A rchive Date
[ 05-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/Suzuki/2003/06/04/103410.html
Right target, wrong reason
By DAVID SUZUKI - CNEWS Science
Wed, June 4, 2003
Many pundits have recently taken swings at Prime Minister Jean Chrétien for speaking critically of President Bush's economic policies. According to critics, this is no time to go after the United States. Not when relations are already sticky following Canada's refusal to enter the Iraq war and our new "liberal" drug possession policies.
I would argue that, on the contrary, there are plenty of good reasons to criticize the Bush administration - but running a deficit is at the bottom of the list.
Let's start with the "war on terrorism." It was supposed to make the world a safer, more just place. That hasn't happened according to Amnesty International. In fact, the group claims that the United States, the leader of the war on terror, is now at the forefront of new human rights abuses. According to Amnesty's recently released annual report, since 9/11, the U.S. government has detained thousands of foreign nationals - mostly men of Arab or South Asian origin - without charge and deprived them of the safeguards provided by international law. U.S. forces also held hundreds of detainees at undisclosed locations in Afghanistan during the war. And the U.S. continues to detain more than 600 people at a naval base in Cuba, where they are being held without charge or legal assistance. Amnesty says that the war on terrorism has overall made the world a less secure, more dangerous place.
Reporters Without Borders, an organization dedicated to media freedom, has also taken the Bush administration to task for detaining six French journalists last month who were sent to cover a story in Los Angeles. According to the organization, the reporters were handcuffed, body-searched and held for 26 hours before being deported.
Scientists too have been speaking out against U.S. government policies. A recent editorial in the science journal Nature lambastes the U.S. for failing entirely to protect Iraqi universities and museums from the looting and destruction that followed the Iraq war. The authors point out that the looting took place right under the noses of U.S. troops and resulted in the loss of the world's finest collection of artifacts on earliest human civilization. That's a loss, not just to science, but to humanity.
Another editorial, this time in the journal Science, questions the U.S. Department of Energy's plans to use lie-detector tests as a way to ferret out security risks in the department. A National Academy of Sciences review of lie-detectors found that: "Its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee screening." The department chose to ignore the recommendation.
Other scientists are speaking out against unilateral U.S. actions that could further destabilize international relations and make the world even more dangerous. The U.S. Congress, for example, recently approved $15 million to research Earth-penetrating nuclear weapons that could destroy underground bunkers hiding chemical or biological weapons. Critics of these "mini-nukes," like astrophysicist Robert Nelson, say that rather than destroying any hidden chemical agents, a nuclear blast would probably disperse them more widely. He also argues that the use of these bombs could blur the lines between conventional and nuclear weapons, making the use of nuclear weapons in combat more likely.
Other Bush administration actions include spending hundreds of billions on a controversial missile defense system, pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and consistently opposing the creation of the new International Criminal Court to prosecute crimes against humanity.
Human rights abuses. Increasingly dangerous unilateral actions. Voting against clean energy. Refusing to address global warming. These are why Mr. Chrétien should be speaking out against the Bush government. Compared with these issues, running a deficit is small potatoes indeed.
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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