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Is There Oil Beneath Your Feet? • Estonia Stands Up to Russia • The Battle of Chalons

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A Foreign Policy of FreedomRon Paul’s collection of inspired statements to the House of Representatives show him to be one of the most consistent and morally responsible politicians in government today. (2007, 372pp, pb, $20.00) BKFPF

Special Report on NAFTA Crushing the American Family

Most Americans cherish the Constitution because it protects our rights. But what if our Constitution could be overruled by a higher authority similar to the European Union? This issue explains how NAFTA, a trade pact the United States entered, is being grown to supersede our government and protected rights. (April 16, 2007, 48pp, 1/$2.95; 10/$12.50; 25/$22.50) TNA070416

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The Culture-Wise FamilyCoauthors Ted Baehr, a movie industry expert, and Pat Boone, a legendary entertainer, know firsthand the persuasive power of the entertainment industry. Here, they draw from their extensive experience and interviews with experts to show the power of the media and its influence on families. They examine the ongoing threats posed by the media’s promotion of a humanistic worldview and offer thoughts on why this insidious perspective is permeating the entertainment industry. (2007, 269pp, hb, $19.95) BKCWF

A Case for Repealing NAFTA A merger of the United States, Mexico, and

Canada enabled through NAFTA and called the North American Union is arguably

the greatest current threat to our free-doms under the U.S. Constitution. This 36-minute video presents many of the reasons why the American people must

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The Culture-Wise FamilyCoauthors Ted Baehr, a movie industry expert, and Pat Boone, a legendary entertainer, know firsthand the persuasive power of the entertainment industry. Here, they draw from their extensive experience and interviews with experts to show the power of the media and its influence on families. They examine the ongoing threats posed by the media’s promotion of a humanistic worldview and offer thoughts on why this insidious perspective is permeating the entertainment industry. * Buy case lots of 100 at a special rate of $75.00. See case-lot shipping rates on

A Foreign Policy of FreedomRon Paul’s collection of inspired statements to the House of Representatives show him to be one of the most consistent and morally responsible politicians in government today. (2007, PRODUCTSPRODUCTSPRODUCTSFEATURED

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Vol. 23, No. 14 July 9, 2007

COVER STORY

REAL ID ACT

12 Pushing National IDsby Dennis Behreandt — Congress tried to implement a national ID through the Real ID Act, but several states are opposing the measure.

COVER Design by Joseph W. Kelly

FEATURES

GLOBAL WARMING

18 Alternative Explanations for Climate Changeby Dennis Behreandt — Climate change may not be of this Earth.

ENERGY

22 Is There Oil Beneath Your Feet?by Ed Hiserodt — Oil may be an abundant renewable resource.

EDUCATION

25 What Grade Does NCLB Get?by Jodie Gilmore — The bottom line on the No Child Left Behind Act.

BALTIC STATES

28 Estonia Stands Up to Russiaby Vilius Brazenas with William F. Jasper

CONSTITUTION CORNER

31 Federal Environmentalismby George Detweiler — A dangerous ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.

HISTORY — PAST AND PERSPECTIVE

34 The Battle of Chalonsby Charles Scaliger — Rome’s last stand against Attila the Hun.

THE LAST WORD

44 The Continuing Iraq Warby John F. McManus

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DEPARTMENTS

5 Letters to the Editor

7 Inside Track

11 QuickQuotes

33 The Goodness of America

41 Exercising the Right

42 Correction, Please!

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THE NEW AMERICAN • JULY 9, 2007 5

Soviet System “Collapse”In Dennis Behreandt’s otherwise excellent review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (April 30), I was very disappointed to see the unmodified phrase, “It seems that following the collapse of the Soviet system …” I won-dered who was asleep at the switch. THE NEW AMERICAN has always incorporated the context provided by the revelations of Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and the fact that nothing substantial in terms of con-trol has changed in the communist countries since 1989.

Also, Michael Telzrow’s essay on Aaron Burr, “A Missed Shot at Treason,” gave an able summary of the facts but left the reader with the conventional view that Burr’s con-spiracy to bring about secession was an iso-lated adventure. Omitted was the fact that Burr eagerly sought military support from Napoleon, the former Illuminist who consoli-dated international power in the wake of the French Revolution, and the fact that French Jacobins had tried in 1794 to bring a similar revolutionary bloodbath to America in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. With that in mind, the Burr Conspiracy seems to have been just one unsuccessful step toward trying to destroy the American union — international plotting that would continue until 1865.

WILLIAM H. MCILHANY

Beverly Hills, California

WMDs More and more lately, a faithful reader would believe your writers are a bunch of lefties, but “The Last Word” by Gary Benoit (Febru-ary 19) is a real prizewinner. He says: “And after going to war to accomplish one mis-sion — e.g., getting rid of weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein had …”

Any honest person knows President Bush was not alone in the belief Iraq had those weapons. Former President Clinton, the ma-jority of Congress, the UN, most Americans, and our allies all had the same belief — and so did you. You are as bad as the rest of the newspapers.

We probably would not have had a 9/11 terrorist attack if President Reagan would have acted responsibly in 1983 when Hez-bollah bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 Marines. Add to that the inaction of Clinton when hundreds of

U.S. service men and women were killed in Arabia, Africa, and on a Navy ship.

Why don’t you report the fact that the world would not have Mideast and terrorist problems if President Carter wouldn’t have pushed Aya-tollah Khomeini into power in Iran in 1979, replacing the U.S.-friendly Shah?

RICHARD SCHLEIS

Kiel, Wisconsin

Problems With Pinochet Jim West, in “The Passing of President Pi-nochet” (Letter to the Editor, February 19), disagreed with your position that Pinochet was wrongly reviled. The facts agree with THE NEW AMERICAN. The Chilean military (of which Pinochet had been its leader) had prided itself on its history of never having been involved in a coup to overthrow the government — as had been the habit of the military in most of the other South Ameri-can countries. Even during the period when Allende’s communism was severely destroy-ing the economy and quality of life in Chile, the military kept its hands off the govern-ment. It was not until Allende decided to en-sure the continuation of that policy that he made his fatal mistake.

He planned an operation to assassinate members of the general staff. The plan was leaked to a member of that staff, and Allen-de, after realizing that the military knew of and had stopped his plan by taking control of the government, committed suicide.

Also, Mr. West’s remark that Nixon and his CFR-controlled government “in-stalled” Pinochet should be considered in-valid in light of the fact that our Department of State (DOS) made the same mistake in Chile that it is making in Cuba and had made in South Africa and Panama. It placed an economic embargo against Chile. Instead of trying to help a new government that had thrown out a communist government, our government conspired against Pinochet’s re-gime. In spite of our DOS, Pinochet’s gov-ernment made an amazing economic recov-ery from Chile’s communist disaster.

TOM STRIDER

Viera, Florida

Send your letters to: THE NEW AMERICAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912. Or e-mail: [email protected]. Due to vol-ume received, not all letters can be answered. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.

Publisher John F. McManus

Editor Gary Benoit

Senior Editor William F. Jasper

Copy Editor Kurt Williamsen

Contributors Dennis J. Behreandt

Christopher S. Bentley Steven J. DuBord

Jodie Gilmore William P. Hoar Warren Mass

Michael E. Telzrow Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Editorial Assistant Ann Shibler

Art Director Joseph W. Kelly

Desktop Publishing Specialist Steven J. DuBord

Research Mary Benoit

Brian T. Farmer Bonnie M. Gillis

Marketing Larry Greenley

Public Relations Bill Hahn

Web Manager Brian Witt

Advertising/Circulation Julie DuFrane

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THE NEW AMERICAN is pub-lished biweekly by Ameri-can Opinion Publishing

Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Will Congress Turn Its Back on You?The “compromise” plan hatched between Republican and Democrat senators on “comprehensive immigration reform” would provide amnesty for millions of illegal aliens — despite the fact that on the whole the American people are dead set against amnesty. (June 11, 2007, 48pp) TNA070611

Special Report on NAFTA Crushing the American Family Most Americans cherish the Constitution because it protects our rights. But what if our Constitution could be overruled by a higher authority similar to the European Union? This issue explains how NAFTA, a trade pact the United States entered, is being grown to supersede our government and protected rights. (April 16, 2007, 48pp) TNA070416

Mix or Matchfor SpecialQuantityDiscounts

Transformation of American Jobs In recent years, the United States has been holding an “open house,” selling and even giving away jobs or paying foreigners to take American jobs. This issue explains matter-of-factly the reasons behind the giveaway and how to stop it. (June 25, 2007, 48pp) TNA070625

✁

Making Our Schools SafeIn the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, renewed calls are being sounded to make our schools safe — by getting rid of guns if necessary. This issue of TNA clearly explains why that course of action won’t work — and what will. (May 28, 2007, 48pp) TNA070528

Special Immigration Report This report makes a great tool for informing others about the social and economic toll that unchecked immigration is having on America — and what really needs to be done to set things right. (May 2006). RPIMM (One immigration pamphlet stitched into each report.)

Will Congress Turn Its Back...

Special Report on NAFTA

Making Our Schools Safe

Special Immigration Report

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Will Congress Turn Its Back on You?The “compromise” plan hatched between Republican and Democrat senators on “comprehensive immigration reform” would provide amnesty for millions of illegal aliens — despite the fact that on the whole the American people are

Making Our Schools SafeIn the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, renewed calls are being sounded to make our schools safe — by getting rid of guns if necessary. This issue of TNA clearly explains why that course of action won’t work — and what will. (May 28, 2007, 48pp)

✁✁✁

Will Congress Turn

Transformation of American Jobs In recent years, the United States has been holding an “open house,” selling and even giving away jobs or paying foreigners to take American jobs. This issue explains matter-of-factly the reasons behind the giveaway and how to stop it. (June 25, 2007, 48pp)

Will Congress Turn

Inside Track


Filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest cinematic provoca-tion, dubbed SiCKO, opens in theaters on June 29. The film’s premiere at the “Cannes Film Festival has been an overwhelming success,” Moore says on his website. “The 2,000 people inside the Lumière Theater were alternately in tears and laughing during the two-hour film.”

According to Moore, the purpose of the film is to “ig-nite a fire for free, universal health care.” To that end, he makes the film a vehicle for extolling the virtues of so-cialized medicine in Cuba, Canada, and France. Accord-ing to the Los Angeles Times, “Moore spends much of the film focusing on France’s socialized medicine. Doctors lead comfortable lives, patients receive attentive care, employers grant extended health-related leaves — all reasons the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked France tops in its global 2000 survey of the best healthcare countries.”

The filmmaker then goes after the United States by comparing it to Cuba. “That the United States ranked only 37th on the WHO list, just two slots ahead of Cuba, particularly infuriates Moore,” says an admiring L.A. Times. “With more wealth and technology than any other country, we nevertheless have 50 million citizens without insurance, 9 million of them children. As ‘Sicko’ anec-

dotally documents, many Americans eligible for insurance can’t afford it, and a long inventory of preexisting conditions limits the insurability of those who can.” Of course, the L.A. Times doesn’t indicate what part of the supposed 50 million is ever denied ac-cess to healthcare, or explain that the World Health Organization’s rating is a completely arbitrary construct or that most Americans enjoy the quality of care they receive; they just don’t like having to pay so much for it.

Michael Moore Calls for Socialized Medicine

Tucked away in the recesses of the current immigration bill is a provision to help boost military recruiting. It’s known as the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors provision, or DREAM.

The measure was expected to help boost sagging recruitment numbers by allowing illegal aliens to enlist as a way to obtain citi-zenship. The Defense Department figures showed that the Army fell short in May by 399 recruits. The Army National Guard fell 12 percent short of their goal, while the Air National Guard was well below their target, by 23 percent.

Bill Carr, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for military

personnel policy, explained that if one had come across the bor-der as a minor child and had been in the U.S. school system for “a number of years,” then one could be eligible to enlist in the military under DREAM. Under the provision, the newly enlisted recruits would be given a Z visa, granting them probationary sta-tus as a legal resident and making them eligible for student loans and other benefits as a first step toward citizenship.

But one of the many questions this recruitment bid raises is, “Why would any illegal immigrant, who is already being offered a road to U.S. citizenship and college monies under the proposed amnesty legislation, sign up to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

Desperate Bid to Increase Recruitment

Though few Republicans are willing to stand up and openly sup-port amnesty (even presidential aspirant John McCain, who has cosponsored past amnesty attempts, said in a presidential debate that he has never supported any amnesty), President Bush is doing his best to twist enough Republican arms to get the deal passed in the Senate.

After the Senate rejected taking further action on the Bush-Kennedy immigration bill in early June, falling 15 votes short of the 60 needed to move it forward, Bush went after the Republi-can holdouts. He told reluctant Republicans that he would put $4.4 billion toward additional border security if they approved of his amnesty — the money to be taken from “the fines and penal-

ties that we collect from those who have come to our country illegally” as they apply for legal status, according to the New York Times.

But some senators realize that the $1,000 fine that each illegal alien would pay (plus $500 for each spouse, child, and parent living here illegally) would be unlikely to even cover the cost of affirming their amnesty applications — let alone pay for border security — and that there is no reason to believe that Bush would implement border security improvements after refusing to se-cure the border for six years. Said Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.): “There’s no reason why we should be forced to tie amnesty to [border security].”

Luring Republican Senators Into Selling Out on Immigration

Michael Moore at the New York premiere of his movie SiCKO

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8 THE NEW AMERICAN • JULY 9, 2007

By any measure, Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the nation. Led by Senators Kerry and Kennedy and 11 Democratic House members, the state’s congressional contingent — indeed the state itself — consistently leans to the hard left both politi-cally and culturally. This left lean is epitomized by the state’s status as the only state in the nation to allow same-sex “marriage” — though five other states allow the equivalent of civil unions. Homosexuals have been allowed to marry in that state for three years — since the Massachusetts Supreme Court “found” such a right in that state’s constitution.

But that could’ve changed after supporters of traditional mar-riage collected 170,000 signatures asking for an amendment de-fining marriage as being between a man and a woman — if they weren’t submarined by the state’s legislature.

Once the required signatures were collected, 50 affirmative votes were needed in two successive legislative sessions to place

the proposed amend-ment on the ballot. It passed the first time, but failed a second vote by five votes. To pro-ceed with gaining a new amendment, the whole process would have to be started anew.

