NEWS ROUNDUP
Idaho ranchers can kill wolves harassing livestock The image of a wolf howling at the moon has long embodied the American West, but that romantic symbol is about to get a taste of harsh reality in Idaho. Next week, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton are expected to sign an agreement that would place management of an estimated 500 gray wolves into state, rather than federal, hands. Different Idaho groups, including hunters and livestock producers, pressured state officials to give them greater control. Officials in Boise then asked Washington to make the change. The agreement would give ranchers permission to eliminate wolves that harass livestock. It also would empower state wildlife managers to pick off wolf packs that make a dent in the state's deer and elk populations. The wolf's revival in Idaho started a decade ago when officials released 35 wolves into central Idaho. Their numbers have grown steadily since then....
Delisting Only Starts Next (and bigger) Fight for Yellowstone Grizzlies To delist or not to delist, that is NOT the question. Whether the greater Yellowstone subpopulation of grizzly bears is removed from federal protection or not, the challenge of keeping these famous bruins alive will not go away. Not in this lifetime, not during our kids' lives. Not ever. That's the point that is getting lost in the current verbal donnybrook that has caused a schism to emerge in the environmental movement and among several prominent independent wildlife experts. Whatever one wants to call the action that is proposed for grizzlies -- delisting or downgrading of their federal protected status -- Wyoming, Montana and Idaho must prove they are up to the task of shepherding this population into the future. The ability of those states to get the job done is less than certain....
BLM to zap pest plants The Bureau of Land Management is getting aggressive in a bid to deal with the growing problem of invasive plant species in the West. But the agency's proposal to apply herbicides to nearly 1 million acres of federal land in 17 Western states is drawing fire from environmentalists and organic food producers. Verlin Smith, the BLM's branch chief for renewable resources in Utah, calls the rise of cheat grass, tamarisk, Russian olive and other invasive species a public lands epidemic that is strangling rangelands and wildlife habitat, and sucking up precious water resources in the nation's most arid region. In addition, he noted, "It changes the whole fire cycle. Normally, fire in a vegetative ecosystem occurs every so-many years. But with cheat grass and other invasive plants, that time frame shortens considerably. It perpetuates the cheat grass and almost wipes out the possibility that the native species will be able to re-emerge and reclaim the site....
How to save the duck population Duck hunters have a passion for their sport. Many hours go into building decoys and duck blinds. Biologist Kurt Forman works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and he's also a duck hunter. Forman believes his sport could be in trouble. "The fate of waterfowl hunting in the U.S. will be largely tied to the fate of the grasslands and wetlands in the central Dakotas," says Forman. That's because nesting habitat in Canada is disappearing, and ducks are forced to nest more in the Upper Midwest. Forman oversees a program that pays farmers and ranchers to keep grassland and wetlands in their natural state. The program is funded mostly through donations from duck hunters. But the new research published in the latest issue of BioScience shows that perhaps Forman should change his focus. Carter Johnson, an ecology professor at South Dakota State University, conducted the study which looked at how climate changes will impact the breeding ground for waterfowl. He says it's getting warmer in the Upper Midwest, and that warmer weather means wetlands will start to dry up....
Private group purchases 150,000 acres of forest A group of private investors has purchased for an undisclosed sum 150,000 acres of Ohio forest land that's been for sale with the reorganization of the former MeadWestvaco paper group. Dayton-based Escanaba Timber on Wednesday said it sold the acreage on Dec. 16. The buyer is Scioto Land Company, represented by Robert G. Chambers, a timber manager who also works for Kentucky-based Tolleson-Knox Land Management Company. The deal makes Scioto the largest private owner of timber land in Ohio. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources wants to speak soon with Chambers on its desire to acquire a special tract now in Scioto's holdings — the 16,000-acre Raccoon Ecological Management Area, a place of widely recognized federal research on oak growth that was once a state forest. It is strategically located in Vinton County near Zaleski State Forest. It could be the state's biggest land buy in a generation or more....
Colorado Silver Mine Could Be Destroyed Preservation groups say the historic Yankee Girl silver mine site near Red Mountain Pass could be destroyed if the owners can't unload the property or be persuaded to protect it. Jim and Dee Ann Krupp purchased the 22-acre property last year, more than a century after its heyday between 1889 and 1893. Jim Krupp said he purchased the site in hopes of making a land exchange with the Forest Service to limit public access near the couple's cabin south of Crested Butte. He said the agency has now balked at the deal and he has put the property back on the market for $295,000. He said he does not want to destroy the Yankee Girl's so-called headboard structure and believes the site has historical value. "We do want to keep it in the public domain," Krupp said....
New Mexico gets more ATV trails, laws New Mexico's ATV enthusiasts will have more trails to ride under a law taking effect Sunday. At the same time, younger ATV riders will be safer, says the lawmaker who sponsored the measure in the state Senate. Riders under 18 will be required to wear eye goggles and helmets and take a safety training course. They also will be prohibited from having passengers on their all terrain vehicles, which are popular in New Mexico for hunters and outdoor recreationists. "Once this program is up and running, it will pay off big time by saving young lives," said Sen. Dede Feldman, an Albuquerque Democrat who sponsored the bill this year with Rep. Bobby Gonzales, a Democrat from Taos. The law also increases the registration fee from $15 for a three-year registration to $17 for two years. In addition, those who ride on state land will be charged a user fee of up to $30. The exact amount will be set by the Department of Tourism. The increased fee will help pay for additional ATV trails and tracks on state land. The locations of the new trails haven't yet been announced....
Goats eat fire threat The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is using 200 goats to clear brush on 120 acres along the mountainside of State Park Road on Palomar Mountain throughout the month of December to reduce the fire threat. “The benefit of using goats for brush reduction is that they can roam on steep terrain and eat all the plants that other grazing animals cannot survive on,” said Kelly Strecker, Forester for NRCS. “In many places, goats have also proven to be more cost-effective than using hand crews or masticators for brush removal.” The goats are gathered, led into a section of the project area and enclosed within electrical fencing. Large appetites compel the goats to feed on the shrubs, brush and weeds that continue to serve as a fuel source on Palomar Mountain. The electrical fencing is then rotated throughout different sections to complete the project area. The Watershed Recovery Project and the Fire Safety and Fuels Reduction Program are cooperative efforts between federal, state and local agencies as well as community organizations and interested stakeholders. The $45 million program is funded by the Natural Resource Conservation Service, US Forest Service, County of San Diego and others....
Land grabbed, swapped Plum Creek Timber Co. recently sold about 40,000 acres along the Montana-Idaho border near Powell to Tim Blixseth, timber tycoon and developer of Montana’s exclusive Yellowstone Club. The land, the balance of Plum Creek’s Idaho holdings, is made up of 640-acre sections interspersed in a checkerboard arrangement with Forest Service land that’s managed by the Clearwater National Forest. The historic Lolo Trail, used by migrating Nez Perce Indians and later by explorers Lewis and Clark, runs through both public and private land in the area, and trail and road easements have afforded public access to the privately owned sections. While the Clearwater’s Roberta Morin says the Forest Service hasn’t been formally informed of the sale and is thus unclear about the status of public access, Blixseth assures the Independent that access won’t change. He also says he has no plans to log the area: “There’s been so much timber cut off that property that I have zero plans to log any trees. That property needs to heal up and grow,” Blixseth says. In the long term, he says, the area should be publicly owned and he hopes to broker a land exchange with the government to consolidate ownership for both the public and him. Blixseth, whom Forbes magazine ranks as the nation’s 346th richest person, has a history of successful land exchanges....
A Drier and Tainted Nevada May Be Legacy of a Gold Rush Just outside the chasm of North America's biggest open-pit gold mine there is an immense oasis in the middle of the Nevada desert. It is an idyllic and isolated spot where migratory birds often alight for a stopover. But hardly anything is natural about it. This is water pumped from the ground by Barrick Gold of Toronto to keep its vast Goldstrike mine from flooding, as the gold company, the world's third largest, carves a canyon 1,600 feet below the level of northern Nevada's aquifer. Nearly 10 million gallons a day draining away in the driest state in the nation - and the fastest growing one, propelled by the demographic rocket of Las Vegas - is just one of the many strange byproducts of Nevada's tangled love affair with gold. An extensive review of government documents and court records, and scores of interviews with scientists and present and former mine industry workers and regulators, show that an absence of federal guidelines, of the sort that are commonplace for coal or oil, allowed gold wide latitude to operate here in the rural fastness of the desert, perhaps more than any other American industry....
Death of a Sawmill Thanks to the nation's housing boom, business has been good for the West's sawmills for the past three years. But Jim faced an insurmountable problem: He couldn't buy enough logs to keep his mill running. This despite the fact that 10 times as many trees as Jim's mill needed die annually on the nearby Kootenai National Forest. From his office window, Jim could see the dead and dying standing on hillsides just west of the mill. They might as well have been standing on the moon, given the senseless environmental litigation that has engulfed the West's federal forests. Thanks to Jim's resourcefulness, his mill survived its last five years on a steady diet of fire- and bug-killed trees salvaged from Alberta provincial forests. Such salvage work is unthinkable in our national forests, forests that, news reports to the contrary, remain under the thumb of radical environmental groups whose hatred for capitalism seems boundless. Americans are thus invited to believe that salvaging fire-killed timber is "like mugging a burn victim." Never mind that there is no peer-reviewed science that supports this ridiculous claim--or that many of the West's great forests, including Oregon's famed Tillamook Forest, are products of past salvage and reforestation projects....
Cabin builder learns access road is illegal When Terry Botnen built his cabin last spring northwest of Jordan, he thought he'd found his retirement dream. He built a simple 20-by-30-foot cabin on 40 acres of ground atop a ridge. No power lines run to the remote location, so he used generators to supply power. But since April, his dream home has turned into a nightmare. Part of the attraction of the land is the big-game hunting and solitude. The 120 acres are bordered by Bureau of Land Management land to the west and Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge lands to the west and north. The CMR property is a wilderness study area. The problem is that the three pieces of property are accessible only by an old road that crosses BLM land and then a corner of the CMR property. Doug Watt argues that the road has been used by his family for years to access the 120 acres. "It's on every map Rand McNally prints," he said. "I believe at one time it connected two homestead families." But the CMR doesn't see it that way....
For Riders of Dunes, True Grit--and Risk There are no speed limits, no age limits and no roads across these sands. Formed by ancient Colorado River delta sediments fanned out across the desert floor, the area is also known as Glamis, after the nearby town, or the Algodones Dunes. The 200 square miles of wind-sculpted ridges, bowls and flatlands undulate from the Chocolate Mountains south to the Mexican border. They are among the most popular — and most deadly — places in the nation for riding off-road vehicles, particularly on holiday weekends in winter. Seven have died so far this riding season, which runs from October through April. It is the highest toll at this point in the season in the memory of coroner's officials here. More than 30,000 people show up on an average three-day weekend, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the area and has been aggressively seeking to expand off-road access here. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, some 200,000 people arrived, more than the regular population of surrounding Imperial County. With the New Year's weekend approaching, local authorities fear more deaths....
Local man indicted, accused of bribing BLM A prominent business man has been indicted on federal charges that he bribed a former Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employee. Norman Geoff McMahon, 71, of Farmington, was indicted Dec. 14 by a grand jury in federal District Court in Albuquerque. It is alleged he bribed Ralph Mason, a formar BLM employee, four times. "Nobody (with the BLM) has received anything in writing or have received any phone calls," said Bill Papich, a spokesman for the BLM's Farmington office. "If a bribe was reported, the BLM would take it really seriously. We will be doing a thorough investigation." Papich said that Mason had been "let go by the BLM a while back," but was unaware of exactly when that was. According to court documents, McMahon allegedly gave a total of $7,000 to Mason between Dec. 15, 2000, and Feb. 15, 2002....
Cows gunned down A teen faces six felony charges after a booze- and gun-fueled summer camping trip he attended ended with four bullet-riddled cows belonging to an Eagle Point rancher. Billy James Frye, 18, of Eagle Point, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to four counts of aggravated animal abuse, felony theft and criminal mischief in connection with what Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife Trooper Jeff Allison described as a "cow massacre." Police believe Frye and a group of friends went camping the weekend of August 27 just off Highway 140 near Lake of the Woods. The nine teens, ranging in age from 15 to 19, brought along alcohol, cigarettes and a small cache of weapons to keep themselves entertained, Allison said. At some point, four cows were gunned down — two were pregnant, two had recently given birth, Allison said....
Friday, December 30, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
FLE
U.S. Asks Supreme Court to Transfer Terror Suspect
The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court today to allow for the immediate transfer of Jose Padilla from a military brig to civilian custody to stand trial on terrorism charges, challenging an appellate court ruling last week that blocked the move. The Justice Department, in an unusually strong criticism of a lower court that has historically been a staunch ally, said the earlier order blocking Mr. Padilla's transfer to civilian custody represented an "unwarranted attack" on presidential discretion. In last week's ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., refused to allow Mr. Padilla to be transferred to civilian custody to face charges in Miami that he had conspired with Al Qaeda to commit terror attacks abroad. But Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, in the administration's new filing today asking the Supreme Court to take up the custody issue, said the Fourth Circuit's decision "defies both law and logic," and he noted that Mr. Padilla himself had sought to be transferred to civilian custody. In unusually caustic language, the solicitor general said that the Fourth Circuit did not have the authority to "disregard a presidential directive." And he said its decision blocking Mr. Padilla's transfer "is based on a mischaracterization of events and an unwarranted attack on the exercise of Executive discretion, and, if given effect, would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns." The Fourth Circuit is widely known as one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, and it has sided with the Bush administration on a number of key issues involving matters of terrorism and national security....
Spy Agency Removes Illegal Tracking Files
The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type. The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program. "Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy." Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035....
Constitutional Spying
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a chronic problem. The controversy over President Bush's decision to bypass FISA warrants in the electronic surveillance of al Qaeda operatives has highlighted the act's limitations. But FISA has been a problem ever since it became law in 1978. Congress passed and President Carter signed the bill regulating electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence collection in the wake of an extended, post--Watergate debate about the so--called "imperial presidency." The debate was given added urgency by reports and official investigations of indiscriminate snooping in this country by elements of the U.S. intelligence community. However, like so much else from that period, the broad arguments about the president's role in the constitutional order were wrong, and the laws designed to correct real problems created a new set of problems. One irony of today's debate is that so many liberals are now defending FISA. Previously, a common complaint from the ACLU and others was that the secret federal court that issues warrants for foreign intelligence surveillance in this country had become a "rubber stamp" for the executive branch. Out of the thousands of applications put forward by the Department of Justice to the panel over the years, only a handful had ever been rejected. Instead of a check on executive authority, the court had become complicit in its activities-or so it was said. And to a certain extent that has been the case. Yet the reason for the high percentage of approvals has less to do with deference to executive judgment than with FISA's standard for obtaining a warrant when it involves surveillance of an American citizen or an alien residing legally in the United States. Before the government can get a warrant, the Justice Department must put together a case to present before the court stating the "facts and circumstances relied upon . . . to justify [the attorney general's] belief that the target is an agent of a foreign power" or "engages . . . in international terrorism." And the FISA judges can only grant the warrant when "there is probable cause to believe that the target" is engaged in espionage or terrorism. In short, before the government can collect intelligence on someone by breaking into his house or tapping his phones, it had better already have in hand pretty persuasive evidence that the person is probably up to no good. FISA is less about collecting intelligence than confirming intelligence....
