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July 23, 2002
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US:
Oppression Abroad Means Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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Reviews of Gore:
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July
24, 2002
The Battle for Zuni
Salt Lake
by Jeffrey St. Clair
For the Zuni, this place is the center of the
world. For the Department of the Interior under Gale Norton,
it's just another coal seam, 18,000 acres of wasteland just waiting
to be strip-mined.
The pueblo tribes of the Southwest call
this place the Zuni Salt Lake sanctuary. The Interior Department
and the mining company insist on calling it by the less alluring
Fence Lake.
Located about 60 miles south of Zuni
pueblo, Zuni Salt Lake is a rare, high desert lake. It's extremely
shallow, with the depth varying from four feet to only a foot
and a half. During the summer months, much of the water evaporates
under the scorching New Mexico sun, leaving behind beds of salt.
For centuries, the pueblo tribes of the
Southwest, including the Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Hopi and Taos pueblos,
have made annual pilgrimages to Zuni Lake to harvest salt, for
both culinary and ceremonial purposes. Ancient roadways radiate
out from the lake to the various pueblos. The lake itself is
considered sacred, home the Salt Mother deity, who the Zuni call
Ma'l Oyattsik'i.
The land surrounding Zuni Salt Lake has
always been considered a sanctuary zone, a kind of inter-tribal
commons were hostilities are lain aside, purification ceremonies
are performed and the sacred salts are gathered. Anthropologists
say these areas, termed Neutrality Zones, are rare in North America
and the Zuni Lake site is one of the most prominent and well
preserved.
Most of the traditional lands of the
Zuni Pueblo, including the salt lake, were seized by the federal
government in the 1880s. The lake itself was designated a federal
salt mine. The Zuni began fighting for the return of their most
sacred site around the turn of the century. Finally, in 1977
the Carter administration relented to mounting pressure and decided
to return Zuni Salt Lake to the pueblo. But, except for 5,000
acres of land immediately surrounding the lake, the remainder
of the Zuni Salt Lake sanctuary stayed in federal hands, under
the control of the Bureau of Land Management.
The Zuni Sanctuary has the geological
misfortune to straddle the San Augustine coal formation, which
stretches from Zuni Salt Lake north toward the Jemez Mountains.
In 1986, the Zuni Tribe learned that the Salt River Project,
an Arizona Utility with close ties to Bruce Babbitt, had applied
for a permit with BLM to gauge an 18,000-acre strip mine at Fence
Lake, 11 miles north of Zuni Salt Lake, in the heart of the sanctuary
zone.
One of the big concerns raised by the
Zuni at the time concerned the effect of the strip mine on the
Dakota aquifer that underlies Zuni Salt Lake. Coal mines are
massive consumers of water. One estimate suggests that the initial
proposal for the Fence Lake Mine require the extraction of 600
gallons of water from the aquifer every minute over the 50-year
life span of the mine. The Zuni rightly feared that this would
do lasting damage to the aquifer and the lake itself. They asked
the US Geological Survey to investigate.
Typically, the USGS took its time, partly
because of the innate sluggishness of the agency and partly do
to political interference from political appointees in the Reagan
and Bush I administrations. When the report finally appeared
in 1992, the Survey's hydrologists estimated that the strip mine
could lower the aquifer by at least four feet up to ten miles
away. The report concluded that the survival of Zuni Salt Lake
itself could be put into question.
But by then, the Salt River Project utility
had been granted two strip mine leases by the ever-compliant
Bureau of Land Management. Things came to a pause, however, when
archaeologists with Park Service stepped in, determining that
more than 55 percent of the land the BLM had given away to be
strip mined by the Salt River Project qualified for protection
under the Federal Register of Historic Places.
Archaeologists working for the Park Service
and the tribes estimated that the sanctuary zone, which includes
about 187,000 acres surrounding the lake, contains more than
5,000 archaeological sites, including burial shrines, ceremonial
areas and other structures. It turned out that despite a decade
of protests from the pueblo tribes the BLM hadn't screened any
part of the area for cultural or archaeological sites, areas
it was ready to consign to dynamite and giant shovels.
The BLM knew better. In 1988, Dr. Clara
Kelly, an independent anthropologist working for the Acoma Pueblo,
interviewed elders with the tribe who told her that the Acoma
considered most of the land slated for strip mining as being
sacred. They also told her that the Zuni, famed for their reticence
on these matters, believed the sanctuary zone extended over an
even larger area. When Kelly tried to follow up, the BLM apparently
interfered and she wasn't granted permission to talk with the
Zuni elders. Her initial report was found in the BLM's files.
Kelly wasn't the only scientist to find
her warnings buried. Earlier this year, a hydrologist for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Office, claiming that a supervisor had harassed him
after he cited hydrological studies saying that the strip mine
would harm Zuni Salt Lake.
The Clinton administration could have
halted the project, but it didn't. In fact, the 1990s were largely
a time of the Zuni tribe, and environmental groups, fighting
off the BLM and the Salt River Project with one administrative
appeal after another. Despite the high-minded rhetoric from Clinton
and Babbitt about environmental justice and Indian sovereignty,
the administration steam-rolled the concerns of the tribe and
were ready to give final approval for the mine as the clock ran
out on the Clinton White House.
For awhile, it looked like the Bush 2
administration, under fire and facing contempt of court citations
for its ravaging of the Indian Trust Funds, might reverse course
and can the project. But on May 17, Gale Norton quietly gave
final approval for the strip mining to begin.
Under the Norton plan, the Salt River
Project will be permitted to strip mine more than 18,000 acres
over the next 40 years, extracting as much as 40 million tons
of coal. To suppress dust and process the coal, Norton will allow
the company to pump water from the nearby Atarque Aquifer.
The coal is destined for the aptly named
Coronado Generating Station near St. Johns, Arizona, a main power
source for metropolitan Phoenix that spews out a gray swirl of
smoke visible for 50 fifty miles. In order to get the coal to
the power plant, the SRP will build a 44-mile long railroad from
the strip mine, which will cross federal land and destroy many
ancient roadways to Zuni Salt Lake. The utility says its on schedule
to begin construction of the railroad in the spring of 2003 and
will begin mining coal in January of 2005.
Zuni tribal leaders say that the mine
will destroy more than 500 burial shrines.
The Zuni and other pueblo tribes have
few options left, but they are resigned to fight in the courts
and, if necessary, through civil disobedience. On July 17, runners
from Hopi, Acoma, Taos and Laguna pueblos led a protest at the
headquarters of the Salt River Project then ran to Zuni pueblo,
a ceremonial reenactment of the ancient pilgrimages to Zuni Lake.
"Everyone must learn to respect
this place," said Bucky Preston, from the Hopi Nation, who
had just completed the 250-mile run from Phoenix. "We must
start disciplining ourselves. If we don't, greed will destroy
us all."
The governor of Taos Pueblo, Vincent
Lujan was somewhat more direct. He reminded the officials of
the Salt River Project utility about the Pueblo revolts of 1680,
when the pueblo tribes pushed back the Spanish and warned that
they were in for a similar battle.
"It took us 60 years of fighting
to get back our sacred Blue Lake at Taos," Lujan said. "Now
are embarking on a similar battle. There's meaning in what these
runners do here. We were here before you. We're going to be here
forever. This is where our ancestors shed their blood."
Today's Features
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US:
Oppression Abroad Means Repression at Home
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil and the Taliban
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
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