Bernd Debusmann

In his inaugural address on January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama promised that “we’ll restore science to its rightful place.” Mark that down as a broken promise, as far as a key element of America’s nuclear energy future is concerned.

Obama’s remark on science was a swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose administration was frequently criticized, often with good reason, for allowing ideology to trump science on subjects as varied as stem cell research, the morning-after birth control pill and the environment.

In contrast, Obama’s most prominent move to shelve a major scientific project — The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository — has been driven not by ideology but by a toxic combination of Nimbyism (from “not in my backyard”), electoral politics and high-handed leadership of America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That combination led to the closure of a project that, over its long gestation period, involved more than 2,500 scientists and has so far cost $15 billion.

Power-generation and nuclear waste are not usually subjects of great public interest but they made headlines and sparked renewed debate in the wake of last March’s nuclear accident in Japan, where spent fuel rods (nuclear waste) posed a greater radiation threat than the core of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Those rods were stored in pools of constantly circulating water — the system used at most U.S. nuclear plants — and dangerously overheated when an earthquake interrupted power supply to the pools.

Over the past few weeks, the steadily increasing waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors and the repository once meant to hold most of it deep underground, have been the subject of a string of reports and congressional hearings. They shed light not only on the need for a decision on what best to do with the waste but also on the fact that science on this issue has not been restored to the “rightful place” Obama promised in his eloquent inaugural speech.

According to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), more than 75,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are now held at sites scattered around the country, an amount that is expected to double by 2055. What’s the best option to storing these hazardous substances? “A geologic repository is widely considered the only currently feasible option for permanently disposing nuclear waste,” the GAO’s leading expert on energy matters, Mark Gaffigan, told a Congressional subcommittee.

It was called in response to a report by the GAO, the research arm of Congress, which discussed several options for storing nuclear waste and spelled out the reason the Department of Energy shut down Yucca mountain — not because it was deemed unsafe but because it lacked public support in Nevada. That’s not surprising — Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat, has waged a relentless campaign for more than two decades to kill the project, saying it was unsafe. That’s his opinion, not universally shared by scientists.

HIGH-COST ELECTORAL VOTES

When he was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Obama came down on the side of Reid, a stand that helped him beat his Republican rival John McCain, the Arizona senator firmly in favor of Yucca, and win the hotly contested state’s five electoral votes. Again, politics trumped science. Those five votes must count among the most expensive in American electoral history. Soon after taking office, Obama pulled the plug on Yucca mountain by writing it out of the budget. The project’s offices in Las Vegas were shut, the staff fired.

Up on the mountain, 4,950 feet from the Mojave desert, on the edge of a former nuclear test site 95 miles from Las Vegas, the gate has been closed to the entry of the five-mile tunnel drilled into the mountain to serve as a graveyard for nuclear waste.

But the project isn’t quite dead, yet. There is a pending lawsuit by the states of South Carolina and Washington against the Obama administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Their argument: Yucca was a congressionally mandated program (the legislation dates back to 1982) and cannot be killed by administrative fiat. While a Washington appeals court ponders the issue, a Blue Ribbon Commission set up last year continues to ponder “recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.”

The commission, which has until next January to complete its work, came up with draft recommendations in May. They include this one: “The United States should proceed expeditiously to develop one or more permanent deep geological facilities for the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste … Geologic disposal in a mined repository is the most promising and technically accepted option available for safely isolating high-level nuclear wastes for very long periods of time.”

In other words: Something just like Yucca as long as it’s not Yucca. The commission did not say in whose backyard they were looking to open such a site.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) — It was a pledge that helped Barack Obama win the presidency. “I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days. But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I’m promoting.”

That was on May 28, 2008, and it went down well with the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, Americans of Latin American descent. Of the around 10 million Latinos who went to the polls in November 2008, more than two thirds voted for Obama. For many of them, he has been a disappointment. Once in office, he put immigration on the back burner. He did not push the issue when Democrats had solid majorities in both houses of Congress.

Instead, in the first two years of the Obama presidency, around 1,100 illegal immigrants were deported every day, on average, a pace without precedent. According to the Department of Homeland Security, deportations totaled 387,790 in 2009 and 392,000 in 2010. These are not figures that have endeared Obama to immigrant communities.

Which is why a parade of prominent Latinos, from celebrities (actress Eva Longoria, music producer Emilio Estefan, Maria Elena Salinas of Univision) to business leaders, were invited to meetings at the White House in April and May where Obama talked about immigration and promised renewed efforts to push for Congressional action on immigration reform.

