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Senator Threatens to Block Vote on E.P.A. Nominee
April 14, 2005

Senator Threatens to Block Vote on E.P.A. Nominee
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, April 13 – Stephen L. Johnson, President Bush’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, won nearly unanimous approval from a Senate committee today, although one member said he might block confirmation by the full Senate.

The vote of the panel, the Environment and Public Works Committee, was 17 to 1. The lone dissenter was Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, who complained that the agency had not responded to his requests for detailed analyses of antipollution proposals differing from the administration’s.

Each member of the Senate has the power to delay confirmation of a presidential nominee, and after the committee vote, Mr. Carper did not rule out doing so if he did not receive the information.

Suggesting that the blame lay with the White House, the senator said: “Steve Johnson needs to be unfettered by this administration to do the job as it needs to be done. We need legislation, but to get the right legislation, we need good, timely technical information.”

Last week two other Democrats, Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Bill Nelson of Florida, also threatened to block confirmation. Their objections sprang from a program in Florida, co-sponsored by the E.P.A., in which low-income families would have been compensated to allow research about the effects of pesticides on their infants.

Mr. Johnson, the agency’s acting administrator, agreed on Friday to cancel that study. Yet Ms. Boxer said before voting on Wednesday that she still had “great reservations” about his stewardship. She mentioned concerns dealing with other human testing programs, decisions that the agency’s critics have said are made on the basis of politics rather than science, and financial support for the Superfund program.

“I am going to go with my hopes, not my fears,” Ms. Boxer said of her vote backing the nomination.

Mr. Johnson, who has a background in pesticides, would become the first career scientist to lead the agency. He has held several senior positions there and been acting administrator since Michael O. Leavitt left in January to become secretary of health and human services.

Mr. Carper’s concerns underscore a major division on the committee between Republicans who favor the Bush administration’s approach to reducing emissions from power plants and members who back alternatives that, unlike the administration’s initiative, would set limits on carbon dioxide emissions in addition to those of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. Mr. Carper and Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, have introduced one alternative; Senator James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, has offered another.

The administration plan failed to win committee approval last month for the second consecutive year, in part, Mr. Carper says, because the agency has refused to analyze the two alternatives to determine their costs and effectiveness, as it has the administration approach.

In attributing the agency’s reluctance to the White House, Mr. Carper suggested that Mr. Johnson would exercise only as much independence as officials there would allow.

He said he believed that Mr. Johnson “would serve the agency well if the White House would let him,” adding, “Unfortunately, I don’t believe the White House has let past administrators do their jobs effectively, and I don’t believe they’re ready to do that now.”

Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, declined to respond to Mr. Carper’s comments directly, on the ground that confirmation was still pending. But “the president believes Mr. Johnson is the best-qualified individual to lead the E.P.A.,” Mr. Duffy said, “which is why we selected him.”

Why would Jan Kounen, director of “Dobermann,” want to do a documentary on Shipibo Shamanism?

My film “Dobermann” allowed me to express my visceral anti-establishment convictions with a joy usually reserved for bad, little kids. After that, I started thinking that the time had come for me to examine the reality of what has so far been my joyfully chaotic existence and to ponder my place in the universe‚Ķ

Where would I begin ?
Boxed in by our senses, we only see a single dimension of reality. Our eyes only allow us to perceive a minor part of the light’s reflection of the specter of what matter truly is. Our other senses restrict us in exactly the same ways.
I’ve always held the conviction that other dimensions exist, and that our brains and our central nervous systems function as filters for our consciousness. These filters are necessary to grasp the material world, but their makeup is all too often weighed down by cultural, moral and scientific doctrines that provide us with a much too limited image of the Universe.
So I was continuously plagued by the question: “Can we tear away the veil, just for one second?”

Shamanism
With the exception of Buddhism and the Tibetan Dzogtchen tradition, which include terribly constraining techniques, current religions offer little in the way of approaching the “Invisible.”
So I then delved into reading the scriptures by the mystics.
Along the way, I came across Shamanism.
As I read their scriptures, I came to learn about the lives of these men, these Shamans who use plants, meditation, chants and rituals to journey into the Invisible. In contrast to what I had read previously, I learned that Shamans do not provide answers. All they do is record their observations and, based on their own experiences, establish their belief systems. Their role is simply to guide souls on their own, personal quests.

