The New York Times today continues its campaign against missile defense, devoting space in its international section to an article reporting that 50 Nobel laureates have signed a letter to President Clinton urging him to reject a missile defense system. As we noted on June 29, when the Times reported on a group of 40 "American scholars on China and former diplomats" who had signed a letter asking Mr. Clinton to delay a decision on missile defense, a group letter like this is the sort of publicity stunt that often doesn't tell you very much about the merits of a particular issue. In the case of the Nobel laureates, however, the text of their letter shows the flaw in their logic. The Times quotes the laureates as dismissing the North Korean threat and saying that "Other dangerous states will arise. But what would such a state gain by attacking the United States except its own destruction?"
Aha. The Nobel laureates must have not been paying attention during the Clinton administration, when it became abundantly clear that dangerous states could attack America without even barely a slap on the wrist, never mind the threat of "destruction." Consider Iraq, whose Ramzi Yousef, as Laurie Mylroie has written in The National Interest, was a key figure in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Or consider Iran, which newspapers have reported was behind the 1996 bombing of the U.S. Air Force barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. The Clinton administration has dealt with Iraq and Iran not by destroying them, but, in the case of Iraq, by refusing to implement the law requiring America to aid the democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein, and, in the case of Iran, by relaxing American sanctions on Iranian caviar, carpets and pistachios.
The Times article on the letter from the Nobel laureates doesn't include a quote from a single supporter of missile defense countering the arguments made in the letter. There is only a paraphrase of a comment from a Pentagon spokesman saying that the laureates had no access to secret information. That is beside the point.
There is one slight improvement in the Times' coverage of the missile defense issue today. Yesterday's smartertimes.com objected to a sentence in yesterday's Times reporting that "The Pentagon schedule to build a missile defense is entirely driven by the belief that North Korea will have a long-range missile by 2005." Today the phrase "entirely driven" has been discarded; today's story states that North Korea's missile program "is a main reason that the Pentagon wants to build its system." Fair enough.
Meanwhile, another Times story, on an upcoming test of the missile defense system, seems to be missing a word. The article says, "If the kill vehicle finds and destroys the warhead, the sky would 'with a big flash,' said a Pentagon briefer." Huh? The sky would fall with a big flash? The sky would be filled with a big flash?
Mother Jones Claims Scoop on Bio-Warfare: Mother Jones magazine sends smartertimes.com the following wire: "A front page story in today's New York Times, 'Fungus Considered as a Tool to Kill Coca in Colombia,' reports on how the U.S. is pressuring Colombia into field-testing a coca-killing herbicide that may pose serious threats to the environment and human health. That's old news to readers of the MoJo Wire, Mother Jones magazine's online sister publication, which broke the story ('Drug Control or Biowarfare?' by Sharon Stevenson and Jeremy Bigwood) on May 3, 2000."
The wire continues: "The MoJo Wire also reported critical details of the story that the Times didn't cover. While the Times acknowledges that environmentalists have raised concerns about the herbicide, known as fusarium oxysporum, it doesn't explain the scientific evidence underpinning those concerns; in fact, the experts quoted at length in the Times piece downplay the environmental risks, asserting that the main concern is whether fusarium will be effective against coca plants. The MoJo Wire article, however, includes links to several scientific research papers and US government studies showing that fusarium can attack plants besides coca, including food crops; and that it can pose a lethal danger to people and animals with weakened immune systems. The Times story also doesn't mention an amendment to the upcoming $1.3 billion Colombian aid package, added last March by Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, which virtually forces Colombia to move toward deploying the herbicide. The amendment , also linked to from the MoJo Wire article, requires President Clinton to certify that the Colombian government 'has agreed to and is implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's total coca and opium poppy production' using, among other things, 'tested, environmentally safe mycoherbicides.' Fusarium oxysporum is the only mycoherbicide that has been considered for this use."