Disorder in the Court
Set aside, for the moment, all the broad and complicated questions of law at issue here, and consider just the factual record as it's been revealed in any number of authoritative, after--the--disaster investigations. According to the December 2002 report of the House and Senate intelligence committees' Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, for one, the FISA system as a whole-and the FISA court in particular-went seriously off the rails sometime around 1995. A false impression began mysteriously to take hold throughout the government that the FISA statute, in combination with the Fourth Amendment, erected an almost impermeable barrier between intelligence agents and law enforcement personnel where electronic eavesdropping was concerned. And by the time, a few years later, that Osama bin Laden had finally become an official counterterrorism priority, this FISA court--enforced "wall" had already crippled the government's al Qaeda monitoring efforts. Absent specific, prior authorization from the FISA court, federal al Qaeda investigators were formally prohibited from sharing surveillance--derived intelligence information about terrorism suspects and plots with their law enforcement counterparts. And in late 2000, after federal prosecutors discovered a series of legally inconsequential errors and omissions in certain al Qaeda--related surveillance applications the FISA court had previously approved, the court's infamously prickly presiding judge, Royce Lamberth, appears to have had a temper tantrum ferocious enough to all but shut down the Justice Department's terrorism wiretapping program. "The consequences of the FISA Court's approach to the Wall between intelligence gathering and law enforcement before September 11 were extensive," the Joint Inquiry explained. "Many FISA surveillances of suspected al Qaeda agents expired because [Justice officials] were not willing to apply for application renewals when they were not completely confident of their accuracy." And new applications were not forthcoming, the result being that, at least by the reckoning of one FBI manager who testified before the intelligence committees, "no FISA orders targeted against al Qaeda existed in 2001" at all. Not one. Non--Justice intelligence agencies quailed before Judge Lamberth, too, it should be noted. The National Security Agency, for example, "began to indicate on all reports of terrorism--related information that the content could not be shared with law enforcement personnel without FISA Court approval." It used to be, not so long ago, that NSA's pre--9/11 timidity about such eavesdropping was universally considered a terrible mistake. The agency's "cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States," the Joint Inquiry concluded, helped blind it to the nature of al Qaeda's threat. NSA "adopted a policy that avoided intercepting communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries." What's more, NSA adopted this unfortunate policy "even though the collection of such communications is within its mission," even though "a significant portion of the communications collected by NSA" has always involved "U.S. persons or contain[ed] information about U.S. persons," and even though "the NSA and the FBI have the authority, in certain circumstances, to intercept . . . communications that have one communicant in the United States and one in a foreign country."....
Wiretaps fail to make dent in terror war; al Qaeda used messengers
The Bush administration's surveillance policy has failed to make a dent in the war against al Qaeda. U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers. "They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said. "At most, we have caught some riff-raff. But the heavies remain free and we believe some of them are in the United States." The law enforcement sources said the intelligence community has identified several al Qaeda agents believed to be in the United States. But the sources said the agents have not been found because of insufficient intelligence and even poor analysis. The assertions by the law enforcement sources dispute President Bush's claim that the government surveillance program has significantly helped in the fight against terrorism. The president said the program, which goes beyond the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, limits eavesdropping to international phone calls. The sources provided guidelines to how the administration has employed the surveillance program. They said the National Security Agency in cooperation with the FBI was allowed to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of any American believed to be in contact with a person abroad suspected of being linked to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. At that point, the sources said, all of the communications of that American would be monitored, including calls made to others in the United States. The regulations under the administration's surveillance program do not require any court order. "The new regulations don't require this because it is considered an ongoing investigation," a source familiar with the program said....
Secret court modified wiretap requests
Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined. The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA, which intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications. "They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration." Bamford offered his speculation in an interview last week....
Are You Being Searched?
They know when you are sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know if you've been bad or good: They're the National Security Agency, and as The New York Times reported this Christmas Eve, they've been conducting analysis of telecommunications on a scale far beyond that of the targeted program of eavesdropping on domestic-to-international communications revealed earlier this month. Both programs remain shrouded in secrecy, but there's at least some reason to think that, under the logic of a Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year, it's the more expansive one that will meet fewer constitutional obstacles. The defenses offered thus far of warrantless wiretaps on U.S.-to-foreign communications of persons with "links" to al-Qaeda have been, if not quite tortured, then at least subject to coercive tactics. Consider, for instance, the argument that Congress' authorization of military force to pursue terrorists in the wake of 9/11 gave President Bush the power to authorize such surveillance—even though Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the administration declined to seek such authority explicitly for fear of being turned down. The argument turns on a strained analogy to a 2004 Supreme Court ruling holding that the authorization of force included the authority to detain captured combatants, a fairly obvious natural concomitant of war, even though it did not explicitly mention "detention." The alternative would be to conclude, ludicrously, that Congress intended a "take no prisoners" War on Terror, in which enemies must either be released or shot on the spot. But administration apologists—take the hairpin curve in this logic slowly or you may crash—have parsed the ruling as entailing that Congress therefore endorsed anything short of putting a bullet in a suspected terrorist's brainpan. Prominent conservative blogger John Hinderaker turns his gaze on the Fourth Amendment's stipulation that governmental searches be "reasonable" and asks: Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists' cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons?....
Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts
Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda. The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out. The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say. The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions. "It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."....
U.S. Asks Supreme Court to Transfer Terror Suspect
The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court today to allow for the immediate transfer of Jose Padilla from a military brig to civilian custody to stand trial on terrorism charges, challenging an appellate court ruling last week that blocked the move. The Justice Department, in an unusually strong criticism of a lower court that has historically been a staunch ally, said the earlier order blocking Mr. Padilla's transfer to civilian custody represented an "unwarranted attack" on presidential discretion. In last week's ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., refused to allow Mr. Padilla to be transferred to civilian custody to face charges in Miami that he had conspired with Al Qaeda to commit terror attacks abroad. But Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, in the administration's new filing today asking the Supreme Court to take up the custody issue, said the Fourth Circuit's decision "defies both law and logic," and he noted that Mr. Padilla himself had sought to be transferred to civilian custody. In unusually caustic language, the solicitor general said that the Fourth Circuit did not have the authority to "disregard a presidential directive." And he said its decision blocking Mr. Padilla's transfer "is based on a mischaracterization of events and an unwarranted attack on the exercise of Executive discretion, and, if given effect, would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns." The Fourth Circuit is widely known as one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, and it has sided with the Bush administration on a number of key issues involving matters of terrorism and national security....
Spy Agency Removes Illegal Tracking Files
The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most files of that type. The files, known as cookies, disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week. Agency officials acknowledged yesterday that they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raised questions about privacy at the agency, which is on the defensive over reports of an eavesdropping program. "Considering the surveillance power the N.S.A. has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy." Until Tuesday, the N.S.A. site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035....
Constitutional Spying
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a chronic problem. The controversy over President Bush's decision to bypass FISA warrants in the electronic surveillance of al Qaeda operatives has highlighted the act's limitations. But FISA has been a problem ever since it became law in 1978. Congress passed and President Carter signed the bill regulating electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence collection in the wake of an extended, post--Watergate debate about the so--called "imperial presidency." The debate was given added urgency by reports and official investigations of indiscriminate snooping in this country by elements of the U.S. intelligence community. However, like so much else from that period, the broad arguments about the president's role in the constitutional order were wrong, and the laws designed to correct real problems created a new set of problems. One irony of today's debate is that so many liberals are now defending FISA. Previously, a common complaint from the ACLU and others was that the secret federal court that issues warrants for foreign intelligence surveillance in this country had become a "rubber stamp" for the executive branch. Out of the thousands of applications put forward by the Department of Justice to the panel over the years, only a handful had ever been rejected. Instead of a check on executive authority, the court had become complicit in its activities-or so it was said. And to a certain extent that has been the case. Yet the reason for the high percentage of approvals has less to do with deference to executive judgment than with FISA's standard for obtaining a warrant when it involves surveillance of an American citizen or an alien residing legally in the United States. Before the government can get a warrant, the Justice Department must put together a case to present before the court stating the "facts and circumstances relied upon . . . to justify [the attorney general's] belief that the target is an agent of a foreign power" or "engages . . . in international terrorism." And the FISA judges can only grant the warrant when "there is probable cause to believe that the target" is engaged in espionage or terrorism. In short, before the government can collect intelligence on someone by breaking into his house or tapping his phones, it had better already have in hand pretty persuasive evidence that the person is probably up to no good. FISA is less about collecting intelligence than confirming intelligence....
Disorder in the Court
Set aside, for the moment, all the broad and complicated questions of law at issue here, and consider just the factual record as it's been revealed in any number of authoritative, after--the--disaster investigations. According to the December 2002 report of the House and Senate intelligence committees' Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, for one, the FISA system as a whole-and the FISA court in particular-went seriously off the rails sometime around 1995. A false impression began mysteriously to take hold throughout the government that the FISA statute, in combination with the Fourth Amendment, erected an almost impermeable barrier between intelligence agents and law enforcement personnel where electronic eavesdropping was concerned. And by the time, a few years later, that Osama bin Laden had finally become an official counterterrorism priority, this FISA court--enforced "wall" had already crippled the government's al Qaeda monitoring efforts. Absent specific, prior authorization from the FISA court, federal al Qaeda investigators were formally prohibited from sharing surveillance--derived intelligence information about terrorism suspects and plots with their law enforcement counterparts. And in late 2000, after federal prosecutors discovered a series of legally inconsequential errors and omissions in certain al Qaeda--related surveillance applications the FISA court had previously approved, the court's infamously prickly presiding judge, Royce Lamberth, appears to have had a temper tantrum ferocious enough to all but shut down the Justice Department's terrorism wiretapping program. "The consequences of the FISA Court's approach to the Wall between intelligence gathering and law enforcement before September 11 were extensive," the Joint Inquiry explained. "Many FISA surveillances of suspected al Qaeda agents expired because [Justice officials] were not willing to apply for application renewals when they were not completely confident of their accuracy." And new applications were not forthcoming, the result being that, at least by the reckoning of one FBI manager who testified before the intelligence committees, "no FISA orders targeted against al Qaeda existed in 2001" at all. Not one. Non--Justice intelligence agencies quailed before Judge Lamberth, too, it should be noted. The National Security Agency, for example, "began to indicate on all reports of terrorism--related information that the content could not be shared with law enforcement personnel without FISA Court approval." It used to be, not so long ago, that NSA's pre--9/11 timidity about such eavesdropping was universally considered a terrible mistake. The agency's "cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States," the Joint Inquiry concluded, helped blind it to the nature of al Qaeda's threat. NSA "adopted a policy that avoided intercepting communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries." What's more, NSA adopted this unfortunate policy "even though the collection of such communications is within its mission," even though "a significant portion of the communications collected by NSA" has always involved "U.S. persons or contain[ed] information about U.S. persons," and even though "the NSA and the FBI have the authority, in certain circumstances, to intercept . . . communications that have one communicant in the United States and one in a foreign country."....
Wiretaps fail to make dent in terror war; al Qaeda used messengers
The Bush administration's surveillance policy has failed to make a dent in the war against al Qaeda. U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers. "They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said. "At most, we have caught some riff-raff. But the heavies remain free and we believe some of them are in the United States." The law enforcement sources said the intelligence community has identified several al Qaeda agents believed to be in the United States. But the sources said the agents have not been found because of insufficient intelligence and even poor analysis. The assertions by the law enforcement sources dispute President Bush's claim that the government surveillance program has significantly helped in the fight against terrorism. The president said the program, which goes beyond the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, limits eavesdropping to international phone calls. The sources provided guidelines to how the administration has employed the surveillance program. They said the National Security Agency in cooperation with the FBI was allowed to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of any American believed to be in contact with a person abroad suspected of being linked to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. At that point, the sources said, all of the communications of that American would be monitored, including calls made to others in the United States. The regulations under the administration's surveillance program do not require any court order. "The new regulations don't require this because it is considered an ongoing investigation," a source familiar with the program said....
Secret court modified wiretap requests
Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined. The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA, which intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications. "They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration." Bamford offered his speculation in an interview last week....
Are You Being Searched?
They know when you are sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know if you've been bad or good: They're the National Security Agency, and as The New York Times reported this Christmas Eve, they've been conducting analysis of telecommunications on a scale far beyond that of the targeted program of eavesdropping on domestic-to-international communications revealed earlier this month. Both programs remain shrouded in secrecy, but there's at least some reason to think that, under the logic of a Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year, it's the more expansive one that will meet fewer constitutional obstacles. The defenses offered thus far of warrantless wiretaps on U.S.-to-foreign communications of persons with "links" to al-Qaeda have been, if not quite tortured, then at least subject to coercive tactics. Consider, for instance, the argument that Congress' authorization of military force to pursue terrorists in the wake of 9/11 gave President Bush the power to authorize such surveillance—even though Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the administration declined to seek such authority explicitly for fear of being turned down. The argument turns on a strained analogy to a 2004 Supreme Court ruling holding that the authorization of force included the authority to detain captured combatants, a fairly obvious natural concomitant of war, even though it did not explicitly mention "detention." The alternative would be to conclude, ludicrously, that Congress intended a "take no prisoners" War on Terror, in which enemies must either be released or shot on the spot. But administration apologists—take the hairpin curve in this logic slowly or you may crash—have parsed the ruling as entailing that Congress therefore endorsed anything short of putting a bullet in a suspected terrorist's brainpan. Prominent conservative blogger John Hinderaker turns his gaze on the Fourth Amendment's stipulation that governmental searches be "reasonable" and asks: Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists' cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons?....
Defense Lawyers in Terror Cases Plan Challenges Over Spy Efforts
Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda. The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out. The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say. The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions. "It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."....
NEWS ROUNDUP
Downside of cleaner air: more warming New measurements of tiny particles in Earth's atmosphere contain a sobering message: All those hard-won efforts to cut air pollution may unwittingly accelerate global warming. The result: The planet is likely to warm more and faster than current projections suggest, according to a team of British and American scientists. The group has produced the most precise estimates yet of how tiny particles, known as aerosols, could affect the world's climate. Aerosols, which include pollutants, have a cooling effect on the atmosphere, and the team's work suggests that the cooling effect is strong - nearly as strong as the top estimates of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus, the dwindling presence of aerosols means that global average temperatures could rise faster than previously estimated and reach toward the high end of projections for the end of the century....
