Water in the Desert M. G. Piety Racism and the American Psyche: Some Thoughts on Race and Intelligence Pam Martens Banksters Gone Wild Alan Farago Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia? Sprawl and the Credit Crisis Allan Nairn It Takes (Out) a Village Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday Alice Slater The Iran Opening Robert Weissman The Story of Stuff Website of the Day Something About Mitt   December 5, 2007 Mike Whitney Why the CFR Hates Putin Sharon Smith The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden and the Dead End Democrats James Petras Venezuela in the Aftermath Ron Jacobs The Iran Charade Dave Zirin Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor John V. Whitbeck Two States or One? Time to Choose Peter Zinn Covered in New Orleans Niranjan Ramakrishnan Impeach Pelosi Instead Alan Farago The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida Heather Gray US Meddling in Australian Politics Website of the Day A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas   December 4, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in Ann Arbor Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court Paul Craig Roberts The Lies at the End of the American Dream Ray McGovern No-Nuke Iran Winslow T. Wheeler Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are Too Small Allan Nairn The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just Want Food" Russell Mokhiber The USA v. Al Arian Nikolas Kozloff As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American Left John V. Walsh Peace Movement Paralyzed Ghada Ageel Will Peace Cost Me My Home? Stephen Soldz The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations Website of the Day Hands Off the People of Iran     December 3, 2007 Tariq Ali Venezuela After the Referendum Bill Quigley New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor, Tax Credits for Developers Eric Walberg The Bible and Middle East History Uri Avnery After Annapolis Marjorie Cohn Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed Dave Lindorff Vengeance Isn't Sweet Stephen Fleischman Homeless in Paradise Martha Rosenberg Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile Website of the Day So Just Lead!   December 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift in a Sea of Booze Jeffrey St. Clair The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West Mike Whitney "Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir Rosen Shemon Salam A Visit From the FBI Roger Burbach The Battle in Bolivia Benjamin Dangl New Politics in Old Bolivia Brian M. Downing The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to the Surge? Greg Moses Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story Sonja Karkar The "Never-Never" Peace Conference Saul Landau Ethics and Evil in South Boston Margaret Kimberley Black America Left Behind John Ross What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution? Reza Fiyouzat Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran Judith Scherr Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays Lance Olsen Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy Christopher Brauchli Mr. Bush and the Despots Robert Fantina Iraq as U.S. Colony Dan Bacher Fish Triage on Prospect Island Michael Donnelly Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency Website of the Weekend Appalachian Voices   November 30, 2007 Peter Stone Brown The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan Wajahat Ali The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's Former Minister of Information Allan Nairn Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers Alan Farago The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash John Ross The Death of Latin America's First Revolution Corporate Crime Reporter America's Corporate Crime Capitals Lucia Alvarez Diego Gonzalez Argentina's Political Future James Rothenberg The Iraqi Miracle Website of the Day Bio-Bling?   November 29, 2007 R. F. Blader The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran Stephen Soldz War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire Sheldon Richman Iraq 3.0 George Wuerthner Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws Felice Pace Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis? Col. Dan Smith The Meaning of Annapolis Harvey Wasserman Terror Target Nukes Nikolas Kozloff Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08 Paul Krassner Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike! Dave Lindorff News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela? CP News Service The One State Declaration Website of the Day A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter November 28, 2007 James Petras CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela Jeff Halper Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One Way Street Pam Martens Crashing Citigroup Peter Morici Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession Mohammed Khatib Separate and Unequal in Palestine Helen Redmond The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America William S. Lind In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm? Ben Tripp We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges Jeff Berg Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran Website of the Day The Lies of Joe Klein   November 27, 2007 Joe DeRaymond On the Road to the Torture School Paul Craig Roberts Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary and Rudy Marjorie Cohn Remembering Victor Rabinowitz Mike Whitney A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp Ron Jacobs The Myths of Military Progress Col. Dan Smith The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work Ralph Nader Family Learning Karim Makdisi Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut Christopher Ketcham Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop Ronan Bennett Martin Amis Does a Coulter Website of the Day Celebrating the Uncensored Media   November 26, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Heading for Annapolis Paul Craig Roberts The End of All That David Macaray Enter Mediator Sameer Dossani Pakistan's Wounded Dictator Roger Burbach The Final Battle in Bolivia Mark Scaramella Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire Brian McKinlay Howard's End Rick Kuhn The Fall of a Racist Union Buster Binoy Kampmark Ruddslide and Dull Alec