Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
Recent Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
13, 2003
Anatomy
of a Swindle
Land
Fraud as Government Policy
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Green River, Utah
As you drive across central Utah on Interstate
70, you are likely to be captivated by a golden bulge of sandstone
shimmering in the sun to the south. This is the San Rafael Swell,
a knot of canyons, domes and cliffs the marks the beginning of
the redrock country of the Four Corners region.
The old desert rat Edward Abbey praised the Swell as one of the
most austere and beautiful places in the desert Southwest.
Naturally, the Swell, underlain with
coal seams and pools of oil, has also been long prized by other
less aesthetically-minded interests: strip miners and oil and
gas companies.
Much of the area lies under the jurisdiction
of the Bureau of Land Management, never known as the greenest
of federal agencies. Still, because most of the Swell remains
in a roadless and relatively unscathed condition it has been
difficult for the BLM to get away with simply opening it up to
mining and drilling. Lawsuits and endangered species keep getting
in the way. Environmentalists have long sought to turn the area
into a wilderness or national park.
Enter Steven Griles, deputy secretary
of interior and former lobbyist for oil and mining interests.
Already under investigation for bullying the Bureau of Land Management
on behalf of his former oil industry clients, Steven Griles,
the deputy
secretary of the interior, is now at epicenter of a new scandal
involving the proposed swap of more than 135,000 acres of land
in the heart of the San Rafael Swell to the state of Utah in
exchange for parcels of state-owned land totally 108,000 acres.
The deal, which was shelved in late July
following a scathing internal review by the interior department's
Inspector General, would have bilked the federal government out
of ten of millions of dollars and opened habitat for rare species
to unrestricted plunder.
Under a scheme hatched by Utah congressmen
Chris Cannon and James Hansen, more than 130,000 acres of BLM
land in the Swell would have been handed to the state of Utah
in exchange for 107,000 acres of state lands. The congressmen
promoted the deal as "fair value exchange," meaning
that the market value of the lands being traded was roughly equal,
a requirement of federal land law. To rub salt in the wound,
the deal was pitched as an environmentally benign transaction.
But this was a croc and most people inside
the BLM knew it. Biologists warned that the federal lands harbored
the desert tortoise, an endangered species, and thus could not
be traded away. Geologists disclosed that the federal land contained
a trove of minerals and natural gas deposits, while the state
lands were nearly worthless economically and offered little in
the way of ecological value. One BLM officer in Utah noted that
the oil, gas, coal and shale deposits alone on the federal lands
"could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars."
Agency land appraisers fired off internal
memos saying that the appraisals had been deliberately cooked
to make the grossly inequitable deal appear like a bargain for
the feds. One memo said that the official appraisal, approved
by Griles, was "one-sided and inaccurate." The appraisal
approved by Griles and his cohorts valued the state and federal
lands at about $35 million each. But BLM appraisers in Utah determined
that the federal lands were worth at least $117 million more
than the state lands.
In an internal memo to BLM director Kathleen
Clarke, Dave Cavanagh, the agency's chief land appraiser, pointed
out that the deal "generously inflated the value of the
state lands to the disadvantage of the BLM." He also warned
that public statements by officials in the Interior department
that the deal had been scrutinized by independent appraisers
was "potentially misleading to the public." One of
the most astonishing things about this memo is the fact that
Cavanagh has himself been under fire from environmental groups
for his role in approving bogus appraisals for other land deals.
Clarke dismissed the concerns of her
line officers, hid the real numbers from skeptical members of
congress, such as Rep. Nick Rahall, the West Virginia Democrat,
and pursued the deal anyway. Word came down from Clarke's office
that dissenters were to shut up and to stop putting their complaints
about the deal in writing. Efforts to shred the paper trail exposing
the deal ensued.
Clarke is a former top aide to both Rep.
James Hanson, former head of House Resources Committee, and Utah
governor Mike Leavitt, a notorious anti-environmentalist who
believes that all federal lands should be turned over to the
states.
