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Today's
Stories
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
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
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Weekend
Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004
Steal a Tree Go to
Jail; Steal a Forest, Meet the President
The
Politics of Timber Theft
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Stealing trees is as old as the King's timber
reserves. The sanctions for such sylvan thievery have always
been harsh. In medieval England, it meant public torture and
slow death. In the US, the levy was a kind of financial death
penalty _ triple damages plus serious jail time.
A couple of years ago, two tree poachers
drove a log truck onto a small farm in central Indiana after
midnight, cut down two 100-year old black walnut trees in the
small woodlot, loaded the pilfered trunks onto their truck and
fled across a cornfield. The county sheriff caught them when
their truck stalled in the field and sank in the mud. It turns
out that the men had been hired by a local sawmill owner, who
was set to sell the lumber to a German timber broker. All three
men were tried and convicted of tree theft.
The black walnut trees, highly prized
by German furniture makers, were valued at $150,000 each. The
men were hit with $900,000 in fines and three years of jail time.
Contrast this with evidence coming out
of a trial in Portland, Oregon, concerning timber theft on a
massive scale. According to internal documents from the US Forest
Service, more than 10% of all trees cut off of the national forests
are stolen, usually
by timber companies that deliberately log outside the boundaries
of timber sales offered by the agency. The annual toll involves
hundreds of thousands of trees valued at more than $100 million.
The situation was so rife with theft
and fraud that in 1991 Congress set up a Timber Theft Task Force
to investigate tree stealing on federal lands. The ten-person
team launched three probes: timber theft on the ground, accounting
fraud, and complicity and obstruction of justice by Forest Service
managers.
The team won an early victory. In 1993,
the Columbia River Scaling Bureau, a supposedly independent accounting
agency that measures and values timber logged off the national
forests in Oregon and Washington, was convicted of fraud. The
Bureau deliberately undervalued logs in return for kickbacks
from timber companies. The firm was hit with a $3.2 million fine.
But this was just a tune up for much
bigger fish, namely the largest privately-owned timber company
in the world: Weyerhaeuser. The investigation was code-named
"Rodeo." The task force had compiled evidence that
Weyerhaeuser had illegally cut more than 88,000 trees off of
the Winema National Forest in southern Oregon. The pilfered trees
were valued at more than $5 million. Moreover, investigators
suspected that managers in at least three different Forest Service
offices had gotten wind of the investigation, tipped off Weyerhaeuser,
destroyed documents and tried to silence agency whistleblowers.
As the investigation picked up steam
in the spring of 1995, the head of the task force, Al Marion,
traveled to Denver for a secret meeting with the chief of the
Forest Service, Jack Ward Thomas, hand-picked for the position
by Bill Clinton. Thomas, a wildlife biologist, had won the job
after his role in spearheading Option 9, the infamous Clinton
forest con job that restarted logging in the ancient forests
of the Pacific Northwest.
Marion outlined the investigation for
Thomas and Manny Martinez, his newly-appointed deputy for law
enforcement. The lead investigator told Thomas that the evidence
was compelling and that there would be a good probability of
criminal convictions and recovery of large civil fines.
According to notes from the session taken
by Martinez, Thomas told Marion that he would give his team "18
months to finish the cases" and promised them an additional
$300,000 to pursue the investigation. In the next few weeks,
the team developed new leads suggesting that Weyerhaeuser's tree
theft was systematic and may have been occurring on three other
national forests in the region. One estimate suggested that Weyerhaeuser
might have been illegally logging more than 33,000 trees a month.
Most of the illegal logging done by Weyerhaeuser
occurred in so-called salvage sales, where only dead and dying
trees were meant to be cut. Instead, Weyerhaeuser crews, often
operating at night, logged off thousands of healthy ponderosa
pines and hauled them off to mills under cover of darkness.
On other occasions, timber theft investigators
alleged, Weyerhaeuser crews logged off green trees in open daylight
under the nose of Forest Service officials and then bundled the
green trees in with stacks of dead lodgepole pines.
"They bundled the trees, sometimes
20 trees to a bundle," says Dennis Shrader, the lead investigator
in the Rodeo case. "I estimated that as many as ten trees
per bundle were green trees."
Yet, just as the task force was closing
it on its culprits its work came to a crashing halt. Less than
a four weeks after the Denver meeting with Jack Ward Thomas,
Marion received a bizarre letter from the chief thanking him
for his service and disbanding the task force immediately. The
letter was hand delivered by Martinez.
Marion and his colleagues were out of
a job. Thomas ordered their files seized and locked in a vault,
where they remained for the next ten months. Marion retired rather
than be relocated to West Virginia. Shrader, the head of the
Weyerhaeuser investigation, was reassigned to a desk job in a
storage closet in the Portland office of the Forest Service.
Why did Thomas pull the plug? It now
seems evident that the order came directly from the White House
in order to protect Weyerhaeuser executives, who were longtime
friends and backers of Clinton, his chief of staff Mac McLarty
and his top White House counsel Bruce Lindsay.