Monica Benderman What Do You Know of War? Brenda Norrell Return to Alcatraz Website of the Day Ghostworld by DJ Spooky   November 24 / 25, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson, MD Robert Fisk Darkness Falls on the Middle East Saul Landau Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P. Jeffrey St. Clair Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism Rannie Amiri Beirut's Black Friday Christopher Brauchli Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace Daniel Gross The Gap and Black Friday Mike Whitney "A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions" Marjorie Cohn Iran and the 2008 Elections David Rosen Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans David Michael Green If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom .... Kenneth Rexroth When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan Muhammad Iqbal Trans. Shahid Alam Ghazal Website of the Day Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill November 23, 2007 Gary Leupp Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat Valley Laura Carlsen Coming to Terms with Diversity in Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP David Macaray Keeping Labor Unions Out Andy Worthington Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden Clifton Ross Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant Seth Sandronsky Battling Sodexho Dan Bacher Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation William A. Cook The Myth of Middle East Peace Website of the Day Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short Film   November 22, 2007 Alan Farago Who Lost America's Everglades? Greg Moses A Thanksgiving Basting Dave Lindorff Impeachment is Back on the Table Mike Ely Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving Omar Azfar Gore for President of Pakistan?   November 21, 2007 Vijay Prashad Our Dictator, Their Democracy Martha Rosenberg Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant Manuel Garcia, Jr. Epiphany on the Glacier John Ross The Last Days of Mexican Corn Brian McKenna Cancer Terrorists Unmasked Stephen Soldz Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo Monica Benderman Needing Peace Ben Terrall Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar Website of the Day Mercy for Animals   November 20, 2007 Oren Ben-Dor Why Israel Has No "Right to Exist" as a Jewish State Wajahat Ali An Interview with Norman Finkelstein Alan Farago The Dark Arts and the Bush Dynasty Marjorie Cohn Musharraf Plays Bush for a Fool Ralph Nader Green is Gold? Andy Worthington Guantánamo Whistleblower Launches a New Attack on Rigged Tribunals Sara Olson When Going AWOL is the Only Escape Dave Lindorff Likelihood of Iran Attack Gains Credence Paul Krassner The First Amendment, a Dialogue Website of the Day Joanne Mariner on Torture November 19, 2007 Winslow T. Wheeler Why Congress Won't Reform China Hand The U.S. Game Plan in Pakistan Allan Nairn Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia Uri Avnery How to Get Out? David Macaray The Chalice that Poisoned the Labor Movements Dave Lindorff Democrats in Future Shock: They Could Lose It All in 2008! Bill Quigley Twenty Thousand Protest at Ft. Benning; Eleven Face Federal Criminal Trials Ron Jacobs Sitting on the Group W Bench: War, Thanksgiving and Arlo Guthrie Sunsara Taylor Legalized Rights for Fertilized Eggs? Binoy Kampmark Why Steve Irwin--You're Dead! Heather Gray Another Look at W.E.B. DuBois Website of the Day The Meat Market     November 17 / 18, 2007 P. Sainath Neoliberalism's Price Tag: 150,000 Farm Suicides in India David Rosen The Scarlet Hypocrites: Republicans, Christians and the Politics of Adultery Mike Whitney Pentagon Cover Up: 15,000 or More US Deaths in Iraq War? George Wuerthner Saving the Big Wild Brenda Norrell The Case of Jim Main, Jr: In Montana, Indians are Guilty Until Proven Innocent George Ciccariello-Maher Of Submarines and Loose Screws Karim Makdisi Lebanon is Hanging by a Thread Marie Trigona Wal-Mart in Argentina Valerio Volpi The Catholic Church, Incorporated Fred Gardner The Straight-Ahead Runner Robert Fantina The White House Press Office Mike Ferner Thank God for the Senate Republicans! Missy Comley Beattie The Radical Majority Kenneth Couesbouc Circles of Power Patrick O'Hayer A Portrait of Mailer and a Young Poet Poets' Basement Davies, Buknatski and Ford   November 16, 2007 Cockburn / St. Clair The Vices of Hillary Clinton: Secrecy, Intransigence and War Dave Zirin The Indictment of Barry Bonds: Busted by a Broken System Gary D. Barnett A Day in the Life of an Unwilling Federal Agent Alan Farago Sprawl, Mortgage Fraud and Political Corruption Dave Lindorff Two Brothers and Two Scandals Russell Mokhiber Pelosi and Me: "What Should be Done with Those Protesters?" Robert Ovetz Cargo Ships in Paradise: Shipping Lanes Threaten the Yosemite of the Sea Brenda Norrell "Today We Experienced America:" Arresting Indigenous People on the Border David Swanson Wolf Blitzer Loses Democratic Debate Peter Letheby Outside the Box on the Great Plains Website of the Day Why Activism Fails   November 15, 2007 Cockburn / St. Clair Hillary Clinton in Arkansas Adolfo Gilly The Spirit of Revolt Peter Bohmer 10 Days That Shook Olympia Andy Worthington The Trials of Omar Khadr: Gitmo's Child Soldier Gray / Derks Obama's Pitch to South Carolina's Black Churches Affronts Gay Groups Liaquat Ali Khan Liberating Pakistan Dave Lindorff Where's the Party? Christopher Brauchli Tipping Point: the Politics of Gossip Anthony Papa Racism as Law: Crack Cocaine Sentences Martha Rosenberg Merck's Big Write Off Ben Terrall Thank You, Ehren Watada Website of the Day On the Colorado: Drought, Climate Change and Water Supplies November 14, 2007 Cockburn / St. Clair The Making of Hillary Clinton James Petras Venezuela Between Ballots and Bullets Al Giordano Campaign 08: Don't Trust Anyone Over 50 Paul Craig Roberts The Lobby Andy Worthington Innocents and Foot Soldiers Stephen Lendman Torturing Palestinian Detainees Fatima Bhutto Aunt Benazir's False Promises: the Dismantling of Pakistani Democracy Martin Smith Norman Mailer and the "Good War" Jeff Leys Slip Sliding Away: House Votes on War Funding Website of the Day Why the Writers are Striking November 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Hillary's Big Problem and How Bill Can Fix It Jeffrey St. Clair Mailer and Us: the Writer as Fighter Robert Bryce The Pakistan