CURRENT UPDATES: May 9, 2006

May 9, 2006

Dear Friends,

Here in New York the pollen count is high and gas prices and rents are higher. But we are maintaining equilibrium, balanced and boosted by the courage of comedians and former CIA analysts.

In this edition of our ATRC E-Update we answer the question: Does Ray McGovern's Reality have a "Well-Known Liberal Bias?"

We also provide a synopsis of our event with anti-nuclear thinkers and activists Jonathan Schell and Helen Caldicott, and link to useful nuclear resources. Then we turn to the trillion pound gorilla in the room- the military budget and the costs of the war in Iraq, and alert you to an incredible new resource- the Unified Security Budget, which helps us think about security in terms of concrete safety and deterrence instead of just dollars spent.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. RAY MCGOVERN TAKES ON RUMMY, COLBERT TAKES ON BUSH

II. ARMAGEDDON AND INDIAN POINT

III. THE COST OF IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, ETC....

IV. ALTERNATIVE SECURITY BUDGET RELEASED

Thanks from the ATRC, where we agree with Stephen Colbert that:

"polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality."
And reality has a well-known liberal bias,

Frida Berrigan
Bill Hartung

I. RAY MCGOVERN TAKES ON RUMMY

Is Ray McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran, a senior citizen version of comedian Stephen Colbert? Just days after the late night TV host skewered President Bush at the White House Press Club dinner, McGovern launched a steely attack on Mr. Impossible to Pin Down, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In Atlanta, for an appearance at the Southern Center for International Studies, Rumsfeld was interrupted at least three times by protestors including one with a banner that read, "Guilty of War Crimes." But the criticism did not end when the last protester was ejected from the room.

One of Rumsfeld's questioners was Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who briefed President George H.W. Bush on intelligence, who asked:

"Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary and that has caused these kinds of casualties? Why?"

DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, I haven't lied. I did not lie then. Colin Powell didn't lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The President spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people, and he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were, and we were --

RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were, "near Tikrit, near Baghdad, and northeast, south and west of there." Those were your words.

DONALD RUMSFELD: My words -- my words were -- no, no, no, wait a minute! Let him stay one second. Just a second.

RAY McGOVERN: This is America, huh? Go ahead.

…. Rumsfeld stumbled through more stock answers, which you can hear on http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/05/1432203

For added inspiration, watch McGovern's cross-examination right after Stephen Colbert's White House Press Club dinner performance.

Go to http://www.c-span.org/ and scroll down under video to

"Comedian Stephen Colbert at White House Correspondents' Dinner (4/29/2006)"

II. ARMAGEDDON AND INDIAN POINT

More than 60 people came out on Thursday night to participate in a conversation on nuclear power and nuclear warfare with Helen Caldicott and Jonathan Schell, which was moderated by Bill Hartung.

Jonathan Schell, author of Unconquerable World, The Fate of the Earth and many other books, began by describing nuclear weapons as geriatric. "We are in the seventh decade of the nuclear age," he said, and then offered a brief but compelling thumbnail sketch of where we stand in the nuclear story.

Schell, who is The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, noted that there has been a "genuine revolution" in U.S. nuclear history, continuing to say that even those of us who oppose it are not quite caught up with how fast events are unfolding. U.S. nuclear polices were dragged into the vortex of the so-called "war on terror" and the post-9/11 period has seen the completion of this nuclear revolution, which has two parts- once which is public and visible and another which is covert and hidden.

On the public side there are all sorts of new and explicit ideas-regime change and preventative war are now seen as "tools in the foreign policy toolbox." And then, by defining Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil," the Bush administration drew nuclear policies further into the war on terror, asserting U.S. intention to use nuclear weapons even against those countries which do not possess or plan on using nuclear weapons. Thus, Schell observes, the United States seeks a monopoly on the use of force,. But rather than deter other countries from seeking nuclear weapons, Schell sees a revolution in proliferation. North Korea has nuclear weapons. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Iran is a work in progress. The war in Iraq has obscured the shifts in nuclear policy and allowed nuclear proliferation to take hold.