The Jaguar Man Wild jaguars in the U.S.? What sounds implausible was proven true in 1996 when two male jaguars were photographed, first in southern New Mexico and then in Arizona. Until that time, experts had concluded that our hemisphere’s biggest cat—seldom seen north of the Mexico border since European settlement—had disappeared forever from the U.S. “It was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen,” says Warner Glenn, a big-game hunter whose hounds brought a large jaguar to bay during a late-winter mountain lion hunt. Glenn took a series of remarkable photos. “I felt tremendously lucky,” said the rancher, who wrote a book about his experience. Six months after Glenn’s sighting, members of a party led by Jack Childs treed a jaguar in the Baboquivari Mountains near Tucson. Childs caught the cat on videotape as it settled into an aerie of juniper branches. “I considered it a once-in-a-lifetime event,” says the retired surveyor. Since then, motion-triggered hidden cameras in southern Arizona have clicked off 16 pictures of the endangered cats, including two that appear to be the first resident U.S. jaguars in decades. “What Jack and Warner have documented is amazing,” says Mexican wildlife biologist Octavio Rosas. “But this species will not survive long north of the border without effective protection in Mexico.” Rosas, now completing his Ph.D. degree at New Mexico State University, was spurred into action by the sightings made by Glenn and Childs. “I’d been working with wildlife in Sonora, the Mexican state immediately south of Arizona, so I knew that a small breeding population existed there and was probably the source of the cats seen sporadically in the U.S.,” he says. Rosas soon put together a unique project that tied local conservation and field research to economic development....
Wildlife officials mull graylng plan State and federal officials are proposing a new plan they say would help the last population of fluvial grayling in the lower 48 states expand its numbers. The goal is to get ranchers to leave more water in the Big Hole River in southwest Montana and to use the water they do extract more efficiently. Fluvial, or river dwelling, grayling live in about 80 miles of the upper stretch of that river -- their last refuge in the contiguous United States -- and their numbers have been declining for decades. Environmental groups have been pushing for the grayling to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, an idea that rankles most ranchers in the Big Hole, a beautiful and sparsely settled valley where the economy is based around cattle and irrigation....
Oil, gas well byproduct: water James and Pam Lang started building a new home near La Veta this year and watched water produced by nearby gas wells turn their trickling creek into a small river. "The flow is growing heavier and heavier," said Pam Lang. The Langs live in Denver and plan to retire to their new home below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. "I'm concerned about the waste of water. There's no attempt to conserve it or use it," said Pam Lang. The unnamed creek flows into the Cucharas River. That's the worry across Colorado, where years of severe drought fostered a strong conservation ethic and the state's oil and gas wells pump up millions of gallons of water a day. Most of that water isn't used, but energy companies, state officials and potential users are looking at ways to turn that wasted water into a new water resource....
Aldo Leopold Foundation Logging Trees Planted by Leopold Himself Five-hundred pine trees planted by Aldo Leopold and his family in the 1930's are being cut down, but don't worry, every part of the tree will be put to good use. Steve Swenson is an ecologist with the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He says this logging is the same kind of land stewardship Leopold wrote about in A Sand County Almanac. "The ones we're taking out are the ones you might call the sub–dominant trees or the ones that are under that upper most canopy." Swenson says this 10 acre forest needs to be thinned to provide the healthier trees more room to grow. "We felt that the trees around it would benefit if this one was removed." But the exciting thing for Swenson is how the fallen trees will be used. "We'll make that into a timber, like an 8X8 or a 4x10 or something, but it's going to hold up the building down there."....
No federal protection for landlocked trout Rainbow trout landlocked above the Calaveras and San Antonio dams near Sunol Regional Wilderness remain without special federal protection. Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service reversed its previous plan to extend the same protections to those so-called "resident" rainbow trout that now exist for their wild downstream cousins -- the Central California Coast steelhead trout. Steelhead, which migrate to the ocean to mature and return to fresh water to spawn, have been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act since 1997. The Alameda Creek Alliance, which for years has been trying to restore a steelhead run along the full stretch of creek and its tributaries, said continuing to treat steelhead and landlocked resident trout as two distinct populations is "arbitrary" given their genetic links....
L.A. Times prints quote from fake release A quote in a fake news release that was intended as an April Fool's joke ended up in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times. The story in Tuesday's editions of the Times noted how successful the reintroduction of wolves had been 10 years ago, but said the predators remained controversial. "In Wyoming, for example, Gov. Dave Freudenthal last April decreed that the Endangered Species Act is no longer in force and that the state 'now considers the wolf as a federal dog,' unworthy of protection," the story read. The Times printed a correction Wednesday, acknowledging that the news release was a hoax....
Carbon takes aim at Nine Mile Canyon plan Carbon County officials are vowing to go to "whatever lengths necessary" to prevent what they view as a too-big designation to protect the archaeological resources of Nine Mile Canyon. An Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation for 60,539 acres in the canyon is to be part of a resource management plan issued by the Bureau of Land Management, county officials say. The BLM hasn't released the plan's final version, adds a county commissioner, but local officials have been shown proposed contents. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition supports ACEC designation for the canyon, which is world famous for its archaeological resources. The group seeks to protect the abundant examples of rock art and other evidence of the past. But Michael S. Milovich, a Carbon County commissioner, responded, "I don't know why they need to do the whole canyon."....
U.S. nears OK of Yucca rail The Energy Department moved a step closer Wednesday to getting the public land it needs to build a railroad that would take nuclear waste across Nevada to Yucca Mountain, illustrating why Utah lawmakers wanted Congress to approve the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area so badly. The Bureau of Land Management withdrew about 308,600 acres of land in the state from sale, surface entry or mining claims for 10 years, according to a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register. This will allow the Energy Department to study a mile-wide corridor to decide where it can build a rail line to the proposed federal nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The bureau would still need to grant the department a right-of-way to actually construct a railroad, but Wednesday's announcement allows the department to prepare an environmental impact statement studying how building a railroad would affect the land there. Grazing permits, public access and other current uses of the land would not be affected but no new permits will be allowed....
BLM to enforce Glamis curfew With the approaching New Year's weekend, the federal agency that manages the desert's most popular off-roading area says it will maintain a "zero tolerance" policy on irresponsible behavior and serious offenses. Officials with the U.S Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday they will be out in force at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, also known as Glamis, where thousands of riders are expected to descend on the wind-whipped sand hills for the holiday weekend. "We will have a greater focus on safety and safety compliance this weekend as we encourage our visitors to recreate in a safe and responsible manner," said Vicki Wood, a top BLM manager. The BLM will close an area known as Competition Hill 30 minutes before sunset. It has become known as a rowdy area where mostly younger riders congregate after dark....
Mining company, tribes, state work to preserve artifacts The Three Affiliated Tribes, the Coteau Properties mining company and the State Historical Preservation Office have worked out a plan to preserve American Indian artifacts in a mining area near here. The federal Bureau of Land Management has signed off on the plan, which would affect cultural sites and stone features in a 5,300-acre area northwest of Beulah. A North Dakota Indian Culture Education Trust will be administered by the State Land Department. The land and stone features will be set aside, and Coteau will donate $400,000 for education. If the acres are eventually leased for grazing, that money will go into the trust. Coteau plans to start mining in the area in 2007. The 5,300 acres, part of a 17,000-acre mining permit area, are underlain with coal owned by the federal government. Coteau is expected to be the only bidder for some 89 million tons of the federal coal....
BLM begins review of split-estate issues around the Rockies With natural gas drilling rates at or near record highs in the Rockies, a federal agency is seeking comments on how it manages energy development when the minerals are publicly held and the ground above is privately owned. The energy bill passed in July directs the Bureau of Land Management to review drilling on land with split ownership, where one party owns the minerals and another owns the surface. The agency is focusing on cases where the minerals are publicly held and the land is private. Elected officials, landowners and energy companies have wrangled over so-called "split estate" issues from Montana to New Mexico. State and federal agencies encourage companies that own or lease minerals to negotiate the placement of wells, access to the property and possible compensation. Mineral rights, however, trump surface rights. State and federal laws give mineral rights owners reasonable use of the surface to extract the oil and gas. Companies can post bonds and drill without an agreement with the landowner. "I applaud the BLM for at least asking for public comment," said Peter Shelton, who owns land in Montrose County 300 miles west of Denver. His suggestions include notifying people when the minerals under their property are up for auction and requiring that companies have agreements with landowners before drilling can start....
Rewriting the Rules The Department of Interior is taking a red pen to documents that lay down the mission of the National Park Service, and the results may be felt for years to come. The Park Service’s management policies guide the daily decisions of superintendents as they pursue the goal of guaranteeing the preservation of parks for the future while providing for the enjoyment of park resources. Although some might consider the process a tedious clarification of bureaucratic policies, it’s a meaningful exercise that will have dramatic effects on the way we experience our national parks. The troubles began in August, when Paul Hoffman, an Interior political appointee, sought to rework the Park Service’s management policies, which he characterized as outdated....
Award-Winning Film 'Grizzly Man' To Debut on Discovery Channel The critically acclaimed film Grizzly Man, documenting Timothy Treadwell’s obsession with the Grizzly Bear, will make its television debut on Friday, Feb. 3, at 8 pm on Discovery Channel. ‘Diary of the Grizzly Man,’ which follows at 10:30 pm, is a never-before-seen 30-minute film that delves deeper into the mind and madness of Timothy Treadwell and addresses controversies such as claims of fictitious interviews in ‘Grizzly Man.’ Named best movie of the year by TIME Magazine’s Richard Schickel, and heralded by Roger Ebert as “brilliant,” ‘Grizzly Man’ also received the Sundance Film Festival’s prestigious Alfred P. Sloane Feature Film Award and the Best Feature Documentary award at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival. ‘Grizzly Man’ has also been selected Best Documentary of 2005 by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, honored by all major critics associations, and nominated for numerous awards. Respected director Werner Herzog’s film ‘Grizzly Man’ paints a complex portrait of Treadwell, a tireless and passionate advocate for grizzly bears who died in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve in 2003 after being mauled and devoured by a grizzly along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard....
Environmental Critics Get EPA Grants The same environmental groups that lobby and sue the government over protecting air, water and human health also are collecting federal grant money for research and technical work, documents show. More than 2,200 nonprofit groups have received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency over the past decade, including some of the Bush administration's toughest critics on environmental policy. "It may be confusing to the public that with the right hand we're accepting government money and with the left hand sometimes we're beating up the government," said Charles Miller, communications director for Environmental Defense. The group has received more than $1.8 million from the EPA since 1995. One recipient, the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently was cited by auditors for failing to properly document more than one-third of the $3.3 million it received in three EPA grants....
Dog Chases Sheep, Herd Killed On Train Tracks More than 130 sheep were hit by a train in Spanish Fork. The sheep's owners have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and 20 years of hard work raising the herd. The sheep were killed the week before Christmas near Interstate 15. The owner of the herd said the sheep were corralled onto the tracks by a neighbor's dog, and literally plowed down by a Union Pacific train. Traveling in excess of 60 miles-an-hour, the sheep were no match for a the train. “That's carnage like I’ve not seen before,” said sheep owner Jim Jensen. “Some of them are just killed and laying there and others are just in pieces.” The herd of 140 Suffolk and Hampshire sheep was chased through an electric fence and onto the tracks by a neighbor's dog. The dog killed a few of them, but the train ran over nearly all of the others. “We have sheep scattered about 800 yards down the tracks,” said Jim Jensen....
Downside of cleaner air: more warming New measurements of tiny particles in Earth's atmosphere contain a sobering message: All those hard-won efforts to cut air pollution may unwittingly accelerate global warming. The result: The planet is likely to warm more and faster than current projections suggest, according to a team of British and American scientists. The group has produced the most precise estimates yet of how tiny particles, known as aerosols, could affect the world's climate. Aerosols, which include pollutants, have a cooling effect on the atmosphere, and the team's work suggests that the cooling effect is strong - nearly as strong as the top estimates of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus, the dwindling presence of aerosols means that global average temperatures could rise faster than previously estimated and reach toward the high end of projections for the end of the century....
The Jaguar Man Wild jaguars in the U.S.? What sounds implausible was proven true in 1996 when two male jaguars were photographed, first in southern New Mexico and then in Arizona. Until that time, experts had concluded that our hemisphere’s biggest cat—seldom seen north of the Mexico border since European settlement—had disappeared forever from the U.S. “It was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen,” says Warner Glenn, a big-game hunter whose hounds brought a large jaguar to bay during a late-winter mountain lion hunt. Glenn took a series of remarkable photos. “I felt tremendously lucky,” said the rancher, who wrote a book about his experience. Six months after Glenn’s sighting, members of a party led by Jack Childs treed a jaguar in the Baboquivari Mountains near Tucson. Childs caught the cat on videotape as it settled into an aerie of juniper branches. “I considered it a once-in-a-lifetime event,” says the retired surveyor. Since then, motion-triggered hidden cameras in southern Arizona have clicked off 16 pictures of the endangered cats, including two that appear to be the first resident U.S. jaguars in decades. “What Jack and Warner have documented is amazing,” says Mexican wildlife biologist Octavio Rosas. “But this species will not survive long north of the border without effective protection in Mexico.” Rosas, now completing his Ph.D. degree at New Mexico State University, was spurred into action by the sightings made by Glenn and Childs. “I’d been working with wildlife in Sonora, the Mexican state immediately south of Arizona, so I knew that a small breeding population existed there and was probably the source of the cats seen sporadically in the U.S.,” he says. Rosas soon put together a unique project that tied local conservation and field research to economic development....
Wildlife officials mull graylng plan State and federal officials are proposing a new plan they say would help the last population of fluvial grayling in the lower 48 states expand its numbers. The goal is to get ranchers to leave more water in the Big Hole River in southwest Montana and to use the water they do extract more efficiently. Fluvial, or river dwelling, grayling live in about 80 miles of the upper stretch of that river -- their last refuge in the contiguous United States -- and their numbers have been declining for decades. Environmental groups have been pushing for the grayling to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, an idea that rankles most ranchers in the Big Hole, a beautiful and sparsely settled valley where the economy is based around cattle and irrigation....
Oil, gas well byproduct: water James and Pam Lang started building a new home near La Veta this year and watched water produced by nearby gas wells turn their trickling creek into a small river. "The flow is growing heavier and heavier," said Pam Lang. The Langs live in Denver and plan to retire to their new home below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. "I'm concerned about the waste of water. There's no attempt to conserve it or use it," said Pam Lang. The unnamed creek flows into the Cucharas River. That's the worry across Colorado, where years of severe drought fostered a strong conservation ethic and the state's oil and gas wells pump up millions of gallons of water a day. Most of that water isn't used, but energy companies, state officials and potential users are looking at ways to turn that wasted water into a new water resource....
Aldo Leopold Foundation Logging Trees Planted by Leopold Himself Five-hundred pine trees planted by Aldo Leopold and his family in the 1930's are being cut down, but don't worry, every part of the tree will be put to good use. Steve Swenson is an ecologist with the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He says this logging is the same kind of land stewardship Leopold wrote about in A Sand County Almanac. "The ones we're taking out are the ones you might call the sub–dominant trees or the ones that are under that upper most canopy." Swenson says this 10 acre forest needs to be thinned to provide the healthier trees more room to grow. "We felt that the trees around it would benefit if this one was removed." But the exciting thing for Swenson is how the fallen trees will be used. "We'll make that into a timber, like an 8X8 or a 4x10 or something, but it's going to hold up the building down there."....