Fuel Connection David Macaray The Teamsters and the Hollywood Strike Mike Whitney Bulletins from the Titanic Ralph Nader Pakistani Lawyers vs. American Lawyers Nikolas Kozloff Chavez Blasts the Spanish King Jordan Flaherty Education Versus Incarceration in Tallulah, Louisiana B. R. Gowani Dear Mrs. Bhutto Website of the Day Monty Python: "Fuck You, Very Much FCC"   November 12, 2007 Vicente Navarro Why Hillary's Health Care Plan Really Failed Ben Brown Letter from Ho Chi Minh City: a Tribute to My Vietnam Vet Father Omar K. A Pakistani Lawyer's Testimony: Life Under the Brutal Emergency Sadia Abbas The Roots of Pakistan's Political Crisis: Corrupt Elites and a Kleptocratic Military Farzana Versey Mailer's Miasma Richard W. Behan The Political Crimes of Complicity Paul Krassner Asshole of the Year: Congratulations Tim Russert! Cindy Sheehan Faith and War Peter Stone Brown The Return of Levon Helm Dave Lindorff Dennis, You are Not Alone Website of the Day Police Attack in Olympia   November 10 / 11, 2007 Alain Gresh Uncle Sam's New Backyard: How to Turn a Region into a Graveyard Mike Whitney For Whom the Closing Bell Tolls: the Last Dead Bull on Wall Street Ron Jacobs A View from the Pakistani Left: an Interview with Farooq Tariq Jeffrey St. Clair The First Dambuster: a Coyote Story Alan Farago Tangled Up in Blue: a Brief History of Florida Environmentalism Binoy Kampmark When Language Drowns: Torture in America Robert Fantina Legitimizing Torture Fred Gardner Psychological Torture in the Name of Family Values Ayesha Ijaz Khan The General in His Labyrinth Nicola Nasser NATO's Southward Drift Philip Rizk The Blame Game in Gaza Michael Dickinson Condom Nation: the Pope vs. Terry Higgins Joel S. Hirschhorn The Grand Delusion: a Conspiracy of Two Parties Paul Krassner Flunking Out of the Electoral College Wadner Pierre / Joe Emersberger The Ongoing War on Journalists in Haiti           Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition December 15 / 16, 2007 Rachel Carson Kills Millions? The Greening of Big Tobacco By STANDARD SHAEFER   "Instinctively we caught the spirit of the times. It was the era when Rachel Carson's book on the environment came out. It was an era when the people on our planet became aware. It was an era of the freedom movement-when the young people, the students during the 60s were protesting. The Marlboro advertising symbolized a free spirit who was not chained to a time-clock, it symbolized freedom without being controlled by a computer. On the other hand, our advertising fit into the idea of nature that was clean and unpolluted, so we reached the wishes and longings of many environmentalists, tramps, and adventurers." Georg Weisman, The Marboro Story Director Emeritus, Philip Morris.   In May of 2007, near the eve of Rachel Carson's 100th birthday, as Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md) was preparing a congressional bill that would honor the iconic environmental activist, there was sudden surge of opposition. The issue was genocide. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot­ Rachel Carson dwarfed them all, according to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Sun, and New York Times Magazine. Over decades, they had run opinion pieces by authors associated with rightwing think tanks suggesting she was responsible for killing one child every 15 seconds, three million people annually, and over one hundred million since 1972. Her personal responsibility for the US ban on DDT allegedly caused untold deaths in the developing world where restrictions on pesticide hampered agriculture and set off a chain reaction of needless environmental regulations that threatened economic freedom. The issues brought up in 2007 were not in any way new claims or new findings, just recycled accusations from those papers , but it was enough. Cardin pulled his bill because pro-DDT Senator Tom Coburn (R-Ok) threatened to block it. Why so much fuss over a symbolic act and who was behind it all? Grassroot activists, bloggers, and scientists lit up their glowboxes, especially the greens who have always been the closest readers of rightwing smear campaigns. Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales and widely heralded "expert" on DDT thought he had the answer. The only force evil enough to attack his hero Rachel Carson was Big Tobacco. He began to search the public archive of Tobacco Legacy Archive, a collection of formerly secret company documents released only recently thanks to the court cases surrounding their products. Some of the story Lambert got right. In 1998, the new Director-General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland had established the Tobacco-Free Initiative, an effort to establish an international treaty to enhance tobacco control and promote public health initiatives to reduce smoking. Horrified, Big Tobacco did what they always did when their profits were in jeopardy. They paid third parties to attack their enemy. As Lambert realized, this worked best if some other issue, so-called larger issue could be used to distract attention, as had happened in the well-known efforts by the FDA to regulate nicotine. But Lambert kept investigating. He announced that he had found the man behind the Carson smear- Roger Bate. Bate had started a fake grassroots group called Africa Fights Malaria and used it to criticize the WHO as implementing an inept approach to the malaria crisis. Bates attempted to get Big Tobacco to support the group, citing his ability to triangulate. The idea was to use the DDT issue to distract people from tobacco and the debate around environmental tobacco (ETS or second-hand smoke). The key elements of Africa Fights Malaria strategy were articulated as: Simplify our arguments. Pick issues on which we can divide our opponents and win. Make our case on our terms, not on the terms of our opponents - malaria prevention is a good example. ... this will create tensions between LDCs and OECD countries and between public health and environment. The idea was to make the choice appear to be a question of people or birds. That such a strategy would appeal to Big Tobacco was certainly true, and Lambert found documents connecting Bate to Philip Morris, but that is where Lambert began to go awry. Philip Morris never hired Bate, or at least there is no such record. There are only records proving that he tried to pitch a smear campaign but did not get far. In