PLAYING POLITICS
President Obama “must take care when he attempts to score cheap political points on national security issues, as he did last week with his unnecessary decision to release previously classified details of the legal opinions authorizing the use of the extreme interrogation techniques - torture, to you and me - that were drawn up by the Bush administration,” London Telegraph columnist Con Coughlin writes.
“Apart from highlighting the sophistry Bush’s lawyers used to justify the inexcusable, there is little new in the revelations that the CIA had used White House-sanctioned methods of torture - such as waterboarding, in which a detainee suffers simulated drowning,” the columnist said.
“The Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib scandals provide graphic examples of how the Bush administration lost the plot over its handling of terror suspects. But the fast tempo of the global campaign against Islamist-inspired terrorism means that all this is ancient history. Abu Ghraib is now run by Iraqis, who don’t share the West’s qualms about mistreatment of prisoners; and Guantanamo will be closed by the end of the year. Torture and extraordinary rendition are practices that ceased long before the Bush administration left office.
“So why did Mr. Obama reopen old wounds by publishing the Justice Department’s legal opinions? The answer lies more with the president’s desire to heap humiliation on his predecessor than his stated aim of transparency on this dark episode. Playing party politics with sensitive security issues might work well on the campaign trail, where candidates can do so without consequences. But in office, it is another matter and runs the risk of compromising the effectiveness of intelligence and security agencies.”
FIGHTING HYSTERIA
“Irish documentary filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have stirred up trouble before by debunking smug liberal hypocrisy. Their latest film, ’Not Evil, Just Wrong’ takes on the hysteria over global warming and warns that rushing to judgment in combating climate change would threaten the world’s poor,” John Fund writes at www.opinionjournal .com.
“The film reminds us that environmentalists have been wrong in the past, as when they convinced the world to ban the pesticide DDT, costing the lives of countless malaria victims. The ban was finally reversed by the World Health Organization only after decades of debate. The two Irish filmmakers argue that if Al Gore’s advice to radically reduce carbon emissions is followed, it would condemn to poverty 2 billion people in the world who have yet to turn on their first light switch,” Mr. Fund said.
“Mr. McAleer and Ms. McElhinney have put needles into the pincushions of self-satisfied environmentalists before. In 2007, they produced a documentary called ’Mine Your Own Business,’ which told the story of a poor village in Romania, where environmentalists fought plans for a new gold mine. The village, where unemployment tops 70 percent, desperately needed the $1 billion in new investment and 600 jobs the project would bring. But environmentalists have blocked it, claiming it would pollute a pristine environment.
“Mr. McAleer, then a journalist with the Financial Times, considers himself an environmentalist. But when he covered the story for his paper, he says, ’I found that almost everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.’
“The two filmmakers are skilled at using provocative publicity tactics. On April 22, they will hold a public showing of their film at the Rachel Carson Elementary School in the suburbs of Seattle. ’Since it was Rachel Carson who touched off the campaign to ban DDT, we thought showing “Not Evil, Just Wrong” there would be appropriate,’ says Mr. McAleer.
“Local environmentalists will probably not appreciate the gesture and will be appalled that the school agreed to rent out its auditorium to the renegade skeptics. But somebody might point out that it’s not evil, just appropriate, to hold a debate about the real-world consequences of acting on global warming fears.”
UNDELIVERED SPEECH
” ’The trouble with the eco-crusader is that his false guilt and his false fears feed endlessly upon each other.’
“With Earth Day coming up on Wednesday, I remembered this line from an old presidential speech,” John Andrews writes in the Denver Post.
” ’From the emotional remorse that we have sinned terribly against nature,’ it continues, ’there is but a short step to the emotional dread that nature will visit terrible retribution upon us. The eco-crusader becomes, as a result, deaf to reason and science, blind to perspective and priorities, incapable of effective action.’
“That’s telling ’em, Mr. President. Or it would have been, if Richard Nixon hadn’t let staffers talk him out of giving the speech in 1971,” said Mr. Andrews, director of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University.
“Fired up by attacks on the ’disaster lobby’ by Look magazine Publisher Thomas Shepard and uneasy about his own role in establishing the Environmental Protection Agency after the first Earth Day in 1970, Nixon directed me and other speechwriters to produce a warning against ecological extremism.
“Our draft died on his desk amid concerns about political backlash. I kept the file as a historical curiosity - the presidential bombshell that wasn’t. Today, four decades into the age of true-believing green religion, Nixon’s undelivered speech reads prophetically.
“So does Shepard’s diagnosis that the environmental doomsayers ’are basically opposed to the free enterprise system and will do anything to bolster their case for additional government controls.’ So does the denunciation by professor Peter Drucker, another source we consulted at the time, of the green fallacy ’that one can somehow deprive human action of risk.’ The battle lines have changed little in 38 years.”
FEAR-MONGERING
“According to the Department of Homeland Security, Americans need to be on the lookout for twisted, hate-filled veterans recruited from the ranks of people passionate about a single issue like, say, illegal immigration or abortion,” Sherman Frederick writes in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Talk about profiling. Navy vet? Check. Strong border laws? Check. Anti-abortion? Check. Uh oh. My government thinks I’m a potential terrorist,” Mr. Frederick said.
“This, of course, is absurd. But more importantly, it is dangerous fear-mongering at its worst. The folks in the Department of Homeland Security could not be more scary when they use such language to describe, and thus target, citizens who disagree politically with the Obama administration.”
• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/635-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes .com.
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