In addition, the White House launched a new website devoted to “President Obama and the Hispanic Community.” Hispanic members of the administration set up a series of conference calls with community leaders to reassure them that Latinos are “an integral part” of Obama’s vision to “out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.”

It’s a hearts-and-minds campaign driven by numbers — census figures released in March showed the Hispanic population at 50.5 million, 12 million of whom are expected to vote in 2012, two million more than in 2008. Another reason for the courtship: reminders that Obama’s 2008 campaign promise has not been forgotten. In the words of Luis Gutierrez, a Democratic congressman from Obama’s home state, “there was a compact. You came to us and you said. ‘elect me president and I will be champion for immigration reform.’”

That stood for a package that would have provided better control of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a new visa system, and a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, most of them Mexicans, who are already in the country. Prospects for that kind of reform are virtually zero – its Republican opponents insist that before any other changes, the border must be “secure.” They mean entry-proof, something no border ever has been.

FIXED FRONTS, UNCHANGING ARGUMENTS

The arguments on both sides have not changed since George W. Bush tried to fix the country’s dysfunctional immigration system in his second term in office. His attempt died in the Senate in June 2007 because he could not convince legislators in his own Republican party that illegal immigrants in the country should have the possibility to fix their status.

Last December, a much narrower bill fell five votes short of the 60 votes it needed for passage in the Senate. The DREAM Act (short for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) would have given legal status to hundreds of thousands of students who were brought to the U.S. by parents who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas. Many of those the DREAM ACT would have covered have lived almost their entire lives in the country.

Allowing them to stay, in the eyes of immigration hardliners, would be tantamount to amnesty. That is the argument that killed Bush’s reform plan, too.

The word amnesty tends to end rational debate but in April, 22 Democratic Senators wrote a letter to Obama suggesting that he, as “the nation’s chief law enforcement officer”, could exercise his executive powers to suspend deportations and allow the youths to stay. Obama shrugged off the idea. He may come to regret that.

For Latinos to affect the president’s chances of winning a second term, they don’t have to switch allegiance to the Republican party. It’s enough for a substantial number to just sit out the vote. If that happened, his electoral chances would be diminished.

So, Latin leaders can expect more invitations to the White House and more reassuring words. Deeds are another matter.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON — Call it the coalition of the baffled — a diverse group of prominent public figures who challenge the U.S. government’s logic of keeping on its terrorist blacklist an Iranian exile organization that publicly renounced violence a decade ago and has fed details on Iran’s nuclear programme to American intelligence.

On the U.S. Department of State’s list of 47 foreign terrorist organizations, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq is the only group that has been taken off similar lists by the European Union and Britain, after court decisions that found no evidence of terrorist activity in recent years. In the U.S., a court last July ordered the State Department to review the designation. Nine months later, that review is still in progress and supporters of the MEK wonder why it is taking so long.

The organization has been on the list since 1997, placed there by the Clinton administration at a time it hoped to open a dialogue with Iran, whose leaders hate the MEK for having sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war.

Calls to hasten the delisting process rose in volume after Iraqi troops raided the base of the MEK northeast of Baghdad, near the Iranian border, in an operation on April 8 that left at least 34 dead, according to the United Nations Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay. In Washington, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, called the raid a “massacre.” Video uploaded by the MEK showed gut-wrenchingly graphic images of dead and wounded, some after being run over by armoured personnel carriers.

The raid drew cheers from officials in Iran, where the group is also classified as terrorist, one of the few things on which Washington and Tehran agree. The word schizophrenia comes to mind here. Iran is one of four countries the U.S. has declared state sponsors of terrorism. The MEK’s stated aim is the peaceful ouster of the Iranian theocracy. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

In response to the April 8 violence, MEK supporters organized a seminar in Washington whose panelists highlighted the bipartisan nature of those critical of the terrorist label. It’s not often that you see the former chairman of the Democratic National Committe, Howard Dean, a liberals’ liberal, sitting next to Rudolf Giuliani, the arch-conservative former mayor of New York.

At a similar event in Paris on the same day, the podium was shared by Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel, Gen. James Jones, U.S. President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, former NATO commander Wesley Clark and MEK leader Maryam Rajavi. The theme at both events – take the MEK off the list and protect the around 3,400 Iranians in Iraq, who live in Ashraf, a small town surrounded by barriers and security fences.