No federal protection for landlocked trout Rainbow trout landlocked above the Calaveras and San Antonio dams near Sunol Regional Wilderness remain without special federal protection. Last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service reversed its previous plan to extend the same protections to those so-called "resident" rainbow trout that now exist for their wild downstream cousins -- the Central California Coast steelhead trout. Steelhead, which migrate to the ocean to mature and return to fresh water to spawn, have been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act since 1997. The Alameda Creek Alliance, which for years has been trying to restore a steelhead run along the full stretch of creek and its tributaries, said continuing to treat steelhead and landlocked resident trout as two distinct populations is "arbitrary" given their genetic links....
L.A. Times prints quote from fake release A quote in a fake news release that was intended as an April Fool's joke ended up in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times. The story in Tuesday's editions of the Times noted how successful the reintroduction of wolves had been 10 years ago, but said the predators remained controversial. "In Wyoming, for example, Gov. Dave Freudenthal last April decreed that the Endangered Species Act is no longer in force and that the state 'now considers the wolf as a federal dog,' unworthy of protection," the story read. The Times printed a correction Wednesday, acknowledging that the news release was a hoax....
Carbon takes aim at Nine Mile Canyon plan Carbon County officials are vowing to go to "whatever lengths necessary" to prevent what they view as a too-big designation to protect the archaeological resources of Nine Mile Canyon. An Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation for 60,539 acres in the canyon is to be part of a resource management plan issued by the Bureau of Land Management, county officials say. The BLM hasn't released the plan's final version, adds a county commissioner, but local officials have been shown proposed contents. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition supports ACEC designation for the canyon, which is world famous for its archaeological resources. The group seeks to protect the abundant examples of rock art and other evidence of the past. But Michael S. Milovich, a Carbon County commissioner, responded, "I don't know why they need to do the whole canyon."....
U.S. nears OK of Yucca rail The Energy Department moved a step closer Wednesday to getting the public land it needs to build a railroad that would take nuclear waste across Nevada to Yucca Mountain, illustrating why Utah lawmakers wanted Congress to approve the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area so badly. The Bureau of Land Management withdrew about 308,600 acres of land in the state from sale, surface entry or mining claims for 10 years, according to a notice in Wednesday's Federal Register. This will allow the Energy Department to study a mile-wide corridor to decide where it can build a rail line to the proposed federal nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The bureau would still need to grant the department a right-of-way to actually construct a railroad, but Wednesday's announcement allows the department to prepare an environmental impact statement studying how building a railroad would affect the land there. Grazing permits, public access and other current uses of the land would not be affected but no new permits will be allowed....
BLM to enforce Glamis curfew With the approaching New Year's weekend, the federal agency that manages the desert's most popular off-roading area says it will maintain a "zero tolerance" policy on irresponsible behavior and serious offenses. Officials with the U.S Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday they will be out in force at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, also known as Glamis, where thousands of riders are expected to descend on the wind-whipped sand hills for the holiday weekend. "We will have a greater focus on safety and safety compliance this weekend as we encourage our visitors to recreate in a safe and responsible manner," said Vicki Wood, a top BLM manager. The BLM will close an area known as Competition Hill 30 minutes before sunset. It has become known as a rowdy area where mostly younger riders congregate after dark....
Mining company, tribes, state work to preserve artifacts The Three Affiliated Tribes, the Coteau Properties mining company and the State Historical Preservation Office have worked out a plan to preserve American Indian artifacts in a mining area near here. The federal Bureau of Land Management has signed off on the plan, which would affect cultural sites and stone features in a 5,300-acre area northwest of Beulah. A North Dakota Indian Culture Education Trust will be administered by the State Land Department. The land and stone features will be set aside, and Coteau will donate $400,000 for education. If the acres are eventually leased for grazing, that money will go into the trust. Coteau plans to start mining in the area in 2007. The 5,300 acres, part of a 17,000-acre mining permit area, are underlain with coal owned by the federal government. Coteau is expected to be the only bidder for some 89 million tons of the federal coal....
BLM begins review of split-estate issues around the Rockies With natural gas drilling rates at or near record highs in the Rockies, a federal agency is seeking comments on how it manages energy development when the minerals are publicly held and the ground above is privately owned. The energy bill passed in July directs the Bureau of Land Management to review drilling on land with split ownership, where one party owns the minerals and another owns the surface. The agency is focusing on cases where the minerals are publicly held and the land is private. Elected officials, landowners and energy companies have wrangled over so-called "split estate" issues from Montana to New Mexico. State and federal agencies encourage companies that own or lease minerals to negotiate the placement of wells, access to the property and possible compensation. Mineral rights, however, trump surface rights. State and federal laws give mineral rights owners reasonable use of the surface to extract the oil and gas. Companies can post bonds and drill without an agreement with the landowner. "I applaud the BLM for at least asking for public comment," said Peter Shelton, who owns land in Montrose County 300 miles west of Denver. His suggestions include notifying people when the minerals under their property are up for auction and requiring that companies have agreements with landowners before drilling can start....
Rewriting the Rules The Department of Interior is taking a red pen to documents that lay down the mission of the National Park Service, and the results may be felt for years to come. The Park Service’s management policies guide the daily decisions of superintendents as they pursue the goal of guaranteeing the preservation of parks for the future while providing for the enjoyment of park resources. Although some might consider the process a tedious clarification of bureaucratic policies, it’s a meaningful exercise that will have dramatic effects on the way we experience our national parks. The troubles began in August, when Paul Hoffman, an Interior political appointee, sought to rework the Park Service’s management policies, which he characterized as outdated....
Award-Winning Film 'Grizzly Man' To Debut on Discovery Channel The critically acclaimed film Grizzly Man, documenting Timothy Treadwell’s obsession with the Grizzly Bear, will make its television debut on Friday, Feb. 3, at 8 pm on Discovery Channel. ‘Diary of the Grizzly Man,’ which follows at 10:30 pm, is a never-before-seen 30-minute film that delves deeper into the mind and madness of Timothy Treadwell and addresses controversies such as claims of fictitious interviews in ‘Grizzly Man.’ Named best movie of the year by TIME Magazine’s Richard Schickel, and heralded by Roger Ebert as “brilliant,” ‘Grizzly Man’ also received the Sundance Film Festival’s prestigious Alfred P. Sloane Feature Film Award and the Best Feature Documentary award at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival. ‘Grizzly Man’ has also been selected Best Documentary of 2005 by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, honored by all major critics associations, and nominated for numerous awards. Respected director Werner Herzog’s film ‘Grizzly Man’ paints a complex portrait of Treadwell, a tireless and passionate advocate for grizzly bears who died in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve in 2003 after being mauled and devoured by a grizzly along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard....
Environmental Critics Get EPA Grants The same environmental groups that lobby and sue the government over protecting air, water and human health also are collecting federal grant money for research and technical work, documents show. More than 2,200 nonprofit groups have received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency over the past decade, including some of the Bush administration's toughest critics on environmental policy. "It may be confusing to the public that with the right hand we're accepting government money and with the left hand sometimes we're beating up the government," said Charles Miller, communications director for Environmental Defense. The group has received more than $1.8 million from the EPA since 1995. One recipient, the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently was cited by auditors for failing to properly document more than one-third of the $3.3 million it received in three EPA grants....
Dog Chases Sheep, Herd Killed On Train Tracks More than 130 sheep were hit by a train in Spanish Fork. The sheep's owners have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and 20 years of hard work raising the herd. The sheep were killed the week before Christmas near Interstate 15. The owner of the herd said the sheep were corralled onto the tracks by a neighbor's dog, and literally plowed down by a Union Pacific train. Traveling in excess of 60 miles-an-hour, the sheep were no match for a the train. “That's carnage like I’ve not seen before,” said sheep owner Jim Jensen. “Some of them are just killed and laying there and others are just in pieces.” The herd of 140 Suffolk and Hampshire sheep was chased through an electric fence and onto the tracks by a neighbor's dog. The dog killed a few of them, but the train ran over nearly all of the others. “We have sheep scattered about 800 yards down the tracks,” said Jim Jensen....
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
NEWS ROUNDUP
Bugs get buffet In a stand of trees near a small subdivision outside Big Spring, beetles from the Greek island of Crete have been released with the hopes they'll eat away at a growing menace to the state's water supply. Salt cedar trees, a non-native plant imported from Asia in the 1800s, are considered one of the biggest environmental threats in the western half of the United States. They thrive wherever water is present, sucking thousands of gallons out of rivers and streams. "This is a truly evil plant. It pushes out non-native plants, increases salinity, and a mature tree is believed to consume as much as 200 gallons a day," said Okla Thornton, manager of natural resources for the Colorado River Municipal Water District in Big Spring. The water district provides drinking water for 27 counties, including the cities of Midland and Odessa, San Angelo and Abilene....
Wolves Thrive but Animosity Keeps Pace Of all the recent reintroductions of native animals, none has provoked as much opposition as the wolf. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released 66 radio-collared wolves into central Idaho and Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996. Some wolves were immediately killed by hunters opposed to reintroduction, but most flourished, coming together in the wild to form new and surprisingly resilient packs. The animals are now scattered across parts of Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, a region where earlier this century the much-reviled predator was hunted for bounty and ranchers tacked wolf skins and skulls to their fences. But now, as the Fish and Wildlife Service ponders a delisting plan that would turn over management of the wolves to the states, federal officials are balking at plans they fear would allow hunters to exterminate whole packs....
Magnetic pole drift could shift northern lights Glaciers receding, ice pack thinning _ can the image of the Far North hold out for much longer? Now Alaska may be losing its northern lights. No joke. Scientists at a recent convention in San Francisco warned that the aurora may move to Siberia over the next 50 years because Earth's magnetic north pole is drifting that way. And doing it mighty fast, as these things go. Sayonara, aurora. But don't blame this on global warming. The cause lies in the Earth's molten core of nickel and iron, which acts like a giant bar magnet, said Neal Brown, director of the Alaska Space Grant Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a retired geophysics professor. The magnet lines up roughly north-south and produces Earth's protective magnetic field as well as the polarity that helps birds, fish and compass-bearing humans navigate the globe....
Mexican wolf to remain on list There was good news and bad news as far as the Greenlee County Board of Supervisors was concerned. Chairman Hector Ruedas announced at the Dec. 20 board meeting that the five-year review of the Mexican gray wolf introduction program is almost completed. He said that was fine with him, although the program has been in existence for seven years and it has taken that long to perform a five-year review. Ruedas, who sits on a wolf program oversight committee, said, “Thank God it's over. There were thousands of hours spent on this review.” The bad news? That was delivered by County Admi-nistrator Kay Gale, who said the wolves are not being removed from the Endan-gered Species list as was hoped. Instead, the Mexican wolf, which now inhabits part of Greenlee, will be considered endangered in 47 of the 48 contiguous states until all gray wolves are no longer considered endangered in those 47 states. Only Minnesota has succeeded in having gray wolves reclassified from endangered to threatened....
Third plan may be charm for aiding minnows In their third try in two decades, federal officials are proposing to formally list more than 630 miles of Southwestern rivers as prime living grounds for two imperiled species of minnows. The areas include a host of Arizona and New Mexico rivers and streams, including portions of the Gila, San Francisco, Verde, Blue and Lower San Pedro rivers. But the proposed critical habitat designations for the spikedace and loach minnow contains a crucial omission that is good news for Sierra Vista in its 20-year struggle over the fate of the San Pedro River. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opted to leave out of the proposal the Upper San Pedro, including the 40-mile-long San Pedro Riparian National Conservation area. That stretch of river was in an earlier version of the prime habitat that the service has since discarded for legal reasons....
BLM plan to use herbicides in 17 western states draws fire A Bureau of Land Management proposal to apply herbicides to nearly 1 million acres in 17 Western states, including North Dakota, is drawing fire from environmentalists and organic food producers. Verlin Smith, BLM branch chief for renewable resources in Utah, said the weed killer is needed to combat the rise of cheat grass, tamarisk, Russian olive and other invasive species, which he says are strangling rangelands and wildlife habitat and sucking up precious water resources. "It changes the whole fire cycle. Normally, fire in a vegetative ecosystem occurs every so-many years. But with cheat grass and other invasive plants, that time frame shortens considerably. It perpetuates the cheat grass and almost wipes out the possibility that the native species will be able to re-emerge and reclaim the site," he said. "This is an effort to reclaim some of these lands from invasives. Herbicides are one of the tools we have at our disposal," he said....
National parks seek ways to raise funds Put an X in a tax-return box and send more money to Yosemite and other national parks. Or lobby Congress and boost general park funding at the expense of some other programs. Possibilities, and the political choices, are proliferating for national park supporters. With the park service's deferred maintenance backlog exceeding $4.5 billion, by some estimates, the need to help is obvious. Donors already are being tapped to augment the park service's $1.6 billion annual budget. Boosted by contributions from the likes of Bank of America, the private Yosemite Fund reports receiving more than $23 million for the park since 1988. These donors could be recognized more explicitly under a park service proposal. It won't mean corporate logos inside national parks, except for use on brochures and written material, but could result in plaques, benches or embedded stones noting the donors....
Ranch Rodeo The other day I took a moment to sit back and relax. Flipping through the TV channels, I spotted a rodeo. All kinds of cowboys in their fancy Stetsons and purple chaps were strutting their stuff. They were riding bad horses and making it look easy. It got me thinking about how long these boys could hold up in a real rodeo? There's no doubt that these guys are tough, but are they ranch savvy? Sure, the horses bucked hard and the bulls were mean, but it was a pretty nice environment in that arena. There was no wind, no rain and they weren't wearing rubber knee-high boots and slickers. Also, they only had to concentrate on one critter at a time, and as most ranchers will tell you, it isn't the critter you're concentrating on that gets you. It's the one that sneaks up from behind that takes a chunk out of your hide. So, I decided to come up with my own rodeo, one that's a little closer to everyday ranch life. My rodeo takes place in May, when the muck (not mud, muck) is up to a person's knees. Most guys are about done calving, except for a few late ones, so there's a lot to do. I came up with a handful of events that's sure to test the mettle of most any cowboy....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Without faith, why have Christmas? It's Christmastime, when we celebrate the birth of Christ. Surveys show that more than 80 percent of us in the United States believe in God. That's more people than have lawyers, drive foreign cars, believe DNA is absolute proof of a criminal act, own a home, have been divorced, or watch "Oprah." How can such a high percentage of a highly educated, well-read, technologically and scientifically knowledgeable people believe in an omnipotent being? Where inside of us is the biological process that allows faith to exist? Not just to exist but to flourish....