fact, there is some indication that Helmut Reif, Philip Morris' Director of Science & Technology for it's R&D facility in Neuchatel, Switzerland (Fabriques de Tabac Reunies), was not thrilled that Bate had approached other tobacco companies. More importantly, Reif had been successfully undermining the World Health Organization's science throughout the 1980s and 1990s; and as one report suggests, he had developed a host of tactics far more sophisticated than the one's Bate proposed. Reif had no need of a freelance shill and he no doubt knew better than to risk exposure by going head to head against someone like Rachel Carson, whether she was alive or not, especially by using an amateur. Bate got tobacco money anyway, just not from Philip Morris and not until after the Africa Fights Malaria campaign. RJ Reynolds documents show that they paid (via a front group) for the publication of What Risk?, a book Bate edited that had a chapter on secondhand smoke. Even then, documents suggest RJR wanted to be sure they had their kind of person handling the chapter of ETS. Bate would later work for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that Philip Morris had used during their expensive anti-FDA campaign, where he would oppose environmental regulations, but he was by no means an agent provocateur for Big Tobacco. He was just a free-market fundamentalist and avowed enemy of environmental regulation. Though Bate denied that he was personally behind the Carson attack, he was attached to several rightwing think-tanks and would eventually join the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the force behind several laughable "CO2: We call it life" ads. Also, by the time Lambert had pieced together his story on the popular Grist environmental news site, The Union of Concerned Scientists had already exposed the tobacco industry's role in denying global warming in January of 2007 and connected the Competitive Enterprise Group to both Big Tobacco and Big Oil. The real impact of Lambert's digging is that it reveals how Big Tobacco's malfeasance had become so widely known that there is almost an army of freelancers like Roger Bate begging to get in on the game. Lambert is quite right, though, to point out that Bate was using Africa Fights Malaria to bolster his credentials with rightwing think-tanks. But, Lambert's suggestion that Big Tobacco is a monolithic entity so greedy and corrupt that it willingly takes on its enemies in bold, public fashion is at best a distraction. True, it has been the case from time to time, as Alan Brandt made clear in The Cigarette Century, that Philip Morris will embrace flamboyant tactics such as embracing the bill of rights, even arranging to distribute copies of it to undermine anti-smoking activists. But the bulk of Big Tobacco's strategy has been to work in the shadows, using its own PR firms, its own "safe science" advocates. Even when Big Tobacco has suffered major setbacks, they have striven to maintain their invisibility, creating a corporate culture arguably as secretive as the CIA and a business model of undermining efforts to expose their other damage. Tobacco is without a doubt one of the most destructive plants on the planet even before it hits the lungs. Only when anti-tobacco advocates understand how the tobacco industry has deflected notice of these other evils will they be able to widen the war. And the environment is good place to start because it is easy to document and already a hot issue. "The time is now for anti-tobacco advocates and environmentalists to unite," according to Judith McKay, senior policy consultant for the World Health Organization. If so, then it is crucial to x-ray the secret documents and see how Big Tobacco has been able to keep environmental threats separate from public health concerns, and keeping their actions as opaque as possible. SMOKE PRINTS EVERYWHERE Big Tobacco hardly twitched on the release of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. They were certainly aware of the book. They did not, however, attack it or fear it might draw attention to their own massive use of pesticide. They embraced it through the public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton, Inc., one of the most notorious PR firms in the world having played a hand in everything from greenwashing the chemical industry to deceiving the US to the start of the first Gulf War. Confidential documents reveal that they boasted to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) about how they had influenced the content of several science journalists covering tobacco issues. The TIRC was an industry funded entity that granted awards to study the link between smoking and disease. In effect, it was part of a four-decade effort to spread scientific disinformation about the link, but as these minutes from Hill & Knowlton reveal, they liked their doubt cast in nonscientific terms as well. Hill & Knowlton had a long going effort to influence media coverage of tobacco issues, but they also liked to find opportunities to contrast the tobacco industry with other problem industries. One of the jobs Hill & Knowlton was most proud of concerned a journalist named George Dusheck, who was not writing about tobacco at all, but reviewing Silent Spring. After consulting with H & K, Dusheck inserted a passage about the tobacco industry into his review: The reaction of the pesticide industry (to the book) is a sharp contrast to that of the tobacco industry, when it faced what it feared was an economic threat from the American Cancer Society's report of smoking and lung cancer. The tobacco companies did not panic, did not abuse ACS scientists as writers of science fiction horror stories, did not seek to influence any newspaper's publications or handling of the story. They did create a Tobacco (Industry) Research Committee headed by a respected scientist, Clarence Cook Little, which has worked quietly and with adequate funds to get at the cause of lung cancer. In doing so it has got its viewpoint before the public without hysteria. And it has continued to sell cigarettes-more cigarettes today than in 1954 when the ACS findings were first reported. The Duschekexample proves both more typical of Big Tobacco's modus operandi and more enlightening than the Bate/Carson episode. Of course Clarence Cook Little was exactly the kind of shill anti-tobacco forces love to vilify and rightfully so. Few have done more