3.9.07

Water and Development - Global Issues

Water and Development - Global Issues
Anup Shah

Much of the world lives without access to clean water. Privatization of water resources, promoted as a means to bring business efficiency into water service management, has instead led to reduced access for the poor around the world as prices for these essential services have risen. This article looks into this issue in further detail below.

Introduction—A Water Management Crisis Leading to Lack of Access to Safe Water for Much of the World

Consider the following:

  • The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, focusing on water, notes the following:
    • Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
    • Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.
    • More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.
    • Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.
    • 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but not in their house or yard, consumpe around 20 litres per day. In the United Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. The highest average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day.)
    • Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea
    • The loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness.
    • Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
    • Millions of women spending several hours a day collecting water.
    • To these human costs can be added the massive economic waste associated with the water and sanitation deficit.… The costs associated with health spending, productivity losses and labour diversions … are greatest in some of the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5% of GDP, or some $28.4 billion annually, a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to the region in 2003.
    (See pages 6, 7, 35.)
  • 400 million children (1 in 5 from the developing world) have no access to safe water. 1.4 million children will die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation (State of the World’s Children, 2005, UNICEF)
  • A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World. (Maude Barlow, Water as Commodity—The Wrong Prescription, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3)
  • “Already, corporations own or operate water systems across the globe that bring in about $200 billion a year. Yet they serve only about 7 percent of the world’s population, leaving a potentially vast market untapped.” (John Tagliabue, As Multinationals Run the Taps, Anger Rises Over Water for Profit, New York Times, August 26, 2002)

Already some one third of the world’s population is living in either water-scarce, or water-short areas. It is predicted that climate change and population growth will take this number to one half of humanity. Yet, as Maude Barlow has commented, it is not necessarily over-population causing water shortages: “12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.”

The United Nations appears to concur:

We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.

— 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, 2006, p.2

Indian scientist and activist, Vandana Shiva noted in a documentary that the water crisis is a human-created crisis only in the last two or so decades. In other words, it is not so much of a water shortage crisis, but a water management crisis. That documentary was World Without Water, from True Vision Productions broadcast by Britain’s mainstream media channel, Channel 4 on April 29, 2006.

The main reason for the water crisis, the documentary implied, is the commoditization of water. By promoting water as a commodity, this has led to increased control of water by multinational corporations. In turn, there has been increased fear that the poor are shut out, because the MNC’s main responsibility is to shareholders and to increase profit. As a result, though there may be many people in terms of market access, many people are too poor to afford it. The World Bank, IMF and others have encouraged countries around the world to privatize water access in the hope for increased efficiency as well as follow other policies such as removal of subsidies for such provisions. In doing so, the poor have found themselves being shut out as prices have risen beyond affordability.

The documentary traced the struggles of

  • A family in Bolivia living just behind a water plant, unable to afford the 9-month salary equivalent connection charge [highlighting the issue of access inequality and water access privatization];
  • Poor Indian farmers in Rajasthan facing water shortages and worse because the Coca Cola company had taken so much water from nearby wells and aquifers [highlighting the issue of need versus luxury];
  • Tanzanian people’s struggles with water privatization, and even the struggles of the poor in the world’s richest country, the United States [highlighting water resource commoditization and privatization versus water as a human right with universal access].

Around the world, the documentary noted, water access issues are reaching crisis point, similar to the ones they highlighted in detail.

Coca Cola vs. Indian Farmers: Luxury vs. Necessity

The documentary’s look at Coca Cola (Coke for short) company’s activities in India highlighted problems also seen around the world. Because Coke had been pumping water from local wells and aquifers, this led to farmers digging deeper and deeper to search for water, sometimes under dangerous conditions. Some farmers were digging as deep as 450 feet without finding water. The documentary noted that they wanted Coke to leave for they brought them nothing but misery. Indeed, earlier in 2000, violent protests by farmers in the state of Kerala led to the closure of Coke there.

The documentary also noted that for each liter of drink from Coca Cola, some 3 liters of water was needed.

When asked, Coke noted all the activities they were pursuing to be a more responsible neighbor. Coke also claimed that government figures showed they did not cause the drop in water levels, yet those figures showed otherwise. They also noted that agriculture is responsible for more water usage than Coca Cola. While this is partly correct, this applies more to industrial agribusinesses, not small farmers.

Furthermore, farmers are arguably using the land for more productive (and necessary) purposes than Coke. In addition, Coke, typical of many global companies, have used the lands (and, in this case, water) of the poor countries, to produce products to be mainly consumed by people in wealthy countries.

Privatization in both rich and poor countries can mean many cannot access safe water

In Tanzania, the documentary noted the hardships and struggles of the poor when the country followed rich-country and World Bank advice and privatized their water services. In a region where currently 11 million lives are at risk from water shortage, these policies are having serious impacts. Privatization led to increased prices and lack of access, rather than increased access.

In Bolivia, even though much of the major city covered by the documentary was connected up by the global water company, the poor could not afford the connection charges. Some 200,000 people in that city—a quarter of the population—were not connected. (The French company that owned the water services there said in the documentary that the poor “chose” not to be connected.) Numerous health and social problems developed, especially for the children and the poor were resorting to illegal connections. (We can often see such actions by poor as being “illegal”, but when the system itself encourages such last-resort actions and “corruption” we hear less of that aspect.)

In Detroit, USA, the documentary noted that the poor in the richest country in the world were also affected by similar global problems. Like families in Tanzania, many African Americans in Detroit were finding they needed to make daily trips to get water. The documentary followed the struggle of a woman who had fallen behind on her water bills because her disabled husband’s medical bills had grown so much. Yet, some 40,000 households (some 100,000 people) in Detroit were facing water shortages in similar ways, simply for being too poor to afford the bills. In this particular case, city officials were also accused of running down the water service so that it could be privatized and thereby reduce their accountability.

Water Access Policy: Following Neoliberal Ideology

The documentary then turned to the question of where the idea of privatization of such a vital resource came from. In short, Neoliberlism—as also detailed on this site’s section on free trade and globalization—was pushed by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, USA’s Ronald Reagan and others, around the world. The World Bank and other international institutions took on this ideology, and encouraged privatization of most resources. In other words, they attempted to put a price on everything, even if it was not appropriate (e.g. health, education, and, possibly, water, amongst other services).

But it was not just conservative political parties pushing such ideologies. As also noted on this site’s neoliberalism section, economic ideology and political ideologies, though extremely related are also different in various ways. As a result, Britain’s Labour Party for example, also changed to become “New” Labour and supported privatization around the world. In Tanzania and elsewhere, they have used foreign aid budgets to pay for privatization (where British companies benefit) and even fund television advertising and popular songs that promote privatization. Furthermore, pressure is put on third world countries to privatize with favorable terms for private companies (including full guarantees in case of problems (i.e. bail out by the poor country’s tax payers). This again questions our common perceptions of corruption.