To hear Dean tell it in Washington, the April 8 raid was evidence that the Iraqi government is becoming “a satellite government for Iran,” with the terrorist designation used to justify “mass murder.” Dean is not alone in ascribing this and a previous attack that killed 11 in Ashraf in July 2009 to the growing influence of Iran as the U.S. prepares to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by the end of the year.

WHAT NEXT?

What then? You don’t have to be a pessimist to anticipate more raids, more bloodshed and a humanitarian crisis. Until the end of 2008, the U.S. was responsible for the security of Ashraf and its residents enjoyed the status of “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention. That changed when the U.S. transferred control of Ashraf to the Iraqi government which provided written assurances of humane treatment of its residents.

They don’t seem to be worth the paper they are written on. The Iraqi raid on April 8 came a day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was in Baghdad for talks with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One of the topics Gates raised — Iran’s influence in the region.

That Ashraf and the terrorist label for its inhabitants would put the United States in an awkward position after the transfer of responsibility was spelt out with remarkable clarity in February 2009 in a cable from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Marked secret and released through Wikileaks, the cable said harsh Iraqi action would place the U.S. in “a challenging dilemma.”

“We either protect members of a Foreign Terrorist Organization against actions of the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) and risk violating the U.S.-Iraqi Security Agreement or we decline to protect the MEK in the face of a humanitarian crisis, thus leading to international condemnation of both the USG (U.S. government) and the GOI (government of Iraq).”

Which raises a question. How could the U.S. fail to protect unarmed Iranian dissidents opposed to a dictatorship but go to war to protect Libyans in a conflict between armed rebels and a dictatorship? Unlike the Libyan rebels, of whom little is known, the Iranians in Ashraf were all subject to background checks by the American military in the six years it was in control of the camp.

If there’s logic in protecting one but not the other, it’s not easy to see.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON — Every year since 1976, The U.S. Department of State has published an extraordinarily detailed report on the state of human rights in the world. The latest, out in April, runs to more than 2 million words. Printed out from State’s website, it would run to more than 7,000 pages. The report covers 194 countries.

That’s every country in the world, except one: the United States.

Which gives rise to a few questions. Is the United States the one and only country on the planet with a perfect record of observing human rights, at home or in the countries where it wages war? If not, why does the government feel entitled to scrutinize the human rights practices of others? The report discovers blemishes even in countries that rarely come to mind in the context of human rights violations.

Switzerland, say, where in 2010 “police at times used excessive force, occasionally with impunity.” Or Canada, where “human rights problems included harassment of religious minorities, violence against women, and trafficking in persons.” Or the tiny South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, where American human rights checkers found “police violence, poor prison conditions, arrests without warrants, an extremely slow judicial process, government corruption, and violence and discrimination against women.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes the annual report as “the most comprehensive record available of the condition of human rights around the world” and its attention to detail is indeed impressive. The Vanuatu chapter, for example, runs to almost 5,000 words, a lot considering there are only 220,000 inhabitants.

Given the effort that goes into the report, the only global assessment of human rights by a government (as opposed to private advocacy groups), one might assume that its findings play a major role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. But that is not the case. Where U.S. national interests are at stake, human rights violations are not necessarily obstacles to normal or even close relations.

“It’s easy to see the whole exercise as holier-than-thou preening that alienates even countries sympathetic to the cause,” wrote David Bosco, a professor at American University’s School of International Service, in a comment in Foreign Policy magazine. Among some countries, American criticism produces not alienation but red-hot fury.

Russia, heavily criticized in the latest U.S. report, shot back by describing the document as “obvious evidence of the use of ‘double standards’ and the politicization of human rights issues.” Russia’s foreign ministry pointed to “odious special prisons in Guantanamo and Bagram, still functioning despite promises to shut them down” as part of the reasons why the United States should clean its own house before criticizing others.

China, another target of American rebuke, has been so angered by the human rights reports that it began publishing an annual counter-report in 2000, focused solely on the United States. The latest came out just two days after the U.S. report which highlighted China’s intensifying crackdown on dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and lawyers.

HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICAL TOOL

China’s response: “The United States ignores its own severe human rights problems, ardently promoting its so-called ‘human rights diplomacy’, treating human rights as a political tool to vilify other countries and advance its own strategic interests.”

The Russo-Chinese-American sniping brought to mind the old adage that people in glass houses are well advised not to throw stones but China’s point about human rights as a political tool and the primacy of strategic interests merits closer attention than it tends to get in the United States.