Bugs get buffet In a stand of trees near a small subdivision outside Big Spring, beetles from the Greek island of Crete have been released with the hopes they'll eat away at a growing menace to the state's water supply. Salt cedar trees, a non-native plant imported from Asia in the 1800s, are considered one of the biggest environmental threats in the western half of the United States. They thrive wherever water is present, sucking thousands of gallons out of rivers and streams. "This is a truly evil plant. It pushes out non-native plants, increases salinity, and a mature tree is believed to consume as much as 200 gallons a day," said Okla Thornton, manager of natural resources for the Colorado River Municipal Water District in Big Spring. The water district provides drinking water for 27 counties, including the cities of Midland and Odessa, San Angelo and Abilene....
Wolves Thrive but Animosity Keeps Pace Of all the recent reintroductions of native animals, none has provoked as much opposition as the wolf. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released 66 radio-collared wolves into central Idaho and Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996. Some wolves were immediately killed by hunters opposed to reintroduction, but most flourished, coming together in the wild to form new and surprisingly resilient packs. The animals are now scattered across parts of Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, a region where earlier this century the much-reviled predator was hunted for bounty and ranchers tacked wolf skins and skulls to their fences. But now, as the Fish and Wildlife Service ponders a delisting plan that would turn over management of the wolves to the states, federal officials are balking at plans they fear would allow hunters to exterminate whole packs....
Magnetic pole drift could shift northern lights Glaciers receding, ice pack thinning _ can the image of the Far North hold out for much longer? Now Alaska may be losing its northern lights. No joke. Scientists at a recent convention in San Francisco warned that the aurora may move to Siberia over the next 50 years because Earth's magnetic north pole is drifting that way. And doing it mighty fast, as these things go. Sayonara, aurora. But don't blame this on global warming. The cause lies in the Earth's molten core of nickel and iron, which acts like a giant bar magnet, said Neal Brown, director of the Alaska Space Grant Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a retired geophysics professor. The magnet lines up roughly north-south and produces Earth's protective magnetic field as well as the polarity that helps birds, fish and compass-bearing humans navigate the globe....
Mexican wolf to remain on list There was good news and bad news as far as the Greenlee County Board of Supervisors was concerned. Chairman Hector Ruedas announced at the Dec. 20 board meeting that the five-year review of the Mexican gray wolf introduction program is almost completed. He said that was fine with him, although the program has been in existence for seven years and it has taken that long to perform a five-year review. Ruedas, who sits on a wolf program oversight committee, said, “Thank God it's over. There were thousands of hours spent on this review.” The bad news? That was delivered by County Admi-nistrator Kay Gale, who said the wolves are not being removed from the Endan-gered Species list as was hoped. Instead, the Mexican wolf, which now inhabits part of Greenlee, will be considered endangered in 47 of the 48 contiguous states until all gray wolves are no longer considered endangered in those 47 states. Only Minnesota has succeeded in having gray wolves reclassified from endangered to threatened....
Third plan may be charm for aiding minnows In their third try in two decades, federal officials are proposing to formally list more than 630 miles of Southwestern rivers as prime living grounds for two imperiled species of minnows. The areas include a host of Arizona and New Mexico rivers and streams, including portions of the Gila, San Francisco, Verde, Blue and Lower San Pedro rivers. But the proposed critical habitat designations for the spikedace and loach minnow contains a crucial omission that is good news for Sierra Vista in its 20-year struggle over the fate of the San Pedro River. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opted to leave out of the proposal the Upper San Pedro, including the 40-mile-long San Pedro Riparian National Conservation area. That stretch of river was in an earlier version of the prime habitat that the service has since discarded for legal reasons....
BLM plan to use herbicides in 17 western states draws fire A Bureau of Land Management proposal to apply herbicides to nearly 1 million acres in 17 Western states, including North Dakota, is drawing fire from environmentalists and organic food producers. Verlin Smith, BLM branch chief for renewable resources in Utah, said the weed killer is needed to combat the rise of cheat grass, tamarisk, Russian olive and other invasive species, which he says are strangling rangelands and wildlife habitat and sucking up precious water resources. "It changes the whole fire cycle. Normally, fire in a vegetative ecosystem occurs every so-many years. But with cheat grass and other invasive plants, that time frame shortens considerably. It perpetuates the cheat grass and almost wipes out the possibility that the native species will be able to re-emerge and reclaim the site," he said. "This is an effort to reclaim some of these lands from invasives. Herbicides are one of the tools we have at our disposal," he said....
National parks seek ways to raise funds Put an X in a tax-return box and send more money to Yosemite and other national parks. Or lobby Congress and boost general park funding at the expense of some other programs. Possibilities, and the political choices, are proliferating for national park supporters. With the park service's deferred maintenance backlog exceeding $4.5 billion, by some estimates, the need to help is obvious. Donors already are being tapped to augment the park service's $1.6 billion annual budget. Boosted by contributions from the likes of Bank of America, the private Yosemite Fund reports receiving more than $23 million for the park since 1988. These donors could be recognized more explicitly under a park service proposal. It won't mean corporate logos inside national parks, except for use on brochures and written material, but could result in plaques, benches or embedded stones noting the donors....
Ranch Rodeo The other day I took a moment to sit back and relax. Flipping through the TV channels, I spotted a rodeo. All kinds of cowboys in their fancy Stetsons and purple chaps were strutting their stuff. They were riding bad horses and making it look easy. It got me thinking about how long these boys could hold up in a real rodeo? There's no doubt that these guys are tough, but are they ranch savvy? Sure, the horses bucked hard and the bulls were mean, but it was a pretty nice environment in that arena. There was no wind, no rain and they weren't wearing rubber knee-high boots and slickers. Also, they only had to concentrate on one critter at a time, and as most ranchers will tell you, it isn't the critter you're concentrating on that gets you. It's the one that sneaks up from behind that takes a chunk out of your hide. So, I decided to come up with my own rodeo, one that's a little closer to everyday ranch life. My rodeo takes place in May, when the muck (not mud, muck) is up to a person's knees. Most guys are about done calving, except for a few late ones, so there's a lot to do. I came up with a handful of events that's sure to test the mettle of most any cowboy....
On the Edge of Common Sense: Without faith, why have Christmas? It's Christmastime, when we celebrate the birth of Christ. Surveys show that more than 80 percent of us in the United States believe in God. That's more people than have lawyers, drive foreign cars, believe DNA is absolute proof of a criminal act, own a home, have been divorced, or watch "Oprah." How can such a high percentage of a highly educated, well-read, technologically and scientifically knowledgeable people believe in an omnipotent being? Where inside of us is the biological process that allows faith to exist? Not just to exist but to flourish....
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
FLE
Federal agents' visit was a hoax
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story. The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account. Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false. But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details. The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student's uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter. But when Dr. Williams went to the student's home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried....
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret. Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations. But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world....
Some fear eavesdropping could undermine work of spy agency
The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by U.S. citizens without a warrant violated longstanding practices and could undermine a key U.S. intelligence agency that's critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week. The super-secret National Security Agency, which eavesdropped on the Soviet Union's leaders and scored other intelligence coups during the Cold War, has spent three decades recovering from domestic spying scandals in the 1970s. Now, with its electronic ears and vast computer banks turned primarily to intercepting suspecting terrorists, the officials said they fear that the NSA once again will bear the brunt of congressional scrutiny and public outrage, complicating its mission. "The damage it's done to NSA's reputation is almost irreversible in my view," said a longtime top intelligence official with intimate knowledge of the agency's workings. Those concerns are part of a broader backlash in the intelligence community against some of the Bush administration's tactics in the war on terror....
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said. As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said. The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter. "There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."....
Powell supports government eavesdropping
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants. Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation. But he added, "My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it."....
Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying
Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries to glean data on possible terrorists. "As far as Congressional investigations are concerned," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, "these new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans." Members of the Judiciary Committee have already indicated that they intend to conduct oversight hearings into the president's legal authority to order domestic eavesdropping on terrorist suspects without a warrant. But Congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably seek to expand the review to include the disclosure that the security agency, using its access to giant phone "switches," had also traced and analyzed phone and Internet traffic in much larger volumes than what the Bush administration had acknowledged. "We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," said a Republican Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because no decisions had been made on how hearings might be structured....
Power We Didn't Grant
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance. On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused....
Eavesdropping: Back to the Future
President Bush’s do-it-yourself eavesdropping notwithstanding, the Pentagon could soon have legal authority to “covertly” gather intelligence on American citizens in the United States – a power taken from them because of excesses during the Vietnam War. The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting in closed session, last month quietly approved a request from the Department of Defense (DOD) to allow it to conduct surveillance operations within American Muslim communities. The DOD said the cooperation of these communities could help fight insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We believe there are people in the United States who have information of value to us," said Jim Schmidli, deputy general counsel for operations at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "That information is within different ethnic communities in this country -- recent additions to our population from distressed areas of the world, primarily the Middle East." But civil liberties groups and leaders of the Muslim community say the Pentagon is using the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to resume the domestic spying powers that Congress banned after those powers were used to spy on Americans during the Vietnam era....
The Curious Section 126 of the Patriot Act
What is it that the National Security Agency began doing after 9/11 that necessitated Presidential authorization for warantless surveillance? We have all learned in the past week that the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978 contains provisions that allow the government to conduct quick reaction surveillance of an individual and go to the court afterwards for a warrant. So what would the NSA need to do that isn't covered by the provisions of FISA? My guess is the government decided after 9/11 to monitor everyone. Thanks JMC for pointing out that the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act Of 2005 contains a Section 126, inserted by the House, requiring the Attorney General to submit a report to Congress "on any initiative of the Department of Justice that uses or is intended to develop pattern-based data-mining technology." Congress is seeking assurances that "the privacy and due process rights of individuals" is protected in the course of the government using massive databases of non-publicly available data; both proprietary databases and its own compiled intelligence and law enforcement databases to "search" for terrorists and terrorist connections....
Padilla Put-Down
The Bush Administration is sometimes its own worst enemy when it comes to fighting for the tools it needs in the war on terror. In that category we'd put the President's failure to defend the need for aggressive interrogation of foreign terror detainees, culminating in his recent cave-in on Senator John McCain's "torture" amendment. Signing up for a six-month extension of the Patriot Act, rather than sticking by his demands for long-term renewal, could turn out to be another. Last month's decision to abandon the enemy-combatant case against Jose Padilla in the U.S. Supreme Court is a third example. Fortunately, in the Padilla case, an appeals court is now forcing the Administration to show the courage of its own convictions. In an extraordinary ruling issued Wednesday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, rejected the Department of Justice's request to vacate its earlier ruling, which said that the President "unquestionably" has the right to detain U.S. citizens who happen to be enemy combatants--a right the Administration has said repeatedly is indispensable to fighting this war. It also rejected the Administration's request to transfer Padilla from military to civilian custody so that he could answer criminal charges brought last month in a federal court in Miami. The case now continues its course to the Supreme Court, which can either hear the case (as expected) or let the Fourth Circuit's ruling stand. This week's Fourth Circuit opinion is scathing, and a Washington attorney of our acquaintance says, "I have never seen that kind of language addressed to the government." Writing for the court, Judge Michael Luttig says that the Administration's actions leave the impression that Padilla has been held "by mistake" and give the "appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court." This case "presents an issue of such especial national importance as to warrant final consideration by" the High Court. We'd agree that there is a vital constitutional principle at stake here, and we hope the Supreme Court takes it--despite the government's apparent ambiguity about the case. Over the past three and a half years, Padilla has become a liberal icon--an "innocent" man who has been held "illegally." The public debate has been largely about one man's rights and not about the right of the rest of us to be protected from enemy attack....
Some Border Patrol Agents Take a Chance on Love
The forbidden romance between the Border Patrol agent and the illegal immigrant began in a gym. Maria Terrazas, 31, met Jose Ruiz three years ago at LM's Body Builders in this remote border town. Terrazas, a waitress and mother of two, knew Ruiz was a catch. As a Border Patrol agent, Ruiz belonged to an elite class in town: available men with good jobs and an education. The two began dating, and their relationship continued even after Terrazas was deported to Mexico in November 2004. She quickly bluffed her way through U.S. customs and back to Ruiz. Terrazas, who said several of her illegal immigrant girlfriends have relationships with border agents, saw nothing unusual about dating a man whose job was to keep people like her out of the U.S. "He had his own job and I had mine," Terrazas said in an interview. "I never thought it'd cause problems." But it did. Terrazas faces deportation again and Ruiz, 30, is on leave from the patrol. A second agent has been charged with felonies for giving Terrazas a short ride across the border from Mexico. It is one of four felony cases stemming from a federal crackdown against corruption on the Arizona border....
Guilty When Charged
American prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by prosecutors’ threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors, who exchanged dropped charges or reduced sentences in exchange for false testimony against defendants. Not all the wrongfully convicted are poor. Some are wealthy and prominent people targeted by corrupt prosecutors seeking a celebrity case in order to boost their careers. Until it happens to them or to a member of their family, Americans are clueless to the corruption in the criminal justice (sic) system. Most prosecutors are focused on their conviction rates, and judges are focused on clearing their court dockets. Defendants are processed accordingly, not in terms of guilt or innocence. "Law and order conservatives" wrongly believe that the justice (sic) system is run by liberal judges who turn the criminals loose. In actual fact, the system is so loaded against a defendant that very few people, including the totally innocent, dare to risk a trial. Almost all (95–97%) felony indictments are settled by a coerced plea. By withholding exculpatory evidence, suborning perjury, fabricating evidence, and lying to jurors, prosecutors have made the risks of a trial too great even for the innocent. Consequently, the prosecutors’ cases and police evidence are almost never tested in court. Defendants are simply intimidated into self-incrimination rather than risk the terrors of trial. According to Yale University law professor John Langbein, "The parallels between the modern American plea bargaining system and the ancient system of judicial torture are many and chilling." Just as the person on the rack admitted to guilt in order to stop the pain, the present day defendant succumbs to psychological torture and cops a plea, whether he is innocent or guilty, in order to avoid ever more charges. Michael Tonry, director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, reports that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison than any country on earth, including dictatorships, tyrannies, and China. The US incarceration rate is up to 12 times higher than that of European countries....
Federal agents' visit was a hoax
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story. The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account. Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false. But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details. The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student's uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter. But when Dr. Williams went to the student's home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried....
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret. Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations. But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world....
Some fear eavesdropping could undermine work of spy agency
The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by U.S. citizens without a warrant violated longstanding practices and could undermine a key U.S. intelligence agency that's critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week. The super-secret National Security Agency, which eavesdropped on the Soviet Union's leaders and scored other intelligence coups during the Cold War, has spent three decades recovering from domestic spying scandals in the 1970s. Now, with its electronic ears and vast computer banks turned primarily to intercepting suspecting terrorists, the officials said they fear that the NSA once again will bear the brunt of congressional scrutiny and public outrage, complicating its mission. "The damage it's done to NSA's reputation is almost irreversible in my view," said a longtime top intelligence official with intimate knowledge of the agency's workings. Those concerns are part of a broader backlash in the intelligence community against some of the Bush administration's tactics in the war on terror....