Separate from the above-mentioned documentary, The World Development Movement campaign organization (WDM) reported in 2005 that “British aid money is being used to push water privatization on poor countries PDF formatted document—making it less likely that clean water will ever get to the poorest people. And while poor people lose out, a group of big UK companies are profiting from this aid.” This, the organization says is being done through four main ways:

  1. Expensive consultancies (which a lot of that aid money goes to paying for and these groups have a vested interest in pushing for privatization);
  2. Public relations campaigns (to get the poor to accept privatization of water);
  3. Direct funding for privatization; and
  4. Via conditions imposed by the IMF and World Bank.

Predictably then, price hikes have been witnessed around the world, accompanied by public protests. The documentary noted the irony of the efficiency that private companies were supposed to bring to the provision and functioning of this service. One of the various examples given was where people had their water cut off but were still billed for many months for water they could never have used. Intermediary water sellers in Tanzania, for example, found business to be booming, because there were so many poor people unable to afford the privatized service and turned to them instead, and they also hiked up prices. Around the world, stories have been similar. Many poor people have also ended up working even more than they already do, unnecessarily.

In Tanzania, the documentary highlighted the courage of the Prime Minister Edward Lowassa, who after 18 months, became disillusioned by the British and World Bank-encouraged privatization. He complained to the documentary that the multinational corporations were only interested in profit. While the MNCs said that independent reviews were positive, the documentary revealed those same reports actually showed otherwise. Senior British staff were told to leave. “Think again before you privatize [water],” President Lowassa warned; It is “dangerous.”

Privatization vs. Democratic Accountability of Management of a Fundamental Resource

The above-mentioned documentary noted that the World Bank argues that the problem is not privatization itself, but that privatization is not being practiced properly.

Yet, the market-based paradigm for such a vital resource has come under question. The earlier-mentioned WDM report as well as the documentary noted that the goals of a responsible government (universal access), and the goals of a private company (profit, typically by providing access to those who can pay) implies that private sector efficiency for profit may not mean that same efficiency will lead to universal access.

Certainly, there are cases where markets have provided innovative ideas and efficiency in management. This typically requires a market where people that can pay for the service. For universal access, however, (which includes people who may not be able to pay, for a variety of reasons, and may require subsidies or assistance), a solely market-based privatization may be inappropriate.

The United Nations Human Development Report, focusing on water, weighs in on this too, and adds:

Some privatization programs have produced positive results. But the overall record is not encouraging. From Argentina to Bolivia, and from the Philippines to the United States, the conviction that the private sector offers a “magic bullet” for unleashing the equity and efficiency needed to accelerate progress towards water for all has proven to be misplaced. While these past failures of water concessions do not provide evidence that the private sector has no role to play, they do point to the need for greater caution, regulation and a commitment to equity in public-private partnerships.

Two specific aspects of water provision in countries with low coverage rates caution against an undue reliance on the private sector.

  1. The water sector has many of the characteristics of a natural monopoly. In the absence of a strong regulatory capacity to protect the public interest through the rules on pricing and investment, there are dangers of monopolistic abuse.
  2. In countries with high levels of poverty among unserved populations, public finance is a requirement for extended access regardless of whether the provider is public or private.

— 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, 2006, p.10 (Numbered list formatting is mine)

For poor countries, as argued elsewhere on this web site, pursuing neoliberal ideology too early goes counter to experiences from history; today’s wealthy countries did not prosper following these policies. They only used these policies once a market-based economy was already established and society had sufficiently developed.

Problems of privatization of water are many PDF formatted document the WDM adds. For example,

  • Alternatives are often not considered. Those private consultancies often follow a privatization ideology and they of course stand to win money from it. A major problem is that it is the government of the poor country left to pick up the pieces of failed privatization projects PDF formatted document.
  • Privatization of such vital resources (a right for all to access even if they do not have money) risks losing democratic accountability, and as cases in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere have shown, soaring water prices as a result can lead to many, many people not affording a basic right, and even spark massive unrest;
  • Profits from a private company can also be siphoned off elsewhere (often to other countries from where the company came) to their shareholders, and less is reinvested into the system itself;
  • Investment is likely only on those parts of the system that may bring profit, leaving the government with less resources to deal with the other parts of the system;

Earlier in 2001, the Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First) suggested that economic globalization is largely to blame for this water crisis. As if to turn around the World Bank’s point that privatization is not being practiced properly and more of it is needed, Food First counters that it is democracy not being practiced properly, so we need more democracy and democratic accountability, rather than less. The increased commoditization of a basic necessity and a public service “reduces the involvement of citizens in water management decisions.” Furthermore,

These companies argue that privatizing water is the best way to deliver it safely to a thirsty world. This is yet another area of potential disagreement. It is true that governments have done an abysmal job of protecting water within their boundaries. However, the answer is not to hand this precious resource over to transnational corporations who have escaped nation-state laws and live by no international law other than business-friendly trade agreements. The answer is to demand that governments begin to take their role seriously and establish full water protection regimes based on watershed management and conservation.

— Maude Barlow, Water as a Commodity—The Wrong Prescription, Institute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3

Water: A Human Right or a Commodity?

The fundamental question this documentary raises then is whether water is a fundamental human right, or a commodity; a privileged service that you can only access if you can afford it.

Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights—the premier human rights doctrine that practically all nations have signed up to—notes the following:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of ... circumstances beyond his control.”

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, December 10, 1948

While water is not mentioned explicitly, the right to food includes water as well, because water is essential for humans to live, and is therefore in line with the principles of the declaration.

Water and Environmental Issues

Along with access issues comes use issues. The Coca Cola example noted above highlighted one issue of luxury versus needs. Another issue is the efficient (or inefficient) use of water in industrial agriculture, factories and plants.

It takes a great deal of water to manufacture our goods:

  • 1 newspaper takes 150 gallons
  • 1 liter of orange juice takes 1000 gallons
  • 1 pound of beef takes 2500 gallons
  • 1 new car takes 40,000 gallons

— WaterDoc.org, Hart Productions Inc, 2005

Food First, mentioned above, charges that “While transnational corporations over-exploit water resources as they expand industrial and agricultural capacity, they pollute the water table through pollution or overuse. Meanwhile developing countries—under onerous lending requirements enforced by the World Bank—have had to aggressively export their way out of debt, devastating watersheds and placing water supplies in danger.” Quoting them further, and at length:

In the race to compete for foreign direct investment, countries are stripping their environmental laws and protection of natural resources, including water protection. In some cases, such as the world's 850 free trade zones, they either look the other way as environmental laws are broken and waters are criminally polluted or actually set lower standards in these zones than for the rest of the country.

