GMW: President ordered bombing of Greenpeace/Wise Use in the White House

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GMW: President ordered bombing of Greenpeace/ " Wise Use " in

the White House

" GM WATCH " <info

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:53:29 +0100

 

 

 

 

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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1.President ordered bombing of Rainbow Warrior, spy chief says

2. " Wise Use " in the White House

3.Free the Iraqi blogger

 

" If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury

box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used. " -

President Reagan's former interior secretary, James Watt (item 2)

 

Senhor Pereira's widow has received neither an apology nor compensation

for his murder from the French Government. (item 1)

 

EXCELLENT ARTICLE:

It is an Insult to the Dead to Deny the Link with Iraq

Tony Blair put his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power

by Seumas Milne

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0714-27.htm

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1.Mitterrand ordered bombing of Rainbow Warrior, spy chief says

From Charles Bremner in Paris

The Times, July 11, 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-3-1689202,00.html

 

FRANCOIS MITTERRAND ordered the sinking of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow

Warrior, despite the late President's denials at the time, France was

told yesterday.

 

Exactly 20 years after the bungled operation in Auckland harbour, a

report by Admiral Pierre Lacoste, who at the time was head of the DGSE,

the French foreign intelligence service, was published by Le Monde.

 

In Operation Satanic, as the DGSE called the plan, three teams of

secret agents used explosives to sink the vessel as it was preparing

to sail

to observe French nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll in the Pacific.

Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese photographer, died in the attack.

 

In a scandal that continues to haunt France's relations with

Australasia, New Zealand arrested two DGSE officers who were posing as

tourists.

They were sentenced to long jail terms, but handed back to France in

1986.

 

M Mitterrand and his ministers denied any knowledge of Operation

Satanic, which they put down to rogue agents. The President ordered an

inquiry " to find out the truth " . It whitewashed the Cabinet, but M

Mitterrand

sacked Charles Hernu, then the Defence Minister, and Admiral Lacoste.

 

In the admiral's memorandum, which, the newspaper said, was prepared a

year after the attack but did not surface till this weekend, he wrote

that M Hernu had ordered him to " neutralise " the Rainbow Warrior because

it was vital for national defence to prevent the environmentalist

organisation from disrupting the nuclear tests. " They are waging war

against

us. We cannot have scruples about such a vital subject, " the minister

told Admiral Lacoste.

 

The admiral wrote that he had sought confirmation from M Mitterrand

that the risky operation had been authorised. The President received him

on May 15: " I asked if he was authorising me to execute the project of

neutralisation. He gave his agreement, stressing the importance that he

attached to the nuclear tests. The authorisation was sufficiently

explicit. "

 

The admiral described how the Defence Minister had assigned GBP300,000

from secret funds for the mission, which was also approved by the Chief

of Defence Staff. When the Greenpeace affair broke with the arrest of

the French agents, M Mitterrand, Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister, M

Hernu and senior staff denied any knowledge. " There was an easy way for

them to find out from day one; they only had to summon me. Not only was

I never summoned, but they always refused to let me (testify) when I

asked, " wrote the admiral. His report, with its first-hand account of the

planning, confirmed longstanding suspicions that the late Socialist

President must have been involved.

 

The sabotage was the first of a string of scandals that tainted M

Mitterrand's presidency.

 

Yesterday Greenpeace held a rally in Paris to commemorate Senhor

Pereira, who was 35 when he drowned in the sinking boat. He had

returned to

the vessel to save his cameras after a first explosion, intended to

force the crew to flee before a second, more powerful charge holed the

boat.

 

Senhor Pereira's widow has received neither an apology nor compensation

from the French Government.

 

THE ADMIRAL'S ACCOUNT

March 19, 1985 Charles Hernu orders Admiral Lacoste to " prevent "

Greenpeace from intervening against the Moruroa programme

May 15 President Mitterrand confirms the order to Admiral Lacoste

July 10 Rainbow Warrior is sunk in Auckland harbour

July 23 Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur of DGSE charged with murder

August 6 French Government denies any knowledge of operation

August 26 French inquiry finds no involvement by DGSE chiefs or

Government

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2. " Wise Use " in the White House

Yesterday's fringe, today's Cabinet official.

 

Fifteen years ago the anti-environmental " wise use " movement made a

splash with its talk of timber wars, threats to shoot " jackbooted " park

rangers and resource managers, and attacks on grassroots environmental

activists. You don't hear much about wise use anymore, but that's not

because the wise-users went away.

 

Far from it. Just as neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard

Perle long pushed their hawkish agenda from the sidelines before

becoming key officials,

veterans of once-discredited militant anti-environmental groups are now

setting natural-resource policy for the Bush administration

 

Wise use arose in 1988, combining property-rights activists with

elements of the timber, mining, oil, and off-road-vehicle industries

and a

smattering of Reagan administration leftovers. Its original focus was the

perceived threat that George H. W. Bush would follow through on his

pledge to be " the environmental president. "

 

Wise-use activists went on to confront the Nature Conservancy, the

Sierra Club, and local environmental activists, sometimes with

vigilante-style tactics ranging from

telephone death-threats to arson and shootings. In Washington, Idaho,

Montana, and New Mexico, a number of wise-users even united with the

militia movement

 

That alliance proved their undoing: Following the deadly 1995 attack on

the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by militia associates

Timothy McVeigh and

Terry Nichols, wise use lost much of its industry backing and went into

decline.