Across the nation, 27 states have already amended their constitutions to prohibit homosexual marriage and 17 more have simply passed laws ban-ning it. Interestingly, though “just over half of those surveyed [in Massachusetts] supported [same-sex ‘marriage’],” according to the New York Times, politicians wouldn’t let the issue come for a vote by the people who live in the state.

Being Denied a Voice on Same-sex “Marriage”

On June 7, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Ha-beas Corpus Restoration Act, which would reinstate the right of habeas corpus — the protection against arbitrary and indefinite

imprisonment. The new legislation was made necessary in 2006 when Congress severely limited and, according to some, actually revoked the right of habeas corpus — even for American citizens — when it passed the Mili-tary Commissions Act.

If passed by both the Senate and the House and signed into law, the Ha-

beas Corpus Restoration Act would allow detainees and enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their impris-onment in federal courts. More importantly, it would undo the dangerous possibility that, under the Military Commissions Act, American citizens might find themselves imprisoned without charge and without access to the courts.

The measure received enthusiastic support from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, who explained its importance. “Habeas corpus,” Feingold pointed out, “is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily. And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive deten-tion decisions. As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress last year, habeas corpus ‘safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy — ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully.’”

Habeas Corpus Restoration Moves Forward in Congress

On June 11, a federal appeals court ruled that the president may not indefinitely imprison a U.S. resident on suspicion alone. The ruling comes in the case of enemy combatant Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was living in Peoria, Illinois, as a university stu-dent when he was arrested in 2001. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, claimed that Marri was a member of a sleeper cell in the United States, preparing for a set of terrorist attacks.

In its 2 to 1 decision in the Marri case, the U.S. Court of Ap-peals for the Fourth Circuit argued that the Constitution protects both citizens and residents from unchecked military power and arbitrary imprisonment. “The President cannot eliminate consti-tutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a

civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention,” the court concluded.

Even though Marri is quite possibly the dangerous terrorist federal authorities believe him to be, the Court of Appeals rul-ing is a victory for those interested in preserving the rule of law. The matter, however, remains unsettled and Marri will remain in prison, pending appeal. In the meantime, it will be busi-ness as usual for the Bush administration, according to Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd. “The president has made clear that he intends to use all available tools at his disposal to protect Americans from further al-Qaeda attack, including the capture and detention of al-Qaeda agents who enter our borders,” Boyd said.

Court Challenges President on Enemy Combatants

Inside Track

Bush signs the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

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9THE NEW AMERICAN • JULY 9, 2007

According to Agence France-Press, the U.S. military is readying to face expanded and more dangerous threats, es-pecially from Communist China. According to the report, “China’s secretive transformation of its military power leaves the United States preparing for the worst eventuali-ties, including over Taiwan, a Pentagon official said.” The official, Richard Lawless, undersecretary for Asia-Pacific affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee that the United States was interested in dialogue with China about its military expansion, but that such dialogue did not ap-pear to be imminent. “I think if we had a true dialogue of depth,... we might be able to constrain and put some of those issues of [Chinese] intent to bed,” Lawless said. “Not being able to, we must plan and prepare for the worst.”

Lawless’ comments echoed concerns highlighted in the 2007 Defense Department annual report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. “The outside world has limited knowledge of the motivations, decision-making, and key capabilities supporting China’s military modernization,” the Defense Department report noted, while also pointing out that “China’s actions in certain areas increasingly appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies.”

Meanwhile, in Eurasia, Russia has raised the specter of nuclear war. Reacting to the U.S. proposal to place anti-missile instal-

lations in Eastern Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned: “If the U.S. nuclear potential ex-tends across the European territory and threatens Russia, we will be obliged to take countermeasures.” More ominously, he continued, “Of course, we’ll have to select new tar-gets in Europe.”

In Washington, the official line is that the proposed anti-missile system is intended to counter missile threats from rogue states like Iran, but nearly everyone discounts that explanation.

More than likely, the real reason for putting the system in East-ern Europe is, in fact, to counter new Russian ballistic-missile capabilities, a new generation of nuclear missile that features a multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle system that sends individual warheads from a single ICBM toward multiple targets. Such systems are very difficult to intercept and Russian military leaders touted the new missile as unstoppable.

To mount a defense against such a missile system, anti-missile weaponry would need to be situated relatively close to the launch site in order to target the ICBM in its boost phase. ■

Preparing for Larger Conflicts

It seemed to be a minor victory in the fight to stop the Trans Texas Corridor, the Texas segment of the NAFTA superhighway, after Texas lawmakers who had duked it out against the Texas Depart-ment of Transportation (TxDOT) and Governor Rick Perry over the Trans Texas Corridor agreed to a compromise bill.

Originally, lawmakers delivered H.B. 1892 to Perry, which if not successfully vetoed would have stopped the corridor in its tracks, so Perry threatened lawmakers with a special session if the road dispute wasn’t resolved. They compromised with S.B. 792.

Under the new bill, ground was lost, allowing road-construc-tion exemptions for several projects, but the bill wasn’t a wash-out. The two-year moratorium against new state agreements with private corporations to build tollways survived. And TxDOT’s aggressive policies were dealt a blow as authority was returned to affected localities and construction slowed, particularly on TTC-69.

But Perry indicated he wasn’t about to play dead in the future: “I am proud to sign this legislation.... Every planned road con-struction project will move forward as scheduled, local leaders will have more authority … and all toll revenue will be used for projects in the area it was raised.” Yet anti-tollers remain cau-tiously optimistic that the new bill amounted to victory. Capitol insiders maintain Perry was merely “spinning” the loss in order to continue courting international funding for himself and his state from parties interested in seeing the United States acquiesce

to a regional government called the North Ameri-can Union. Interestingly, S.B. 792 was delivered to Perry days before he attended a meeting in Is-tanbul of the Bilderberg group — a very influen-tial and wealthy group of individuals actively pur-suing an internationalist agenda — and signed only after his return.

Oklahoma’s face-off with the corridor build-ers was more definitive. In Oklahoma, after H.B. 1917 (enabling the cor-ridor through that state) failed to be heard in the House, it was resurrected under the guise of another bill. The new bill passed to the Senate, was rewritten to prohibit the corridor, and eventually emerged as an innocuous bill permitting only a local road project. In the end, Oklahomans succeeded in providing a bulwark against the corridor, but Texas is hunkering down for what will surely be a shoot-out in the next legislative session.

Wins Against the Trans Texas Corridor

Texas Governor Rick Perry

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THE NEW AMERICAN • JULY 9, 2007

Democratic Presidential Hopeful Wants All U.S. Troops Out of Iraq“I would leave no troops in Iraq whatsoever. The difference between me and the other candidates is, they would leave troops there indefinitely, and I would not.”Still far from being a top contender, Bill Richardson, for-mer U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and current governor of New Mexico, has seized on an issue that he hopes will propel him toward the nomination.

It Might Be Stupid to Alter the Pledge of Allegiance“With hurricanes, tornadoes, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?”Television star Jay Leno makes an excellent point.

He Rues the Absence of Christian Influence in Our Nation“If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.”Editor Thomas Fleming of Chronicles magazine would like to see the claim that our nation is “Chris-tian” backed up by some seriously needed changes.

Candidate Edwards Gives Council on Foreign Relations His View About the Iraq War“The war on terror is a slogan only for politics; it is not a strategy to make America safe. It is a bumper sticker, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world.”During his speech at CFR headquarters in New York, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards did not mention that he used the term “war on terror” during his 2004 vice-presidential campaign to describe the war in Iraq.

Amnesty Concerns Her More Than Two Senators Having a Profanity-laced Argument“So, open-borders sellout McCain cursed out Senator John Cornyn. Yawn! I didn’t get all worked up about it because when it comes to [obscenities], no obscene utterance compares to the George W. Bush-backed, RNC-backed, Kennedy-conspired, fantasy-based amnesty profanity unleashed on conservatives and the country.”Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin minces no words in condemning the proposed amnesty legislation.

Amnesty Would Weaken U.S. Security“Granting amnesty would reward lawbreakers and legalize scores of criminals and terror suspects that are currently here illegally, making it that much easier for them to operate within our society undetected. A country which cannot control its borders loses control of its destiny.”Claiming that amnesty for the illegal millions already in our nation is the wrong approach because the flood of border crossers is basically a security issue, Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) pointed to the illegal immigrants who were planning a terror attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey.

He’s Very Critical of What Came After Him at CBS”I have nothing against Katie Couric. The mistake [at CBS] was to try to bring the Today Show ethos to the evening news and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”Speaking on MSNBC’s morning program, former CBS anchor Dan Rather had plenty to say about the poor ratings being achieved by his former employer. ■

— COMPILED BY JOHN F. MCMANUS

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QUICKQUOTES

Bill Richardson

John Edwards

Dan Rather

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by Dennis Behreandt

The ABC News headline was in-tended to be alarming. Posted by “Brian Ross & the Investigative

Team,” the headline proclaimed: “FBI Terror Watch List ‘Out of Control.’ ” According to the report by Justin Rood, the watch list, intended to help authori-ties keep tabs on a few of the world’s

worst terrorist threats, had gotten so big as to become nearly useless for actually fighting terrorism. “A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government’s list of all suspected terror-ists with links to international organiza-tions, said they had 465,000 names cover-ing 350,000 individuals,” Rood reported. “Many names are different versions of the

same identity — ‘Usama bin Laden’ and ‘Osama bin Laden’ for the al Qaeda chief, for example.”

The number cited by the NCTC spokes-man turns out to be too small, in fact. The ABC News report noted that a bud-get request on the Department of Justice website actually refers to a list containing 509,000 names. As Rood points out, this extensive list contains numerous mistakes.

REAL ID ACT

Congress tried its best to shackle the nation with a national ID through passage of the Real ID Act. Now several states try to roll back the measure.

NationalNationalPushing IDs


“U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list,” Rood observed. “Re-porters who have reviewed versions of the list found it included the names of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, at the time he was alive but in custody in Iraq; impris-oned al Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui; and 14 of the 19 Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers, all of whom perished in the attacks.”

The expanding terror watch list is com-pelling evidence that the federal govern-ment can’t even manage to keep a relative-ly small database under control. That’s a bad omen for the future. Under legislation signed into law by President Bush in 2005 and now due to be implemented in 2009, the nation will create a federally admin-istered list that is a quantum leap in size larger than the terrorist watch list. More-over, under this new program it won’t be the names of terrorists or suspected terror-ists that inhabit the new, gargantuan fed-eral database; it will be the names and per-sonal information of ordinary law-abiding Americans.

The measure in question is the Real ID Act, which creates a de facto national ID for all Americans by requiring states to both issue licenses that conform to federal Department of Homeland Security guide-lines and to link state driver’s-license da-tabases together in a massive new feder-ally administered database. It’s a highly

controversial measure that is increasingly running into conflict with the states them-selves over its enormous funding costs and its authoritarian overtones.

The Legislative Back DoorThere have been many attempts to foist a national ID card onto the American public, even going back as far as the early 1980s, though these have often been viewed in a dim light as a result of religious concerns. The Reagan administration was a case in point. Writing for the Cato Institute in 1997, author Stephen Moore recalled that during Reagan’s early years in office, “Then-Attorney General William French Smith argued that a perfectly harmless ID card system would be necessary to reduce illegal immigration. A second cabinet member asked: why not tattoo a number on each American’s forearm? According to Martin Anderson, the White House do-mestic policy adviser at the time, Reagan blurted out ‘My god, that’s the mark of the beast.’ As Anderson wrote, ‘that was the end of the national identifica-tion card’ during the Reagan years.”

Opposition to such a scheme by President Reagan was not enough to kill national ID proposals outright, and by 1997, Congress was debating a measure introduced by Florida

Republican Bill McCollum that intended to “improve the integrity of the Social Security Card” by turning it into a picture ID.

The issue came up again in a big way following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Then, Oracle Corp. CEO Larry El-lison sparked outrage among privacy advocates when he offered to supply the data-base software that would underpin a national ID card to the federal government for free. “The government could phase in digital ID cards to replace existing Social Security cards and driver’s licenses,” Ellison said at the time in an article for the Wall Street Journal. “These new IDs should be

based on a uniform standard such as credit card technology, which is harder to coun-terfeit than existing government IDs.” At a conference on privacy that year, Wired News reporter Declan McCullagh noted, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) passed out “LarryCards” to attend-ees. Another group called Larry Ellison “the privacy villain of the week.”

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, few took the prospect of a resurrect-ed push for a national ID system seriously. But public disdain for a national ID in the wake of Ellison’s proposal apparently didn’t register with congressional law-makers or with the Bush administration. On January 26, 2005, Wisconsin Repub-lican F. James Sensenbrenner introduced H.R. 418, the Real ID Act of 2005, into the House of Representatives. The measure stipulated that federal agencies “may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver’s license or identification card issued by a State to any person unless the State is meeting the requirements of this section.”

The expanding terror watch list is compelling evidence that the federal government can’t even manage to keep a relatively small database under control.

REAL ID ACT

Just say no: President Reagan opposed plans for a national ID during his time in office. Today, many Republicans support what Reagan steadfastly opposed.

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Among the requirements for the new ID was the stipulation that it include “com-mon machine-readable technology, with defined minimum data elements” — in other words, an electronic means of storing personal data on the card itself that could be accessed by appropriate card-reading technologies. Moreover, all the data on the card would be linked via a massive federal database, much as envisioned by Larry Ellison.

The measure initially passed the House in February 2005, but because it looked like it would stall in committee in the Sen-ate, the text of the Real ID Act was added to what was deemed the next must-pass legislation — an emergency supplemen-tal appropriations bill funding the Iraq War as well as aid for victims of the Asian tsu nami. The appropriations bill, with the Real ID Act attached, was passed 368-58 in the House on May 5, 2005, and in the Senate five days later by a unanimous vote. “I am glad the House could complete its work on the emergency supplemental bill,” Real ID Act author Sensenbrenner said when the measure passed the House. “It provides the resources needed by our military to protect the country and win the war against terror. I am especially pleased with its inclusion of the REAL ID Act.”