In the 1960s, Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser,
enticed by cheap land prices and non-union labor, began buying
up forestland in the southeast. By the time Bill Clinton was
elected governor in 1978, Weyerhaeuser was the largest landowner
in Arkansas. During Clinton's idealistic first term, he tried
to curtail the roughshod logging practices of the timber industry
in the state by placing limits on clearcutting, aerial pesticide
spraying and logging near streams and rivers. The new regulations
riled Weyerhaeuser, which poured money into the campaign of Clinton's
rival Frank White. Clinton lost and retreated to a corporate
law firm in Little Rock run by his pal Bruce Lindsay to lick
his wounds and plot his return to power.
Lindsay soon introduced the humbled Clinton
to Jack Creighton, Weyerhaeuser's CEO. Clinton confessed his
mistakes and pledged to devote himself to protecting Weyerhaeuser's
interests should he ever return to the governor's mansion. The
timber giant accepted Clinton's apologies, invested heavily in
his re-election bid and remained a faithful political sponsor
over the next 20 years.
When local Forest Service officials tipped
Weyerhaeuser to the criminal probe on the Winema Forest, Weyerhaeuser
executives complained to their two protectors in the Clinton
inner circle, McLarty and Lindsay. The White House instructed
political appointees in the Department of Agriculture to tell
Thomas to kill the investigation. And it was so.
"The bottom line is that Weyerhaeuser
is one of the largest companies in the world," says Shrader.
"When you've got an organization that large and with that
kind of clout and that amount of resources, they are able to
apply political pressure."
While Thomas may have intervened in order
to save Weyerhaeuser, his decision to terminate the task force
entirely had the effect of halting of every other timber fraud
investigation then under way.
Up in southeast Alaska a two-year long
probe by the task force had uncovered an even grander timber
theft scheme unfurling on the Tongass National Forest, the nation's
largest publicly-owned forest. Investigator Steven Slagowski
had been presented with compelling evidence that large rafts
of timber logged off the Tongass by the Ketchikan Pulp Company,
owned by Louisiana-Pacific, were routinely disappearing at night
before they could be scaled and inventoried by Forest Service
workers. The timber ended up being sold to lucrative Asian markets,
in violation of federal laws requiring the logs to be sent to
Alaska mills.
This was just one of a number of scams
on the Tongass uncovered by Slagowski and his colleagues in 1994.
He estimated that as much as one out of every three trees logged
from the Tongass was illegally cut. In some cases, entire islands
were clearcut with the timber companies paying little or nothing
for the trees. The illegal cutting often occurred in endangered
species habitat. He noted that nesting sites for bald eagles
and marbled murrelets, a small forest-nesting seabird, were both
routinely clearcut. "It was theft of unprecedented proportions,"
says Slagowski.
As in Oregon, the Tongass timber theft
ring thrived with the collusion of Forest Service officials,
many of them high ranking. Forest Service managers routinely
gave advance warning to targets of the investigation and the
regional office, based in Juneau, twice convened secret "vulnerability
assessment teams." On both occasions, the teams included
managers suspected of either being complicit with the timber
thieves or participating in the cover-up.
All of this has come out through a lawsuit
filed with the US Merit Systems Protection Board by five members
of the task force who are seeking the return of their jobs. The
MSPB is a federal administrative court charged with hearing claims
brought by federal whistleblowers who have suffered retaliation
for exposing government corruption.
These days instead of going after multi-million
dollar timber theft rings Forest Service law enforcement teams
spend their time arresting environmental protesters, pulling
up pot plants and harassing poor Hispanics in northern New Mexico
who gather firewood from federal forests without a permit.
"Since 1995, ongoing investigations
have been disrupted or are simply gathering dust," says
Tom Devine, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project,
which represents Marion and five other whistleblowers from the
quashed task force. "No new major fraud cases have been
opened and only small, firewood theft cases are being investigated."
Steal a tree for firewood go to jail.
Steal an entire forest of trees and ship the logs to Japan and
watch your company's stock soar.
The Bush administration, naturally, sees
no compelling reason to restart an investigation into white-collar
crime in the forest. Instead, they have moved to make it easier
for timber companies to legally steal trees from the public lands.
In November, Bush signed the deceptively-titled Healthy Forests
Initiative, which prescribes wholesale clearcutting of public
forests immune from legal challenge and environmental strictures
_ all in the name of fire prevention.
A couple of weeks later, Bush issued
an executive order opening 300,000 acres of ancient forest on
the Tongass to logging. Clinton had deferred logging on these
lands, but rejected pleas from environmentalists to permanently
protect the temperate rainforest from cutting. Bush exploited
the loophole at the request of Alaska's Senator Ted Stevens,
who, as detailed in an extraordinary profile in the Los Angeles
Times, has exploited the appropriations process to enrich himself,
his family and his son's clients, including timber companies
operating on the Tongass.
None of this logging will have to take
place under the cover of darkness.
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 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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