Throughout Latin America and Asia, massive industrialization in rural communities is affecting the balance between humans and nature. Water use is being diverted from agriculture to industry. Huge corporate factories are moving up the rivers of the Third World, sucking them dry as they go.

Agribusinesses growing crops for export are claiming more of the water once used by family and peasant farmers for food self-sufficiency. The global expansion in mining and manufacturing is increasing the threat of pollution of underground water supplies and contaminating the aquifers that provide more than 50 percent of domestic supplies in most Asian countries.

To feed the voracious global consumer market, China has transformed its entire economy, massively diverting water use from communities and local farming to its burgeoning industrial sector. As the big industrial wells consume more water, millions of Chinese farmers have found their local wells pumped dry. Eighty percent of China's major rivers are now so degraded, they no longer support fish. Economic globalization and the policies that drive it are proving to be totally unsustainable.

— Maude Barlow, Water as a Commodity—The Wrong Prescription, Institute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3

(Some further examples of unnecessary/wasteful uses of water are described or hinted to in this site’s section, Behind Consumption and Consumerism.)

Climate Change and Water Security

Climate change is going to increase water security:

Many of the world’s most water-stressed areas will get less water, and water flows will become less predictable and more subject to extreme events. Among the projected outcomes:

  • Marked reductions in water availability in East Africa, the Sahel and Southern Africa as rainfall declines and temperature rises, with large productivity losses in basic food staples. Projections for rainfed areas in East Africa point to potential productivity losses of up to 33% in maize and more than 20% for sorghum and 18% for millet.
  • The disruption of food production systems exposing an additional 75–125 million people to the threat of hunger.
  • Accelerated glacial melt, leading to medium term reductions in water availability across a large group of countries in East Asia, Latin America and South Asia.
  • Disruptions to monsoon patterns in South Asia, with the potential for more rain but also fewer rainy days and more people affected by drought.
  • Rising sea levels resulting in freshwater losses in river delta systems in countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt and Thailand.

— 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, 2006, p.15

Future wars over water?

For a number of years now, we have heard of predictions that future wars will be fought over control of essential resources, such as water. To some extent, most wars have already been about that. However, in terms of water itself, some experts question this prediction. Inter Press Service (IPS) notes a number of experts disagree with the view that future wars will be over water, and instead feel it is mismanagement of water resources which is the issue, not scarcity (which is the underlying assumption for the prediction of such wars.)

That same IPS article quotes Arunabha Ghosh, co-author of the United Nations Human Development Report 2006 themed on water management who says, “Water wars make good newspaper headlines but cooperation (agreements) don’t.… there are plenty of bilateral, multilateral and trans-boundary agreements for water-sharing—all or most of which do not make good newspaper copy.”

Others have noted that there are many more examples of cooperation than conflict in regions with shard water interests. The Stockholm International Water Institute opines that “10- to 20-year-old arguments about conflict over water are still being recycled.”

At the same time there have been various incidents that fuel the fear of water-related wars, such as Israel’s recent bombing of the Lebanese water pipelines from the Litani River to farmland along the coastal plain and parts of the Bekaa Valley, and the conflict in Sri Lanka where the rebel group diverted a canal.

Other examples that might be worth watching include the Panama canal as that country considers nationalizing it, the North West Passage through Canada’s northern polar region that is now opening up more due to climate change, which the US argues should be an international water way, and various others that may affect water dependency further up or downstream (e.g. between India/Pakistan, Israel/Jordan, various Nile-dependent countries throughout northern, eastern and central Africa).

The Stockholm International Water Institute also argues that “Such arguments [for water wars] ignore massive amounts of recent research which shows that water-scarce states that share a water body tend to find cooperative solutions rather than enter into violent conflict,” which may offer hope that conflicts do not arise, at least not due to water resources.

Maude Barlow, in a short interview also raises the concern of geopolitical issues with water. She notes that places such as United States, China and Europe are all seeing water as a national security issue, whether it be for access, management or shortage. Control and access to water will also be important for their industries, as well as for people’s consumption:

Maude Barlow, Water Stress, May 12 2007, © Big Picture TV

International Agreements and Action

Access to fresh water is becoming a political problem, rather than a technical one, with lots of questions on the best way for countries to provide it.

The Millennium Development Goals, a number of targets to help alleviate poverty around the world by 2015, includes the aim to “reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.” A number of international meetings have taken place in recent years.

For example, March 17-22, 2000, saw the Second World Water Forum, which tried to address many issues. The types of topics addressed included the following:

  • Water as a human right
  • Water Management—not water scarcity—as the problem
  • Call for a new Water Ethic; That water is a management problem, a cultural problem, rather than a resource problem in most cases
  • Governments should participate in people’s projects rather than people participating in governments’ projects
  • Water culture—and gender. Female involvement will be important. Women are often more sensitive to cultural and other issues which will be important.
  • Privatization—water should maintain a common property resource, common heritage of all. However, there may be costs associated with being able to provide the infrastructure and services in a sustainable way.
  • Eco-sanitation: Turning waste into a resource
  • Rainwater Harvesting

Some activists were concerned about the corporate agenda in water privatization. However, as per the final declaration of the water forum, water security was defined to mean that “freshwater, coastal and related ecosystems are protected and improved; that sustainable development and political stability are promoted, that every person has access to enough safe water at an affordable cost to lead a healthy and productive life and that the vulnerable are protected from the risks of water-related hazards.”

The declaration of the third World Water Forum in Japan, in 2003, saw increased support for the private sector. As an AlterNet news report noted, sponsors of the forum included big corporations such as Microsoft and Coca Cola. However, the same AlterNet report noted that privatization was hardly mentioned at the fourth Forum in early 2006, although it was a big concern for activists, environmentalists and others present. The report also quoted Gemma Bulos, founder of the NGO A Single Drop, who attended both the Forum and the parallel alternative forums and noted that, “The omission of the privatization rhetoric may have raised some question as to whether that methodology is considered viable anymore.”

The fourth Forum also noted in its final ministerial declaration that governments should have the primary role in providing water access and related improvements. (This does not preclude the use of private companies contracted to provide the service, but highlights the importance of democratic accountability over the provision of such service.)

The aforementioned 2006 Human Development Report notes that dealing with causes rather than effects is also cost-effective. “Every $1 spent in the [water] sector creates on average another $8 in costs averted and productivity gained.” The report also lays out four foundations for success, recognizing that these are no ready-made blueprints:

  1. Make water a human right—and mean it.
  2. Draw up national strategies for water and sanitation.
  3. Support national plans with international aid.
  4. Develop a global action plan.