OppositionCritics were not as pleased as Sensen-brenner. Pointing out that the measure was falsely linked with popular efforts like fighting terrorism and stopping illegal im-migration, Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul pointed out, in an essay entitled “The National ID Trojan Horse,” that it was really a dangerous step toward authoritarianism. “Supporters claim the national ID scheme is voluntary. However, any state that opts out will automatically make non-persons out of its citizens,” Paul warned. “The citizens of that state will be unable to have any dealings with the fed-eral government because their ID will not be accepted. They will not be able to fly or to take a train. In essence, in the eyes of the federal government they will cease to exist.” Though supporters insisted the measure was not meant to be a form of na-tional ID, Paul disagreed. “Federal legis-lation that nationalizes standards for driv-ers’ licenses and birth certificates creates a national ID system pure and simple,” he

said. “It is just a matter of time until those who refuse to carry the new licenses will be denied the ability to drive or board an airplane. Such domestic travel restrictions are the hallmark of authoritarian states, not free republics.”

Critics of Ron Paul’s position on the measure point out that similar restrictions already exist for those who don’t carry a state license or ID. That may be true, but the constitutionality of such a measure on the federal level is at least dubious, and the underlying philosophy of a national ID is diametrically in opposition to the motivating aims of the Founding Fathers. They believed, as Thomas Jefferson elo-quently expressed, that rights come not

from government, but from God, and that government may not abridge those rights. A government that issues a national ID turns that concept on its head. In issuing a national ID, a government, in essence, issues a license to citizens granting them access to rights that, absent the ID, would be legally inaccessible.

In sum, when a government issues a national ID, it is a sign that the govern-ment has adopted the idea that it — not God — is the source of human rights. This is the source of Congressman Paul’s quip that those lacking a national ID, once these are required, will, in the eyes of govern-ment, “cease to exist.”

Others have since echoed Congress-

REAL ID ACT

Early advocate: Tech workers walk near the Oracle campus. Company CEO Larry Ellison was a strong supporter of a national ID following 9/11.

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man Paul’s concerns and have added their own. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been similarly critical, stating that Real ID creates a dangerous national ID that will facilitate government sur-veillance of law-abiding citizens. “Once the IDs and database are in place,” EFF warns, “their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been co-opted by private companies to create massive data-bases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because ‘common machine-readable tech-nology’ will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts.”

Moreover, when implemented, Real ID will compromise the integrity and secu-rity of each person’s private information while failing to improve national security. In EFF’s opinion, the “IDs do nothing to stop those who haven’t already been iden-tified as threats, and wrongdoers will still be able to create fake documents. In fact, the IDs and database will simply create an irresistible target for identity thieves.”

Security experts agree that the plan puts personal data at risk. According to com-puter security expert Bruce Schneier, au-

thor of the book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, a national ID would be a security nightmare. In Schneier’s opinion, no mat-ter how secure the card is made, sooner or later clever criminals will find a way to create a forgery. They will have great incentive to do so because, unfortunately, the harder it is to create a forgery, the more valuable a successful forgery becomes.

Beyond that, though, is the risk from the linkage of 50 state databases into one mas-sive federal database. “The security risks of this database are enormous,” Schneier said in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It would be a kludge of ex-isting databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. Com-puter scientists don’t know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure. The daily stories we see about leaked personal information demonstrate that we do not know how to secure these large databases against outsiders, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of insid-ers authorized to access it. The fact that REAL ID database is a ‘one stop shop’ for personal information exacerbates these risks.”

For all the risk the Real ID system would mean to the in-tegrity and security of person-

al information for millions of Americans, it would do little or nothing, according to Schneier, to prevent terrorism and ensure national security. It is based, he says, on the mistaken assump-tion that if government knows who everyone is, it will be able to identify the evildoers.

The theory behind Real ID, Schneier said in his Senate tes-timony, is that “if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you’re likely to be an evildoer.” That, he says, is untrue. “If you need any evidence of this, look at the single largest identity-based anti-terrorism security measure in this country: the No-Fly List. The No-Fly List has been a disaster in every

way: it harasses innocents, it doesn’t catch anyone guilty, and it is trivially easy to evade. This is what you get with identity-based security, and this is what you should expect more of with REAL ID.”

Battleground in the StatesAs passed, the measure was due to take effect in 2008, but under pressure from vigorous and growing opposition, the Bush administration announced on March 2 that implementation would be postponed to December 2009 — if it is not repealed before then.

Opposition to the bill has come from many of the nation’s states where the mea-sure is billed as a dangerous, expensive, unfunded, and unnecessary mandate. In Missouri, opposition has been led by state Representative Jim Guest, a vocal critic of the measure who leads Legislators Against

For all the risk the Real ID system would mean to the integrity and security of personal information for millions of Americans, it would do little or nothing, according to computer security expert Bruce Schneier, to prevent terrorism and ensure national security.

REAL ID ACT

16

Real ID (LARI), a nationwide coalition of state legislators fighting to stop implemen-tation of the Real ID Act.

Like others, Guest warns that the mea-sure undermines the basic rights and free-doms of the American people. “We’re sup-posed to be a government of, by and for the people,” he told the online tech journal eWeek.com. “Government’s role is to pro-tect citizens’ freedom. In this case, they’re not doing that.” According to the Missouri legislator, Real ID “is a direct frontal as-sault on the freedom of citizens.” And it has to be stopped now, before implemen-tation, he says, because it falls under the Department of Homeland Security and lacks future legislative oversight. “Home-land Security has total control; there is no judicial or legislative control over this. Once they issue [the Act] there is no way of stopping them.”

Many states have taken Rep. Guest’s warning seriously. So far 38 states have seen legislation introduced in their legis-latures opposing the Real ID Act or even barring state participation in the measure once implemented. According to the Elec-tronic Privacy Information Center, “The states that have passed anti-REAL ID leg-islation are Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hamp-shire, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Washington.”

The resolution passed by the state of Ar-kansas pulls no punches in its assessment of the threat posed by the Real ID Act. The Arkansas measure notes: “The ‘common machine-readable technology’ required by the REAL ID Act of 2005 would convert state-issued driver licenses and identifica-tion cards into tracking devices, allowing computers to note and record a person’s whereabouts each time he or she is identi-fied.” The Arkansas resolution also points out that the Real ID Act “wrongly coerces states into doing the federal government’s bidding by threatening to refuse to the citi-zens of non-complying states the privileges and immunities enjoyed by the citizens of other states.”

In Montana, legislation opposing im-plementation of Real ID was tougher still. There, House Bill 487, which was signed into law by Governor Brian Schweitzer on April 17, directs “the Montana Depart-ment of Justice not to implement the pro-

visions of the Federal Act” and states that “the purpose of the Legislature in enacting [this measure] is to refuse to implement the REAL ID Act and thereby protest the treatment by Congress and the President of the states as agents of the federal govern-ment and, by that protest, lead other state legislatures and Governors to reject … the REAL ID Act.” As he signed the measure into law, Governor Schweitzer was defi-ant. “The best way for Montana to deal with the federal government on this issue and many others is to say ‘No. Nope. No way and hell no,’” he said.

The opposition at the state level may have finally caught the attention of fed-eral lawmakers. On the Democratic side of the aisle, measures have been introduced in both the House and

Senate to repeal the Real ID Act. While neither measure has garnered much sup-port as of yet and both have been referred to committee, their existence is proof that activism at the state level is beginning to have an effect at the federal level. Much good has been done by the states that have already passed measures opposing the implementation of a national ID — it now falls to the rest of the states to follow suit and prevent the federal government from converting the free citizens of America into subjects of the budding new national-security regime. ■

EXTRA COPIES AVAILABLEAdditional copies of this issue of

THE NEW AMERICAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To order, visit www.thenewamerican.com/marketplace/ or see the card between pages 38-39.

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REAL ID ACT

Freedom first: The Real ID Act will create “domestic travel restrictions [that] are the hallmark of authoritarian states, not free republics,” says presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul.

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by Dennis Behreandt

Outside the G8 Summit in Hei-ligendamm, Germany, a varied coterie of left-wing radicals, in-

flamed by socialist propaganda and orga-nized by several fringe groups from the far left, blocked roads, attacked police with stones, and waved anti-capitalist signs and banners to protest the meeting of heads of state at the posh Heiligendamm sea re-sort. Inside, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations, led this year by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, worked toward a plan to confront the pur-ported menace of global warming.

Merkel had set the stage for the sum-mit’s focus on global warming with a policy statement on May 24. Outlining

her plans for the summit, Germany’s new “Iron Chancellor” opined that climate change “is without a doubt a challenge for all mankind.” As a result, according to an MSNBC report, she pledged “to secure U.S. backing for a pledge to halve emis-sions by 2050.”

As a counterpoint to Merkel, the Bush administration — widely and wrongly believed to be opposed to regulations aimed at fighting global warming — was prepared with its own climate plan. In a summary of the plan made available by the White House, the Bush administration pledged its allegiance to the dangerous and unworkable Kyoto Accord that sought to impose caps on carbon emissions and that, as a result, would have constricted eco-nomic activity. “The U.S. remains com-

mitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [the Kyoto Accord],” the summary said, “and we expect the new framework to complement ongoing UN activity.” Legally, it should be noted, the United States does not have a commitment to the Kyoto agreement since it was never ratified by the Senate.

Nevertheless, Merkel and the other delegates to the G8 Summit, including Britain’s Tony Blair, who earlier asserted that he was the guy who could bring Bush around on global warming, welcomed the new Bush proposal on climate change. The Bush plan, Merkel said, was “an important step forward.”

Evidently so, as it helped lead to a new agreement among the G8 leaders on emis-sions. On June 7, according to a press

GLOBAL WARMING

Alternative Explanations for

Climate Change Some scientists have uncovered evidence that climate change is driven by forces that are not of this Earth.

Solar power: A NASA graphic depicts Earth’s magnetosphere deflecting the solar wind. Times of high solar activity can also deflect galactic radiation from Earth, according to some researchers, limiting cloud formation and allowing more solar energy to penetrate the atmosphere.

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release from the summit, the leaders of the G8 nations reached a “breakthrough on climate protection” in the form of a non-binding agreement to cut greenhouse emissions in half by 2050, as Merkel had originally proposed. Though the agreement lacks the legal teeth to force G8 nations to actually cut emissions, it is a further sign that the Bush administration is continuing to move toward restrictions on U.S. indus-tries. “The possibility is here for the first time to get a global deal on climate change with substantial cuts in emissions,” gushed Tony Blair.

Highly touted by its supporters, the agreement is intended to serve as the frame-work for building a successor to Kyoto. In that sense it would be great for constricting industrial output and destroying economies. What it won’t do is have an effect on the cli-mate. That’s because the real driver of cli-mate change is far outside human control. In fact, the real engine behind the planet’s climate, if a growing number of scientists are right, is a fiery orb that is a staggering 91 million miles away: the Sun.

Lessons of HistoryThough it gets little attention outside the scientific literature, variability in solar ra-diation has been shown to have an effect on climate in the past. In 1999, a paper in the journal Quaternary Science Reviewspointed this out. The authors of the paper, a team of Dutch and Russian scientists, ex-amined the relative levels of a carbon iso-tope that is more commonly created when the Sun is quiet and solar radiation is at a minimum. They found that substantial increases in the carbon isotope coincided with global-cooling events at about 850 B.C. and 1600 A.D. The latter date corre-sponds to the so-called Little Ice Age.

According to the researchers, “It is well documented that periods of decreased solar activity … often coincide with cli-matic change. The best-known example is the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), a solar event that is coinciding with one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age.... According to Lean et al. (1992) the sun during the Maunder Minimum was 0.25% less bright than it was during the solar

minimum of 1985-1986. Climate model experiments indicate that such a decrease in solar irradiance is capable of causing a global cooling of about 0.5°C.” One-half degree Celsius corresponds to the increase in the global mean temperature compared to a century ago.

Based on the findings of their re-search, the Dutch and Russian scientists concluded that climate reacts strongly to small changes in solar radiation. “Accept-ing the idea of solar forcing of Holocene and Glacial climatic shifts has major im-plications for our view of present and fu-ture climate,” they wrote. “It implies that the climate system is far more sensitive to small variations in solar activity than generally believed. For instance, it could mean that the global temperature fluctua-tions during the last decades are partly, or completely, explained by small changes in solar radiation.”

Some scientists have claimed that the Sun has been more active in recent years. In 2003, another team of European research-ers, led by Ilya Usoskin of the University

GLOBAL WARMING

A new plan: Leaders from the Group of Eight nations at the G8 Summit, including President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, announced a plan to cut greenhouse emissions.

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of Oulu in Finland, published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters docu-menting an increase in solar activity based on sunspot observations. “The most strik-ing feature of the complete SN [sunspot number] profile is the uniqueness of the steep rise of sunspot activity during the first half of the 20th century. Never during the 11 centuries prior to that was the Sun nearly as active.” They pointed out that pe-riods of high solar activity corresponded with periods of warmth on Earth and that periods of low solar activity likewise cor-respond with periods of wet, cool weather. The researchers concluded that the “cur-rent high level of solar activity may also have an impact on the terrestrial climate. We note a general similarity between our long-term SN reconstruction and different reconstructions of tempera-ture: both SN and temperature show a slow decreasing trend just prior to 1900, followed by a steep rise.”

A U.S.-based team of sci-entists reached a similar con-clusion in a study published in Physical Review E, a journal of the American Physical So-ciety, in February 2004. Led by physicist Nicola Scafetta of Duke University, the re-searchers concluded that their analysis

suggests that the increase of the earth’s temperature during the last 80 years is partially related to the increase in solar activity. While anthropogenic added greenhouse gases may also have partially contributed

to the increase of the earth temperature during the last century, we observe that natu-ral phenomena like eruption of volcanoes and several side effects of the solar variabil-ity can contribute to climate change. For example, the increased solar activity may favor an increase of the water vapor concentration in the air, which is known as one of the strongest greenhouse gases,

as well as the melting of snow and ice, which will lower the reflection of the earth and increase the absorp-tion of solar energy. The increase of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases may also be partially due to the fact that the warming of the oceans may re-duce the uptake of these gases from the air.

Current ConditionsThe warming influence of a more active Sun in recent decades has been confirmed by other researchers, including Dr. Sami Solanki, director of the famed Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in

Gottingen, Germany. Summarizing his re-search for the London Telegraph in July 2004, Dr. Solanki noted: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global tempera-tures.” According to Dr. Solanki, “The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently — in the last 100 to 150 years.”