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said. As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said. The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter. "There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."....
Powell supports government eavesdropping
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants. Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation. But he added, "My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it."....
Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying
Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries to glean data on possible terrorists. "As far as Congressional investigations are concerned," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, "these new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans." Members of the Judiciary Committee have already indicated that they intend to conduct oversight hearings into the president's legal authority to order domestic eavesdropping on terrorist suspects without a warrant. But Congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably seek to expand the review to include the disclosure that the security agency, using its access to giant phone "switches," had also traced and analyzed phone and Internet traffic in much larger volumes than what the Bush administration had acknowledged. "We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," said a Republican Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because no decisions had been made on how hearings might be structured....
Power We Didn't Grant
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance. On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused....
Eavesdropping: Back to the Future
President Bush’s do-it-yourself eavesdropping notwithstanding, the Pentagon could soon have legal authority to “covertly” gather intelligence on American citizens in the United States – a power taken from them because of excesses during the Vietnam War. The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting in closed session, last month quietly approved a request from the Department of Defense (DOD) to allow it to conduct surveillance operations within American Muslim communities. The DOD said the cooperation of these communities could help fight insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We believe there are people in the United States who have information of value to us," said Jim Schmidli, deputy general counsel for operations at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "That information is within different ethnic communities in this country -- recent additions to our population from distressed areas of the world, primarily the Middle East." But civil liberties groups and leaders of the Muslim community say the Pentagon is using the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to resume the domestic spying powers that Congress banned after those powers were used to spy on Americans during the Vietnam era....
The Curious Section 126 of the Patriot Act
What is it that the National Security Agency began doing after 9/11 that necessitated Presidential authorization for warantless surveillance? We have all learned in the past week that the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978 contains provisions that allow the government to conduct quick reaction surveillance of an individual and go to the court afterwards for a warrant. So what would the NSA need to do that isn't covered by the provisions of FISA? My guess is the government decided after 9/11 to monitor everyone. Thanks JMC for pointing out that the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act Of 2005 contains a Section 126, inserted by the House, requiring the Attorney General to submit a report to Congress "on any initiative of the Department of Justice that uses or is intended to develop pattern-based data-mining technology." Congress is seeking assurances that "the privacy and due process rights of individuals" is protected in the course of the government using massive databases of non-publicly available data; both proprietary databases and its own compiled intelligence and law enforcement databases to "search" for terrorists and terrorist connections....
Padilla Put-Down
The Bush Administration is sometimes its own worst enemy when it comes to fighting for the tools it needs in the war on terror. In that category we'd put the President's failure to defend the need for aggressive interrogation of foreign terror detainees, culminating in his recent cave-in on Senator John McCain's "torture" amendment. Signing up for a six-month extension of the Patriot Act, rather than sticking by his demands for long-term renewal, could turn out to be another. Last month's decision to abandon the enemy-combatant case against Jose Padilla in the U.S. Supreme Court is a third example. Fortunately, in the Padilla case, an appeals court is now forcing the Administration to show the courage of its own convictions. In an extraordinary ruling issued Wednesday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, rejected the Department of Justice's request to vacate its earlier ruling, which said that the President "unquestionably" has the right to detain U.S. citizens who happen to be enemy combatants--a right the Administration has said repeatedly is indispensable to fighting this war. It also rejected the Administration's request to transfer Padilla from military to civilian custody so that he could answer criminal charges brought last month in a federal court in Miami. The case now continues its course to the Supreme Court, which can either hear the case (as expected) or let the Fourth Circuit's ruling stand. This week's Fourth Circuit opinion is scathing, and a Washington attorney of our acquaintance says, "I have never seen that kind of language addressed to the government." Writing for the court, Judge Michael Luttig says that the Administration's actions leave the impression that Padilla has been held "by mistake" and give the "appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court." This case "presents an issue of such especial national importance as to warrant final consideration by" the High Court. We'd agree that there is a vital constitutional principle at stake here, and we hope the Supreme Court takes it--despite the government's apparent ambiguity about the case. Over the past three and a half years, Padilla has become a liberal icon--an "innocent" man who has been held "illegally." The public debate has been largely about one man's rights and not about the right of the rest of us to be protected from enemy attack....
Some Border Patrol Agents Take a Chance on Love
The forbidden romance between the Border Patrol agent and the illegal immigrant began in a gym. Maria Terrazas, 31, met Jose Ruiz three years ago at LM's Body Builders in this remote border town. Terrazas, a waitress and mother of two, knew Ruiz was a catch. As a Border Patrol agent, Ruiz belonged to an elite class in town: available men with good jobs and an education. The two began dating, and their relationship continued even after Terrazas was deported to Mexico in November 2004. She quickly bluffed her way through U.S. customs and back to Ruiz. Terrazas, who said several of her illegal immigrant girlfriends have relationships with border agents, saw nothing unusual about dating a man whose job was to keep people like her out of the U.S. "He had his own job and I had mine," Terrazas said in an interview. "I never thought it'd cause problems." But it did. Terrazas faces deportation again and Ruiz, 30, is on leave from the patrol. A second agent has been charged with felonies for giving Terrazas a short ride across the border from Mexico. It is one of four felony cases stemming from a federal crackdown against corruption on the Arizona border....
Guilty When Charged
American prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by prosecutors’ threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors, who exchanged dropped charges or reduced sentences in exchange for false testimony against defendants. Not all the wrongfully convicted are poor. Some are wealthy and prominent people targeted by corrupt prosecutors seeking a celebrity case in order to boost their careers. Until it happens to them or to a member of their family, Americans are clueless to the corruption in the criminal justice (sic) system. Most prosecutors are focused on their conviction rates, and judges are focused on clearing their court dockets. Defendants are processed accordingly, not in terms of guilt or innocence. "Law and order conservatives" wrongly believe that the justice (sic) system is run by liberal judges who turn the criminals loose. In actual fact, the system is so loaded against a defendant that very few people, including the totally innocent, dare to risk a trial. Almost all (95–97%) felony indictments are settled by a coerced plea. By withholding exculpatory evidence, suborning perjury, fabricating evidence, and lying to jurors, prosecutors have made the risks of a trial too great even for the innocent. Consequently, the prosecutors’ cases and police evidence are almost never tested in court. Defendants are simply intimidated into self-incrimination rather than risk the terrors of trial. According to Yale University law professor John Langbein, "The parallels between the modern American plea bargaining system and the ancient system of judicial torture are many and chilling." Just as the person on the rack admitted to guilt in order to stop the pain, the present day defendant succumbs to psychological torture and cops a plea, whether he is innocent or guilty, in order to avoid ever more charges. Michael Tonry, director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, reports that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison than any country on earth, including dictatorships, tyrannies, and China. The US incarceration rate is up to 12 times higher than that of European countries....
NEWS ROUNDUP
Saving Law From Extinction After years of effort, landowners, developers and other business interests might finally see changes in the Endangered Species Act, a landmark environmental law that has itself become endangered owing to growing dissatisfaction among supporters and critics. The 1973 law, which grants federal protection to species threatened with extinction, hasn't been significantly updated since 1988. While it is widely seen as in need of reworking, though, there is little consensus over how to revise a central provision that restricts use and development of land considered essential to preserving a listed animal or plant species. In September, that began to change. The House approved revisions that would eliminate the so-called critical habitat program, which restricts encroachment in areas containing physical or biological features essential to the conservation of an endangered species. That change would relieve builders and loggers, among others, of the lengthy development permitting process and the costs of complying with critical habitats and make the government pay for economic losses owners suffer when use of their property is restricted. But the vote was close -- 229-193 -- and there was considerable support for a less-sweeping alternative. Now a showdown is brewing in the Senate, which will begin debating the law's future when Congress reconvenes next month....
Aware of Political Ecosystem, Property Rights Advocate Embraces Conservation Plan So imagine the reaction in these precincts when, in the early 1990's, the Interior Department set out to protect the warbler by buying - or condemning - cedar-covered land. There were protests on the Capitol steps in Austin. One rancher took a bulldozer to his cedar trees. Others indicated they would tie the project up in court battles. The effort stalled. Over a decade later, in a cultural and political turnabout, people like Kerry Russell, a lawyer, rancher and lifelong resident of the area, have largely bought into a conservation program that combines federal and state incentives with flexibility for landowners, who can participate by committing land to conservation purposes forever, or for as little as 10 years. Part of the payoff is that they are shielded in those years from unilateral conservation actions by government, a provision that gave the program the name "Safe Harbor." "If you sign up to restore or enhance the habitat for a certain number of years, after that time you won't be held to" the obligations any further, Mr. Russell said. He has committed to preserve and tend 150 acres of cedar groves on his property for the migratory warblers forever. Mr. Russell, like his fellow Republican Bob Long, a rancher a few counties away, is a familiar public face of the program in Texas. The state has been a focal point of safe harbor initiatives, and the Austin office of Environmental Defense has been in the forefront of putting together safe harbor agreements....
Feds pressure state on methane water rules A federal agency is putting pressure on Montana regulators to back away from a proposed crackdown on coalbed methane wastewater. The U.S. Department of Energy says it was called in at the request of Wyoming state officials, who have worried their northern neighbor may go overboard with water quality rules. The Board of Environmental review was left wondering why the Department of Energy had a representative at a hearing earlier this month on a proposal that would apply tougher water quality restrictions on coalbed methane operations. "You don't typically get those type of individuals traveling to testify," said Robin Shropshire, a member of the state Board of Environmental Review that is looking at tougher water rules. The prospect of large-scale, coalbed methane drilling in southeastern Montana has led to bitter disputes between conservationists, some land owners and the natural gas industry. But federal regulators are an uncommon sight in the battle....
Grape-eating bears killed as vineyards' territory expands Bears have frequented the pond and an adjacent meadow since the Dakins bought the property, which they call Wild Springs Ranch, a decade ago. Now, just like that, they are gone. The new owner of the adjacent Aetna Springs Vineyard, tired of having his prized grapes eaten, hired federal trappers a few months ago to kill the offending bears. The tragic fate of their beloved bruins has thrust the Dakins into a seething debate over the future of the nation's most famous wine-growing region. Wildlife is often the loser as vineyards steadily creep into the hinterlands amid a growing demand for the kind of premium grape that can be produced only in mountainous wildland regions....
IRS, lawmakers study gifts to protect habitat They gave away the rights to develop the land, ensuring that no shopping mall or subdivision will ever displace the mallards and pintails. It’s not the usual charitable gift. But it’s duck season, and Ducks Unlimited is bagging hunting land along the flyway that bears southbound ducks into Arkansas every winter. The conservation-minded charity has accumulated nearly 18, 000 acres in the state, most of it during the past five years — not by buying parcels, but by accepting conservation easements from landowners willing to sign away the right to ever cash in by selling to a developer. In exchange, they get a federal income tax deduction. Concerned about outsized deductions that some donors have claimed for easements on golf courses or land of marginal value, the Internal Revenue Service is scrutinizing a stack of easements, including some held by Ducks Unlimited, and Congress has been considering a rewrite of the rules....
Deer and Foxes Compete for an Island Kingdom On the balmy last day of fall, three white-rumped mule deer skittered around a rocky mountainside, then ranged free across the upper reaches of Santa Rosa Island. Not far away on a brushy slope, two tiny foxes with reddish-brown chests lounged side by side like housedogs, passing their afternoon inside a large chain-link cage. These inhabitants of Channel Islands National Park have vastly different origins. The mule deer are thriving descendants of animals brought to the island early in the last century to provide hunting for the owners and their guests. The 5-pound Santa Rosa Island foxes, once-plentiful natives of the island, now number only about 70 and are listed as a federal endangered species. The fate of these two species and others, however, has been intertwined for two decades as the National Park Service has struggled to transform the remote island from a privately owned cattle ranch and hunting operation into a park that protects public access and unique natural, cultural and archeological resources. Although the cattle were removed seven years ago, the former owners have been permitted to maintain commercial deer and elk hunting, which park officials say has been harmful to the island's plant and animal life and restricted the public....
Pombo-led panel unveils rewrite of environmental canon Tracy Rep. Richard Pombo's House Resources Committee unveiled a Christmas package of proposals to alter a bedrock federal environmental law this week in the latest in a yearlong string of controversial ideas that has sent environmentalists into orbit. This week's effort by Pombo's panel is to revisit the National Environmental Policy Act, known by its acronym NEPA. This is the 35-year-old law that requires the federal government to consider environmental concerns whenever it acts on public land. NEPA can require lengthy impact reports for timber harvests, mining permits and oil leases. Oil, gas, nuclear energy, logging and ranching interests have long clamored for revisions to the law, which they say allows environmental groups to block projects they dislike. Pombo and much of his family are longtime ranchers....
FWP takes aim at hay-eating elk near Buffalo Between 250 and 300 elk that raided ranchers' haystacks in the Buffalo area in central Montana have dispersed after the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks expanded a late hunt and issued kill permits and supplemental licenses to thin the herd and scare them off. "They didn't stay in here very long," said Buffalo-area rancher Bill Mikkelson. "(FWP) did kill a few right off the bat to scare them out of here." But the problem is becoming an annual occurrence that may require a change in hunting regulations before it is solved. The elk traveled into the region, north of Judith Gap, in early December. They are part of 700 head of elk that winter on the west side of the Snowy Mountains. Heavy snowfall on their usual winter range likely pushed them out in search of food. "This is the fourth time in six years that we've had movement out of the Snowies onto the flats toward the Little Belts," said Mike Aderhold, Region 4 supervisor for FWP. "We've been treating it as an anomaly, but now we're starting to think it's more of a pattern."....
Feds keep steelhead, rainbow trout distinct Ten groups of steelhead from Southern California to Washington will retain Endangered Species Act protection under a new policy that lists only those that spend time in the ocean, exempting fish that remain in their native rivers, NOAA Fisheries announced Friday. The change in policy was prompted by a suggestion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has jurisdiction over trout and steelhead that remain in rivers, that the two agencies adopt the same policy for defining steelhead populations. NOAA Fisheries retained the old policy for salmon, said Garth Griffin, fisheries biologist for NOAA Fisheries in Portland. While steelhead are the same genus as salmon, they are different species and have much different life histories. The decision by NOAA fisheries was applauded by Trout Unlimited and the Native Fish Society in Portland, who said counting steelhead and genetically identical rainbow trout in the same population groups could lead to inflated fish numbers that could result in removing protections for some steelhead that need it....
Cattle, birds, endangered species coexist in Ramona grasslands Entering the grasslands on Rangeland Road presents a series of contrasts: Dozens of cows graze outside the gates of an exclusive community. Beyond neighborhood traffic lies seemingly vacant rolling hills where birds burst from every other bush. These are the remains of a habitat that once sprawled across Southern California. "Look, meadowlarks," said Zach Principe, an ecologist working for the Nature Conservancy on a visit earlier this month. Under tufts of California buckwheat, he also pointed out rodent burrows and picked up a handful of crumbly ground cover. Principe was on hand to begin surveying the national conservation group's latest acquisition, a 1,230-acre property known as the Davis/Eagle Ranch, northwest of the Ramona Airport. This property is part of around 8,000 acres of what's known as the Ramona grasslands....