Our Western sensibilities tend to make most of us scoff at Shamans or to consider them with fear or amusement. They are nothing more than witch doctors who use powerful drugs to induce trances, and can not function in reality. Despite all this, I set out to meet them in Mexico. High up in the sierra, I sought out the Huichol Indians, widely known for their active Shamanism and its sources which go back several thousand years.
This gave me the opportunity to frequent Shamans and share their peyote ritual.
This initial experience left me disturbed, but unsatisfied.
We had not bonded on a personal level.
So I set out again. This time I went to the jungles of Peru, where a powerful form of Shamanism exists, using the sacred plant, called the “soul’s creeper.” Following several encounters and experiences with “curanderos” (healers) and “brujos” (witch doctors), I met “Questembetsa.”

Shipibo-Conibos
Questembetsa is a Shipibo-Conibo Shaman, who enabled me to experience Shamanism from the inside. There are 45,000 Shipibo Conibos living together along the Amazon River in Peru. Questembetsa is the spiritual guide of all Shipibo Conibos. He is the Master Shaman who trains all of his people’s Shamans. Questembetsa enabled us to film a summer solstice ceremony, which lasted for three days and three nights. This traditional celebration has never been recorded on film, and justly so. It has not occurred for 70 years and has obviously been seen by very few “non-Indians.”
Using night-vision cameras, we were able to immortalize the shots of these unique moments.

Under Questembetsa’s protective watch, I participated in ceremonies and experienced what can be characterized as a “near death experience.” For me, this was a powerful consciousness experience, where I crossed over, to the other side of the mirror. Once my initiation began, it would continue for over a year. Having experienced this journey of initiation and learning, I am now able to speak about Shamanism.

A consciousness technology
Conceptual thinking is a limited tool when one truly attempts to develop one’s consciousness.
Indeed, human consciousness has a natural tendency to identify with thoughts and reason – stopping there. Shamans use a technology or an outside element, generally consisting of sacred plants. Using powerful psychotropic substances, the Shamans guide individuals, enabling them to “peel away” consciousness from thoughts and reason. The subconscious is gradually unveiled. During these experiences, a different reality appears and is observed through the prism of our consciousness.
Are we remembering who we are, or are we simply discovering who we are?
Without words, this reality is sometimes expressed through terror, suffering and tears. At times it comes in the form of beauty and tears of joy inspired by the magic.
It comes from within one’s being, in the form of archetype images.
Each and everyone’s personal history and culture individually determine this reality.

We all share a universal mythology, which serves as a source for the visions.
Each and every one of us is an infinite universe, where angels and demons make up our thoughts, emotions, memory and our body. My journey deep into the jungle continued when I met scientists from the “Aton Institute” in Norway. The Aton Institute studies consciousness, quantum physics and the molecular chemistry of sacred plants as well as past civilizations.

Sacred plants or drugs ?
Psychotropics are drugs or narcotics. In our culture, the word “narcotic” is synonymous with decadence. In past civilizations such as the Incas or the Egyptians, these hallucinogenic plants were considered instruments of knowledge, magic plants or “master plants.”
Scientists agree and have demonstrated through modeling that the key lies in the DNA, genetic programming, the pineal gland or the famous “third eye,” located between the brain’s hemispheres. They believe that the molecules of the Ayahuasca plant are a molecular nano-technology that activates the consciousness. Angels and demons are the archetype contacts with the negative and positive encoding of our DNA. Presently, Shamans know how to use the Ayahuasca plants. The Shamans consider these plants as instruments made available by the Universe for men to be able to pass through the Invisible and enter into contact with the Universe.

Developments for the documentary

This documentary film will be the testimony of a personal and subjective adventure. It will also show the dangers and risks involved in Shamanism: (1) losing yourself in the light or the darkness of your recently awakened emotions or (2) misinterpreting the feelings or visions. This could lead to schizophrenia in the event these journeys not be guided by competent Shamans or compliant with an unyielding discipline and strict diet.

The film will primarily show the therapeutic power of the Shamans and their plants. This power is a type of ancestral psychoanalysis or human psychotherapy backed by 4,000 years of experience and practice.
The film will allow the Shamans to speak for themselves. It will show how their cultures and their belief systems culminate from their knowledge of the Invisible.
CGI sequences will reproduce the power of the recurring visions and the unfolding of the poetic story I witnessed. We will also convey the humor and terror I felt while experiencing these visions. The film will include investigative interviews with therapists, ethnologists and specialists in molecular brain chemistry. In the interest of understanding the invisible interaction between a Shaman and a “novice,” we will record the brain-wave interaction between Questembetsa and myself during a ceremony this spring. This will enable us to identify them and study their meaning.
Finally, the December 1999 interviews, with Western individuals in therapy, will be repeated. Over a year later, we will compare the results of these two sets of interviews.
My personal experience will be told on the parallel of selective testimony, somewhere between Western science and Indian therapy.