A brighter, more active Sun can have a substantial effect on the climate on Earth. In addition to a brighter Sun resulting in more solar radiation reaching the Earth, Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute and his collaborators have proposed a novel theory explaining another effect a brighter Sun might have on climate. Since the mid-1990s Svensmark has been doggedly researching the cor-relation between galactic cosmic rays and climate, despite ridicule from the UN’s In-tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that his work is “scientifically ex-tremely naive and irresponsible.” Quite the opposite, in fact, is true, as Svensmark is a legitimate scientist who publishes his work in peer-reviewed journals. His results arecontroversial — but that alone does not disqualify them; important scientific work

Unfortunately, the world’s ideologically motivated political leaders are willfully ignoring the complexities and uncertainties of science in their mad rush to shackle the United States and the world within the confines of a restrictive regulatory regime.

GLOBAL WARMING

Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was active as an artist during the Little Ice Age, depicted the cold winters of Europe in many paintings, including in one of his more famous works, Winter Landscape With a Bird Trap.


has often been controversial.In a highly watered down summary,

what Svensmark says is that galactic cos-mic rays — radiation originating outside the solar system — seed cloud formation and that when solar activity is high, less cosmic radiation reaches Earth, reduc-ing cloud cover and allowing more of the Sun’s energy to penetrate and warm the atmosphere. For this to hold, however, Svensmark would need to demonstrate a mechanism whereby cosmic radiation can initiate cloud formation. In a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Geophysics, Svensmark claims to have done just that. In the paper’s abstract, Svensmark writes, “A recent experiment has shown how … cosmic rays assist in making aerosols, the building blocks of cloud” formation. As a result, says Svens-mark, “Variations in the cosmic-ray influx due to solar magnetic activity account well for climatic fluctuations on decadal, cen-tennial and millennial timescales.” In fact, the researcher concludes, “The changing galactic environment of the solar system has had dramatic consequences, including Snowball Earth episodes.”

The work of scientists like Henrik Svens-mark and others who are investigating

solar and extra-solar influences on climate points to an important fact that is regularly overlooked, namely that the Earth’s climate is a complex system that is not easily understood and that, as a result, requires dedicated, ongo-ing, and intense investigation.

Unfortunately, and likely to the detriment of us all, the world’s ideologically motivated politi-cal leaders are willfully ignoring the complexities and uncertain-ties of science in their mad rush to shackle the United States and the world within the confines of a restrictive regulatory regime. If they succeed imposing their regulatory regime, by 2050 they will have had no effect on the Earth’s climate — which will have scarcely changed from the climate experienced today — but the people enjoying the fine, mid-century weather will likely be poor, unemployed, and hungry as a result. ■

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by Ed Hiserodt

abiotic (a–' bı– ät'ik): adj. Originating from sources other than biological materials such as plants, animals, or other formerly living organisms.

Two illustrations from my junior and senior high-school science textbooks have stuck in my mind

for some 50 years. The first was a draw-ing of a German shepherd-sized horse with graphics demonstrating how this tiny equine evolved by biologic stages into today’s large “modern” horse. The second memorable diagram showed multiple stra-ta of the Earth’s crust with dinosaurs and plants being converted into petroleum by the pressure and heat of compression from layers of rocks and soil that had somehow

built-up miles above their remains.Years later, in a long-forgotten source,

the first of these images was tarnished by an article reporting that archeologists had determined that the smaller horses were in fossil formations considered to be of a later date than modern steeds. And now the second of my long-held high-school beliefs is being challenged by a number of geologists and planetary scientists. They don’t believe oil is a product from the con-version of biotic (once-living) sources, but is an ongoing process occurring continu-ously deep within our planet — a region described by the late astrophysicist Thom-as Gold* in his book of the same title: The Deep Hot Biosphere.

The Abiotic TheoryThe conversion of carbon and hydrogen into molecules of various hydrocarbons is thought, by those theorists who sup-port abiotic oil formation, to be possible

only at extreme depths, approximately 60 miles — which is an order of magni-tude deeper than present technology can examine directly. Here, according to abi-otic theorists, carbon and hydrogen are combined to form methane, which in turn forms the multitude of hydrocarbon chains we know as petroleum. Being lighter than the surrounding rock, the hydrocarbons are buoyed up toward the surface, but are usually stopped by an impenetrable layer we call bedrock. There they may accumu-late indefinitely until a fissure occurs, al-lowing a continuation of their rise toward the surface where they then often pool in sedimentary rock.

Ed Hiserodt is the author of Under-Exposed: What If

Radiation Is Really Good for You?

* Austrian Astrophysicist Thomas Gold’s career

began with perfecting radar during WWII. He was

selected by Cornell University to head their As-

tronomy Department in 1959 and was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences. He won the Gold

Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1985.

Beneath Your Feet?Petroleum products are usually deemed “fossil fuels,” created from once-living organisms. But oil may be a renewable resource that is literally beneath everyone’s feet.

ENERGY

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Beneath Your Feet?Is There Oil


One of the causes of fissures is the im-pact of asteroids or comets, such as that causing the Chicxulub Crater on the Yu-catan peninsula in Mexico and often asso-ciated with the extinction of the dinosaurs. This collision fractured the bedrock in the Gulf of Mexico in an area where major oil fields have been found, including the sec-ond largest on Earth, the Cantarell Field, discovered in 1976 by a fisherman of that name who thought he was over a sunken boat leaking fuel oil.

Similarly, the bedrock beneath Saudi Arabia is seriously fractured. Abiotic theo-rists claim the evidence shows the major oil fields in that country are directly over the fissure lines.

Not a New TheoryIn 1757, Russian scholar Mikhail Lo-monossov formulated what became the predominant theory of “rock oil” (petro-leum) formation, otherwise called fossil fuel:

Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased tem-perature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil.

This theory was challenged in the late 19th century by no less a scientist than Dmi-tri Mendeleev, whose formulation of the Periodic Table of the Elements is often considered the most important advance in the history of chemistry. He discounted Lomonossov’s theory, asserting that there was not enough biological material in the sedimentary rock to produce the amount of petroleum thought to exist — and this was years before the magnitude of the Middle East and Gulf of Mexico oil fields was even imagined.

It is possible to see why Mendeleev believed this. Assuming the same com-position as a human, a 20,000-pound dinosaur would have 3,600 pounds of carbon — so a Tyrannosaurus Rex would produce about 460 gallons, or just over 10 barrels, of oil. Known reserves of pe-troleum are at about 2 tril-lion barrels, so it would take 200 billion T. Rexes or some equal biomass to produce that equivalent in petroleum products.

The 1950s brought forth serious studies from Russian and Ukrainian scientists that resulted in what is known

as the R-U Theory. An excerpt from one study gives the flavor of their research:

The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic con-nection with biological matter origi-nating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.

Since then the Soviets, and now the Rus-sians, have put their money where their theories are and, while details are sketchy, have reportedly been highly successful in developing oil fields where many petro-leum geologists fear to tread.

Dmitri Mendeleev, whose formulation of the Periodic Table of Elements is often considered the most important advance in the history of chemistry, asserted that there was not enough biological material in sedimentary rock to produce the amount of petroleum thought to exist.

Beneath Your Feet?

ENERGY

Theorize this: If petroleum, a so-called fossil fuel, was constituted entirely of unfortunate dinosaurs, it would take 200 billion Tyrannosaurus Rexes the size of “Sue” (above) to produce enough carbon to equal known petroleum reserves — which stand at about 2 trillion barrels.

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No Lack of ControversyIt would seem that the abiotic theory could be easily proven or disproven by drilling in areas of volcanic and other non-sedimentary bedrock where no plant or animal life ever existed. This indeed is what Thomas Gold convinced the Swed-ish State Power Board to spend $25 mil-lion doing.

In this case the bedrock had been frac-tured by an ancient asteroid or comet in an area where no surface life was ever present. While insufficient oil was found to be commercially viable, petroleum was indeed located where most geologists

would consider its presence to be impossible. The Lon-don Telegraph quipped in its obituary for Dr. Gold that this was “an achievement which ranked in the same league as getting blood from a stone.”

The debate still rages be-tween those advocating the “traditional” biological hy-pothesis and the R-U school,

now referred to as the “modern” school. Traditionalists claim that biological mark-ers and the ratio of C13 to C14 carbon isotopes are indicative of biologic origins. The latter would hold true because C14 is produced primarily by the action of solar radiation on atmospheric nitrogen, so any-thing with C14 was likely formed on the surface of the Earth.

The R-U advocates claim the markers are merely biological debris picked up as the hydrocarbons rise toward the surface and that the presence of helium in the oil is a sure sign of abiotic genesis. Their claim rests on the fact that a helium nucleus is

also an alpha particle produced by radio-active decay. It is never found in biologi-cal materials. A controversy is raging, but eventually the truth will become known, as either there is oil below the bedrock or there isn’t.

At present, however, successful drilling in areas heretofore considered barren of hydrocarbons will not be something to be announced to the world. Such knowledge, if true, would likely do fatal damage to the generally held belief that we are running out of oil — the primary reason OPEC members can charge $70 for a barrel of oil that can cost 50 cents to bring to the sur-face. And not just OPEC. Anyone with oil and gas leases, options, or mineral rights would have a period of adjustment if and when the current artificial price structure collapses.

But for the rest of humanity, low prices for energy from a renewable, portable, available, acceptable, well-understood source would be of inestimable value in improving our quality of life. This is par-ticularly true for those who are lowest on the economic totem pole. ■

Successful drilling in areas heretofore considered barren of hydrocarbons will not be something to be announced to the world. Such knowledge, if true, would likely do fatal damage to the generally held belief that we are running out of oil.

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by Jodie Gilmore

In 2004, Ashley Fernandez, a 12-year-old girl, along with the other girls in her gym class, was punished by her

teacher for poor behavior by being sent into the boys’ locker room. While in the locker room, “two boys dragged Ashley into the shower room. One held her arms and the other held her legs while they fon-dled her for more than 10 minutes,” report-ed Reason magazine. “The teacher was not present, and no one helped Ashley.” After that incident, Ashley was physically grabbed repeatedly by boys of her school. Ashley requested a transfer to another school, which, under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), should have been an option for her. The principal denied her transfer. When Ashley’s mother kept her home from school, “she got a court sum-mons for allowing truancy.”

Reason magazine followed the account about Ashley with a litany of examples

where students who wished to switch schools under the NCLB were denied transfers or only allowed transfers to other underperforming schools. Since 2002, the regulations associated with No Child Left Behind have cost state taxpayers over $1 billion, according to studies in Ohio and Texas. In 2002, NCLB proponents claimed that the act would whip our nation’s per-formance in math and reading into shape, along with allowing students in poorly run schools to switch to other schools. Five years and some horror stories — like Ash-ley’s — later, the question to be asked is, “Is NCLB meeting this goal? If not, what should be done?”

It depends on whom you ask. The U.S. Education Dept. (USED) says yes. For proof, the USED claims that from 1999 to 2004 achievement gaps between Afri-can-American and white nine-year-olds narrowed to all-time lows. But an online Time magazine article from May 2007 states: “The achievement gap appears to

be narrowing in some spots — fourth- and eighth-grade math scores for minorities, for instance — but not oth-ers. The gap between white and black eighth-graders has widened slightly in math, for example.” The USED also claims that “the percentage of classes taught by a highly qualified teacher has risen to over 90 percent.” But by July 2006, only nine states had submitted a teacher quality plan, and as of May 2006, only two states had established an acceptable definition of “highly quali-fied teacher.”

In a 2006 article, former Education Department official Michael Petrilli and Chester Finn, Jr., a senior fel-low at the Hoover Institution, a public-pol-icy research center at Stanford University, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, stated that the NCLB has left “our schools undermotivated and overreg-ulated, our parents frustrated and bewil-dered, millions of our kids subproficient, and thousands of our schools stuck with ‘in need of improvement’ labels but not improving.” With all the conflicting data about NCLB, it is hard to tell whether it is “working” or not, but several indicators say that it’s not.

Effect on Schools and StudentsUnder NCLB each state creates its own state-wide test to measure reading and math skills, and according to a Government Ac-countability Office study, the states vary wildly in how they define student profi-ciency — the goal of NCLB — making test results hard to interpret. Scoring on

EDUCATION

What Grade Does NCLB Get?

In its fifth year, the No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization amid a cacophony of assenting and dissenting voices. What is the bottom line?

What Grade

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Where to? The No Child Left Behind Act mandates that schools improve student performance — as determined by annual tests — but much of education success is out of the schools’ hands. This fifth-grader stands a 40-percent chance of switching schools one or more times, on top of her normal progression between schools, by the age of 17.


state-level tests can differ significantly from what is considered by many to be the gold-standard test by the National Assessment of Educational Progress

(NAEP). For example, according to a May 2007 online Time magazine article, Mis-sissippi students had the highest reading scores among all state-level tests. But on the NAEP reading test, Mississippi ranked dead last.

Test alterations seem to be common. Ed-ucation pundits Petrilli & Finn said that in Oklahoma, the number of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) on the annual NCLB testing dropped by 85 percent from 2003-04 to 2004-05, but not because students became more proficient. Rather, Oklahoma officials made a change to the state’s NCLB formula for calculat-ing “proficient.” Other states have taken

similar approaches, such as Kentucky’s fi-nagling measurement errors on their tests in 2003, virtually doubling its pass rate. Wisconsin, among other states, has upped its confidence intervals associated with test scoring from 95 percent to 99 percent, which widens the margin by which the schools’ scores can miss the AYP target.

Word and statistical games aside, the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2005 assessment results plainly show that NCLB has not had a significant effect on the overall quality of education. Consider the following data points related to read-ing scores:

• The percentage of eighth-graders per-forming at or above Basic was higher in 2005 (73 percent) than in 1992 (69 per-cent), but there was no significant change in the percentage scoring at or above Pro-ficient between these same years.

• No state had a higher average eighth-grade score in 2005 than in 2003, and seven states had lower scores. The percent-age of students performing at or above Basic increased in one state but decreased in six states.

• The average reading scores for 9-year-olds and

13-year-olds were higher in 2004 than in 1971, but the average score for 17-year-olds had not changed significantly since 1971.

Moreover, in 2003, Richard Elmore, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the AYP require-ment a “completely arbitrary mathemati-cal function grounded in no defensible knowledge or theory of school improve-ment.” He also stated that it “could, and probably will, result in penalizing and closing schools that are actually experts in school improvement.” This could hap-pen because students are tested according to ethnic subgroups and English-speaking ability, and if any group underperforms, the whole school is listed as a failure.