to undermine the concept of "sound science" than he. But here he appears the voice of reason and moderation. What is more noteworthy, however, is how the missteps of the chemical industry are used as an occasion for contrast with the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry appears socially responsible, prudent, and respectful of its opposition. Even more remarkable is the fact that Silent Spring was almost devoid of tobacco references. Carson had mentioned- almost as an aside-that arsenic content in tobacco increased six hundred percent since the mid-1940s as result of DDT remaining in the soil even after its use on tobacco had ceased. Her point was simply that pesticide residue remained in the soil and was in no way critical of tobacco itself. There was no necessity to bring the tobacco industry into the review unless the intention was to substitute one health crisis for another, and deflect attention from Big Tobacco's connection to the pesticide issue entirely. Amusingly enough, in 1964, a stockholder wrote to A.H. Galloway, the president of RJ Reynolds about Silent Spring. The stockholder suggested the book might be helpful. He wanted the company to fund the natural foods movement or what is now thought of as organic or local food movements. He thought doing so would distract from the crusades against the golden leaf. No doubt environmentalists like Lambert would have preferred that Big Tobacco follow that more salacious and more risky route. Should RJR have distributed the book or promoted it, it might easily have caused readers to wonder about what they were really smoking. But even if RJR had done so quietly and with plausible deniability, it would have been entirely consistent with the industry's pattern of divorcing public health from larger environmental issues, and in particular, its pattern of triangulation. It seems, as is often the case, the stockholders understood the business model well before the business' critics.   ASTROTURF AND SECONDHAND HOT AIR Even the best attempt to link tobacco with environmental crisis has garnered little attention: the January 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, is arguably the best and boldest salvo on record. That report documented, much more carefully than British journalist George Monbiot's recent work Heat, how Big Oil is now using not only Big Tobacco's disinformation techniques to contest global warming, but also the very same public relations firms, and in many cases the same bogus scientists. However, subsequent UN reports on the need to act now include not one word about the 1 billion people slated to die from cigarettes and certainly not a word about the well-documented role of the tobacco industry as a leading cause of deforestation, desertification, and thus global warming. Well-documented is not well told, it seems, especially when the subject is disaster. The task is not to just tell the story about how Big Tobacco used deception in both health and environmental matter, but to show how Big Tobacco managed to separate health and the environment in the public discourse insofar as their products were concerned. An internal Philip Morris memo from 1996 shows the general trend continued long after the health risks had become clear. In discussing the increasing pressure on corporations to pay for the environmental damage their product manufacturing might cause, an unidentified Philip Morris executive writes: There has been a recent report of the President's Commission on Sustainable Development which we're concerned about. There's also a U.N. group looking at this. One big issue is the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce ) Charter for Sustainable Development. PM is the only major company not to sign it. Why? Because it equates environment with health, and obviously PM doesn't want to put itself in a position of saying we won't sell products that have health implications to their consumers. The Philip Morris statement could easily describe the modus operandi of the entire industry since the early 1970s, a time in which health professionals had largely agreed that smoking itself was the cause of many diseases, but during which the controversy around ETS ("environmental tobacco smoke" or secondhand smoke), was just beginning. As tobacco historian Alan Brandt points out in The Cigarette Century, Philip H. Abelson, the editor of Science became one of the first and most prominent voices in the United States to describe secondhand smoke as "air pollution," in 1967. Abelson specifically placed emphasis on the fact that nonsmokers often had no choice about accepting its risks. That emphasis seems prescient today given that so much of the controversy around smoking has hinged on the fact smokers have felt they were only endangering themselves. But Abelson was one man sitting on high, an elite editor. He could have been neutralized with methods like the ones Hill & Knowlton had bragged about to the TIRC or with the usual quote mining that is the modus operandi of oppositional research. Abelson's finest contribution was to inspire grassroots activists such as GASP (Group Against Smoking Pollution). By virtue of their very name they deployed the word "pollution" in public discourse more than anyone else. During the 1970s, they were the ones who pushed and got local laws to restrict smoking. Of course, they were somewhat offset at least initially by Astroturf organizations (fake grassroots groups) such as the smokers-rights groups funded by Big Tobacco. To be clear, the smoker's rights groups were not a pure PR invention. There was legitimate anger among smokers as they began to feel more and more like third-class citizens. But if they found smoking turned them into pariahs, it had as much to do with the flimsy defense that tobacco companies offered as it did anything relating to a New Puritanism. To counteract secondhand smoke concerns, Big Tobacco first produced reports suggesting that building ventilation would offset indoor smoke. The suggestions ranged from simply opening windows to installing air filters in offices. However, by 1981, thanks to the National Academy of Sciences, the industry could no longer effectively compartmentalize this issue. By the end of the 1980s, ETS had been implicated in everything from children's earaches, childhood asthma, cervical cancer (often in nonsmoking wives of smokers), sudden infant death syndrome, and