Urgently resolving key issues such as access to safe water, efficient and sustainable use is likely to involve a number of actors, including governments, corporations, activists, and local people who directly feel the implications of decisions made in fancy corporate offices and luxurious international meeting venues. Without understanding or common goals, the environment, the lives of people, and prospects for a healthy future are at risk.

More Information

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27.8.07

Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

Embattled Attorney General Resigns
By Steven Lee Myer
The New York Times

Monday 27 August 2007

Waco, Tex. - Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the resignation had not yet been made public.

Mr. Bush had repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as Mr. Gonzales faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department, over issues including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.

Earlier this month, at a news conference, Mr. Bush dismissed accusations that Mr. Gonzales had stonewalled or misled a congressional inquiry. "We're watching a political exercise," Mr. Bush said. "I mean, this is a man who has testified, he's sent thousands of papers up there. There's no proof of wrong."

Mr. Gonzales's resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush's second term. Karl Rove, another of Mr. Bush's close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

The official who disclosed the resignation today said that the decision was Mr. Gonzales's and that the president accepted it grudgingly. At the same time, the official acknowledged that the turmoil over Mr. Gonzales had made his continuing as attorney general difficult.

"The unfair treatment that he's been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department," the official said.

As recently as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales was denying through his press spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, that he intended to leave.

Mr. Roehrkasse said Sunday afternoon that he had telephoned Mr. Gonzales about the reports circulating in Washington that a resignation was imminent, "and he said it wasn't true, so I don't know what more I can say."

White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales's resignation for months, said this morning: "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new readership."

Senator Schumer said that "Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations."

I've never seen a turnover like this in a presidential staff until W. came along.
The revolving door Administration.



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16.8.07

Army Suicide Rate Highest in 26 Years

Army Suicide Rate Highest in 26 Years

Army Suicides Highest in 26 Years
The Associated Press

Thursday 16 August 2007

Washington - Army soldiers committed suicide last year at the highest rate in 26 years, and more than a quarter did so while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new military report.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its scheduled release Thursday, found there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Persian Gulf War.

The suicide rate for the Army has fluctuated over the past 26 years, from last year's high of 17.3 per 100,000 to a low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.

Last year, "Iraq was the most common deployment location for both (suicides) and attempts," the report said.

The 99 suicides included 28 soldiers deployed to the two wars and 71 who weren't. About twice as many women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide as did women not sent to war, the report said.

Preliminary numbers for the first half of this year indicate the number of suicides could decline across the service in 2007 but increase among troops serving in the wars, officials said.

The increases for 2006 came as Army officials worked to set up a number of new and stronger programs for providing mental health care to a force strained by the longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the global counterterrorism war entering its sixth year.

Failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs were factors motivating the soldiers to commit suicide, according to the report.

"In addition, there was a significant relationship between suicide attempts and number of days deployed" in Iraq, Afghanistan or nearby countries where troops are participating in the war effort, it said. The same pattern seemed to hold true for those who not only attempted, but succeeded in killing themselves.

There also "was limited evidence to support the view that multiple ... deployments are a risk factor for suicide behaviors," it said.

About a quarter of those who killed themselves had a history of at least one psychiatric disorder. Of those, about 20 percent had been diagnosed with a mood disorder such as bipolar disorder and/or depression; and 8 percent had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, including post traumatic stress disorder - one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq.

Firearms were the most common method of suicide. Those who attempted suicide but didn't succeed tended more often to take overdoses and cut themselves.

In a service of more than a half million troop, the 99 suicides amounted to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000 - the highest in the past 26 years, the report said. The average rate over those years has been 12.3 per 100,000.

The rate for those serving in the wars stayed about the same, 19.4 per 100,000 in 2006, compared with 19.9 in 2005.

The Army said the information was compiled from reports collected as part of its suicide prevention program - reports required for all "suicide-related behaviors that result in death, hospitalization or evacuation" of the soldier. It can take considerable time to investigate a suicide and, in fact, the Army said that in addition to the 99 confirmed suicides last year, there are two other deaths suspected as suicides in which investigations were pending.

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29.7.07

Bush Appointee Blocked Surgeon General's Report

Bush Appointee Blocked Surgeon General's Report

Bush Aide Blocked Report
By Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman
The Washington Post

Sunday 29 July 2007

Global health draft in 2006 rejected for not being political.

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist. At a July 10 House committee hearing, Carmona did not cite Steiger by name or detail the report's contents and its implications for American public health.

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished ... via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials. Carmona engaged in similar fights over other public health reports, including an unpublished report on prison health. A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senior medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.

Steiger did not return a phone call seeking his comment. But he said in a written statement released by an HHS spokesman Friday that the report contained information that was "often inaccurate or out-of- date and it lacked analysis and focus."

Steiger confirmed that he sharply disagreed with Carmona on the issue of how much the report should promote Bush administration policies. "A document meant to educate the American public about health as a global challenge and urge them to action should at least let Americans know what their generosity is already doing in helping to solve those challenges," Steiger said in the statement.

Steiger said that "political considerations" did not delay the report; "sloppy work, poor analysis, and lack of scientific rigor did." Asked about the report's handling, an HHS spokeswoman said Friday that it is still "under development."

The draft report itself, in language linking public health problems with violence and other social ills, says "we cannot overstate ... that problems in remote parts of the globe can no longer be ignored. Diseases that Americans once read about as affecting people in regions ... most of us would never visit are now capable of reaching us directly. The hunger, disease, and death resulting from poor food and nutrition create social and political instability ... and that instability may spread to other nations as people migrate to survive."

In 65 pages, the report charts trends in infectious and chronic disease; reviews efforts to curb AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; calls for the careful monitoring of public health to safeguard against bioterrorism; and explains the importance of proper nutrition, childhood immunizations and clean air and water, among other topics. Its underlying message is that disease and suffering do not respect political boundaries in an era of globalization and mass population movements.

The report was compiled by government and private public-health experts from various organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Catholic Medical Mission Board and several universities. Steiger's global health office provided the funding and staff to lead the effort because the surgeon general's office has no budget and few staff members of its own.

"It covered all of the contemporary issues of public health, from environmental health through infectious disease transmission," said Jerrold M. Michael, a former assistant surgeon general and a former longtime dean of the University of Hawaii School of Public Health, who worked on the report.