Steppingstone to a National CurriculumAlso, in their book NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field, Gail Sunderman, James Kim, and Gary Orfield report that “in response to NCLB account-ability, [teachers] ignored important as-pects of the curriculum; de-emphasized or neglected topics that were not on the test; and focused instruction on the tested sub-jects probably excessively.” More specifi-cally, the Center on Education Policy stat-ed that 71 percent of elementary schools

According to Terry Moe, a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education: “When parents … are given alternatives — charter schools or private schools — to the regular public schools, the latter are put on notice that they stand to lose kids and money if they don’t perform.”

EDUCATION

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Staying the same: A national sampling of student proficiency in reading, conducted since 1992, shows that reading scores have either stayed the same or have fallen slightly since NCLB went into effect in 2002. Scores could range from 0 to 500.


have reduced time spent on other subjects to concentrate on the NCLB-tested sub-jects of math and reading. In other words, NCLB has served to narrow the curricu-lum in order to “teach to the test.”

And although it can be argued that a good start in math and reading enables students to learn other subjects more eas-ily later on, the fact that NCLB is shaping what is taught underscores its role in de-veloping a de facto national curriculum.

Nicholas Lemann, a prominent journal-ist who writes about matters regarding ed-ucation, called NCLB a “significant step” toward a national curriculum because al-though states are able to choose their own tests, “they’re judged against the NAEP — you’ll have a great deal of convergence in curriculum.”

Where to With NCLB?Unfortunately, most of the people cited above, although they agree NCLB isn’t improving students’ performance, applaud the goal of a national curriculum, having come to the specious conclusion that “na-tional standards and tests” are necessary to “fix” the school mess.

The mantra of the staunchest propo-

nents of NCLB, and hence of more fed-eral involvement in our schools, is that abject socialism is needed to improve our schools. As an extreme example, in a paper presented at the Second Annual Symposium on Educational Equity (Nov. 2006), Richard Rothstein, research associ-ate of the Economic Policy Institute, as-serts that “unacceptably low achievement, and the achievement gap, are established in our current education and social system by age three” and proposes a 19-year pro-gram that includes prenatal care, pre-K, “highly qualified teachers,” preventative healthcare, and after-school programs. In other words, a cradle-to-workforce educa-tion system that leaves the states and, more importantly, the parents completely out of the picture.

Less extreme are the findings of a report from the Commission on No Child Left Behind, issued in early 2007. The com-mission, sponsored by the Aspen Institute (a think-tank), proposed expanding NCLB to include science testing, using standard-ized test scores to evaluate teachers and principals, and developing uniform state tests. Speaking of the commission’s 230-page report, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-

Mass.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, stated, “I believe so many of their recommendations are going to see life.... My own hope is that following science, we can get into history.”

Besides being uncon-stitutional, a national curriculum is flawed in many ways, but perhaps its most important flaw is that it is unlikely to work. In fact, it is safe to say that it can’t work. Terry Moe, chair of political science and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Edu-cation, pointed out one of the main reasons why the act is doomed to fail: it doesn’t provide great enough incentives to in-spire people to make it work. With public schools being protected from

competition and with mediocre teachers having lifetime security, where’s the mo-tivation to change? He says that schools and politicians have been on “a frenzied push for reform” since 1983 when the book A Nation At Risk castigated public schools. Policy after policy and new cur-riculum after new curriculum have gone by the wayside since then, and we are still in the same predicament. He concluded for Stanford Magazine: “If we want sig-nificant improvement, we need to target the incentives at the heart of the system. Fortunately, there are potent reforms ca-pable of doing that: school accountability and school choice.” He added, “School choice … shapes incentives from below through grassroots action. When par-ents are able to vote with their feet, and when they are given alternatives — char-ter schools or private schools — to the regular public schools, the latter are put on notice that they stand to lose kids and money if they don’t perform.”

Moe believes that until adequate incen-tives are given for improvement, “real reform will be a constant uphill battle, and the public schools will continue to disappoint.” ■

EDUCATION

Aiming to please: Many schools, such as Hillcrest Elementary School in Elgin, Illinois, shown above, are now emphasizing reading and mathematics to raise test scores to meet standards of the No Child Left Behind Act, taking class time from subjects such as social studies and science.

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BALTIC STATES

by Vilius Brazenas with William F. Jasper

C limate change, AIDS in Africa, missile defense, and world hun-ger were some of the weighty

topics that dominated the recent Group of Eight (G8) Summit at the historic seaside spa of Heiligendamm on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. However, Russia’s increasingly open return to Soviet-style rule — in for-

eign and domestic policy — also made its way into the deliberations of the annual high-level palaver, as it had last year.

In the year prior to this year’s summit hosted by Germany’s new chancellor, An-gela Merkel, June 6-8, Putin has been flex-ing his economic and political muscle in ways that are disturbing even many of his erstwhile fans, who, only a couple years ago, were hymning his praises. With oil prices in the $70-per-barrel range, Russia has been awash in record profits. In Au-gust 2006, Russia edged out Saudi Ara-

bia as the world’s largest producer of oil. It was already the world’s larg-est holder, producer, and exporter of natural gas. And Putin showed in 2006 that he was ready, able, and willing to use energy as a weapon. During the winter, he cut off gas sup-plies to Western Europe over a price dispute with Belarus, through which the Russia-to-EU gas pipeline runs. It was an echo of Russia’s alterca-tion the previous winter with Ukraine, which also resulted in a shutdown of the gas pipeline. European Union countries, which are dependent upon Rus-sia for as much as 30 to 100 percent of their natu-ral gas, as well as much of their oil, saw the cost of transportation, electricity, and home heating sky-rocket.

In the days, weeks, and months leading up to the German G8 Summit, Putin, the former KGB/FSB chief, also showed that he was going to play hardball with his Western

corporate partners, canceling contracts and forcing BP, Total, and Royal Dutch Shell to sell their Russian natural-gas projects to the state-owned Gazprom conglomerate.

But energy extortion is not the only weapon Putin has been employing; he has unleashed a series of state actions reminis-cent of the Brezhnev or Stalin eras. Here are but a few of the many telling indica-tors of the new Cold War reality in Russia under the Putin regime:

• On November 23, 2006, former KGB/FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, an out-

Mr. Brazenas, an American citizen, now lives in

Lithuania, his native country.


Russia, once almost defunct, is now flush with oil and natural-gas monies and is reasserting its dominance. But in Estonia, resistance to Russian influence is growing.

ESTONIA RUSSIAStands Up to

Calling the kettle black: Both Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip (left) and Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski have resisted efforts by the EU to force their countries to publicly accept the politically correct view of the Russian occupation of their countries as something less than evil.

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BALTIC STATES

spoken critic of Putin, died a gruesome, public death, the victim of assassination by radiation poisoning. The evidence points overwhelmingly to Putin’s loyal FSB minions as the perpetrators.

• On June 4, 2007, two days before the G8 Summit, Putin dismissed as “foolish-ness” a demand by British prosecutors for the extradition of former KGB/FSB agent Andrei Lugovoi, the chief suspect in the Litvinenko murder. This was but the latest in Putin’s continuous chain of obstructions in the case.

• Putin has clamped down ruthlessly on Russia’s independent and state-owned media, raiding newsrooms and editorial offices, arresting and prosecuting critical editors and reporters, seizing newspaper copies, and cutting off newsprint to those in disfavor.

• On October 6, 2006, Russia’s most famous crusading journalist, Anna Polit-kovskaya, a close friend of Litvinenko and a scathing critic of the Putin regime, was shot to death in her Moscow apartment building. No suspect has been arrested, and Putin’s Kremlin shows no evidence of conducting a serious investigation.

• Shortly before this year’s G8 gather-ing, the World Association of Newspapers issued a statement about the violent re-pression of free press in Russia: “In Rus-sia, the impunity enjoyed by those who order or carry out the execution of journal-ists remains quasi total. It is estimated that 21 journalists were killed since President Putin came to power in March 2000.” The week prior to the summit, Aidan White, secretary-general to the International Fed-eration of Journalists, told delegates at the IFJ’s annual convention: “Russia is the country where the most journalists have been killed in peacetime.” And he warned that the situation is getting worse.

• The decision by the government of Estonia in April to remove a large bronze statue of a Soviet soldier and a monument to the Red Army from the center of its capital, Tallin, was met with harsh con-demnation by the Kremlin. Russian youth groups fanatically loyal to Putin rioted in Tallin, overturning cars, destroying shops, fighting with police, and terrorizing citi-zens. One person was stabbed to death and dozens were seriously injured.

• Following the riots, Estonia found itself neck deep in cyberwarfare, with an intense

attack aimed at overwhelming its Internet infrastructure. Hackers using a network of computers worldwide, shut down many of the country’s government, business, tele-communications, and e-mail delivery web-sites with “distributed denial-of-service,” or DDOS commands that flooded many sites with billions of hits per second.

What’s Deemed FactualAs with past efforts by the Baltic States and other countries formerly occupied by the Red Army, efforts at de-Russification and de-communization are attacked by Moscow and its academic and media sympathizers as “vengeful,” “xenophobic,” and “fascist.”

Exhibit A in this category is an article entitled, “Defusing EU-Russia Tensions; Baltic Crisis” by Anatol Lieven for the International Herald Tri-bune of May 24, 2007. Lieven called on Western leaders to stop pressing Putin on human rights, claiming that “hector-ing criticism is counter-pro-

ductive.” Referring to the removal of the Soviet monument, he said, “West Europe-an countries should publicly deplore pro-vocative actions like those of the Estonian government. Britain and France in particu-lar should state strongly that the defeat of Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly due to their Soviet allies, and that they expect the memory of the Red Army to be honored by other EU members.”

But what was so “deplorable” and “pro-vocative” about Estonia’s actions? A few simple questions should put this into prop-er perspective. Can anyone imagine travel-

As with past efforts by the Baltic States and other countries formerly occupied by the Red Army, efforts at de-Russification and de-communization are attacked by Moscow and its academic and media sympathizers as “vengeful,” “xenophobic,” and “fascist.”


They remember: Estonians, who can as of yet easily recall the torment and genocide inflicted on them by their Soviet occupiers after WWII, moved this statue that commemorates Soviet soldiers killed during WWII, out of a main square in the capital city of Tallin to a cemetery, provoking indignant accusations from Russians that Estonians are “racist.”

Will

iam

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ing to the capital cities of countries bru-tally occupied by Germany during World War II and seeing monuments to Hitler’s Wehrmacht soldiers or SS-troopers? Or large Nazi swastika emblems carved on public buildings and boulevards named after hated Nazi henchmen like Goring and Goebels? It is impossible to imagine, of course, because the conscience of the world recoils at such blatant injustice. But why should the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia be treated differ-ently? They suffered not just a few years of vicious occupation, but over five de-cades of occupation, accompanied by hu-miliation, torture, and genocide.

The Straight StoryRussia’s so-called reformers — Gorba-chev, Yeltsin, Putin — have continued the communist lie, claiming that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” the Baltic States from Hitler, and they are being aided in this fraud by much of the Western press. Here are the unvarnished facts that can be verified in any history book that has not succumbed to revisionism:

• In 1939, socialist dictators Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin conspired to divide Europe between them. They formalized this plan in the infamous Ribbetrop-Mo-lotov Pact.

• They conquered Poland together by coordinated attacks from the West and the East, and celebrated the victory with a joint parade.

• Stalin’s Red Army did not “liberate” anyone; it simply replaced Nazi tyranny with communist tyranny.

Under Stalin’s so-called liberation, around half a million Balts were deport-ed in 1940-41 — loaded onto trucks and trains and taken to death camps in Siberia and other parts of Russia. Most were never seen again. In their places, Stalin moved

in hundreds of thousands of Russians to colonize the Baltic States. Estonia and Latvia were the most heavily affected by this policy, and their Russian populations today are around 25 percent and 30 per-cent, respectively. Those are the percent-ages nationally, but they are much higher in the major cities, where the Russian settlements are concentrated. The Russian population in Lithuania is around six per-cent, again concentrated in the capital of Vilnius and a few other large cities.

As with the tens of millions other peo-ples of the captive nations who fell behind the Iron Curtain, the Baltic peoples were subjected to a “Russification” program, aimed at wiping out their national and spiritual identity. Several generations of Balts were forced to speak Russian rath-er than their native Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian tongues. Their new Rus-

sian “neighbors” were given most of the key positions in the new communist police state. Is it really any wonder that the people of Estonia de-manded the Red Army statue be removed?

Yet Soviet/Russian sympa-thizers in the European Union and the United States still cause problems for those who try to remedy the past. Lithua-

nia’s anti-KGB law is a good case in point. In 1999, the Lithuanian government de-clared the KGB a “criminal organization” (which it most certainly was) and banned those who had served in the KGB from government service and many other jobs. Former KGB officers Kestutis Dziautas and Juozas Sidabras and two of their co-horts challenged the law in the European Court of Justice. The EU judges sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the Lithuanian government to pay each of the KGB men 7,000 euros in damages.

The EU is pressuring Lithuania to aban-don the law altogether. It is also pressur-ing Poland to end its new “lustration” law, which requires the investigation of several hundred thousand Poles who served as in-formants for the Soviet occupation govern-ment. Pro-communist sympathizers in the EU Parliament denounce these measures as “vengeful” and claim that they threaten good relations with the “new” Russia.

But, as Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip has pointed out, it is the “new” Rus-sia that continues to identify with, defend, and emulate the thuggish, murderous ways of the Soviet Union: “I would say that vir-tually all of the issues that we have in our problems with Russia,” said Prime Minis-ter Ansip, “stem from an absolute refusal on the part of Russia to really accept what happened in the past.” ■

“I would say that virtually all of the issues that we have in our problems with Russia,” said Estonia’s Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, “stem from an absolute refusal on the part of Russia to really accept what happened in the past.”


BALTIC STATES

Cult of personality: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has forcefully taken over most energy companies operating in Russia. He has begun to withhold energy supplies from the EU to advance his political agenda, and he is threatening to deploy many new variants of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Still much of the press lauds Russia’s new democratic government.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA will likely open the floodgates to suits seeking to make the federal government enforce all federal laws to the utmost based on the most expansive interpretations imaginable.

Federal Environmentalism

by George Detweiler

On April 2, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, a suit filed by 12 states and 13 environmental groups to require the EPA to

enforce the federal Clean Air Act (CAA) in regard to green-house gases. The states and environmental groups wanted the EPA to determine if greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate changes and, if it determines that they do, to require the agency to regulate engine emissions. Prior to the suit, the EPA had done neither. Following the Bush administration’s lead, the EPA decided against taking such actions because it wanted to institute a more comprehensive, coordinated approach to emissions that took advantage of developing technology. The states and environmental groups won.

