Home > BUSH breaks the law by unilaterally breaking non-nuclear proliferation treaty
BUSH breaks the law by unilaterally breaking non-nuclear proliferation treaty
by Open-Publishing - Saturday 4 March 20061 comment
BUSH breaks the law by unilaterally breaking non-nuclear proliferation treaty without Congressional approval or even informing his Cabinet
He did it again, but this time its worse!
South Asia
Mar4 ,2006
The US’s nuclear cave-in
By Joseph Cirincione
Buffeted by political turmoil at home, US President George W Bush sought a foreign-affairs victory in India. To clinch a nuclear-weapons deal, Bush had to give in to demands from the Indian nuclear lobby to exempt large portions of the country’s nuclear infrastructure from international inspection.
With details of the deal still under wraps, it appears that at least one-third of current and planned Indian reactors would be exempt from International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and that Bush gave in to Indian demands for "Indian-specific" inspections that would fall far short of the normal, full-scope inspections
originally sought. Worse, Indian officials have made clear that India alone will decide which future reactors will be kept in the military category and exempt from any safeguards.
The deal endorses and assists India’s nuclear-weapons program. US-supplied uranium fuel would free up India’s limited uranium reserves for fuel that otherwise would be burned in these reactors to make nuclear weapons. This would allow India to increase its production from the estimated six to 10 additional nuclear bombs per year to several dozen a year. India today has enough separated plutonium for75 - 110nuclear weapons, though it is not known how many it has actually produced.
The Indian leaders and press are crowing about their victory over the United States. For good reason: President Bush has done what Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and his own father refused to do - break US and international law to aid India’s nuclear-weapons program. In1974 , India cheated on its agreements with the United States and other nations to do what Iran is accused of doing now: using a peaceful nuclear energy program to build a nuclear bomb. India used plutonium produced in a Canadian-supplied reactor to detonate a bomb it then called a "peaceful nuclear device". In response, president Richard Nixon and Congress stiffened US laws and Nixon organized the Nuclear Suppliers Group to prevent any other nation from following India’s example.
Bush has now unilaterally shattered those guidelines, and his action would violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) proscription against aiding another nation’s nuclear-weapons program. It would require the repeal or revision of several major US laws, including the US Nonproliferation Act. Nor has he won any significant concessions from India. India refuses to agree to end its production of nuclear-weapons material, something the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China have already done.
This is where Bush is likely to run into trouble. Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress are deeply concerned about the deal and the way it was crafted. Keeping with the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy, the deal was cooked by a handful of senior officials (one of whom is now a lobbyist for the Indian government) and never reviewed by the departments of State, Defense or Energy before it was announced with a champagne toast by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Congress was never consulted. Republican committee staff say the first members heard about it was when the fax announcing the deal came into their offices. Worse, for the president, this appears to be another give away to a foreign government at the expense of US national-security interests.
Bad example
In addition to breaking US law and shattering long-standing barriers to proliferation, lawmakers are concerned about the example the nuclear-weapons deal sets for other nations. The lesson Iran is likely to draw is simple: if you hold out long enough, the Americans will cave. All this talk about violating treaties, they will reason, is just smoke. When the Americans think you are important enough, they will break the rules to accommodate you.
Pakistani officials have already said they expect their country to receive a similar deal, and Israel is surely waiting in the wings. Other nations may decide that they can break the rules, too, to grant special deals to their friends. China is already rumored to be seeking a deal to provide open nuclear assistance to Pakistan - a practice it stopped in the early1990 s after a successful diplomatic campaign by the United States to bring China into conformity with the NPT restrictions. Will Russia decide that it can make an exception for Iran?
Lawmakers loyal to Bush are already signaling tough times ahead for this deal. Republican Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation, offered the following statement after the deal was announced: "There is enthusiastic support on Capitol Hill for growing US-India ties. However, the US-India agreement on civil nuclear cooperation has implications beyond US-India relations. In this process, the goal of curbing nuclear proliferation should be paramount. Congress will continue its careful consideration of this far-reaching agreement."
Royce’s subcommittee has oversight and legislative responsibilities over non-proliferation matters. Republican Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made no secret of his concerns, as has Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Democratic Congressman Edward Markey says, "America cannot credibly preach nuclear temperance from a barstool. We can’t tell Iran, a country that has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that they can’t have [uranium] enrichment technologies while simultaneously carving out a special exemption from nuclear-proliferation laws for India, a nation that has refused to sign the treaty."
This looming congressional battle will pit the proliferation fighters against the nuclear lobby and the increasingly powerful India lobby. Companies and countries (including France, Canada and Russia) are lining up to sell fuel and reactors to India. They will be joined by the US neo-conservatives who seek to construct an anti-China alliance. For them, as one architect of the India deal reportedly said, "The problem is not that India has too many nuclear weapons, it is that they do not have enough."
If Bush were riding high in the polls and had a string of national-security victories behind him, this David-and-Goliath battle would be won by the nuclear giants. But with sagging popularity, deep concern over his leadership, and anger at his administration’s disregard for laws and consultation, lawmakers more concerned about proliferation than profits could block or amend this deal. The president may have made a fatal error in putting nuclear weapons at the heart of improved US-India relations. US lawmakers want the latter, but not at the price of the former.
Dr Joseph Cirincione (jcirincione@carnegieendowment.org) is the director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.