 

Today wise-use veterans and their lawyers and lobbyists are back,

working for the son of the president they once detested. Among prominent

appointees in the

administration with wise-use backgrounds is Interior Department

secretary Gale Norton, who began her career at the Mountain States Legal

Foundation back when

it billed itself as the " litigation arm of Wise Use

 

Mountain States was the brainchild of Reagan's notoriously

anti-environmental Interior secretary James Watt. (After being forced

to resign,

Watt told a group of ranchers that " if the troubles from

environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot

box, perhaps the

cartridge box should be used. " )

 

[Former] Department of Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman also has roots

in the movement. As a lawyer in California, Veneman represented

wise-use activists opposed to a federal conservation plan for the Sierra

Nevada. Her chief of staff, Dale Moore, is a former lobbyist for the

National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a stalwart member of the wise-use

coalition, while her undersecretary for natural resources, Mark Rey,

was a

timber lobbyist and featured speaker at wise-use events through

the late 1990s.

 

Back in its heyday, the movement put forth a 25-point " Wise Use

Agenda, " which at the time was dismissed as right-wing fantasy. It

included a

call to drill for oil in

the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to log Alaska's Tongass National

Forest, to gut the Endangered Species Act, and to open up public lands

to motorized

recreation. These and other wise-use bullet points now frame Bush

administration environmental policy.

 

Drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge has been a constant

preoccupation, and the Tongass was opened to wide-scale logging last

December. The

Endangered Species Act has been continuously undercut. Secretary Norton

reversed a plan to ban snowmobiles from several national parks, instead

increasing their numbers. She also directed the Bureau of Land

Management to find ways to expedite coal, oil, and gas development on 250

million acres of public lands.

 

The Wise Use Agenda also called for privatizing the national parks and

handing them

over to people " with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney. "

Norton has promoted " outsourcing " thousands of National Park Service

jobs to the private

sector to provide " better delivery of services to the public. "

 

" I wish we could take credit for that, but we can't, " demurs wise use's

founding ideologue Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free

Enterprise. " Dick Cheney

sits on my board of directors, but we're not pen pals. Sometimes you

just put something out there long enough and it gets picked up, despite

what you do. "

 

One victory wise use will take credit for goes back to the early days

of the Bush administration, when it appeared the White House might

appoint John Turner as

Interior secretary. Turner had been head of the Fish and Wildlife

Service under the elder Bush, and was a fishing buddy of Dick Cheney's.

 

But he was also president of the Conservation Fund, a " non-membership,

non-advocacy " land preservation organization, so wise use considered

him a " land-grabber " aligned with " the Rockefeller Family Foundation and

their financing of the environmental left, " according to Chuck Cushman

of the American Land Rights Association. Cushman (known to his admirers

as " Rent-a-Riot " ) organized an anti-Turner campaign; the angry protest

spooked the Bush White House, and Turner's name was replaced by Gale

Norton's.

 

" They caved, they blinked, " says wise-use founder Arnold. " Cheney's

probably angry at us, but who cares? Norton is a friend. "

 

This spring, wise use again stepped in to block the Senate from

ratifying the Law of the Seas treaty, an innocuous framework agreement

for

ocean management and

marine protection. With broad support from the Navy, oil companies, the

White House, and environmentalists, the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee had voted

19—0 to take the agreement to a final vote.

 

Then wise-use veteran Henry Lamb, former head of the so-called

Environmental Conservation Organization (a group founded by developers

opposed

to wetlands protection) got involved. His new group, Sovereignty

International, claimed that the Law of the Seas treaty was a plot to

undermine the United States by establishing a " blue hull " United

Nations navy

(from which presumably to launch the black helicopters of

militia-movement fantasy).

 

Lamb's group got Senator James Inhofe ® of Oklahoma to call a hearing

regarding " national security concerns " over the treaty, leading Senate

Majority

Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to put off the vote until after the

presidential elections so as not to alienate Bush's supporters on the far

right.

 

While traditional wise-use paranoia still proves effective, its

rhetoric is softening. Where once leaders like Arnold railed against

environmentalists ( " We're out to kill

the f––s. We're simply trying to eliminate them. Our goal is to destroy

environmentalism once and for all " ), today's wise-use veterans like

Interior secretary Norton take a softer tone. " We have in many ways

reached the limits of what we can do through government regulation, " she

blandly asserts. Now that they occupy the seat

of power, the wise-use movement no longer needs its blowhards and

bullies as it quietly and effectively implements its radical agenda.

 

David Helvarg is author of The War Against the Greens (revised and

updated 2004, Johnson Books) and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign

http://www.bluefront.org

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3.Free the Iraqi blogger

 

Steve Bell, Dahr Jamail, Lori Price (www.legitgov.org) have signed the

petition for the arrested Iraqi blogger, Khalil Jarrar. - see his

website at http://secretsinbaghdad.blogspot.com/

 

Please sign the petition for his release

Free Khalid Jarrar Now!!! Petition

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/820522461?ltl=1121677971

for further information:

 

More info on Khalid:

 

Another Casualty in Rumsfelds Information-war

Mike Whitney

July 17, 2005

http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1 & p=13797 & s2=18

 

 

 

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