The case established the “right” of entities other than the executive branch of the federal government — states and private parties — to require enforcement of federal law in the federal courts. This will likely open the floodgates to suits on the federal government to enforce all federal laws to the utmost based on the most expansive interpreta-tions imaginable, such as using federal law to stop people from fertilizing their lawns (under the Clean Water Act). The court’s decision will tie the hands of government by reducing the flexibility that an administration has under the Constitution to decide the timing and methodology of discharging its duty to enforce the law.

Not everyone will be able to sue successfully as a result of the decision. In considering whether the states and en-vironmental groups could sue in the present case — hence deciding who can sue in future cases — the court consid-ered two major issues: standing (whether the plaintiffs had sufficient interest in the outcome to maintain the suit); and the merits of the suit.

“Standing” requires a litigant to have a substantial, personal interest in the outcome, one that is greater than the general interest of the public at large. In handling the challenge to standing, the court divided the plaintiffs into two classes: private environmentalist groups and the states. The court drew tenuous distinctions between the

two classes. It decided that states’ sovereignty is sufficient to confer special rights of standing on them. The court rea-soned that a state has authority to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases within its borders. But since state-level regulation is ineffective at eliminating emanations of such gases from other states, because gases know no boundaries and may drift over vast areas, a state is not able to protect itself from these wandering gases. Its only recourse is its ability to sue in federal court to enforce federal environ-mental legislation.

To bolster this bold assertion, the court recited parts of the Massachusetts claim that it was, or was in danger of, losing shoreline due to global warming, polar ice cap melting, and the claimed resultant rise in sea level which flooded its shoreline and deprived the state of lands over which it had previously enjoyed jurisdiction. Finally, the court declared that if any one of the plaintiffs has standing to sue, it is sufficient, and the suit could proceed with all plaintiffs participating.

CONSTITUTION CORNER


George Detweiler is a constitutional lawyer and former assistant attorney

general for the state of Idaho.

Thinner than air: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA administrator may not decline to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, even though the EPA is already taking steps to increase vehicles’ fuel efficiency, human-caused global warming is an unproven theory, and the Clean Air Act is unconstitutional.

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As to the merits of the case, the court considered only the merits of the petition-ers’ claims; neither the majority nor the four dissenting judges addressed the real issue: the unconstitutionality of the Clean Air Act (and, derivatively, all federal environmental legislation). One explanation for the judges’ judicial nearsightedness is the fact that nei-ther the several plaintiffs nor the defendant wanted to challenge the constitutionality of the CAA. The plaintiffs, after all, sought more aggressive use and enforcement of the act than the Bush administration was implementing, and the defendant, the EPA, owes its very existence to legislation like the CAA and would soon be put out of business by a judicial finding that Congress has no authority to regulate the environment. And courts generally confine themselves to the issues framed by the litigants. Furthermore the court had sustained environmental legislation in the past, and despite the addition of two new “conservative” justices, Alito and Roberts, it has failed to show an inclination to change course.

The opinion of the court was written by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Kennedy, and Souter. This fearsome five plunged headlong into the petitioners’ claims. The result is 66 pages of largely irrelevant rhetoric.

Every act of Congress must rest on a power conferred by the Constitution. Since that document does not specify any federal authority over the environment or pollution, it must be inferred from other congressional powers, if it exists at all. Sec. 101 of the CAA first declares that “air pollution prevention … and air pollution control … is the primary responsibility of States and local government.” The statement leaves an open door to try to infer a secondary federal power. The inference is never estab-lished. The section continues, declaring that its main purpose is to promote air quality and “promote the public health and wel-fare and the productive capacity of [the Nation’s] population.” It further declares that its purposes include financial assistance to state and local governments in controlling air pollution. Instead of declaring a constitutional base of the CAA, the section reveals the lack of any constitutional pilings to support it.

None of the CAA’s purposes or goals is within congressional grasp. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is the general re-pository of congressional authority. Note first that it contains a precise listing of powers. Madison declared in The Federalist, No. 45, “The powers delegated … to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.” Madison’s admo-nition was later formalized in the 10th Amendment, which re-served powers not delegated to the federal government to the states and to the people.

Congress rested its claim to constitutional authority for the CAA on one phrase from Article I, Section 8: “to promote the public health and welfare.” But any such claim is using that phrase out of context. The entire opening sentence of Article I, Section 8 declares: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Following that is a detailed shopping list of congressional powers. When the list is considered in light of the Madisonian admonition, clearly there is no grant of congres-sional authority to accomplish the goals proclaimed in Section 101 of the CAA.

Historically, the use of the term “general welfare” in Article I, Section 8 has been understood to mean that Congress may see to the general well-being of the nation within the context only of the preceding words: making provision for the common defense. The key phrase was not intended to constitute a sweeping grant of power to Congress to provide for monetary “public welfare grants,” as currently practiced, or for environmental grants. These are exclusively state powers, where they even exist. No matter how urgent, how beneficial, how humanitarian the need may appear, Congress lacks the constitutional authority to touch these areas.

Massachusetts v. EPA reveals that there are no justices on the court who are willing to strike down legislation or other actions of the federal government that fail to conform to the literal lan-guage of the Constitution in certain chosen, politically sensitive instances. There appears no opportunity to create such a court in absence of a president willing to appoint such jurists and a Senate that is willing to confirm them. The key remains to elect leaders who will refuse to fund unconstitutional functions of government. ■

CONSTITUTION CORNER


Irony: California Attorney General Jerry Brown was a proponent of the lawsuit to force the EPA to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions. He now also seeks federal permission from the EPA to enable California to enforce new state restrictions on greenhouse gases that are more restrictive than those in most of the nation — permission he wouldn’t need if the Supreme Court had rightly acknowledged that the Clean Air Act is blatantly unconstitutional.

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Returning a Lost ToddlerOn the morning of February 28, Blanca Amarilis was standing on a subway plat-form in Queens, New York, with her two children. As she let go of her 22-month-old son Stuart’s hand to wipe the nose of a younger child, Stuart dashed onto a car of a Manhattan-bound Number 7 train. The doors closed before she could reach him, and the train left the station.

“I looked down, he wasn’t there,” Ama-rilis told the New York Daily News. “I said, ‘Stuart!’ and a man told me he went on the train. It was so fast. I prayed to God to pro-tect my son and let me find him again.”

Blanca’s prayer was answered as an un-identified woman on the train took charge of Stuart, got off at the next station, and took the next train back to where Stuart had started his adventure. There, the good Samaritan saw a man with a frantic, wor-ried expression and correctly surmised that it was Stuart’s father, Victor Tito. “Is this your son?” she asked the distraught dad.

When the family returned to the same station later that day, Stuart tried to make another “escape” as another Number 7 train pulled alongside the platform. Need-less to say, his mother held tightly onto the tot.

Donated LiverMaggie Catherwood, a college student from Sterling, Virginia, started experienc-ing disturbing symptoms last fall, includ-ing not being able to keep food down. A diagnosis was made the day after her 21st birthday, when she learned that she had Wilson’s disease — a failure of the liver to eliminate copper from food, which ac-cumulates in the organ until it is destroyed. Maggie was put on the waiting list for a liver transplant.

Not long afterwards, three-month-old Allison Brown, daughter of Brian and Terri Brown of Waldorf, Maryland, was diagnosed with biliary atresia, the absence of all major bile ducts. The resultant jaun-dice had caused the whites of the infant’s eyes to turn yellow. And so, Allison was put on the liver-transplant list in early December.

On February 27, Dr. Cal Matsumoto of Georgetown University Hospital in Wash-ington, D.C., received word from the transplant network that a liver that was a suitable match for Maggie had been found, following the death of a teenager. Further-more, records indicated that the liver was also a tissue match for baby Allison. Dr. Matsumoto knew that, unlike other organs, livers can be divided and each portion grows to accommodate the needs of the patient receiving it.

The doctor approached Maggie and told her the good news that a suitable liver had been found, then asked her if she would share the organ designated for her with the infant. The young woman readily agreed.

The liver was flown to Washington in an ice-filled cooler and delivered to George-town University Hospital. Dr. Matsumoto operated on Maggie, and another George-town surgeon, Dr. Thomas Fishbein, trans-planted the liver’s left lobe, just under 20 percent of the organ, into Allison.

Following the successful surgeries, Al-lison’s parents brought their baby to meet Maggie, still recovering in her hospital room.

“The fact that someone else was will-ing to give up part of that liver they need is amazing to me,” said Mrs. Brown, in an interview reported by AP. When Mr. Brown handed baby Allison to Maggie, she exclaimed: “Oh, she’s adorable, oh my gosh!”

“I didn’t even know it was possible” to split a liver, Maggie told AP reporters. She not only agreed to share the vital organ, but when she woke up after surgery her first words were, “How’s the baby?”

Children Raise FundsFort Worth, Texas, police officer Dwayne Freeto was killed in the line of duty last December after his patrol car was struck by a suspected drunken driver. When a group of second graders at the city’s Ridglea Hills Elementary School learned about the tragic incident, they decided they wanted to do something to help the late officer’s family.

According to the Dallas News, the stu-dents spent two weeks selling wristbands

and collecting donations to help the Freeto family. During a school assembly held on March 28, they presented a check for $796 to the Officer Freeto Memorial Fund.

Ridglea Hills principal Sandra Garza said she is proud of the students’ efforts to organize the project to benefit the family of the deceased officer.

Food-show Host HelpsPopular food-show host Rachael Ray was touched by the tragedy that befell the town of Enterprise, Alabama, when a deadly tornado struck the town on March 1. Eight students at Enterprise High School were killed, and the school was totally destroyed by the twister. Though students resumed classes two weeks later at a com-munity college, Ray wanted to make sure they had a prom that would allow them to move forward from the tragic events.

“The students of Enterprise High are so courageous, given all that they’ve gone through,” Ray told AP news. “When I heard about what happened to their school and classmates, we wanted to help.”

She added: “The prom was all about celebrating their accomplishments and honoring the classmates who tragically lost their lives.”

The youthful television chef — who looks closer in age to the high-school stu-dents than to her actual age of 38 — per-sonally planned the menu for the prom and helped prepare the dinner for the event, which was held at nearby Fort Rucker, “the home of Army aviation.” The TV chef also coordinated donations for the dance. The prom’s theme was: “Caught in a Moment.”

The morning of the prom, Ray appeared at a school assembly with Alabama Gover-nor Bob Riley and Enterprise Mayor Ken-neth Boswell. The governor signed a bill appropriating $32 million to rebuild Hill-crest Elementary School and Enterprise High School.

Senior Mitchell Baker appreciated the prom but was still saddened by the loss of his friends. He told the Dothan Eagle: “It makes it a little harder for me. I’m used to all of them being around.” ■

— WARREN MASS

THE GOODNESS OF AMERICA


by Charles Scaliger

The citizens of Orleans lay prostrate in the streets, praying for a miracle. Men, women, and children wept and begged the God of na-

tions to deliver them from the greatest calamity young Christendom had yet witnessed. In the distance, the ter-rifying sounds of siege warfare — the incessant crash of stones and other missiles launched by catapults, the thump of rams testing the walls and gates of the city, and the howling of an enemy host that would show neither restraint nor clemency — warned of imminent catastrophe. Inside the walls of Orleans, thousands of peace-loving citizens prepared for the worst. Outside the walls, on the verge of forcing a major breach in the city’s meager defenses, were the Huns.

Lately led by the emperor Attila, the self-styled “Scourge of God,” the Huns were no strangers to the newly Christianized realms of the eastern and western Roman empire. Their arrival in the vicinity of the Cas-pian Sea from the fastnesses of Central Asia nearly a century earlier had set in motion a chain of events that devastated the aging Roman Empire.

The precise origin of the Huns is uncertain. They were most likely the same as the Hsiung-nu, a power-ful Turkic people conquered and driven out of China during the Han Dynasty. Driving the Goths, Alans, and other Germanic peoples before them, they pushed into Europe in the fourth century, subduing numerous tribes with their superior composite bows and extraor-dinary battlefield mobility.

The Huns’ reputation for ferocity drove the Goths westward to the Danube, where they asked the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens for asylum within Roman ter-ritory. Valens reluctantly granted them leave to enter the empire, and the Goths poured over the Danube and settled on imperial soil.

The abrupt arrival of the Goths within Roman terri-tory triggered an unprecedented immigration crisis for Rome. Conflict between the restless Goths and their Roman overlords led eventually to the monumental Battle of Hadrianople in 378 A.D., in which the Goths and their allies annihilated most of the Roman mili-tary, including the Eastern Emperor Valens.

After Hadrianople, the Goths became permanent and unwanted residents in Central and Western Eu-

In confronting the Huns under Attila, the man known as “the last Roman” led the remnant forces of Western civilization against the rampaging barbarian horde.

Charles Scaliger is a teacher and freelance writer.

— PAST AND PERSPECTIVEHISTORYHISTORY

The Battle ofThe Battle ofChalons

Attila at banquet: “The attendant of Attila first entered with a dish full of meat, and behind him came the other attendants with bread and viands…. A luxurious meal, served on silver plate, had been made ready for us … but Attila ate nothing but meat on a wooden trencher. In everything else, too, he showed himself temperate; his cup was of wood, while to the guests were given goblets of gold and silver.”

— Priscus at the Court of Attila the Hun, 448 A.D.


rope. It was a Gothic host under the lead-ership of Alaric that thrice besieged the Eternal City, finally sacking Rome in 410 A.D.

Another tribe of Germanic barbarians driven westward, the Vandals, led by the formidable Gaiseric, wrested North Africa from the Romans, destroying a large por-tion of the Roman Mediterranean fleet in the process.

Through all these horrendous depreda-tions, the Western Roman Empire some-how lived on, although greatly diminished. By the early fifth century Rome, increas-ingly isolated from the Eastern Empire and its capital Constantinople, controlled with certainty only the Italian peninsula, although she still enjoyed nominal sov-ereignty over portions of Gaul, Belgium, and the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. The rest of formerly Roman western Eu-rope was in the hands of various German-ic tribes, while most of north central and eastern Europe, extending far out beyond the Volga River, groaned under the over-lordship of the Huns.