In a just-published, thought-provoking book, Ideal Illusions — How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights, the historian James Peck argues that beginning in the 1970s, Washington began shaping human rights into an ideological weapon for reasons that had more to do with promoting America’s global reach than with furthering rights.

In the words of its introduction, the latest U.S. report provides “encyclopedic detail” on human rights for 2010, before the turmoil that has swept North Africa and the Middle East in the first three months of 2011. “However, our perspectives on many issues are now framed ” by these changes.

The changes provided yet more evidence that the universal values Washington officially espouses are not universally applied and that self-interest can trump human rights considerations. After mass protests swept from power the autocratic rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, other countries reacted to popular uprisings with violent repression. In Libya, the United States has sided militarily with the opposition. In Yemen, the United States called for the president to step down.

No such calls for the royal rulers of Bahrain, where pro-democracy demonstrations prompted the imposition of martial law, more than two dozen people were reported killed and 400 arrested in a ruthless crackdown supported by neighboring Saudi Arabia. Bahrain is of key importance to the U.S. — it’s the base of its Fifth Fleet which patrols vital oil shipping lanes.

“We hope that this (human rights) report will give comfort to the activists,” Clinton said on April 8.  To those in Bahrain probably not.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

“We stand for universal values, including the rights of the … people to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the freedom to access information.”

–President Barack Obama, during the Egyptian mass uprising against a detested dictator.

“The United States is … to construct an architecture of  values that spans the globe and includes every man, woman and child. An architecture that can not only counter repression and resist pressure on human rights, but also extend those fundamental freedoms to places where they have been too long denied.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a foreign policy speech in September.

That is the theory — U.S. foreign policy in defense of universal values. In practice, the United States has often been unable or unwilling to live up to the values it preaches. Like other big powers, it has placed its self-interest first, which meant dividing the world into acceptable and unacceptable authoritarians. Soaring rhetoric since the beginning of the pro-democracy uprisings in the Arab world notwithstanding, the gap between theory and practice is in full view again.

In an act of selective intervention, the U.S., France, and Britain launched air and missile strikes on Libya on March 19 to prevent the government of Muammar Gaddafi from using “illegitimate force” against Libyans demanding his ouster and clamoring for the same freedoms the Obama administration, after dithering and zig-zagging, eventually cheered in Egypt.

While Gaddafi’s brutal crackdown on opponents provoked a war, equally ruthless repressions (though on a smaller scale) of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain and Yemen prompted rhetorical American slaps on the wrists of the respective rulers, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power for 33 years, and a royal family which declared martial law in Bahrain this week.

So why Libya and not Yemen and Bahrain? Here is where lofty talk of universal values collides with self-interest and here is where policies the United States pursued for more than half a century live on. George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, put it succinctly in a 2005 speech in Cairo: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy … here in the Middle East.”

It still does, where Yemen and Bahrain are concerned. As a newly leaked cable (dating back to 2005) from the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital put it: “Saleh has provided Yemen with relative stability … but has done little to strengthen government institutions or modernize the country. As a result, any succession scenario is fraught with uncertainty.”

OUR SON OF A BITCH

Uncertainty in a tribal country that is home to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is the stuff of nightmares for the U.S. government, which has been counting on Saleh’s cooperation in the fight against AQAP. So, there has been no public American push for him to step down, not even after the killing of 52 pro-democracy demonstrators in a Sana’a square on March 18. Washington shrugged off a call by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, for a suspension of military assistance to Yemen.

Which brings to mind a remark attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 60 years ago, about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch.” Who says there is no consistency in U.S. foreign policy?

In the case of Bahrain, too, U.S. national interests trump universal values. The tiny island, connected by a causeway to Saudi Arabia, is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, there to guard shipping lanes that carry around 40 percent of the world’s tanker-borne oil. Saudi Arabia sent more than 1,000 troops into Bahrain to help the royal family in a ruthless crackdown on dissent.

With martial law imposed, the freedoms of which Obama spoke so approvingly when the Egyptians ousted Hosni Mubarak have been suspended in Bahrain. Hillary Clinton’s talk of an “architecture” to extend fundamental freedoms “to places where they have long been denied” sounds quaint in this context.