Turning to the invisible part of this nuclear revolution, Schell described the Bush administration's quest for nuclear supremacy. He discussed "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," the recent Foreign Affairs article which begins:

"For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending -- and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun."

The article, by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press was published in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs and is available at:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85204/keir-a-lieber-daryl-g-press/the-rise-of-u-s-nuclear-primacy.html

Frida Berrigan discussed "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy" on CBC Radio on April 28th, and the segment can be heard online here

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2006/200604/20060428.html

Much of the analysis Schell shared at the New School lecture can be found in his article "A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy," http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2837

Helen Caldicott, founder and director of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, began her remarks by observing that despite the fact that we are at the most dangerous point in history there is no moral outrage. To murmurs of assent from the audience, Caldicott went on to say that there is no strategy, no leadership and no guts on the nuclear issue- in congress or anywhere else. As people agreed with that, she went on to say that she would "be an Australian tonight," implying we were in for a brash, no-pulled-punches talk… and we were. Repeatedly, Caldicott used medical metaphors from her training as a physician to describe the planet as "in intensive care," or having an "acute clinical syndrome."

Beyond the call to urgent action on behalf of humanity and the planet, the most substantive part of Caldicott's presentation was an effective undercutting of the environmental and geopolitical arguments for nuclear power. She observed that electricity is a "transient byproduct" of nuclear power generation, with the real product being the nuclear waste which we will be saddled with for millennia. Through basic conservation, she went on, Americans can cut their electricity consumption by 20%-- about the same amount of electricity generated by the country's nuclear power plants, rendering the dirty and expensive facilities unnecessary and obsolete. And finally, she painted dire scenes of relatively simple terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants that have dangerous and debilitating impacts on a large segment of the population.

Dr. Caldicott's New Nuclear Dangers has recently been released in paperback, and is available (along with lots of other resources) on her website, The Nuclear Policy Research Institute http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/index.cfm

IN OTHER NUCLEAR NEWS

Indian Nuclear Weapons

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, appeared before Congress in April to discuss the administration's plan for nuclear cooperation with India and draw attention to the plan's implications for U.S. national security.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Milhollin asked: "Why, after 9/11, when we should be doing all we can to fight terrorism, and when we talk almost every day about states or terrorists getting their hands on an atomic bomb, should we weaken the controls on the export of nuclear material? Is this the right time to do that? And if we do it, will it make us safer?"

Read his complete testimony, which answers all these (and more) questions,

http://www.iranwatch.org/Gary/sfrc-milhollin-042606.htm

The Stimson Center also provides a useful analysis of the U.S.-Indian Nuclear deal, called "A Guide to the Perplexed,"

http://www.stimson.org/pub.cfm?id=286

III. THE COST OF IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, AND OTHER GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR OPERATIONS SINCE 9/11

Thanks to Winslow Wheeler at the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information for this synopsis

http://www.cdi.org/program/index.cfm?programid=37

The Congressional Research Service has just released a new report on the past and possible future costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pending Congress' action on the new emergency supplemental, which should complete fiscal year 2006 expenses, the costs will be up to $439 billion by the end of this year.

If Congress approves the $71 billion emergency supplemental to pay for the ongoing cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new total for the war expenses will be $439 billion, according to a new report released on April 24 by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). For the war in Iraq, $320 billion will have been spent; $89 billion for Afghanistan, and $26 billion will have gone toward enhanced security, including combat air patrols, in and over the United States.