Rise of AttilaIn 432 A.D., the Hunnic emperor Rugila died, leaving control of his vast dominions to Attila and Bleda, the sons of his brother Mundzuk. Under their united guidance, the Huns launched campaigns against Sas-sanid Persia, in which they were eventual-ly repulsed, and into southeastern Europe against the Eastern Roman Empire, where they spread desolation across the Balkans and Thrace, penetrating Greece as far as Thermopylae before accepting tributary peace terms from the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II.

Sometime after 440, Attila appears to have murdered Bleda and assumed sole command of the Hunnic state. Under his rule, the Huns were unquestionably the su-preme power in Europe, extorting heavy annual tribute from the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire and gathering under their control dozens of tribes from Central Europe to the Ural River.

The enfeebled Western Roman Empire watched Attila’s ascendancy with grow-ing alarm. The most powerful man in the West in those years was the general Flavius Aetius, sometime aspirant to the throne, who, under the patronage of the Roman queen-regent Galla Placidia, had

risen to the office of magister militum, or supreme commander of the military forces in the West. Nicknamed “the last Roman” by some authorities, Aetius was the last major figure (in the Western Empire, at least) to embody the military virtues of ancient Rome.

Having lived for many years among the Goths as a hostage, Aetius was thor-oughly familiar with the military tactics of the barbarians. For years, it was his able leadership that somehow kept the forces at bay that dismembered the empire after his lifetime.

But Aetius was shrewd enough to rec-ognize the limited resources at his dispos-al. The Roman state by this time existed in little more than name only; the noble culture that had helped to civilize much of the known world in former centuries had long since faded away under the relentless assault of for-eign invaders, economic ruin, and moral decline. Many of Rome’s remaining legions were largely populated by mercenaries, and the govern-ment was honeycombed with double-dealing and outright treason.

Under such circumstances, Aetius was forced to play po-tential foes — the Visigoths,

Vandals, and Huns — against one anoth-er, to prevent any of them from achieving complete hegemony, or forming an irre-sistible alliance against Rome.

For a time, the strategy appeared to work. In 450 A.D., however, the delicate balance of power began to erode. Attila announced his intention of attacking the Visigoths and secured the approval of both the Western Emperor Valentinian III and Aetius to do so.

But then trouble arose from a com-pletely unexpected source. Honoria, the impulsive, strong-willed sister of the weak emperor, had conducted an illicit court affair the previous year, in consequence of which her brother, after executing her lover, had thrown her out of the palace and forced her into an unwanted engagement with a senator. Honoria bridled at such

The most powerful man in the Western Roman Empire was the general Flavius Aetius, the supreme commander of the military. Nicknamed “the last Roman” by some authorities, he was the last major figure in the Western Empire to embody the military virtues of ancient Rome.


Barbarian warlord: Attila “sought to subdue the foremost nations of the world — the Romans and Visigoths. His army is said to have numbered 500,000 men. He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands.”

— Roman historian Jordanes, 551 A.D.


treatment by her feeble-minded brother, whom she clearly deemed unfit to rule. In spring of 450, she sent a letter to Attila, importuning him to rescue her from her situation. Whether the letter was in fact a proposal of marriage to the lord of the Huns is not clear. But Attila interpreted it as such, since Honoria enclosed a ring with the letter.

What impulse could have moved Hono-ria to such an act is difficult to imagine. She must have known of the barbaric customs of the Huns, and that she would be merely one of many wives in Attila’s seraglio. Moreover, Attila himself was re-nowned for his brutal disposition and fear-some appearance. According to Jordanes, the most important chronicler of Attila’s life and times (although not a contempo-rary), the Hun leader was

short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with gray; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin.

Seeing an opportunity to expand his do-minions westward by virtue of royal in-heritance, the emperor of the Huns sent word to Valentinian accepting Honoria’s proposal. He demanded that the emper-or’s sister be delivered to him, along with

a substantial dowry including half of the Western Empire. When an incensed Valen-tinian refused, Attila made plans to invade Gaul to seize his claimed dowry by force of arms.

InvasionAetius, alarmed at these developments, knew that his legions could not hope to defend Rome against the combined might of the Hunnic horde and the host of Ger-manic allies — the Gepids, Alans, Ostro-goths, and Burgundians among them — marching under Attila’s standard. Aetius and Valentinian appealed to Theodoric, the king of the Visigoths, for help. “He [At-tila] measures his ambition by his might,” they wrote. “License satisfies his pride. Despising law and right, he shows himself an enemy to Nature herself. And thus he, who clearly is the common foe of each, deserves the hatred of all.”

To this letter Theodoric responded fa-vorably, conveniently setting aside recent quarrels with Rome. An alliance was hast-ily assembled to save Western civiliza-tion from the Huns, including, besides the Roman legions and Gothic host, a generous number of Franks and other nationalities.

In the meantime, Attila had not been idle. His immense army moved west to the Rhine and began destroying the cities along its eastern bank. First Strasbourg and Worms, then Mainz and Cologne, fell

to the Huns. Imitating the first Caesar five centuries before, the Huns constructed a pontoon bridge across the Rhine, and poured unimpeded into Gaul and Belgium.

Few superlatives are adequate to describe the horrors that fol-lowed as the Huns and their al-lies swept across the rich coun-tryside of northwestern Europe, burning and slaying. The utter desolation of Metz in April 451 is captured in historian Edward Gibbon’s elliptical prose:

[The Huns] involved, in a promiscuous massacre, the priests who served at the altar, and the infants, who, in the hour of danger, had been providently baptized by the bishop; the flourishing city

was delivered to the flames, and a solitary chapel of St. Stephen marked the place where it [i.e., the city of Metz] had stood.

Rheims, Amiens, Cambrai, and many other notable towns and cities in the region followed. Paris alone was spared, thanks, it is said, to the prayers and piety of St. Genevieve.

Sometime in the early summer of that dark year, the army of Attila arrived before the recently strengthened walls of Orleans and apparently laid siege to the terrified city (although some authorities believe the city was spared the rigors of a siege by the arrival of Aetius with his Gothic allies). On the authority of Gibbon and the bulk of received tradition, however, the city held out, under the leadership of their peerless bishop Anianus, a man of “primitive sanc-tity and consummate prudence,” who, an-ticipating the approach of Aetius, exhorted his flock to pray for deliverance.

According to tradition, a distant cloud of dust betokened the approach of the Roman-Gothic army just as the Huns, who had already occupied the suburbs, forced a breach in the city wall. At the approach of the enemy, Attila withdrew from Orleans, leaving the city intact, and marched north-west, looking for a spot to confront Aetius and his allies.

At his heels marched the combined host


To the victor go the spoils: Attila and his Huns pillage a Roman manor during the Italian campaign.


of Romans and Goths, led by Aetius and the aged Gothic King Theodoric in person, along with the latter’s two sons. The flow-er of the militaries of Western Christen-dom had been called out for what no man doubted would be a monumental clash.

At a plain of indeterminate location somewhere between Orleans and Rheims, (but which the historian J.B. Bury placed closer to Troyes) whose name has come down to us as Chalons or the Catalau-nian Fields, Attila decided to make his stand. As the two vast armies encamped and began probing each others’ weak-nesses, a “skirmish” occurred — between Attila’s Gepids and Aetius’ Franks — in which roughly 15,000 lives were lost, cast-ing some perspective on the scale of the greater battle to come.

Some time before the battle, Attila had consulted his pagan soothsayers. They, after inspecting bones and entrails, re-ported that Attila would lose the battle but that the other side would lose its greatest chieftain. Believing from this that Aetius would die and thinking this outcome worth the risk to his own personal safety and the security of the Hunnish empire, Attila ig-nored the warnings and prepared his war-riors for all-out combat.

Battle Is JoinedThe following day, the battle — one of the most substantial the world had seen since Vercellae at the end of the Cimbrian War five and a half centuries earlier — cen-tered on a knife-edged ridge, the capture of which would confer tactical advantage. The Huns first held, then lost the ridge to a determined Roman and Gothic onslaught. The battle lasted all day and into the night, and the Gothic King Theodoric was among the fallen.

The next day found the two remnant armies stalemated. Attila had withdrawn behind a formidable entrenchment of wagons, and had reportedly prepared his own funeral pyre out of saddles, prepared to immolate himself rather than fall into the hands of the foe.

The Romans and Goths, along with their allies, were horrified at the carnage, but Theodoric’s sons, burning to avenge their father’s death, argued to renew the battle.

At this juncture Aetius made a fateful decision, one that the West was to rue bit-

terly in the months that followed. Rather than follow up his initial gains with an all-out victory over Attila, Aetius decided to allow him to withdraw, with the still-formidable remains of his army. Aetius’ reasoning, colored by the same fatal pragmatism that has afflicted de-crepit imperial powers up to our own time, was that maintaining a balance of power among foes was preferable to creating a vacuum by completely vanquishing his enemy.

Accordingly, Attila retired, blood-ied but unbowed, to seek new hori-zons of conquest elsewhere.

The battle dead at Chalons num-bered 177,000, according to Jordanes, although later chroniclers inflated

the figure to more than 300,000. Whatever the final toll, the slaughter was on a scale that Christendom would not again witness for centuries, and it was said that streams in the area were actually swollen by the in-

On the Catalaunian Fields nearly all the powers of Western and Central Europe, great and small, were represented, prefiguring the far-reaching coalitions that have characterized modern international warfare since the Thirty Years’ War.


Chalons: “‘Now show your cunning, Huns, now your deeds of arms!... I shall hurl the first spear at the foe. If any can stand at rest while Attila fights, he is a dead man.’ Inflamed by these words, they all dashed into battle.”

— Attila’s speech to his army at Chalons according to Jordanes, 551 A.D.


flux of blood. For the first time in recorded history, a battle was joined between two vast multinational coalitions rather than between individual powers or small alli-ances. On the Catalaunian Fields nearly all the powers of Western and Central Europe, great and small, were represented, prefig-uring the far-reaching coalitions that have characterized modern international war-fare since the Thirty Years’ War.

While the Battle of Chalons arguably spared the Christian West from annihila-tion, and demonstrated for the first time that Attila was not invincible, it did not put an end to the Hunnic emperor’s depreda-tions. The following year, a furious Attila,

still bent on collecting Honoria and his dowry, invaded Italy. The first object of his wrath was Aquileia, the great commercial city on the Adriatic that was among the largest urban centers of the Roman dominions. In an act of barbarity that made even the storming of Metz pale into insignificance, Attila slaugh-tered the inhabitants of Aquileia and destroyed the city root and

branch. So great was the devastation that Aquileia, like Nineveh and Persepolis be-fore it, never rose again. Padua, Verona, Vicenza, and many other cities were also reduced with varying degrees of severity, but Rome, somewhat inexplicably, was spared.

Perhaps it was superstitious fear inspired by the example of the Gothic prince Alaric, who died mysteriously shortly after sack-ing Rome. Or perhaps it was the persuasive offices of Pope Leo I, afterwards surnamed “the Great,” who pleaded with Attila in person to spare the city, allegedly accom-panied by the miraculous personages of St. Peter and St. Paul. Whatever the cause,

the Scourge of God ultimately made peace with Rome, satisfied with a huge indemnity and promises to eventually deliver Hono-ria. If she were not surrendered within the time stipulated by the treaty, Attila warned the cringing Romans, he would return and inflict even greater horrors.

Fortunately for Honoria, Rome, and the entire civilized world, Attila did not long outlive his latest threat. In 453 he died sud-denly, from an aneurysm supposedly suf-fered during his latest wedding night. Be-reft of Attila’s sure guidance, the empire of the Huns swiftly disintegrated. A coali-tion of vassal tribes arose and overthrew his successors, restoring to the Germanic race uncontested dominion over northern Europe. In the power vacuum that Aetius had so desperately sought to forestall, the Germanic tribes quickly completed the overthrow of the Roman state; three dec-ades after the death of Attila, the Western Empire had ceased to exist.

Aetius, the other major player in Rome’s last great drama, also met an untimely end, at the treacherous hands of the emperor Valentinian. Jealous of Aetius’ success and popularity, Valentinian is said to have per-

sonally murdered “the last Roman” in the pres-ence of his counselors.

The passing of both Aetius and Attila beto-kened the passing of an age. The awful destruc-tion of much of what remained of Roman Italy cleared the way for the resettlement of the peninsula by Germanic tribes, who brought with them ways alien to those of imperial Rome. The forced abdication of the last Roman emperor in 476 A.D. was little more than a long-overdue for-mality. The heroism of the Battle of Chalons may be regarded as Rome’s last convulsion, in which she gave the flower of her final gen-eration to ensure the sur-vival of the new Chris-tian civilization that was to succeed her. ■

The heroism of the Battle of Chalons may be regarded as Rome’s last convulsion, in which she gave the flower of her final generation to ensure the survival of the new Christian civilization that was to succeed her.


Leo and Attila: “Our most blessed Pope Leo undertook the task.... And the outcome was what his faith had foreseen; for when [Attila] had received the embassy, he was so impressed by the presence of the high priest that he ordered his army to give up warfare and … he departed beyond the Danube.”

— The chronicler Propser, 455 A.D.

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Ding-dongDaniel Cerda almost made good an escape after breaking into an occupied house in Aurora, Illinois — not a “clean escape,” however, because the homeowner managed to shoot Cerda in both legs, but an escape nonetheless. Unfortunately for Cerda, his bullet wounds, combined with the help of an alert citizen, proved to be his undoing.

Cerda earned his bullet holes on March 21 when he broke into a house that he evi-dently believed was unoccupied. The inci-dent began when Cerda and a companion repeatedly rang the doorbell on the house. By the time the homeowner got to the door, Cerda and friend were walking away from the house, but that was only temporary.

Moments later, Cerda returned to the house and began trying to kick down the front door. The homeowner got a gun and called the police. When Cerda bashed in the door and entered the house, “the home-owner fired two shots,” reported the Bea-con News. Cerda fled before police could respond.

Later that afternoon a good citizen who was at a Chicago hospital overheard Cerda explaining to police how he got shot, and the police responding by saying his story didn’t make sense. When our good citizen was driving home that day, he listened to commentary about a shooting in Aurora, and he put two and two together. He called the Aurora police, and Cerda was subse-quently arrested.

Bitten for His EffortsAt 4:50 in the afternoon on March 15, a man later identified as Clarence Taylor entered a Shreveport, Louisiana, gas sta-tion intending to rob it. He pointed a gun at a clerk to force compliance, but almost immediately two other clerks pulled their own guns and pointed them at Taylor, sending him fleeing.