A few of the issues it focuses on, such as AIDS treatment and research, have been public health priorities for the Bush administration. But others - including ratifying the international tobacco treaty and making global health an element of U.S. foreign policy - are more politically sensitive. The report calls on the administration to consider spending more money on global health improvement, for instance. And it warns that "the environmental conditions that poison our water and contaminate our air are not contained within national boundaries... . The use of pesticides is also of concern to health officials, scientists and government leaders around the world."

Three people involved in the preparation of an initial draft in 2005 said it received largely positive reviews from global health experts both inside and outside the government, prompting wide optimism that the report would be publicly released that year. The Commissioned Officers Association, a nonprofit group representing more than 7,000 current and retired officers of the U.S. Public Health Service, organized a global health summit in June 2005 in Philadelphia where Carmona was expected to unveil the report in a keynote address - but he was not cleared to release it there.

Richard Walling, a former career official in the HHS global health office who oversaw the draft, said Steiger was the official who blocked its release. "Steiger always had his political hat on," he said. "I don't think public health was what his vision was. As far as the international office was concerned, it was a political office of the secretary... . What he was looking for, and in general what he was always looking for, was, 'How do we promote the policies and the programs of the administration?' This report didn't focus on that."

On June 30, 2006, a Steiger aide sent an e-mail saying that the report should not be cleared for public distribution: "While we believe the subject matter of the draft is important, we disagree with the style, tone and messaging," wrote the aide, Mark A. Abdoo, according to a copy of the e-mail. "We believe this document should be focused tightly on the Administration's major priorities in global health so the American public can understand better why these issues should be important to them. As such, the draft should be a policy statement, albeit one that is evidence based and draws on the best available science."

Steiger, 37, is a godson of former president George H.W. Bush and the son of a moderate Republican who represented Wisconsin in the House and hired a young Dick Cheney as an intern. The elder Bush appointed Steiger's mother to the Federal Trade Commission in 1989. A biographical sketch of her on the American Bar Association's Web site states that Steiger's parents, now deceased, were "lifelong friends" of many members of the same congressional class, including the Rumsfelds and the Bushes.

According to a résumé Steiger supplied to Congress, he obtained a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of California at Los Angeles before teaching at a university in the Philippines and consulting in Angola for the International Republican Institute - a nonprofit group that is associated with the party and promotes democracy around the world. He was an education adviser to then-Gov. Tommy G. Thompson (R) of Wisconsin and came to Washington when Thompson became HHS secretary. He is now awaiting a Senate vote on his nomination as Bush's ambassador to Mozambique.

Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman, said Steiger promoted interest in global health at the department while more than doubling the number of expert staff members overseas and participating in international negotiations on issues such as avian influenza. "You have to look at his skills as an executive leader in spite of the fact that he doesn't have a medical degree or a public health degree," Hall said.

Public health advocates have accused Steiger of political meddling before. He briefly attained notoriety in 2004 by demanding changes in the language of an international report on obesity. The report was opposed by some U.S. food manufacturers and the sugar industry.

According to Walling and three other public health officials familiar with the current dispute, Carmona at one point suggested that Steiger release the global health report in tandem with a separate report of the sort Steiger wanted, but Steiger rejected the idea. An appeal by Carmona to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his staff produced no relief, a former HHS official said.

"I fought for my last year to try to get it out and couldn't get it past the initial vetting," Carmona testified earlier this month. "I refused to release it [with the requested changes] ... because it would tarnish the office of the surgeon general when our colleagues saw us taking a political stand."

Thomas Novotny, a former assistant surgeon general who ran the global health office before Steiger, said, "It's embarrassing, just ridiculous that the report hasn't come out." Novotny, who served at HHS in the Clinton and in both Bush administrations, said that many nations have made health issues central to their foreign relations and trade policies, but that the United States has been reluctant to embrace that idea.

"It made perfect sense for the surgeon general to take up the issue because the U.S. used to be a leader in this field," Novotny said. "For the nation's top doctor to be unable to release the report shows that leadership is gone."

The global health document was one of several reports initiated by Carmona that top HHS officials suppressed because they disliked the reports' conclusions, according to a former administration official. Another was a "Call to Action on Corrections and Community Health."

It says - according to draft language obtained by The Post - that the public has a large stake in the health of the 2 million men and women who are behind bars, and in the health care available to them in their communities after their release.

The report recommends enhanced health screenings for those arrested and their victims; better disease surveillance in prisons; and ready access to medical, mental health and substance abuse prevention services for those released.

But the report has been bottled up at HHS, said three public health experts who worked on it. John Miles, a consultant and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who helped draft it, said he suspects that the proposed health screenings and other recommendations are seen as a potentially burdensome cost. "Maybe they just don't feel it's a priority," Miles said.

Hall, the HHS spokesman, responded in a statement Friday that the Bush administration has always believed that public health policy should be rooted in science. "While we appreciate and respect Dr. Carmona's service as surgeon general, we disagree with his statements," Hall said.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
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16.7.07

Cheney Pushes Bush to Attack Iran

Cheney Pushes Bush to Attack Iran

Halliburton/KBR have so many trucks and contractors in Iraq. Cheney is getting fat rich off this war so why not have another? It redefines BLOOD MONEY.
USA doesn't need another war, it needs a new government.

Cheney Pushes Bush to Act on Iran
By Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger
The Guardian UK

Monday 16 July 2007

Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out. President "not prepared to leave conflict unresolved."

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

"Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

"The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action," Mr Cronin said. "The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."

Almost half of the US's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.

No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Sporadic talks are under way between the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the possibility of a freeze in Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Tehran has so far refused to contemplate a freeze, but has provisionally agreed to another round of talks at the end of the month.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that there are signs of Iran slowing down work on the enrichment plant it is building in Natanz. Negotiations took place in Tehran last week between Iranian officials and the IAEA, which is seeking a full accounting of Iran's nuclear activities before Tehran disclosed its enrichment programme in 2003. The agency's deputy director general, Olli Heinonen, said two days of talks had produced "good results" and would continue.

At the UN, the US, Britain and France are trying to secure agreement from other security council members for a new round of sanctions against Iran. The US is pushing for economic sanctions that would include a freeze on the international dealings of another Iranian bank and a mega-engineering firm owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Russia and China are resisting tougher measures.

Go to Original

As Senate Iran Vote Looms, Brownback Advocates Strike on Iran
Think Progress

Sunday 15 July 2007

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 97-0 to pass a resolution sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to censure Iran "for what it said was complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq." The resolution required the Bush administration to regularly report to Congress on Iran's role in Iraq.

While the resolution explicitly rejected authorization for immediate military action, the gist of the resolution declared Iran is participating in acts of war against the United States, thereby laying the foundation for a confrontation with Iran. Newshoggers wrote that the resolution may provide the "political cover for launching a war."