cardiopulmonary disorders. Even Philip Morris lawyers conceded this and more in 1994. Even as smoking was banned on airplanes and other common areas, the industry kept hoping to keep the issue compartmentalized as an issue of nuisance and personal decorum, especially in the US and the UK. When Philip Morris began to reflect on who and what threatened their efforts to divorce the environment from health issues, it issued an "Executive Summary of Paper on PM Environmental Giving" that acknowledged that it was the largest contributor to the nation's packaging stream and that it was well aware that environmental activists were beginning to make cigarette executives uncomfortable. It insisted: Grassroots mobilizations and environmental politics are not to be underestimated. Our products have been boycotted by environmentally-concerned groups as diverse as state Public Interest Research Groups, recycling advocates, and the "Wise Use" movement. What is striking is the concern over boycotted products, rather than in mobilizing for local laws and regulations that was historically the real catalyst for Philip Morris' decline in stature. The second striking aspect of this report is how throughout it repeatedly states that appearing green is crucial to sustaining their business model. It also reveals that by 1994, citizens had come to regard the environment as "second only to guns and crime." In essence, the furor over ETS did not rank as a major concern either to Philip Morris or what it called "citizens." Furthermore, the stakes would forever seem higher if opposition were focused on the environment: "Everything we produce relies on agricultural production." This document even acknowledges that Philip Morris' Corporate Affairs had a five-year plan that emphasized environment, image, and corporate contributions. Why then did people like Ableson or even GASP not then widen the terms of the debate? Why did they not start investigating exactly what kind of environmental contributions the companies had in mind? Or, put another way, why did they not attack the very idea of Philip Morris as a legitimate business? Were they exhausted even in victory from the prolonged battle over ETS? Activist-journalist Alexander Cockburn, who had written about Big Tobacco's impact on developing countries in the 1970s, described the problem like this, "The left generally didn't get involved in taking on the tobacco companies because they all smoked like chimneys, and many still do." But part of the answer might also do with the experts, who felt perhaps hemmed-in by their field of expertise, usually health related. But what experts do best is draw attention to the unseen externalities, the fallout and the spillover such as the role tobacco plays in deforestation and global warming. They could have reached out to people involved in those struggles. If the truth is told, though, the greens and anti-tobacco advocates were behind the curve by 1977, not 1994. Secret documents from that year reveal that already Big Tobacco had anticipated a wider assault on its environmental impact and particularly that its environmental impact could be easily shown to affect people on a global scale. Nowhere perhaps is this clearer than in inter-office correspondence from 1977 in which Murray D. Rosenberg briefed Philip Morris executives on the "greenhouse effect." Rosenberg credited Helmut Wakeham, Vice President and Director of Research & Develop at the time, and arguably one of the most cold-blooded characters in the entire tobacco saga, for anticipating the issue. Rosenberg's report tutored the other executives on the potential threat to the tobacco industry. Unlike Big Oil's contention that carbon dioxide is a natural component of the atmosphere and thus harmless, Rosenberg's report acknowledged that man-made carbon dioxide is a dire threat to life on the planet, particularly the amount produced from fossil fuels. Rosenberg calculated the annual contribution of cigarette-produced carbon dioxide at 0.0018% of the annual total generated by man. The 0.0018% figure while seeming to exonerate the tobacco industry could easily be shown as incomplete and that is probably why it was never released to the public­ why attract attention to an issue no one was paying monitoring? The figure did not take into account issues like deforestation, paper waste, fuel used to ship tobacco and cure it, nor did he mention that smoking also releases methane, another greenhouse gas. Currently, the anti-tobacco advocates estimate smoking across the globe generates about 2.6 billion kg of CO2 and 5.2 billion kilograms of methane every year. It takes one acre of forest to cure (dry) an acre of tobacco , which is quite a separate calculation from the amount of forest consumed in packaging, newsprint ads, and paper to wrap the cigarettes. In Uruguay and South Korea and Uruguay, forty percent of the annual deforestation is tobacco-related. In Malawi, where only three percent of farmers grow tobacco, almost 80 percent of the trees cut down for curing it. These are more recent numbers than Rosenberg's but even then, the best deforestation estimate is over a decade old. That is precisely the problem. It's safe to say that by the late 1970s, anti-tobacco advocates had fallen behind, drained in part by the necessary struggle against second-hand smoke, and unaware that Big Tobacco anticipated a much larger war. Philip Morris, for example, claimed in a 1997 document it gave its first environmental grant "to help create Keep America Beautiful," in 1956. In fact, the organization began in 1953. Nevertheless, Philip Morris received a letter from K.A.B. in 2000 that allowed them to maintain the language "founding member" for its timeline advertisements. The discrepancy would hardly be worth mentioning except that Keep America Beautiful was from the start a greenwash vehicle started by business executives in the beverage and packing industry. At the time, they were afraid Congress might start requiring them to be responsible for the litter their products contributed. Though often credited as a successful anti-litter advertising campaign, Keep America Beautiful was really a lobbying arm of the packaged products industries, designed to make those industries look responsible, names and dates forever not withstanding. According to Wally Lamb's investigation of secret tobacco documents, Keep America Beautiful's own anti-butts policy was molded by