Police began combing the area for a sus-pect, and about an hour later, officer Mat-thew Childs spotted Taylor walking down a street. When Childs attempted to stop him, Taylor pulled a gun and shot at Childs. Childs shot back. Both men missed, and Taylor was able to elude Childs.

To locate Taylor, police brought in a K-9

unit to search for him. The dog found Tay-lor under a house and discouraged further resistance with a good bite. The gun Taylor had used in the crimes was recovered from under the house. Taylor was charged with attempted first-degree murder, attempted robbery, and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.

A Little Bit of TimeBrian Williams, a Flint, Michigan, pizza deliveryman, spent the night in jail on May 9 after he shot one of three men who were attempting to rob him. The 49-year-old Williams was exiting his vehicle to make a delivery when the men began attacking him; one hit Williams in the back of the head with a wrench. Williams suffered what his lawyer Michael Manley later described in an interview with the Flint Journal as “a savage beating.”

The attackers reportedly demanded money, but Williams instead pulled a gun and began shooting. He hit one of the men, 24-year-old Corneilus Gainer, who ran a short distance before collapsing and dying. Though he was attacked, Williams spent the night in jail.

Police Sergeant Jeff Mabry admitted that “on average, I would say we have a rob-bery of a delivery guy about every month. Usually they get mugged; sometimes they lose their vehicles or their pizzas. Some-times they get hurt.” Yet Williams spent the night in jail.

The county sheriff, Robert Pickell, said, “Flint’s rated as the third most violent in the country. Not everyone who works here went to college and has a nice safe job. There are people who have to make a liv-ing delivering pizzas and driving cabs, and they have a right to defend themselves.” Yet Williams spent the night in jail.

Michigan has a law that states, accord-ing Sheriff Pickell in an interview with ABC Channel 12, “If your life is in danger, imminent danger … you could shoot to kill.” Yet Williams spent the night in jail.

Not only did Williams suffer a beating and the indignity of a night in jail, he was criticized in many circles for being too quick on the trigger and for shooting an attacker who wasn’t wielding the wrench.

One citizen said, “It is not right that he was shooting to kill. Especially when he shot the wrong one. He shot him more than once, which showed he intended to kill. His history of being quick to shoot, especially in the chest, should prove his intentions and he keeps getting away with it.”

The comment about Williams’ previous history was in reference to the fact that Wil-liams had also shot a robber seven years earlier. That robber lived. Apparently, ac-cording to the rationale being used, a person is allowed to save his own life only once.

On a brighter note, the bulk of the com-mentary about the shooting was in defense of Williams. One woman told ABC Chan-nel 12, “That guy ought to get a medal and he should have shot the other two.”

“The Genesee County prosecutor says there will be no charges against [the] pizza delivery man.”

Waiting GameWhen a thrown brick busted out a store window at the Molly Pitcher Mini Mart in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, at 11:30 p.m. on March 28, an hour and a half after store hours, owner Merlony Colaco was ready. He grabbed the shotgun that he’d purchased after two previous bust-and-grab burglaries that month, and he snuck up behind the robber, who was stuffing packs of cigarettes into a trash bag. “The intruder’s head was covered with a shirt” to mask the identity of the thief, reported the Chambersburg Public Opinion.

When Colaco got the drop on the in-truder and the mask was removed, the intruder turned out to be a 19-year-old fe-male, Erica Lynch. As she sat in the store at gunpoint, her accessory to the crime sped away in a car. Lynch quickly admitted that she and two friends, Joshua Ingream and James Byrd, were responsible for a series of burglaries in the area. They committed the crimes to get items that they could sell so that they could buy crack cocaine.

Though Lynch and her friends had hit Colaco’s at least twice previously in March, they hadn’t expected him to buy a gun and camp out in his store waiting for them to strike again. ■

— KURT WILLIAMSEN

“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT


Enticing Illegal AliensITEM: “The Senate’s failure to pass a broad immigration bill was a major po-litical blow to President Bush,” said a CBS/AP story on June 7. “Also in the loser column was the Senate’s Democratic leadership.... The legislation now faces a very uncertain future. [Senate Democratic leader Harry] Reid said he hopes to pass the measure eventually, but he devoted much of his post-vote comments Thursday night to accusing Mr. Bush of doing too little to obtain Republican support. ‘This is the president’s bill,’ Reid told a hushed chamber. ‘Where are the president’s peo-ple helping us with these votes?’”ITEM: The Wall Street Journal reported in its issue dated June 9-10 that after the Sen-ate setback came for Bush’s amnesty plan the president planned a radio speech that would strike “a more conciliatory tone than recent stump remarks suggesting his critics didn’t want to do ‘what’s right for America.’ Like few other issues, immigra-tion overhaul touches multiple chords in American society: jobs, race, law and gen-eral hunger for greater security and order in today’s post-9/11, ‘global’ society.”ITEM: Acknowledging that the immigra-tion reform was flawed in many regards, an editorial in London’s Economist (May 26-June 1) nevertheless maintained: “The current bill is better than nothing.”CORRECTION: While appreciating the cor-dial solicitude about how to handle law-breakers by our betters in Britain (where “Muhammad” is on the verge of becoming the most popular name among newborn males), we believe the editors at the Econo-mist are all wet — perhaps even more than border-jumpers crossing the Rio Grande.

The American establishment, including the Wall Street Journal and most political leaders in both major parties, is also woe-fully wrongheaded on this issue. As if to confirm that point, a recent issue of Time magazine has as its cover story “Why Amnesty Makes Sense.” Without explic-itly acknowledging it as such, the Time article is an out-and-out editorial poorly disguised as news.

Astonishingly, the Time piece with a straight face made the following major

contentions: amnesty can work political-ly; it won’t depress wages; it won’t under-mine the rule of law; it won’t necessarily add to the social-services burden; and it doesn’t have to spawn more illegal immi-gration. Well, if it’s really that good for us, it should be our permanent national policy, right? Indeed, one wonders why Mexico hasn’t adopted this wonderful scheme in-stead of its own restrictive policies.

The proponents of reform propose solv-ing the problem of illegal aliens by making them “legal.” We’ve been sold that bill of goods before, when we were told it was impossible to deport less than three mil-lion of them in the mid-1980s. After that amnesty, we now have somewhere be-tween 12 and 20 million “undocumented” aliens, with the unspecific nature of the number being a telling indication of how little control the United States really has over its borders. As Professor Thomas Sowell writes: “As a result of the current amnesty bill — not honestly labeled this time — will it be ‘unrealistic’ to round up and deport 40 million or 50 million illegal immigrants in the future?”

In fact, the specter of massive deporta-tion is largely a red herring. Simply enforc-ing existing laws would alleviate the situ-ation over the long run. If the illegal aliens can’t find work or take advantage of social-welfare programs, they will largely self-de-port. It is estimated that over 250,000 of them already voluntarily leave each year — though this number is dwarfed by the new arrivals. Whether the immigration re-formers admit they are pushing amnesty is largely irrelevant, for surely those here illegally recognize it as such, as do most Americans, whether there are some condi-tional requirements tacked on or not. Even Time calls it amnesty (though it says this would be “good for America.”)

The legislation actually takes the prin-ciple of amnesty even further. According to John O’Sullivan of National Review, as the Bush administration argument “makes plain (presumably inadvertently) by refer-ring only to citizenship, the payment of a fine is not a condition that an alien must meet to stay in the country legally. Under the terms of the bill, the holder of a ‘proba-

tionary Z visa’ can stay indefinitely with-out paying a wooden nickel.” Indeed, as O’Sullivan notes, many if not most illegals aren’t interested in citizenship anyway. “What they want is the right to live and work in America. The bill grants them this right without any penalty for past trans-gressions. That alone makes it an amnesty. But the whole package makes it an Am-nesty Plus — an immigration and tax am-nesty in one, with citizenship thrown in.”

The more American citizens found out about the lengthy bill, the more vehement-ly they rejected it and the worse it became for the bill’s proponents. Among other provisions, the current legislation allows the government only one day to check the background of potential terrorists and criminals before granting visas; it forgives even those who have already been ordered deported; it provides taxpayer-funded law-yers for illegals and grants them more tax-provided subsidies for college than it does for legal immigrants.

The bureaucracy is bound to be ham-strung, as noted by a Heritage Foundation WebMemo, since the legislation trans-forms the agency now called Immigra-tion and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into an amnesty-distribution center. If an ICE agent “apprehends aliens who appear to be eligible for the Z visa (in other words, just about any illegal alien), the agent cannot detain them. Instead, ICE must provide them with a reasonable opportunity to apply for the Z visa. Instead of initiating removal proceedings, ICE will be initiating amnesty applications. This is the equivalent of turning the Drug Enforcement Agency into a needle-distribution network.”

Time magazine isn’t the only periodi-cal selling fairy-tale facts about the sup-posed benefits of amnesty; the New York Times has also joined the fiction-writing club — something Charles Krauthammer took note of when the Times claimed on its front page that “a large majority of Ameri-cans want to change the immigration laws to allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status.” Writes Krauthammer:

A Rasmussen poll had shown that 72 percent of Americans thought border

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enforcement and reducing illegal im-migration to be very important. Only 29 percent thought legalization to be very important. Indeed, when a dif-ferent question in the Times poll — one that did not make the front page — asked respondents if they wanted to see illegal immigrants prosecuted and deported, 69 percent said yes.

I looked for the poll question that justified the pro-legalization claim. It was Question 61. Just as I suspected, it was perfectly tendentious. It gave the respondent two options: (a) allow illegal immigrants to apply for legal-ization (itself a misleading character-ization because the current bill grants instant legal status to all non-crimi-nals), or (b) deport them.

Surprise. Sixty-two percent said (a). That’s like asking about abor-tion: Do you favor (a) legalization or (b) capital punishment for doctor and mother?

The price tag for this destructive nonsense over the years is truly staggering — total-ing a net amount of $2.6 trillion just for the projected retirement benefits of those who would be legalized, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation. Ana-lysts Robert Rector and Christine Kim of Heritage measured the tens of billions of dollars in services and benefits given to low-skill immigrants, less the taxes they pay — and found that those immi-grants receive almost three times as much ($30,160 per household) as they give back in taxes, for a “fiscal deficit” of $19,587 per household. The amount received is about $10,000 more annually for services, mainly for welfare, than the average U.S. household. “Over the next 10 years,” say the analysts, “the net cost (benefits minus taxes) to the taxpayer of low-skilled im-migrant households will approach $1 trillion.”

Time magazine’s dubious claims not-withstanding, ignoring or loosening immi-gration law is bound to generate even more low-skilled and illegal immigration — and more exorbitant payments. ■

— WILLIAM P. HOAR


Even after deploying 25,000 more troops as part of President

Bush’s “surge,” the news out of Iraq doesn’t get any better. Staff Sergeant David Safstrom, on his third tour of duty in the area, recently searched the body of a man killed by his unit in the pro-cess of setting a roadside bomb. He discovered that the man was a sergeant in the Iraqi Army. Similarly, Captain Douglas Rogers noted that the Iraqis he and his men had trained were firing at them in a recent battle. And Sergeant Kevin O’Flarity told a reporter, “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents.”

When Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank met with Iraqi police officials in late May, police Captain Adel Fakry complained that some American soldiers had expressed “distrust” of his person-nel. Colonel Frank explained: “The reason there is distrust is be-cause I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station.” Add to this the grim statistic showing that April and May 2007 produced the highest two-month total of U.S. fatalities during the entire four-year struggle.

President Bush told the nation his purpose in increasing troop levels was to stabilize the situation so that the Iraqi government would have time to persuade the competing Islamic sects to cease shooting at each other. But, so far, no progress has been made toward ending the escalating civil war that sees our forces being targeted by both sides. And even Mr. Bush has predicted that this summer will be rough with many American casualties.

Yet, despite the continual claims that the troops will be with-drawn as soon as their mission has been completed, a gargantuan embassy complex the United States is now building in Baghdad makes it painfully obvious that our government intends to keep an American presence deeply mired in Iraq for a long time, and that there must be more to our intervention in Iraq than our gov-ernment has shared with the American people.

The new U.S. embassy, scheduled to open in September, has been aptly described by the Associated Press’s Anne Gearan as a “city-within-a-city.” Gearan noted that it will be “the world’s largest and most expensive foreign mission,” occupying 104 acres, containing 21 buildings, providing desk space for a thou-sand bureaucrats, hiding behind high, blast-proof walls intended to protect the occupants from the chaos outside — all for an estimated cost of $592 million.

State Department official David Satterfield can hardly be ac-

cused of misrepresenting the administration’s true in-tent when he acknowledged: “We assume there will be a significant, enduring U.S. presence in Iraq.” But there is more to it than that. As Gearan pointed out in her AP column, the embassy will also serve “as a head-quarters for the democratic expansion in the Middle East that President Bush identified as the organizing principle for foreign policy” during the remaining months of his presidency. That is, the new embassy will serve as a

hub not only for our activities in Iraq but for our involvement with other Middle East nations targeted for “democratic expansion.”

The administration does not view this expansion in solely military terms. The “democratic expansion” envisioned also in-cludes grouping supposedly liberated Middle Eastern nations in a Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA). This proposed pact will parallel other already-established “free trade” blocs, includ-ing the European Union. Each has much more to do with com-promising a nation’s sovereignty than with facilitating trade.

In our own hemisphere, Mr. Bush’s plan to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas met with enough resistance to have it put on a back burner. So he expended maximum pressure on Con-gress to gain congressional passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Now, he and his team led by Vice President Cheney are working to expand NAFTA into an independence-cancelling North American Union that will inte-grate Canada, the United States, and Mexico more completely than was accomplished by 1994’s NAFTA.

The ultimate goal, expressed by many including former Mexi-can leader Vicente Fox and the Wall Street Journal, is to gather all 34 nations in the Western hemisphere into a duplicate of the European Union. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans in the EU’s 27 member states have begun to realize that their parliaments are little more than rubber stamps for the Eurocrats in Brussels. National sovereignty in all 27 has been ceded to the EU superstate.

The MEFTA initiative — proposed in May 2003 by Mr. Bush — is designed to accomplish the same goal in the Middle East, where our new embassy in Baghdad will presumably become a hub for a new regional government intended for that part of the world. To enact yet another regional government, MEFTA, on the path to bringing about global governance, American forces are being killed and wounded in a war that our nation should never have started. ■

The Continuing Iraq WarTHE LAST WORD

BY JOHN F. MCMANUS

A portion of the new U.S. embassy under construction

AP

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“’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world....”

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