Forum posts
5 March 2006, 02:35
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Impeachment is also the test that will determine whether We, the People of the United States, still have the power to affect the conduct of our own elected officials and the will to exercise that power.
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The Impeachable Mr. Bush
An Aggregation of High Crimes and Misdemeanors
By RALPH NADER
What will it take for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to be held responsible for a multitude of political crimes, recklessness, prevarications and just plain massive ongoing mismanagement of the taxpayers government?
The first step is to aggregate these travesties so they add up to a more comprehensive judgment. Then, together they confront us with an awful truth — that our present system of constitution, law and checks and balances have failed to be invoked by the elected and appointed officials of our Congress and our Courts. This is happening even though the polls have been dropping on the Bush regime for over a year and are now quite negative on many important questions.
Consider the following sample of irresponsibility and flouting of the law and then ask yourself how much more will it take to start holding the Bush/Cheney crowd of serial fibbers and dictacrats accountable? Is there ever to be a tipping point in the Washington world of spineless Democrats and supine Congressional Republicans worried about Bush losing the 2006 elections?
1. The drug benefit boondoggle, starting January 1, 2006, has been by all reports maelstrom of confusion, deprivation, gouging and misadministration, leaving many sick people in a frightening limbo. That is Bushland messing up big time while giving the gouging, long-subsidized profit-glutted drug companies hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade paid by the taxpayer.
2. Katrina! The breaching of the levees was predicted at least over a year before and warned about just before the Hurricane hit by federal officials but ignored by the Administration. Bush’s godliness complex let him give the public the impression that the destruction was an unavoidable Act of God, when it was an avoidable disaster of Bush. The White House earlier had cut the Army Corps of Engineers budget designed for hurricane defense in the New Orleans area. The Corps itself is not blameless, but its commander in chief is, after all, George W. Bush.
3. Bush-Cheney plunged our country into an endless war-quagmire in Iraq on an often repeated platform of falsehoods, cover-ups and deliberate distractions from the ignored necessities here at home. Tens of thousands of American have lost their lives, their limbs or their health over there and casualties of innocent Iraqi adults and children are much more numerous. Already costing hundreds of billions of dollars, the mismanagement of this war of choice is the material of hundreds of Pentagon audits, Congressional reports, official admissions, firsthand press reports and Congressional condemnations by the respected Government Accountability Office (GAO).
"Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled", U.S. Report finds, "is a recent front page headline in The New York Times— one of many such headlines in recent months. The corporate contractors, such ass Halliburton, will set records for waste and worse as the facts spill out to the people.
4. The impeachable George W. Bush imperiously asserts that he will continue to violate federal law and place the American people under any surveillance that he chooses to impose without ever using a Congressionally approved procedure which requiresfor a quick and secret court warrant that is even permitted to be retroactive.
He and his pitchmen claim that they are pursuing terrorists. But the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic dragnets are enveloping millions of people, flooding the FBI with what that agency says is mountains of indiscriminate undigested data that are useless.
Besides, as of the end of 2004, Bush and John Ashcroft, his then Attorney General had arrested 5000 people on suspicion of terrorism, jailed them, most without charges, and then proceeded to strike out. Two were convicted and the convictions were overturned in Michigan. The Bush scorecard, according to Georgetown Law professor David Cole was 0 for 5000! Does this record qualify for chronic abuse of legal process or is it just sloppy law enforcement designed to produce political press releases?
5. Bush pumps "the ownership society" and opposes attempts to give investors the power that should accrue to them as owners over the self-enriching managers of the giant corporations. As a result, big time corporate executives keep vastly overpaying themselves, through their rubber-stamp Boards of Directors (starting at $7200 an hour in 2002 and upward for the CEOs of the top 300 corporations). Warren Buffet called runaway executive compensation and stock options a central cause of cooking corporate books and undermining jobs and their own companies’ financial stability.
6. Cutting life-sustaining programs for needy children, sick adults and regulatory health-safety protections for most Americans while reducing the taxes of the richest one percent, including his own and Cheney’s taxes, invites Biblical condemnation. He has left many Americans defenseless from preventable hazards here at home, while he plays the providential Viceroy of Iraq. At the same time, Bush’s forked tongue touts "the safety of the American people" as his highest responsibility.
7. He encumbers young children with taxes (who will have to pay the debt) through massive federal deficits brought about significantly by huge numbers of corporate handouts, giveaways, subsidies and tax escapism. That’s one way of leaving children behind.
8. Mismangement and underfunding implode his educational distraction called No Child Left Behind. Just ask the Republican state of Utah or millions of teachers beset with constant, vapid standardized multiple choice tests created by corporate consultants.
9. He huffs and puffs about spreading democracies around the world while condoning and encouraging the shipment of whole American industries and jobs to the communist Chinese dictatorship, and other dictatorships on which he continues to lavish such globalized policies.
However, his boomeranging foreign policy may yet turn him into an unintended patron saint of elected Islamic theocracies.
These and many other documentations of his tortured tenure can demonstrate what their aggregation can contribute to motivate the American people toward holding him and Cheney accountable to them under the rule of law. But don’t count on the Democrats leading. They blew another election — Congressional and Presidentially — against the worst Republicans in American history.
Aggregation, my fellow citizens, is up to your independent minds and judgments to absorb and act upon.
For a sample of aggregation , see
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