But critics of Washington’s dealings with the world should take note that hypocrisy and double standards are not an American monopoly. Take France and Britain, for example, the United States’ main partners in the attack on the Libyan government. Neither country has a record of unselfish promotion of human rights and freedom, not recently and even less in their colonial pasts. Is hypocrisy the inevitable byproduct of power politics?

What makes the United States particularly vulnerable to charges of double standards is its proclivity to going around the world preaching values it cannot live up to — and to portray itself as more moral and righteous than other nations.

In his State of the Union speech in January, Obama followed a long tradition of American leaders in describing his country in superlative terms. America, he said was “not just a place on the map but the light to the world.”

A fine phrase. It clearly does not mean that universal values are applied universally.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

There is fresh thinking, of a peculiar sort, in the perennial debate over gun violence in the United States, world leader in civilian ownership of firearms. Censorship of news reporting on the mass shootings that have long been part of American life will help prevent other mass shootings.

So says the National Rifle Association (NRA) in an open letter responding to President Barack Obama’s suggestion that it is time for all sides in the gun debate to get together and find a “sensible, intelligent way” to make the United States a safer place. The president mentioned common sense and a White House spokesman talked of the need to find common ground.

Common sense has not been in abundant supply in decades of on-again, off-again debate on guns and violence. As to finding common ground between the leading gun lobby and advocates of better controls, the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, says his group will “absolutely not” take part in the sort of meeting envisaged by Obama. Such a meeting, he said in a series of media interviews, would be with people opposed to the constitutional right to bear arms.

Talking to people of different views is obviously not a concept the politically powerful gun lobby intends to embrace.

In his open letter, LaPierre listed steps the president could take to prevent mass shootings, such as the January 8 rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded a member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords. “One of these (steps) is to call on the national news media to refrain from giving deranged criminals minute-by-minute coverage of their heinous acts, which only serves to encourage copycat behavior.”

It’s an argument that presupposes that there are plenty of deranged Americans who, like the Tucson shooter, are well-armed, passed the background check required to purchase guns, and are primed to spring into action after they see scenes of carnage on television. It’s also an argument fit for a pre-Internet dictatorship where presidents could tell the media how and what to report.

Until he tip-toed into the subject of gun violence on March 13, with an op-ed article in the Arizona Daily Star, Obama had kept silent on the issue, disappointing many of those who had voted him into office after a campaign in which he promised various gun control measures, including a permanent ban on the sale of assault weapons. The disappointment ran so deep that one of the most prominent gun control groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, gave him an “F”, a failing grade,  after his first year in office.

The president’s belated entry into the discussion, stirred anew after the Tucson shooting, will not earn him a reputation as an audacious reformer of a system even some gun enthusiasts admit is defective. “No guts on gun reform,” noted a headline over an opinion piece critical of Obama in The Washington Post.

OBAMA MUM ON KEY ISSUES

The president made no mention of assault rifles, no mention of the high-capacity magazines control advocates want banned, no mention of private sales of guns that do not require background checks, no mention of the so-called Tiahrt Amendment which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important information to trace guns, no mention of a proposal that would have required around 8,500 gun shops along the border with Mexico to report multiple sales of two or more assault weapons to the same person.

Thousands of weapons from those gun shops end up in Mexico, where more than 36,000 people have died since 2006 in parallel wars drug traffickers wage against each other – for access to the rich U.S. market – and against the government. President Felipe Calderon has repeatedly called for a re-instatement of the ban on assault weapons the administration of George W. Bush allowed to lapse in 2004.

The Mexican government expressed disappointment when the limited measure – it called for reporting, not prohibiting, bulk sales – died in the House of Representatives in February after energetic lobbying by the NRA. For it, and other gun rights group, tighter regulations are part of a long-standing conspiracy to undo the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Passed in 1789, the amendment says that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The sinister forces working for infringement, in the eyes of many gun owners, include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the coalition he set up in 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

It has grown from 15 mayors then to 550 now, advocates “common sense legislation for background checks”, and in January dispatched on a tour of 25 U.S. states a truck carrying a billboard with a running tally of Americans killed by guns since the Tucson mass shooting. When the truck left New York, on February 16, that count stood at 1,300. By March 17, it had risen to 2,316. Daily average: 34.

Such figures do not impress the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment. Neither does a bigger number: since the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington, more than a quarter million Americans have died by firearms  (murder, suicide, accidents).

In online discussions about guns, without fail someone comes up with the observation that more people die in car accidents than by bullet. So, goes the inevitable question, should there be restrictions on car sales?