Validating the concern many felt, Sen. Sam Brownback appeared on Fox News shortly after the vote and declared he was ready to preemptively strike Iran. Host Sean Hannity asked Brownback, "There's probably going to come a point for the next president that they're going to have to determine whether to go out and have that preemptive strike. And you're ready and would be ready to do that?"

"Yes, I am, and I think we have to be," Brownback answered. "Sean, if we're going to be serious about this fight, and we're in this fight, and probably for a generation. We're probably in this fight for a generation."

When the Congress voted to authorize force against Iraq in 2002, it cited as justification the fact that Congress had passed a law in 1998 sponsored by Sen. Trent Lott.

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26.6.07

Corruption - Global Issues

Corruption - Global Issues:


Corruption is a major cause and result of poverty around the world, at all levels of society, from governments, civil society, judiciary functions, military and other services and so on. The impact of corruption in poor countries on the poorer members of those societies is even more tragic.

The issue of corruption is very much inter-related with other issues. At a global level, as globalization continues at rapid pace, with promises of prosperity, the “international” (Washington Consensus-influenced) economic system that has shaped this globalization in the past decades requires further scrutiny for it has also created conditions whereby corruption can flourish and exacerbate the conditions of people around the world who already have little say about their own destiny.

A hard thing to measure or compare though, is the impact of corruption on poverty issues, versus those inequalities that are structured into law, such as unequal trade agreements, structural adjustment policies, so-called “free” trade agreements and so on. It is easier to see corruption. It is harder to see these other more formal, even legal forms of “corruption.” It is easy to assume that these are not even issues because they are part of the laws and institutions that govern national and international societies and many of us will be accustomed to it—that is how it works, so to speak. Those deeper aspects are discussed in other parts of this web site’s section on trade-related issues.

That is not to belittle the issue of corruption, for its impacts are enormous too.

Rich Countries involved in corruption abroad

When asking why poor countries are poor, it is quite common to hear, especially in wealthier countries that are perceived to have minimal corruption (at least domestically) that other countries are poor because of corruption. Yet, corruption is not something limited to third world despots. Rich countries too have been involved in corrupt practices around the world.

As Professor Robert Neild from Trinity College, Cambridge University writes in Public Corruption; The Dark Side of Social Evolution (London: Anthem Press, 2002), “Rich countries and their agencies … commonly have been and are accomplices in corruption abroad, encouraging it by their actions rather than impeding it….” (p.209). Specific problems he highlights include:

  • The impact of Cold War corruption (supporting dictatorships, destabilizing democracies, funding opposition, etc);
  • Firms from rich countries bribing rulers and officials from developing countries to gain export contracts, particularly in the arms trade and in construction (even justifying it by suggesting bribery is “customary” in those countries, so they need to do it to, in order to compete);
  • The “corruption-inducing effects of the purchase, by the rich countries and their international corporations, of concessions in Third World countries to exploit natural deposits of oil, copper, gold, diamonds and the like.” Payments made to rulers often violate local (and Western) rules, keeping corrupt rulers in power, who also embezzle a lot of money away.
  • The drug trade. Neild suggests that international law and national laws in rich countries that prohibit drugs may serve to “produce a scarcity value irresistible to producers, smugglers and dealers.” Governments and civil society in the third world are often “undermined, sometimes destroyed” by the violence and corruption that goes with the drug trade. “This is probably the most important way in which the policies of rich countries foster corruption and violence. Yet the effect on the Third World seems scarcely to enter discussion of alternative drug policies in the rich countries.” Legalizing drugs, a system of taxation and regulation, comparable to that applied to tobacco and alcohol might do more to reduce corruption in the world than any other measure rich countries could take, he suggests.

Rich countries have been used to it, too:

Bribery may be pervasive, but it is difficult to detect. Many Western companies do not dirty their own hands, but instead pay local agents, who get a 10 per cent or so “success fee” if a contract goes through and who have access to the necessary “slush funds” to ensure that it does. Bribery is also increasingly subtle.… Until recently, bribery was seen as a normal business practice. Many countries including France, Germany and the UK treated bribes as legitimate business expenses which could be claimed for tax deduction purposes.

— Dr Susan Hawley, Exporting Corruption; Privatisation, Multinationals and Bribery, The Corner House, June 2000

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25.6.07

The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration to Deny Global Warming

The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration to Deny Global Warming

29 June 2007 Issue
"That's a big no. The president believes ... that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one." - Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary responding in May 2001 to whether Bush would ask Americans to curb their first-in-the-world energy consumption.

Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal," they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we are in deep trouble."

You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings, that the White House would at least offer some small gesture to signal its concern about the impending crisis. It's not every day, after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science - especially when it comes from international experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming.

"We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told ABC News, about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man." What we know today, he added, is "not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to 'solve' the problem."

Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president's see-no-evil performance. "I don't see how he can say that with a straight face anymore," Christine Todd Whitman, who clashed privately with Cheney over climate policy during her tenure as the administration's first chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, tells Rolling Stone. "The consequences of climate change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He believes - not quite as much as Senator James Inhofe, that this is a 'hoax' - but that the Earth has been changing since it was formed and to say that climate change is caused by humans is incorrect."

Cheney's statements were the latest move in the Bush administration's ongoing strategy to block federal action on global warming. It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in 2005. "Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid."

Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."

It's now almost impossible to fathom that back in 2000, after then-candidate Bush vowed to place caps on carbon pollution, top climate scientists believed he was just the man to take action on global warming. "It looked like we could finally get beyond the fray that had consumed the Clinton administration," recalls James McCarthy, a Harvard climate scientist who co-chaired the previous report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gaveled down the very day Bush was inaugurated in 2001.

Even at that point, the science was in. The U.N. panel linked "most of the warming observed over the last fifty years" to "human activities." That judgment aligned with the National Assessment on climate change, a landmark federal report commissioned by Bush's father in 1990 and completed just before Bush was elected in 2000. The assessment projected dire impacts from global warming - from the extinction of maple trees in New England to a catastrophic loss of snowpack in California. "If we do nothing," McCarthy says, "the lack of water in California will force a mass exodus."

But those who were expecting a Nixon-to-China moment from Bush on climate weren't counting on the influence of the vice president and his industrial patrons. In March 2001, Whitman traveled to Italy for climate talks with European allies. She affirmed Bush's commitment to regulating greenhouse gases - a position she had vetted with Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andy Card. But what Whitman didn't grasp was that when it came to climate, the president was largely irrelevant.

Whitman should have had her doubts. Prior to joining the Cabinet, she sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.

Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House. In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming. Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the National Assessment.