The Department of Defense (DOD) estimates its "burn rate" of monthly expenses at $6.4 billion in Iraq and $1.3 billion in Afghanistan. CRS points out that DOD did not include the cost of replacing worn out equipment and upgrades to facilities in theater. Adding those and a few other costs calculates to a monthly "burn rate" of $8.1 billion in Iraq; $1.6 billion in Afghanistan, and a total burn rate of $9.9 billion per month.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has made projections for possible future costs. That agency projects total additional costs of $371 billion for the years 2007 to 2016, making a grand total of $811 billion. (This CBO estimate assumes an almost immediate downturn in annual war costs; however, it is questionable whether we have crossed that peak.)

DOD's accounting methods continue to be problematic. The $7.1 billion that CRS reported earlier it could "not track" continues to go untracked. It appears that CRS found another $4 billion that it could "not track" (see page 8). Furthermore, DOD's reports on war costs are incomplete and "understate expenses by over $20 billion because DOD's financial system for tracking war costs has excluded certain types of expenses."

DOD also refuses to provide any comprehensive estimate for the costs to replace and repair all worn out equipment. There has been discussion of an "in-house" Army estimate of its "reset" costs at $36 billion; the Marine Corps has estimated $11.7 billion for themselves. However, these estimates do not appear to be comprehensive.

Public estimates of the number of troops deployed for Iraq do not always include those performing support in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region. CRS estimates total troop deployments for Operation Iraqi Freedom in September 2005 to be 260,000.

Average per troop costs for Iraq are between $355,000 and $360,000 per individual, per year; this dollar amount has been increasing since 2003.

"The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11," Congressional Research Service, Amy Belasco, April 24, 2006.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

IV. ALTERNATIVE SECURITY BUDGET RELEASED

On Wednesday May 3rd, Foreign Policy in Focus and the Center for Defense Information released the Report on the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States, 2007.

In addition to the Center's own Bill Hartung, members of the Task Force are Joseph Cirincione, Center for American Progress; Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives; Anita Dancs, National Priorities Project; Lt. Gen. Robert Gard (ret.); John Gershman, Foreign Policy in Focus; Andrew Grotto, Center for American Progress; Christopher Hellman, Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation; Lorelei Kelly, Stimson Center; Don Kraus, Citizens for Global Solutions; Anuradha Mittal, Oakland Institute; Sonal Shah, Goldman Sachs; Col. Dan Smith, U.S. Army (ret.), Friends Committee on National Legislation; Winslow Wheeler, Center for Defense Information; Cindy Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and John Zavales, CUNY Center.

The thrust of the report is the recommendation that there be a "security shift" from funds currently devoted to military spending towards non-military tools of security such as diplomacy, foreign aid, nonproliferation, and homeland security. Counting the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States currently spends eight times as much on military security instruments as it does on non-military approaches.

As noted in its executive summary, the report "identifies nearly $62 billion in cuts to the regular defense budget mostly to weapons systems that have scant relevance to the threats we face." Among the programs recommended for elimination or major cutbacks are the F-22 combat aircraft, the Virginia-class submarine, the DD(X) destroyer, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The biggest proposed savings come from cutting back the Star Wars program from $10.4 to $2.4 billion per year, and reducing nuclear weapons spending from $18 billion per year to $5 billion per year. The nuclear weapons savings would be achieved by cutting deployed warheads to 600 from the current level of 6,000; reducing nuclear delivery vehicles such as bombers, submarines, and missiles; and cutting back sharply on the Department of Energy's budget for sustaining and researching nuclear warheads.

Major alternative security investments cited in the report include a $10 billion increase in spending for overseas economic development; a $1 billion increase in U.S. contributions to international organizations;

** A $1.8 billion increase in funds for diplomatic operations;

** A tripling of spending on nonproliferation programs such as projects designed to lock down or destroy excess nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials around the world;

** An $8.8 billion investment in alternative energy sources;

** And a $10 billion increase in spending on the nation's basic public health infrastructure.

To read more, including the context for making these kinds of changes, see the report at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3253

There is also a good summary article on the report by Drew Brown of the Knight Ridder News Service,

"Report Criticizes Pentagon Budget Priorities," May 3, 2006 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14492871.htm