Philip Morris and even then reluctantly embraced. This is but one example of the industry's attempts to enhance its opacity even as it tried to address the question of litter that was just starting to be raised. Even without the secret documents available today, Keep America Beautiful's famous crying "Indian" billboards and commercials should have been enough to build some outrage. The history of 19th century conservation is the history of not only the genocide of Native Americans, but also the ecocide of the Great Plains and the overgrazing of pastoral lands by westward settlers. It may be that to oppose the corporations sponsoring those ads would have required a collective introspection few imperial nations ever approach. Nevertheless the exploitation of the crying Indian on that 1971 billboard was undeniable proof that among Americans, the only environment that mattered was the one beneath their own feet. Outside the US, where secondhand smoke had hardly been a mobilizing issue, there were rumblings about deforestation and environmental devastation as early as 1914, when World War I brought smoking into vogue. SMOKING TREES AND COOKING NUMBERS In lesser developed countries where increasingly more and more tobacco was grown only to end up being shipped to the US and England for processing, indigenous people noticed that the crop altered their traditional agricultural heritage. One of the earliest mentions of how tobacco affected Africa comes from the Director of Agriculture in Nyasaland (currently Malawi). He cited the tobacco industry's environmental hazards as early as 1914 when he declared: "Eucalyptus is undoubtedly the fuel tree for Nyasaland and steps are now being taken by the Chief Forest Officer ... to establish fuel plantations in the villages under the various chiefs and headmen to try and put a stop to the rapid deforestation." There are a few more scattered mentions of the problem in the developing nations after this one, but almost entirely they consist of anecdotes like the one above. The first concerted wave of documented, quantitative attention by Westerners does not occur until the 1980s. The sporadic attention given to the issue in the 1970s on issues such as deforestation, pesticide use, and the industry's effects on the "third world" was met by an active campaign to undermine the few statistics being compiled by anti-tobacco forces, most vociferously in the pages of Tobacco Briefing, an industry publication devoted almost exclusively to confronting environmental research into tobacco. One of their main tactics was elementary use of misdirection. For example, in order to minimize reports on forest acreage lost to tobacco farming, Tobacco Briefing would cite a greater amount of wood lost to fuel cooking in lesser-developed countries, thus finessing the fact that cooking is essential to feeding humans and tobacco is not. Just as with the Rosenberg report never being released to the public, despite its seeming exoneration of the tobacco industry, the propaganda within Tobacco Briefing remained largely in-house. Big Tobacco understood clearly that fighting on the terrain of incomplete science and cooked numbers-while helpful to the morale and control of its subordinates such as growers and their advocates-opened them to jeopardy in the larger public discourse. It was better for Big Tobacco to attack its opponents from within more opaque institutions such as advertising regulative bodies. The anti-tobacco advocates, however, felt brash ads and salacious statistics would help them win the war for public opinion. Sometimes it would, but often they were all too willing to narrow their focus whenever Big Tobacco attacked from behind bureaucratic machinery. A case of brash assault, followed by timid withdrawal began on June 5th, 1978 when an independent television agency in the UK broadcast a report by "World in Action," roughly the UK equivalent to "20/20". The event coincided with the publication of "Tobacco and the Third World: Tomorrow's Epidemic?" by journalist Mike Muller, one of the first to draw mass attention to the industry's environmental impact. Muller drew attention to many economic injustices in regard to tobacco farming such as the tobacco crops replacing food crops. He also produced eye-catching environmental statistics. He estimated that cigarette manufacturing machine use four miles of paper per hour to roll and package cigarettes. But his most sensational statistic was that for every 300 cigarettes made in the developing world, one tree is burned in the curing process. The World Health Organization in 1980 (WHO) and the Word Bank in 1984 both reprinted the statistic. But in 1993 tobacco industry forces had sufficiently undermined its legitimacy that ads using it and likeminded statements were pulled from the air in the United Kingdom. "World in Action" continued for over a decade producing hard-hitting shows about the tobacco industry's advertising to children and the dangers of secondhand smoke. It did not, however, return to the environmental impact of Big Tobacco, nor ever mention the occasional academic papers quietly piling up that held far harsher verdicts on Big Tobacco's contribution to deforestation or environmental degradation. The most glaring evidence that anti-tobacco forces had failed to embrace Muller's innovation occurred in July of 1983 when Simon Chapman produced a 64 page pamphlet called The Lung Goodbye, A Manual of Tactics for Counteracting the Tobacco Industry in the 1980s. A deliciously noirish piece of agitprop full of concrete suggestions, the pamphlet contained not a word about expanding the fight to include environmental alliances; this was true despite Chapman's insistence that the best tactic of all was to inflict constant scorn on the industry with the hope of "radicalizing the movement." His suggestions were so aggressive that he felt compelled to remind readers that most of his tactics were legal. The omission of environmental alliances seems even more of historical significance given the fact that Simon Chapman, an Australian sociologist, would later win the World Health Organization's World No Tobacco Day Medal in 1997, along with many other accolades. More importantly, he later produced Tobacco in the third world: a resource atlas in 1990. That publication, perhaps more than any other, marked the single strongest and most widely cited environmental assault on Big Tobacco to date. It