Agency: Project, lynx can co-exist A federal wildlife agency has ratified an earlier opinion that the proposed Village at Wolf Creek won't jeopardize the survival of the Canada lynx in the United States. In a final ruling issued Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the “direct and indirect effects of the Project will not appreciably reduce the likelihood of both the survival and recovery of the lynx.” The Village at Wolf Creek is 288 acres in the middle of the Rio Grande National Forest, where Texas billionaire Billie Joe “Red” McCombs wants to build a luxury resort for as many as 10,000 people. A final opinion on the survival of the Canada lynx, which were introduced in the U.S. in 1999, has stalled a decision by the Forest Service on whether to allow access to the proposed development across public land....
NASCAR Conservationist In late 2004 Al Cecere, founder and president of the American Eagle Foundation, was on Capitol Hill, trolling for votes for a bill he had hatched, the Bald Eagle Coin Act. Its goal was to raise $10 million for bald eagle recovery projects through the U.S. Mint's sale of commemorative coins after the bald eagle goes off the endangered species list, probably this year. But as this session of Congress was set to expire, it looked as if Cecere's coin bill might, too. Besides competing for attention with the intelligence bill, it had raised a few eyebrows among lawmakers with their own coin bills. Finally, though, in a display of bipartisanship unique by today's standards, Cecere garnered enough votes to move the bill toward unanimous passage as Congress's final act. Two days before Christmas, President Bush signed the bill into law....
National Forest Management: Is Politics Trumping Science? Underlying much of the heated debate about National Forest management today are a couple of loaded - and surprisingly hard-to-answer - questions: Do a cluster of recent changes in forest management, notably those relating to forest planning, motorized use and roadless designation, signal an increasing politicization of public land management? And, more specifically, did partisan political maneuvering (and by extension campaign contributions) trump science in shaping these changes? As the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation’s Professor Martin Nie points out, the nuances of political influence largely occur in a black box: whether politicians are influenced by contributions, or whether contributions are made based on like-minded politics is difficult to know. Most of the folks I've spoken with think that, indeed, the new Forest Service planning rules are enabling elected political officials and appointees to make the crucial decisions on public lands - decisions that have long been the province of federal servants. (For some advocates of the changes, that's part of the point). But rather than string together a conclusion, I will present and let you, New West readers, do the deducing....
Experimental forest designated in Sierra For the first time in more than 40 years, the Forest Service has established a new experimental forest in California to study management techniques and reduce wildfire threats in the Sierra Nevada. The agency is teaming with UC Berkeley to designate the Sagehen Experimental Forest about 10 miles north of Truckee and 30 miles west of Reno, Nev. The 8,100-acre area will be managed by the university, the Tahoe National Forest and the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth formally approved the designation on Monday, creating California's 11th experimental forest and the first since 1962. He said such forests have played an important role in improving management of forest resources throughout their history....
Forest Service seeks to protect small bighorn sheep herd Managers of the Bridger-Teton National Forest say they want to set travel routes for skiers and snowboarders through mountainous bighorn sheep winter range to protect the state's smallest and most isolated herd. At just over 100 animals, the Targhee bighorn sheep population is all that remains of a herd that once roamed from the west side of the Teton Range to the valley bottoms of Jackson Hole. The Forest Service says human influences, including recreation, now pose the biggest threat to the stability of the herd. A study in the 1990s showed that the Targhee herd winters on high, wind-swept terrain between Static Peak, in Grand Teton National Park, south to Rendezvous Peak. The U.S. Park Service already closes Static Peak and other areas in the park to skiing each winter to protect the sheep....
Rough skies for aerial tankers In three years, since two of its large fire-retardant bombers broke up in mid-flight, Hawkins & Powers Aviation Inc. has gone from one of the country's largest aerial firefighting firms to the brink of bankruptcy. It has lost key government contracts for the use of most of its heavy air tankers and essentially has been forced from a business it helped pioneer. There have been lawsuits, layoffs and a change in direction. New management has taken over in an effort to satisfy creditors and turn the company into a viable airplane refurbishing business that could be sold to a new operator. Like Hawkins & Powers, the entire aerial firefighting industry is facing an uncertain future....
Scientists target tree-killing beetle The wasps listen for sounds of their prey, then drill through bark to reach them. Either they paralyze the juvenile victim and glue eggs to its back, or pierce it to lay the eggs inside. When the eggs hatch, the wormy wasp young munch away at leisure. For anyone who loves a day in a shady yard, a walk in the woods or the crack of a baseball bat, the gore is justified. The target is the larvae of emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle that has been 100 percent fatal to North American ash trees since its arrival about 10 years ago, likely in a shipping pallet. The beetle, first noticed in 2002, has blanketed most of lower Michigan and appeared in Ohio, Indiana and southern Ontario. Worried that the bug cannot be stopped, researchers are trying to figure out how to help the ash tree survive an infestation. Scientists are studying borer-killing wasps, insecticide use, crossbreeding and the possibility of breeding a tree that makes its own insecticide....
USFS stock home on range In the gathering light of another gray dawn, hundreds of ears perk up as a pair of familiar voices boom out across the pasture. "Come onnnn boys. Come onnnn." Bob Hoverson yells once more, then whistles - a shrill high note that starts the closest mules and horses moving toward the corrals at the Ninemile Remount Depot. The first few trot into the enclosure where ranch manager Dean Solheim is filling the feeding bunks with hay. "They're all 'using' animals," Hoverson says. "They're used to being handled. They all get used a lot more so than most animals used for recreation." The stock comes from upward of 25 different Forest Service ranger districts from as far away as Powell, Wyo. For decades, the remount station has served as winter range for the working stock during their winter vacation. Their season of rest lasts from Nov. 1 to May 15....
Column: Eco-terror returns to the news Arson is a difficult crime to prove, so it's no surprise that the federal government only recently named two suspects in the 1998 fires that caused $12 million in damage atop the Vail ski area. The 28-year-old suspects, who both grew up in Eugene, Ore., have not been charged, let alone found guilty, of anything at Vail. Some informed opinion suggests guilt may never be established unless plea bargains in other cases produce confessions. Of course, lack of evidence never stops many people from drawing conclusions. In times of trauma, human nature seems to respond with shotgun conclusions. Hence, after the 9/11 attacks, many people of dark complexions were attacked simply. … well, simply because they maybe, kinda, sorta looked like people from the Middle East. And after the fires at Vail in 1998, I heard educated people respond with logic that was no better. The Sierra Club had better divulge what it knows about the arsonist, one woman said. "Don't tell me they don't know who it was," she added. This was also about the time that the term "eco-terrorism" was unleashed by headline writers....
Powell, Hazlett defend Caldera efforts When Valles Caldera Trust board member Larry Icerman said last week that the trust was facing a deficit of up to $500,000 in its 2004-2005 operating budget, his announcement raised eyebrows and questions. Former trust Executive Director Ray Powell and former Chief Financial Officer Dennis Hazlett, who both resigned in the fall, defended their records in trying to turn around the trust's dismal financial accounting during their tenures last year. "There is no deficit," Hazlett said this week. "That is my firm belief." Icerman, who's helped oversee efforts to resolve the trust's financial problems, said at a public meeting Dec. 23 in Santa Fe that there was a potential deficit of $200,000 to $500,000 in the trust's operating budget from the last fiscal year. He said a complicated accounting process, with two sets of books and the failure of prior trust administrations to resolve financial issues, may have created the deficit....
Idaho may lose USDA status The U.S. Department of Agriculture will likely strip Idaho of its coveted brucellosis-free status following infections in eastern and central Idaho, a move that would force cattle ranchers to do expensive testing before their animals are shipped out of state. The decision is expected in January, state Department of Agriculture officials said. Idaho, which has had brucellosis-free status since 1991, says it may challenge the federal move. Lifting the status would force ranchers to test female and uncastrated male cattle over 18 months old before selling them across state lines, according to minimum testing guidelines....
Judge orders Wolf Point family to leave home A federal judge has given a Wolf Point area family until the end of February to leave property now owned by the government or face eviction by federal marshals. Senior U.S. District Judge Jack Shanstrom gave Edmund "June" and Loretta Walton and their three sons, Stephen, Pat and T. Ed, "one final opportunity to remove themselves and any personal property they desire'' from land owned by the Farm Service Agency. The deadline is Feb. 28. Shanstrom issued his order Dec. 16. The dispute between the Waltons and the Farm Service Agency dates to the mid-1990s. Edmund and Loretta Walton signed over their property and federal grazing allotments to the agency, which then was called the Farmers Home Administration, in a liquidation agreement in 1994. The agreement allowed the Waltons to live on about 10 acres of the land until mid-1999. The Waltons did not exercise an option to buy back the property - about 4,000 acres south of the Missouri River between Glasgow and Wolf Point - but they continued to occupy it....
Was it UFOs? Mystery haunts eastern plains Cattle rancher Clyde Chess never learned who — or what —killed his heifer 11 years ago, removing its lips, tongue, ears, heart and reproductive organs with laserlike precision. But he has a theory. “I suspect, and I know it sounds far-fetched, it was government testing,” said Chess, who has a ranch in Rush. “They’re the only ones that have that kind of technology.” This is eastern El Paso County, where stories of mysterious black aircraft, unexplained lights in the sky and bizarre cattle experimentation aren’t considered too farfetched. Many remember the string of cattle mutilations that oc- curred in the 1970s and happen to this day. Of course, it’s been a long time since Colorado ranchers sat on their porches at night with shotguns, scanning the sky, but there’s a new mystery on the eastern plains, one involving the unexplained deaths of six horses and a burro in Calhan....
Col. Norman Vaughan, dies at age 100 Refusing to "grow old" to the very end, irrepressible dog musher and world adventurer Col. Norman Vaughan died in an Anchorage hospital Friday amid family and friends -- just four days past his 100th birthday. Vaughan's life as a sportsman, soldier and entrepreneur spanned the 20th century, but it was his buoyant example of how an active outdoor life doesn't have to end at age 70, or 80, or even 90 that inspired legions of admirers. At 84, Vaughan was still entering and completing the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome as the self-proclaimed "oldest and slowest" musher in the world....
It's All Trew: Early letters beautiful in design, neatness In my research, I read many old letters, diaries and personal accounts written in longhand by the authors. It appears that almost all items written before WWII were beautiful in design and neatness plus were easy to read and decipher. Most items written since are the exact opposite. Old school records I have studied show that penmanship was taught at least twice a week in most early schools. Time and again I have found records of teaching penmanship to grownups in night classes outside of school. My own experience mirrors these findings as I remember penmanship classes on certain days through the third grade. I skipped the fourth grade when the schools changed to twelve years instead of eleven. Until this time, my writing was smooth and legible....
Saving Law From Extinction After years of effort, landowners, developers and other business interests might finally see changes in the Endangered Species Act, a landmark environmental law that has itself become endangered owing to growing dissatisfaction among supporters and critics. The 1973 law, which grants federal protection to species threatened with extinction, hasn't been significantly updated since 1988. While it is widely seen as in need of reworking, though, there is little consensus over how to revise a central provision that restricts use and development of land considered essential to preserving a listed animal or plant species. In September, that began to change. The House approved revisions that would eliminate the so-called critical habitat program, which restricts encroachment in areas containing physical or biological features essential to the conservation of an endangered species. That change would relieve builders and loggers, among others, of the lengthy development permitting process and the costs of complying with critical habitats and make the government pay for economic losses owners suffer when use of their property is restricted. But the vote was close -- 229-193 -- and there was considerable support for a less-sweeping alternative. Now a showdown is brewing in the Senate, which will begin debating the law's future when Congress reconvenes next month....
Aware of Political Ecosystem, Property Rights Advocate Embraces Conservation Plan So imagine the reaction in these precincts when, in the early 1990's, the Interior Department set out to protect the warbler by buying - or condemning - cedar-covered land. There were protests on the Capitol steps in Austin. One rancher took a bulldozer to his cedar trees. Others indicated they would tie the project up in court battles. The effort stalled. Over a decade later, in a cultural and political turnabout, people like Kerry Russell, a lawyer, rancher and lifelong resident of the area, have largely bought into a conservation program that combines federal and state incentives with flexibility for landowners, who can participate by committing land to conservation purposes forever, or for as little as 10 years. Part of the payoff is that they are shielded in those years from unilateral conservation actions by government, a provision that gave the program the name "Safe Harbor." "If you sign up to restore or enhance the habitat for a certain number of years, after that time you won't be held to" the obligations any further, Mr. Russell said. He has committed to preserve and tend 150 acres of cedar groves on his property for the migratory warblers forever. Mr. Russell, like his fellow Republican Bob Long, a rancher a few counties away, is a familiar public face of the program in Texas. The state has been a focal point of safe harbor initiatives, and the Austin office of Environmental Defense has been in the forefront of putting together safe harbor agreements....
Feds pressure state on methane water rules A federal agency is putting pressure on Montana regulators to back away from a proposed crackdown on coalbed methane wastewater. The U.S. Department of Energy says it was called in at the request of Wyoming state officials, who have worried their northern neighbor may go overboard with water quality rules. The Board of Environmental review was left wondering why the Department of Energy had a representative at a hearing earlier this month on a proposal that would apply tougher water quality restrictions on coalbed methane operations. "You don't typically get those type of individuals traveling to testify," said Robin Shropshire, a member of the state Board of Environmental Review that is looking at tougher water rules. The prospect of large-scale, coalbed methane drilling in southeastern Montana has led to bitter disputes between conservationists, some land owners and the natural gas industry. But federal regulators are an uncommon sight in the battle....
Grape-eating bears killed as vineyards' territory expands Bears have frequented the pond and an adjacent meadow since the Dakins bought the property, which they call Wild Springs Ranch, a decade ago. Now, just like that, they are gone. The new owner of the adjacent Aetna Springs Vineyard, tired of having his prized grapes eaten, hired federal trappers a few months ago to kill the offending bears. The tragic fate of their beloved bruins has thrust the Dakins into a seething debate over the future of the nation's most famous wine-growing region. Wildlife is often the loser as vineyards steadily creep into the hinterlands amid a growing demand for the kind of premium grape that can be produced only in mountainous wildland regions....
IRS, lawmakers study gifts to protect habitat They gave away the rights to develop the land, ensuring that no shopping mall or subdivision will ever displace the mallards and pintails. It’s not the usual charitable gift. But it’s duck season, and Ducks Unlimited is bagging hunting land along the flyway that bears southbound ducks into Arkansas every winter. The conservation-minded charity has accumulated nearly 18, 000 acres in the state, most of it during the past five years — not by buying parcels, but by accepting conservation easements from landowners willing to sign away the right to ever cash in by selling to a developer. In exchange, they get a federal income tax deduction. Concerned about outsized deductions that some donors have claimed for easements on golf courses or land of marginal value, the Internal Revenue Service is scrutinizing a stack of easements, including some held by Ducks Unlimited, and Congress has been considering a rewrite of the rules....
