Blast from the Past

Second post, second strike against the New York Times. Really, what were the editors thinking when they committed ink and precious space to Ginger Thompson's "Old Foe of U.S. Trying for a Comeback in Nicaragua"?

The article is a hatchet job against former Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, who is again running for office, and cavalierly disregards ongoing U.S. meddling in Nicaragua. As FAIR points out, the piece is "one-sided and inaccurate." That's putting it politely.

When I read the article this morning, I suddenly felt transported back to the unpleasant old days when Ronald Reagan said with a straight face that the Sandinistas were a threat to Harlingen, Texas, and that he had no choice but to arm the Nicaraguan Contra "freedom fighters" (make that terrorists in post-9/11 parlance). It's like the elephant warning that it is about to be crushed by a mouse.

(For those too young to have lived through the era, Reagan--just like "W" today--loved to babble endlessly about freedom while engaging in policies such as the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, then telling the International Court of Justice to get lost when it agreed that such actions were patently illegal.)

The Times article makes the Sandinista government of the 1980s out to have been little more than a front for world communism. It parrots feverish neocon chatter of Al Qaeda recruiters operating in Latin America and a "new axis of evil" of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba emerging.

So obsessed is the article with Ortega's terrible machinations that the reader looks in vain for even a hint of the real issues confronting Nicaragua, still a desperately poor country. It might be expected that Faux News presents such gibberish, but the New York Times? Is this a blast from the past, or a taste of things to come?

Insufficient Explosive Force?

In this inaugural post, I thought I'd briefly comment on an article that demonstrates the madness we continue to live with, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War. (The Cold War may have ended, but the associated mindset seems disturbingly well and alive.)

In a front-page article in the New York Times of April 3, 2005 ("Aging Warheads Ignite a Debate Among Scientists"), William J. Broad breathlessly alerts readers that a design flaw in hundreds of U.S. nuclear warheads carried aboard submarines "could cause them to explode with far less force than intended," a force "so reduced as to compromise its effectiveness."

The article explains that these warheads, known as W-76, are thermonuclear weapons, in which a "small atom bomb" ignites hydrogen fuel to produce a far bigger "bang." But the supposed design flaw might mean that there's "only" the initial nuclear explosion, not the larger thermonuclear blast.

Imagine! The White House threatens to destroy some rogue state ten times over, and it turns out it can only destroy it once. Of course, this is completely unacceptable. But the Times informs us that relief is on the way, in the form of an "overhaul program" to the tune of $2 billion plus.

Under the guise of the "Reliable Replacement Warhead Program," Washington will have yet another avenue to pursue the design of new generations of nuclear weapons. "If possible," Broad writes, "the effort is to proceed without nuclear testing." And if not? Well, then we'll just have to kill international efforts to ban such tests. No problem there; the administration is well practiced in casting aside international treaties it doesn't like.

The Times devotes much space to the arcane technical disagreements among nuclear weapons scientists. It doesn't see fit to comment that efforts to prolong the life of the U.S. arsenal fly in the face of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits the U.S. and the other nuclear weapons states to work toward disarmament. This at a time when the Bush administration is adamant that Iran respect the rules of that very same treaty.

It's an open secret that the Bush administration is an avid believer in U.S. exceptionalism -- one set of rules for the rest ofthe world, another for Washington. But one of the reasons the White House can get away with such blatant double-standards is that the media, by and large, fail so fundamentally to hold the political leadership to account.

Insufficient explosive force? The problem seems to be insufficient willingness to confront mad policies undertaken in the name of "national security."