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Today's
Stories
February 14/15, 2004
Stan Goff
Beloved Haiti
February 13, 2004
Alan Maass
Kevin
Cooper's Fight to Live
Karyn Strickler
McCarthyism in the Sierra Club
Annie Higgins
On
a Street in America
Adam Federman
Democratic Snipers Target Nader
Mike Whitney
George W. Faces the Nation
Brian Cloughley
Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken
Website of the Day
Lying Action Figure Doll
February 12, 2004
Ray McGovern
George
Tenet's Spin Cycle
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
February 14 / 15, 2004
Misdirection in the
Arctic
Oil
Grab
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
With the attention of the press and the big greens
rigidly fixated on the fate of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge,
the Bush administration has quietly launched a quick strike on
an equally pristine stretch of the arctic plain for massive oil
and gas drilling.
The Bush Interior Department is set leasing
off to big oil nearly 9 million acres of untrammeled tundra west
of Prudhoe Bay. The area targeted for drilling sits in the northwest
corner of the 22.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve.
The National Petroleum Reserve, located
on the Arctic plains just west of Prudhoe Bay, was set aside
by President Warren Harding in 1923 and was only to be developed
in the case of a national emergency. Control over the reserve's
oil was originally left in the hands of the US Navy, which proved
a zealous guardian. The Navy resisted demands by big oil to open
the reserve to drilling through the Second World War, the Korean
and Vietnam wars and the energy crisis. Frustrated by the Navy's
obstinacy, the oil lobby pressured the Ford administration to
transfer authority over the reserve from the Pentagon to the
Interior Department, which has long done the oil industry's bidding.
Through the 1980s the Interior Department
began cobbling together different plans for opening the reserve,
but none got very far, mainly because the Reagan and Bush administration's
were obsessed for political reasons with the doomed quest to
tap into the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, the 14 million
acre swatch of tundra, lakes and mountains east of Prudhoe Bay.
Although the petroleum reserve is larger
than ANWR, just as valuable ecologically and is still used for
subsistence hunting and gathering by the Inupiat, the scheme
to turn the coastal plains of the petroleum reserve into a full-scale
oil field has gotten precious little public attention. Why? One
reason is that environmental groups have focused all of their
attention on saving ANWR, which has been under threat for two
decades. The other, perhaps more telling reason, is that the
heavy lifting in prying open the petroleum reserve to plunder
by the oil companies was done by Bill Clinton and Bruce Babbitt
in 1996.
In a cozy session with oil executives
held in at a ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, Clinton and Babbitt agreed
to deliver on two long sought goals: rescinding the ban on the
export of Alaskan crude oil and opening the Alaskan petroleum
reserve to drilling. Neither move generated much coverage by
the national press.
Babbitt went to work and within months
announced his intention to open the reserve to drilling, promising
at the same time that he would "visit every lake and pond"
to make sure the oil companies would not mar the tundra. On October
8, 1998, Babbitt signed the record of decision opening 4.6 million
acres in the northeastern corner of the reserve to oil leasing.
In one of the more striking hypocrisies
of the Clinton age, the green establishment largely went along
with Babbitt's plan to open the petroleum reserve, under the
deluded impression that to do so meant they would be able to
keep the oil companies out of ANWR.
Of course, by swallowing Babbitt's plan
to open the petroleum reserve to oil drilling the greens basically
undermined nearly every ecological and cultural argument for
keeping the drillers out of ANWR.
Like ANWR, the petroleum reserve is home
to a caribou herd. But the Western Arctic caribou herd that migrates
across the reserve is almost twice as large as the herd that
travels across ANWR. Similarly, the petroleum reserve is home
to a slate of declining species, including polar bears, Arctic
wolves and foxes, and musk ox.
Unlike ANWR, the petroleum reserve contains
one of the great rivers of the Arctic, the Colville River, the
largest on the North Slope, which starts high in the Brooks Range
and curves for 300 miles through the heart of the reserve to
a broad delta on the Arctic Ocean near the Inupiat village of
Nuiqsut.
The Colville River canyon and the nearby
lakes and marshes is one of the world's most important migratory
bird staging areas. Over 20 percent of the entire population
of Pacific black brant molt each year at Teshekpuk Lake alone.
The bluffs along the Colville River are recognized as the most
prolific raptor breeding grounds in the Arctic, providing critical
habitat for
the peregrine falcon and rough-legged hawk.
Under the Bush plan, 9 million acres
would be opened to drilling almost immediately and another 3
million acres, near the Inupiat village of Wainwright, would
be opened later in the decade. The plan, tailored to meet the
needs of ConocoPhillips, will call for 1,000s of wells, hundreds
of miles of road, dozens of waste dumps and a network of pipelines
to transport the oil to Prudhoe Bay and the trans-Alaska pipeline.
"It's never enough for the Bush
administration," says Cindy Shogan, director of the Anchorage-based
Alaska Wilderness League. "They won't be happy until every
acre in America's arctic is a wasteland filled with oil, pipelines
and roads."
But oil and gas may not be the only objective.
The BLM, which never misses an opportunity to pursue maximum
development of public lands, estimates that the petroleum reserve
may harbor approximately 40 percent of all coal remaining in
the US (400 billion to 4 trillion US tons).
Coming soon: strip mines in the Arctic.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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