Only recently has Western culture reluctantly come to recognize that Tibetan Buddhism has garnered knowledge of the spirit. The objective of this documentary is to impress upon viewers that these little-known Indians developed veritable cognitive technology through their own sciences of the spirit, thousands of years ago. To me, these men are warriors in the battle to unlock the mysteries of consciousness. Shamans consider the greatest ally and the worst enemy of every individual to be one and the same‚Ķ himself or herself. In conclusion, I personally guarantee this film will not turn out to be a new age Sermon on these Indians and their culture. All “Other worlds” are not worlds of light‚Ķ

Jan Kounen

From Rolling Stone:

The Long Emergency

What’s going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that “people cannot stand too much reality.” What you’re about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans — lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring — to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

The term “global oil-production peak” means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world’s all-time total endowment, meaning half the world’s oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there’s a big catch: It’s the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

The United States passed its own oil peak — about 11 million barrels a day — in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West’s ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

Some “cornucopians” claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of “abiotic” oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.

Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

It will change everything about how we live.

To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn’t easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

The widely touted “hydrogen economy” is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen’s nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with “renewables” are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can’t be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

Virtually all “biomass” schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What’s more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas “inputs” (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser — you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks — as a contributor to greenhouse “global warming” gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world’s second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China’s surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places — the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia — and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world’s remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not “services” like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart’s “warehouse on wheels” won’t be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores’ 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a “cottage industry” basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower — and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don’t refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities’ problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I’m not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope — that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

COURTESY MERRICK!

Officials Ask Why Iraq Details Surface Now
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 6, 2005

Filed at 8:27 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA and members of Congress said they want to know how a presidential commission unearthed details on intelligence failures about Iraq’s prewar weapons programs that previous investigations missed.

Of particular interest is information that emerged in last week’s report about how doubts were handled regarding a leading source on Saddam Hussein’s alleged mobile biological weapons labs — an Iraqi scientist who defected to Germany, code named “Curveball.”

Porter Goss, who became CIA director last September, has instructed officials to determine what happened and why the details did not come to light earlier, said his spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise.

“It was an unhappy surprise to the director that his first understanding of this issue was when he first read” the commission’s report, Millerwise said Wednesday.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., also acknowledged President Bush’s intelligence commission had details that did not emerge during his committee’s yearlong investigation into the Iraq assessments, released last July.

If Bush’s intelligence commission learned “something obvious,” Roberts said, “we want to make sure the intelligence community does fill in those gaps so we have a clear picture.”

Other lawmakers are angrier. “As far as I am concerned, the CIA threw us a curve ball,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., also a member of the Intelligence Committee.

The White House, Congress and U.S. intelligence agencies have launched a number of investigations into the faulty prewar intelligence on the Iraq threat. The most definitive to date came last week from Bush’s intelligence commission.

According to the report, CIA officials tried to tell the agency’s top officials that Curveball was a suspected fabricator and may have been mentally unstable. The new information includes an alleged warning in a late-night phone call to the agency’s former director, George Tenet.

Tenet and his top deputy have both released statements emphatically denying that they received such warnings. Tenet called it “deeply disturbing” that the information didn’t get to him.

Levin wants Tenet to testify under oath. “I don’t think the intelligence committee was given some of that detail on Curveball, but I think it should have been,” Levin said.

“Tenet said he doesn’t remember,” Levin said. “Hey, these are life and death decisions. This is what we tell the world. That’s not good enough. … Where is the responsibility?”

U.S. intelligence agencies and the Bush administration have come under fire since 2001 for not sharing enough information with lawmakers who oversee some of the government’s most sensitive intelligence activities. Some in Congress have been particularly concerned about U.S. detention policies and the botched Iraq intelligence that was used to justify the invasion.

When asked how the new investigation got more detail, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and a commission member, said that the panel conducted numerous long interviews. “We did not come up with that information early,” McCain said of the information on Curveball.

Last week’s report said the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated more than 100 reports from Curveball, with detailed information about mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq.

Curveball was working with German intelligence, and U.S. intelligence had limited access to him. The report said Curveball met once with a defense official and seemed to have a hangover.

The report said CIA officials contended that they tried to raise warnings about Curveball. One unnamed CIA division chief claims to have called Tenet at midnight the night before former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his address to the United Nations, which provided the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq. The division chief recalled telling Tenet that foreign intelligence officials were concerned about Curveball’s credibility.

In an unusual seven-page statement last week, Tenet said his “strong recollection” is that he did not speak with the division chief around midnight.

Tenet also said it was “stunning and deeply disturbing that this information, if true, was never brought forward to me by anyone” when the Iraq intelligence was scrutinized.