contained an entire chapter dedicated to the issue, albeit culled from several admittedly thin but frequently cited sources. It also included references to other environmental issues such as overuse of pesticide as well as its debilitating effect on farmers. It certainly could have marked the moment when Big Tobacco became tagged an environmental menace. Instead it serves to document how little the issue had been studied. In 1992, however, US Surgeon General Novello issued what the industry perceived as a denunciation of the deforestation claim, specifically the 300 to 1 statistic. It came almost ad hominem in a report issued primarily to address smoking and health in the Americas, and it occurred not in a section about the environment, but in a section on "economic externalities," about which it was generally favorable to the industry as a whole. Still, Novello noted in no uncertain terms that data on tobacco and deforestation was relatively slim, often produced by the industry itself, and that most of it was out of date. Regardless, Novello, much to the industry's delight, concluded "deforestation associated with tobacco curing cannot currently be considered a significant negative externality." The statement, taken out of context, would quickly become a major talking point in tobacco industry publications such as Tobacco Briefing, published by the International Tobacco Growers Association (IGTA), a shadowy, quasi-governmental alliance organized around little more than the idea of actual growers. Despite the fact that Novello clearly contradicted what the industry declared was the "definitive report," the ITGA declared 300 to 1 statistic dead. It would resurface occasionally often in independent journalists' broader stories about the tobacco industry, but anti-tobacco advocates simply passed over it in silence. They concentrated on fighting youth smoking and second-hand smoke almost exclusively throughout the 1990s. What is remarkable, however, is that after the Surgeon General's Report of 1992, rather than publicize the other damaging articles about tobacco and deforestation that began to come out, anti-tobacco advocates rarely returned to the theme. Nevertheless, the industry's targeting of children and the obfuscation they manufactured around secondhand smoke sufficiently damaged their image, and anti-tobacco advocates deserve a great deal of the credit for that. As result, during the 1980s until about 1992, the tobacco industry continued its meager environmental giving, as a glance through their annual reports reveals, but they remained reserved about publicizing it. Evidently, they did not want to overstate their environmental record and receive further scorn. HOW GLOBAL IS YOUR WARMING? By 1993, the tobacco industry had to address deforestation more directly at least within the United Kingdom. An organization with a title more officious than official, the Health Education Authority (HEA) began a series of magazine ads that linked tobacco to the destruction of the rainforest. The timing seemed exactly right for an organization devoted largely to issues of youth smoking. Their target was a generation of kids growing up in the aftermath of Earth Day and "save the rainforest" campaigns. Artists such as Sting and a commercially resurgent, MTV-oriented Grateful Dead were prominent donors to rainforest campaigns at this time and their influence on fans and younger bands brought great visibility to the rainforest issue. None of the celebrities, however, drew attention to the role of the tobacco industry in deforestation. That fell to the rather puny HEA. These ads are nearly impossible to track down, but they were pivotal from the point of view of the tobacco industry. From ITGA propaganda there remain hints about what the ads contained. For example, one slogan was "When tobacco companies burn the rainforest only one plant survives." The plant in question was not, as one might expect, the tobacco plant, but the cigarette manufacturing plant; perhaps a slightly awkward play on words, but with visual aid, perhaps poignant overall. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority, the regulative entity charged with handling reckless promotional claims, (and prompted by the IGTA) ruled that the ads were too broad. Too many other factors and industries caused rainforest devastation. The law simply would not allow the type of scorn Simon Chapman favored to be piled on any business. As result, the Advertising Standards Authority pulled the ads and as confidential "media response" documents show, the tobacco industry was prepared to use the incident to intimidate other like-minded tree-hugging upstarts. The HEA continued to push the deforestation issue and published a booklet in which it alleged 150 large trees were cut and burned down to cure one acre of tobacco. Perhaps so. The HEA also alleged that the average smoker thus causes one tree every two weeks to be felled. Here their bold assertions backfired because they assumed one tree per 5.56 kg of tobacco, equivalent to 5,600 cigarettes in two weeks time or 397 cigarettes each day. A smoker would then have to consume 12 cigarettes every hour for more than 33 hours in order to fulfill the HEA's claims. This kind of bloated rhetoric opened the HEA up for what would become a typical IGTA attack. Not simply a matter of choosing a less outrageous number of trees per cigarette, the issue became a matter of why a health advocacy group should be able to pronounce on environmental concerns. From that point on, the HEA dissipated, eventually swallowed by another entity called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and most importantly, it no longer focused on the intersection of health and the environment. In retreating from the tobacco/environment debate, the HEA missed an opportunity to raise the stakes because nearly every document the industry produced in response to deforestation claims reiterated that wood was not the main source of curing fuel. Coal was. The logical move would have been to link tobacco curing not simply to deforestation, but to the greenhouse effect. In a 2000 World Health Organization report outlining, among many other cloak-and-dagger episodes, how the IGTA undermined several tobacco control efforts within the UN, it becomes clear that the IGTA learned a great deal from the HEA episodes. Essentially, the ITGA argued that health organizations had no business disc