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton's first order of business - even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White House colleagues-to-be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.

A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA was no longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement in Italy that something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a move Cheney is suspected of engineering, conservative senators Jesse Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig wrote the White House on March 6th seeking a "clarification" of the president's policy.

Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors dismissed both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing that "the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and solutions to global warming is inconclusive and ... must await further scientific inquiry."

When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke through the palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and marched into the Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were ways to call for a cap on carbon that wouldn't hamstring the economy," she says, "and that it was vitally important we not be seen as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before Whitman could even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was clear the decision had already been made," she says.

As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped into the true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from a secretary that contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming pollution - which he was on his way to deliver, in person, to his allies in the Senate.

Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's energy staffers almost verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise to regulate CO2, it also made a sweeping new declaration: that carbon dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." (The administration would cling to this untenable position for six years, until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law compels the EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)

The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward to working with you and others to address global climate change issues in the context of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face on planet-warming pollution thus enabled Cheney to take control of the White House's energy policy and to work with industry behind closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach to global warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on coal and oil - and that would hurt industry's performance. Everything else flowed from that."

As he shaped climate policy, Cheney took his cues from the Global Climate Coalition, an alliance of anti-Kyoto polluters that included the top lobbying arms of the oil and coal industries. In June 2001, the administration dispatched Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs, to address the GCC at the headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute. In her speech, Dobriansky was glad to give the industry crowd credit for the president's decision to withdraw from the international treaty designed to slow climate change. Her talking points from that day read, "POTUS rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you."

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act also reveal that Dobriansky had received a copy of the GCC's "21st Century Climate Action Agenda," a game plan crafted by polluting industries that calls for "a new approach to climate policy" focusing on "voluntary actions" rather than mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. On February 14th, 2002, Bush gave a speech at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that laid out his policy on global warming for the first time. The speech was a Valentine's Day gift to polluters, officially enshrining the GCC's agenda, almost point for point, as the White House's climate policy. Under the plan, planet-warming pollution would actually increase by thirty-four percent by 2030. Bush vaguely promised to cut the "intensity" of carbon emissions by eighteen percent over the next ten years - neglecting to mention that the nation was already on track for a fourteen percent reduction. He touted $700 million in new funding for technologies that might someday reduce emissions - money that government auditors were later unable to find any trace of. And he promised that the entire plan would be thoroughly reviewed and re-evaluated - in 2012, four years after he left office.

The National Academy of Sciences blasted the policy, saying it lacked a "guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress." Even the technology promoted in the president's plan was bogus. "It's as if these people were not cognizant of the existing science," one member of the academy remarked. "Stuff that would have been cutting-edge in 1980 is listed as a priority for the future."

In his Valentine's Day speech, Bush gave credit to the man who Cheney had placed in charge of crafting the nation's climate policy to suit the needs of big polluters. "I want to thank Jim Connaughton, who is the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality," Bush declared. "He's done a fabulous job of putting this policy together."

Connaughton's mission at the CEQ was to make sure climate regulations never got in the way of energy development. A Yale-educated lawyer, Connaughton comes across like a slightly caffeinated Ron Howard, with a manic energy and a balding pate of wispy red hair. As head of the CEQ, he put a green spin on polluter-friendly measures: Lowering air quality became the "Clear Skies Initiative," while allowing timber companies to step up their clear-cutting was dubbed the "Healthy Forests Initiative."

To direct the White House's spin on global warming, Connaughton appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right experience for the job: He worked as "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an industry coalition that created the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into evidence by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate disinformation campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate change." The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming, disseminating industry-funded research to challenge "the science underpinning the global climate change theory."

Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-climate man running the disinformation campaign. As the "action plan" directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA's science on global warming and inject the industry's denialist positions into government documents. "They decided they didn't need to win the debate on climate," says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney's tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about it and dissipate the will for political action."

But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a rough start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate Action Report, a dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on climate-treaty obligations. The report was developed by the EPA, but internal documents reveal that Cooney edited it to reflect positions advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening page of the chapter on climate impacts, Cooney inserted a litany of language in bold intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our knowledge ... a lack of understanding ... uncertainties ... considerable uncertainty ... perhaps even greater uncertainty ... regarded as tentative."

But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real science. With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered out Cooney's waffling and filed a front-page story that called the report "a stark shift for the Bush administration." The report, the Times observed, detailed "far-reaching effects that global warming will inflict" and "for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming."

Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to whitewash now threatened to undermine his former employers in the energy industry. Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron Ebell had been a key member of the coalition that crafted the disinformation "action plan." In fact, casting doubt on global warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the climate-denial campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.

Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him. "We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a total mess of it."

Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd, 2002. "Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode... . I want to help you cool things down, but after consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration repudiating the report."

That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the bureaucracy." Forget the headlines, he said - there was no shift in the administration's policy.

What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals just how seriously the White House took its intelligence fixing on global warming. Cooney was put in charge of damage control and was apparently instructed to craft a letter to the Times denying that the president had changed course on climate change. But this time, Cooney's editor was not just Connaughton, but Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The collaboration with Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last March, in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed with Rove his work at the CEQ.

The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the Climate Action Report "reinforces" the "significant scientific uncertainties" emphasized in the president's climate policy. Edits to the rough drafts of the letter were blacked out by White House censors, but Rove's pithy endorsement of the final draft survived. "Great," he wrote in praise of Cooney's spin. "Defends the report rather than staying focused on the policy." In other words, Cooney had succeeded in emphasizing the report's overhyped uncertainties, thus shifting attention away from the White House's do-nothing approach to global warming.

At the same time, Cooney got a pat on the back from Bill O'Keefe, his old boss at API. In a letter to Bush's chief of staff, O'Keefe - by that point a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil - urged the president to tighten up the White House spin machine and make sure all communications were "on the same page, with the same message." O'Keefe also faxed a copy to Cooney with a handwritten note reading, "P.S. You are doing a great job."

From then on, Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content to obscure science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself. Draft documents made public by the House Oversight Committee reveal that Cooney now had veto power over federal scientists, including Richard Moss, coordinator of the Climate Change Science Program Office, and even James Mahoney, the assistant commerce secretary nominally in charge of America's climate science.

In one document, Moss and Mahoney attempted to push back on several of Cooney's more than 100 edits to an EPA document called "Our Changing Planet" - each of which served to amplify uncertainty and downplay the threat posed by global warming. Cooney repeatedly overruled Moss and Mahoney with an aggressive "no" scrawled in the margins. On another document Cooney marked up, he commanded EPA officials that "these changes must be made." Beside one strike-through marked with a star, Cooney wrote, "Red Flag: Do not cite National Assessment" - dismissing the landmark report commissioned by Bush's father.