Deer and Foxes Compete for an Island Kingdom On the balmy last day of fall, three white-rumped mule deer skittered around a rocky mountainside, then ranged free across the upper reaches of Santa Rosa Island. Not far away on a brushy slope, two tiny foxes with reddish-brown chests lounged side by side like housedogs, passing their afternoon inside a large chain-link cage. These inhabitants of Channel Islands National Park have vastly different origins. The mule deer are thriving descendants of animals brought to the island early in the last century to provide hunting for the owners and their guests. The 5-pound Santa Rosa Island foxes, once-plentiful natives of the island, now number only about 70 and are listed as a federal endangered species. The fate of these two species and others, however, has been intertwined for two decades as the National Park Service has struggled to transform the remote island from a privately owned cattle ranch and hunting operation into a park that protects public access and unique natural, cultural and archeological resources. Although the cattle were removed seven years ago, the former owners have been permitted to maintain commercial deer and elk hunting, which park officials say has been harmful to the island's plant and animal life and restricted the public....
Pombo-led panel unveils rewrite of environmental canon Tracy Rep. Richard Pombo's House Resources Committee unveiled a Christmas package of proposals to alter a bedrock federal environmental law this week in the latest in a yearlong string of controversial ideas that has sent environmentalists into orbit. This week's effort by Pombo's panel is to revisit the National Environmental Policy Act, known by its acronym NEPA. This is the 35-year-old law that requires the federal government to consider environmental concerns whenever it acts on public land. NEPA can require lengthy impact reports for timber harvests, mining permits and oil leases. Oil, gas, nuclear energy, logging and ranching interests have long clamored for revisions to the law, which they say allows environmental groups to block projects they dislike. Pombo and much of his family are longtime ranchers....
FWP takes aim at hay-eating elk near Buffalo Between 250 and 300 elk that raided ranchers' haystacks in the Buffalo area in central Montana have dispersed after the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks expanded a late hunt and issued kill permits and supplemental licenses to thin the herd and scare them off. "They didn't stay in here very long," said Buffalo-area rancher Bill Mikkelson. "(FWP) did kill a few right off the bat to scare them out of here." But the problem is becoming an annual occurrence that may require a change in hunting regulations before it is solved. The elk traveled into the region, north of Judith Gap, in early December. They are part of 700 head of elk that winter on the west side of the Snowy Mountains. Heavy snowfall on their usual winter range likely pushed them out in search of food. "This is the fourth time in six years that we've had movement out of the Snowies onto the flats toward the Little Belts," said Mike Aderhold, Region 4 supervisor for FWP. "We've been treating it as an anomaly, but now we're starting to think it's more of a pattern."....
Feds keep steelhead, rainbow trout distinct Ten groups of steelhead from Southern California to Washington will retain Endangered Species Act protection under a new policy that lists only those that spend time in the ocean, exempting fish that remain in their native rivers, NOAA Fisheries announced Friday. The change in policy was prompted by a suggestion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has jurisdiction over trout and steelhead that remain in rivers, that the two agencies adopt the same policy for defining steelhead populations. NOAA Fisheries retained the old policy for salmon, said Garth Griffin, fisheries biologist for NOAA Fisheries in Portland. While steelhead are the same genus as salmon, they are different species and have much different life histories. The decision by NOAA fisheries was applauded by Trout Unlimited and the Native Fish Society in Portland, who said counting steelhead and genetically identical rainbow trout in the same population groups could lead to inflated fish numbers that could result in removing protections for some steelhead that need it....
Cattle, birds, endangered species coexist in Ramona grasslands Entering the grasslands on Rangeland Road presents a series of contrasts: Dozens of cows graze outside the gates of an exclusive community. Beyond neighborhood traffic lies seemingly vacant rolling hills where birds burst from every other bush. These are the remains of a habitat that once sprawled across Southern California. "Look, meadowlarks," said Zach Principe, an ecologist working for the Nature Conservancy on a visit earlier this month. Under tufts of California buckwheat, he also pointed out rodent burrows and picked up a handful of crumbly ground cover. Principe was on hand to begin surveying the national conservation group's latest acquisition, a 1,230-acre property known as the Davis/Eagle Ranch, northwest of the Ramona Airport. This property is part of around 8,000 acres of what's known as the Ramona grasslands....
Agency: Project, lynx can co-exist A federal wildlife agency has ratified an earlier opinion that the proposed Village at Wolf Creek won't jeopardize the survival of the Canada lynx in the United States. In a final ruling issued Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the “direct and indirect effects of the Project will not appreciably reduce the likelihood of both the survival and recovery of the lynx.” The Village at Wolf Creek is 288 acres in the middle of the Rio Grande National Forest, where Texas billionaire Billie Joe “Red” McCombs wants to build a luxury resort for as many as 10,000 people. A final opinion on the survival of the Canada lynx, which were introduced in the U.S. in 1999, has stalled a decision by the Forest Service on whether to allow access to the proposed development across public land....
NASCAR Conservationist In late 2004 Al Cecere, founder and president of the American Eagle Foundation, was on Capitol Hill, trolling for votes for a bill he had hatched, the Bald Eagle Coin Act. Its goal was to raise $10 million for bald eagle recovery projects through the U.S. Mint's sale of commemorative coins after the bald eagle goes off the endangered species list, probably this year. But as this session of Congress was set to expire, it looked as if Cecere's coin bill might, too. Besides competing for attention with the intelligence bill, it had raised a few eyebrows among lawmakers with their own coin bills. Finally, though, in a display of bipartisanship unique by today's standards, Cecere garnered enough votes to move the bill toward unanimous passage as Congress's final act. Two days before Christmas, President Bush signed the bill into law....
National Forest Management: Is Politics Trumping Science? Underlying much of the heated debate about National Forest management today are a couple of loaded - and surprisingly hard-to-answer - questions: Do a cluster of recent changes in forest management, notably those relating to forest planning, motorized use and roadless designation, signal an increasing politicization of public land management? And, more specifically, did partisan political maneuvering (and by extension campaign contributions) trump science in shaping these changes? As the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation’s Professor Martin Nie points out, the nuances of political influence largely occur in a black box: whether politicians are influenced by contributions, or whether contributions are made based on like-minded politics is difficult to know. Most of the folks I've spoken with think that, indeed, the new Forest Service planning rules are enabling elected political officials and appointees to make the crucial decisions on public lands - decisions that have long been the province of federal servants. (For some advocates of the changes, that's part of the point). But rather than string together a conclusion, I will present and let you, New West readers, do the deducing....
Experimental forest designated in Sierra For the first time in more than 40 years, the Forest Service has established a new experimental forest in California to study management techniques and reduce wildfire threats in the Sierra Nevada. The agency is teaming with UC Berkeley to designate the Sagehen Experimental Forest about 10 miles north of Truckee and 30 miles west of Reno, Nev. The 8,100-acre area will be managed by the university, the Tahoe National Forest and the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth formally approved the designation on Monday, creating California's 11th experimental forest and the first since 1962. He said such forests have played an important role in improving management of forest resources throughout their history....
Forest Service seeks to protect small bighorn sheep herd Managers of the Bridger-Teton National Forest say they want to set travel routes for skiers and snowboarders through mountainous bighorn sheep winter range to protect the state's smallest and most isolated herd. At just over 100 animals, the Targhee bighorn sheep population is all that remains of a herd that once roamed from the west side of the Teton Range to the valley bottoms of Jackson Hole. The Forest Service says human influences, including recreation, now pose the biggest threat to the stability of the herd. A study in the 1990s showed that the Targhee herd winters on high, wind-swept terrain between Static Peak, in Grand Teton National Park, south to Rendezvous Peak. The U.S. Park Service already closes Static Peak and other areas in the park to skiing each winter to protect the sheep....
Rough skies for aerial tankers In three years, since two of its large fire-retardant bombers broke up in mid-flight, Hawkins & Powers Aviation Inc. has gone from one of the country's largest aerial firefighting firms to the brink of bankruptcy. It has lost key government contracts for the use of most of its heavy air tankers and essentially has been forced from a business it helped pioneer. There have been lawsuits, layoffs and a change in direction. New management has taken over in an effort to satisfy creditors and turn the company into a viable airplane refurbishing business that could be sold to a new operator. Like Hawkins & Powers, the entire aerial firefighting industry is facing an uncertain future....
Scientists target tree-killing beetle The wasps listen for sounds of their prey, then drill through bark to reach them. Either they paralyze the juvenile victim and glue eggs to its back, or pierce it to lay the eggs inside. When the eggs hatch, the wormy wasp young munch away at leisure. For anyone who loves a day in a shady yard, a walk in the woods or the crack of a baseball bat, the gore is justified. The target is the larvae of emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle that has been 100 percent fatal to North American ash trees since its arrival about 10 years ago, likely in a shipping pallet. The beetle, first noticed in 2002, has blanketed most of lower Michigan and appeared in Ohio, Indiana and southern Ontario. Worried that the bug cannot be stopped, researchers are trying to figure out how to help the ash tree survive an infestation. Scientists are studying borer-killing wasps, insecticide use, crossbreeding and the possibility of breeding a tree that makes its own insecticide....
USFS stock home on range In the gathering light of another gray dawn, hundreds of ears perk up as a pair of familiar voices boom out across the pasture. "Come onnnn boys. Come onnnn." Bob Hoverson yells once more, then whistles - a shrill high note that starts the closest mules and horses moving toward the corrals at the Ninemile Remount Depot. The first few trot into the enclosure where ranch manager Dean Solheim is filling the feeding bunks with hay. "They're all 'using' animals," Hoverson says. "They're used to being handled. They all get used a lot more so than most animals used for recreation." The stock comes from upward of 25 different Forest Service ranger districts from as far away as Powell, Wyo. For decades, the remount station has served as winter range for the working stock during their winter vacation. Their season of rest lasts from Nov. 1 to May 15....
Column: Eco-terror returns to the news Arson is a difficult crime to prove, so it's no surprise that the federal government only recently named two suspects in the 1998 fires that caused $12 million in damage atop the Vail ski area. The 28-year-old suspects, who both grew up in Eugene, Ore., have not been charged, let alone found guilty, of anything at Vail. Some informed opinion suggests guilt may never be established unless plea bargains in other cases produce confessions. Of course, lack of evidence never stops many people from drawing conclusions. In times of trauma, human nature seems to respond with shotgun conclusions. Hence, after the 9/11 attacks, many people of dark complexions were attacked simply. … well, simply because they maybe, kinda, sorta looked like people from the Middle East. And after the fires at Vail in 1998, I heard educated people respond with logic that was no better. The Sierra Club had better divulge what it knows about the arsonist, one woman said. "Don't tell me they don't know who it was," she added. This was also about the time that the term "eco-terrorism" was unleashed by headline writers....
Powell, Hazlett defend Caldera efforts When Valles Caldera Trust board member Larry Icerman said last week that the trust was facing a deficit of up to $500,000 in its 2004-2005 operating budget, his announcement raised eyebrows and questions. Former trust Executive Director Ray Powell and former Chief Financial Officer Dennis Hazlett, who both resigned in the fall, defended their records in trying to turn around the trust's dismal financial accounting during their tenures last year. "There is no deficit," Hazlett said this week. "That is my firm belief." Icerman, who's helped oversee efforts to resolve the trust's financial problems, said at a public meeting Dec. 23 in Santa Fe that there was a potential deficit of $200,000 to $500,000 in the trust's operating budget from the last fiscal year. He said a complicated accounting process, with two sets of books and the failure of prior trust administrations to resolve financial issues, may have created the deficit....
Idaho may lose USDA status The U.S. Department of Agriculture will likely strip Idaho of its coveted brucellosis-free status following infections in eastern and central Idaho, a move that would force cattle ranchers to do expensive testing before their animals are shipped out of state. The decision is expected in January, state Department of Agriculture officials said. Idaho, which has had brucellosis-free status since 1991, says it may challenge the federal move. Lifting the status would force ranchers to test female and uncastrated male cattle over 18 months old before selling them across state lines, according to minimum testing guidelines....
Judge orders Wolf Point family to leave home A federal judge has given a Wolf Point area family until the end of February to leave property now owned by the government or face eviction by federal marshals. Senior U.S. District Judge Jack Shanstrom gave Edmund "June" and Loretta Walton and their three sons, Stephen, Pat and T. Ed, "one final opportunity to remove themselves and any personal property they desire'' from land owned by the Farm Service Agency. The deadline is Feb. 28. Shanstrom issued his order Dec. 16. The dispute between the Waltons and the Farm Service Agency dates to the mid-1990s. Edmund and Loretta Walton signed over their property and federal grazing allotments to the agency, which then was called the Farmers Home Administration, in a liquidation agreement in 1994. The agreement allowed the Waltons to live on about 10 acres of the land until mid-1999. The Waltons did not exercise an option to buy back the property - about 4,000 acres south of the Missouri River between Glasgow and Wolf Point - but they continued to occupy it....
Was it UFOs? Mystery haunts eastern plains Cattle rancher Clyde Chess never learned who — or what —killed his heifer 11 years ago, removing its lips, tongue, ears, heart and reproductive organs with laserlike precision. But he has a theory. “I suspect, and I know it sounds far-fetched, it was government testing,” said Chess, who has a ranch in Rush. “They’re the only ones that have that kind of technology.” This is eastern El Paso County, where stories of mysterious black aircraft, unexplained lights in the sky and bizarre cattle experimentation aren’t considered too farfetched. Many remember the string of cattle mutilations that oc- curred in the 1970s and happen to this day. Of course, it’s been a long time since Colorado ranchers sat on their porches at night with shotguns, scanning the sky, but there’s a new mystery on the eastern plains, one involving the unexplained deaths of six horses and a burro in Calhan....
Col. Norman Vaughan, dies at age 100 Refusing to "grow old" to the very end, irrepressible dog musher and world adventurer Col. Norman Vaughan died in an Anchorage hospital Friday amid family and friends -- just four days past his 100th birthday. Vaughan's life as a sportsman, soldier and entrepreneur spanned the 20th century, but it was his buoyant example of how an active outdoor life doesn't have to end at age 70, or 80, or even 90 that inspired legions of admirers. At 84, Vaughan was still entering and completing the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage to Nome as the self-proclaimed "oldest and slowest" musher in the world....
It's All Trew: Early letters beautiful in design, neatness In my research, I read many old letters, diaries and personal accounts written in longhand by the authors. It appears that almost all items written before WWII were beautiful in design and neatness plus were easy to read and decipher. Most items written since are the exact opposite. Old school records I have studied show that penmanship was taught at least twice a week in most early schools. Time and again I have found records of teaching penmanship to grownups in night classes outside of school. My own experience mirrors these findings as I remember penmanship classes on certain days through the third grade. I skipped the fourth grade when the schools changed to twelve years instead of eleven. Until this time, my writing was smooth and legible....
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