Clarke has maintained that she recused
herself from all matters related to the deal in order to avoid
a conflict of interest. But the IG report revealed that in March
of 2002, Clarke met with Sally Wisely, the BLM's top officer
in Utah. Wisely told the IG's investigators that she had requested
the meeting in order to relay her fears that the deal was being
rushed through without enough attention being given to the concerns
of the appraisers and geologists. Clarke told Wisely that it
was a done deal.
But Clarke is just a stooge for Griles,
who is for all practical purposes running the BLM like a private
fiefdom. Since taking office Griles has pursued a course of privatizing
the federal estate through land swaps, where federal lands rich
in timber, minerals and oil are traded away for beat-over private
and state lands. After the transfers, the lands, now free from
the uncomfortable burdens of federal environmental laws, are
easier for extractive industries to exploit with dispatch.
Griles is already under investigation
for his role in squashing an environmental review of a natural
gas leasing plan in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. The leases,
worth tens of millions of dollars, would be held by former clients
in Griles's old lobbying firm. A provision in Griles's buy-out
contract allows him to be paid more than $2 million from the
firm's profits over the next two years.
Griles's lieutenant in the Utah land
exchange was Thomas Fulton, the deputy assistant secretary of
Interior for Lands and Minerals Management. Fulton handled the
negotiations with state of Utah and the congressional delegation.
Fulton may end up being the fall-guy in the affair. The IG report
fingers Fulton for providing false information to other Department
of Interior officials (ie., Interior Secretary Gale Norton) and
members of congress. Fulton has been removed from his position
and is now in bureaucratic exile planning the BLM's commemoration
of the bi-centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
In the summer of 2002, BLM appraiser
Kent Wilkinson went public with his objections to the deal. The
whistleblower said that the swindle was one of the most one-sided
land deals since the sale of Manhattan. "This is like Enron
all over again," Wilkinson wrote in a broadcast email to
journalists, which accompanied his analysis of the deal. "They're
cooking the books and it's all to the detriment of the public."
Wilkinson's revelations prompted an outrageous
fit from Rep. Chris Cannon, the pudgy Utah congressman. Cannon
called Wilkinson a publicity-seeking liar and a stooge of environmentalists.
He summoned the appraiser's boss to his office and demanded that
"strong measures" be taken against the whistleblower
for insubordination. "I want to make sure they get slapped
hard, because they're acting inappropriately," Cannon blustered.
With a congressional bounty on his head,
Wilkinson brought his concerns to Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, a whistleblower protection group and one of the
worthiest environmental outfits inside the Beltway.
PEER went on the offensive against Cannon
and recruited help from Jack McDonald, the former chief appraiser
for the BLM in Utah. "This is just another rip-off,"
McDonald told the Washington Post last year. "What does
it tell you when an agency suppresses its own professionals?
The agency's got something to hide."
But none of this stopped Cannon from
proceeding with the deal. The measure was pushed through the
House last fall without debate, but Congress adjourned before
the senate could act on it.
The question now is how far will the
investigation go up the Interior Department food chain. Another
IG report has been launched into Clark and Grille's conflicts
of interest in the deal, which now appears to be dead.
Don't look for any prosecutions, though.
Ashcroft has already taken a pass at pressing any criminal charges
against Griles, Clark and Fulton for the swindle.
But the land exchanges go on, many with
similar accounting hi-jinks and lopsided appraisals. In the next
year alone, more than a million of acres of federal land will
be secretly traded away to states and corporations. This is the
dream of the Sagebrush Rebels finally come true: the federal
estate is steadily being turned over to private hands unencumbered
by noisome environmental regulations.
"Despite some pretty damning revelations
of what these people have done, you don't get a very good idea
of what's going to happen to them," says Janine Blaeloch,
director of the Seattle-based Western
Lands Exchange Project, the only group in the nation
fighting these rip-offs (and one of the best environmental groups
of any kind). "This case shows how poisonous these land
deals are, especially in places like Utah where the politicians
want to privatize all public lands."
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|