Although some of Cooney's edits were revealed in a New York Times story in June 2005 that led to his departure, the full extent of his interference has never been reported. His commissarial coup came in April 2003, with his revisions to the EPA's Draft Report on the Environment. He began by deleting the sentence "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." He then deleted the top-line assessment by the National Research Council, which establishes an unequivocal cause-and-effect link - "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." In its place, Cooney wrote the following mishmash of his own creation: "Some activities emit greenhouse gases and other substances that directly or indirectly may affect the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby potentially affecting climate on regional and global scales."

The changes sparked a rebellion by the EPA's senior scientists. In an internal memo uncovered by Congressional investigators, they wrote that Cooney's edited text "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change" and "may leave an impression that cooling is as much an issue as warming." Whitman was also furious. "The language that CEQ found acceptable was such pablum," she says now. "It was so much below the level of sophistication of the report that I felt it would have denigrated it all." But her solution to this problem was to simply delete the section on climate change - handing Cooney a carte-blanche victory.

Whitman says she killed the section hoping that scientific documents included with the report would speak for themselves. But the capitulation helped drive her to the breaking point. Four days after bowing to Cooney, she resigned as head of the EPA.

Internal documents uncovered by Rolling Stone reveal that Cooney did far more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration's point of view. Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled false intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president, Cooney steered industry-sponsored junk science on global warming to Cheney. "What disturbed me most," Whitman says, "was the administration's record of taking the most extreme of the science - what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight as the real science."

The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study underwritten in part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study, which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually warm, was authored by two astrophysicists, both of whom were on the payroll of the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-denial group funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill O'Keefe, Cooney's former boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal in January 2003 quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper was fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.

"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."

But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great excitement in the White House. When Kathie Olsen of the Office of Science and Technology Policy forwarded the study to Cooney, he responded with an enthusiastic, "Thanks, Kathie!" Six minutes later, according to internal e-mails, the study was in the hands of Kevin O'Donovan, who served as Cheney's point man on climate. The study also grabbed President Bush's attention, as revealed in an e-mail sent two days later to a high-ranking White House official: "Bob - if you din't [sic] already have, this is the study the President was talking about."

The study gave Cheney's office the quasi-plausible refutation of climate science it was waiting for. According to a memo reviewed by congressional investigators, but which the CEQ refused to make public, Cooney was eager to promote the sham science. The study, he e-mailed O'Donovan, "represents an opening to potentially reinvigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past 1,000 years." The paper, he added, "contradicts the dogmatic view held by many in the climate science community that the past century was the warmest in the past millennium... . We plan to begin to refer to this study in administration communications on the science of global climate change."

One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw the study, he wrote to Cooney (the former API lobbyist who is now "corporate issues manager" for ExxonMobil) and CC'd O'Donovan (who now works for Shell Oil).

"What??!!" Koch wrote in mock disbelief at the study's claim that the planet isn't really heating up. "I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!"

Such joking aside, the administration continues to hold up the discredited study as a counterweight to the IPCC's scientific, peer-reviewed findings on global warming. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee in March, Connaughton lauded the study as a "new and major piece of science." His only regret, he said, is that "I'm not a scientist, so I can't find it conclusive."

Although Cooney resigned in 2005, the campaign of disinformation he implemented had the desired effect. Two months after Cooney returned to work for ExxonMobil, the Cheney energy plan was passed into law. A massive giveaway for the fossil-fuel industry, the Energy Policy Act authorized $6 billion in subsidies for oil and gas production and another $9 billion for coal producers. Worst of all, the bill fast-tracked the construction of coal-fired power plants that would hasten global warming.

Nor did Cooney's return to the oil industry spell an end to the administration's meddling in climate science. Less than a month later, before the G8 summit on climate change, the administration killed the opening line of the eight-country report - "Our world is warming" - and quashed a section that cited "increasingly compelling evidence of climate change." Last month, in negotiations leading up to the newest round of G8 talks, the administration blocked another motion that "resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions."

"It's the ideological bent of the current administration," says McCarthy. "They seem absolutely resistant to any call to action, no matter what the science says."

Indeed, the campaign to sow doubts about climate change has grown more aggressive in recent years. No longer is the administration simply censoring scientific reports - it has moved to silence the scientists themselves. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the administration refused to allow a top federal scientist whose research links increased hurricane intensity to global warming to speak to the press. It sent out a gag order to top government polar scientists, demanding that anyone attending international scientific conventions agree not to speak to reporters about "climate change, polar bears and sea ice." And it ordered a former intern from the Bush-Cheney campaign in the NASA press office to prevent Dr. James Hansen, the godfather of global-warming science, from talking to the media.

"Interference with communication of science to the public has been greater during the current administration than at any time in my career," Hansen testified before Congress in March, suggesting that NASA's press office had become an "office of propaganda." This month, when news leaked that the Pentagon plans to kill a satellite program critical to monitoring the Earth's climate, NASA's scientists issued a confidential memo warning that the move "places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy."

In many ways, the administration's refusal to budge on global warming mirrors its intransigence on Iraq. No matter how bad the reports from the field get, Bush appears determined to stay the course. "Never once - not a single time - have they revisited the decision to not do anything serious about global warming," says Symons, who sat in on Cheney's task force. "They say it's more 'serious' now than they did earlier on. But the president has never said, 'Let's start over and come up with a real plan.' "

Even when Bush proposes what looks like a plan, it's designed to stall real progress on global warming. In May, America's allies in the G8 unveiled an ambitious proposal: Member nations would cut planet-warming pollution in half by 2050, accepting mandatory caps on carbon emissions. But the administration flatly rejected the plan, which it called "fundamentally incompatible with the president's approach to climate change."

Instead, at the G8 summit on June 6th, Bush pushed what he touted as his "new initiative" for combating climate change. For the first time, the president acknowledged that "long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gases" are needed. But his solution, in essence, is to take his do-nothing strategy global, turning our allies into a Coalition of the Warming. Under his proposal, mandatory caps on emissions would be replaced with "aspirational goals" to be met through voluntary cuts and futuristic technology. Countries would work independently for the next "ten to twenty years" to develop strategies to "improve energy security, reduce air pollution and also reduce greenhouse gases" - apparently in that order.

And when will the United States and other polluting nations be expected to meet the nonbinding targets they set for themselves under Bush's plan? Not until as late as 2075 - well past the point that global warming will have superheated the planet.

This article is from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on news stands until June 29th

View our slide show, "Inside the Bush Administration's Denial Campaign Against Climate Change," here.

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