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07/13/2004:

"Dirty Gold, Dirty Bombs, and Another Native American Land Grab:Yucca Mountain"

by AL Kennedy The Guardian UK
Native Americans lose their land as our presidential hero revives old-time nuclear tensions with Moscow

So glad that our Tony has now slithered himself a plucky and important millimetre away from Bush - "I now feel I can only agree absolutely with 99% of what the lovely president thinks and does". Sturdy chap, our premier. But if he's looking to improve his personal popularity - we can hardly expect him to be acting out of conscience - he still has to deal with the difficulty that if Bush and Blair together are the Laurel and Hardy of demonic foreign policy, Bush and Blair apart are quite evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children.

Now, like many British citizens, I'd rather not think about our ghastly leader, but Bush is rather harder to blot out. It's that whole terror thing. I've been waking up screaming since I was five, so I find I am slightly susceptible to terror. Not the $60bn-earmarked-for-next-year, civil-rights-dissolving, Orange Alert type of terror - I mean real terror.

And it's not as if the genuine terror of Bush is hard to notice. Within hours of coming into office, he'd started approving oil exploration in national parks, cutting support for disadvantaged children, raising the levels of arsenic in drinking water... Being an utter bastard with numbing consistency is his only speciality beyond mangling his native language and playing golf like an unhinged Muppet in times of crisis.

But Team Bush could never be happy just tormenting its own (non-millionaire) citizens - the misery must spread. So we in the rest of the world get to be alarmed by the whole sabotaging Kyoto thing, the murdering strangers for fun and profit thing and the screwing the Middle East in hopes of Armageddon thing. But what gets slightly less attention is the reviving the cold war arms race thing.

It seemed momentarily puzzling when the US withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty and started developing cuter, smaller types of "battlefield" nukes when there didn't seem to be a cold war any more. These things were of little or no help against mobile terror cells and the Pentagon had proved itself completely unable to protect even its own troops from the radiation produced by existing DU weapons. But, of course, all this lucrative US nuclear development was bound to alarm the Russians and therefore justify itself retrospectively. Hence, Mr Putin's obliging announcement that his scientists have developed a vigorous response to America's ballistic missile defence. The fact that BMD won't work as advertised is, of course, balanced by the fact that it gets nukes very close to Russia and is supposed to be pre-emptive not defensive. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense - it makes money, which is much more important.

And the new cold war is why US military nuclear facilities (which have been closed down as unsafe by the FBI in the past) are now immune from environmental legislation. Better yet, plans for the Nevada test site now include sexy, actual testing of nuclear weapons. Needless to say this is really pleasing everyone in Las Vegas, which is only 65 miles away, and everyone in Utah - soon to be renamed Downwind, the Malignantly Mutating State. Naturally, attempts to amend the relevant Defence Authorisation Act failed.

But the Bushies' joy doesn't end there, because the Nevada test site isn't even on United States land - it's on territory which belongs to the Western Shoshone nation and is protected by treaty (should you feel that treaties between the US and indigenous peoples are in any way binding). The Yucca Mountain site earmarked for America's nuclear waste depository is also on Western Shoshone land, as is the planned Federal Counterterrorism Facility. And what is probably the world's third largest gold-producing area. Full Article

Western Shoshone Defense Project
by: Jerry Reynolds / Washington D.C. correspondent
Indian Country Today
WASHINGTON - One of the largest ongoing seizures of Indian land in modern times will move forward following President George W. Bush’s signing of the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill on July 7.

Under provisions of the bill, Western Shoshone claims to 24 million acres of land in Nevada, Utah, California and Idaho, based on the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863, are officially subsumed through payment by the U.S. government. The bill will forcibly distribute approximately $145 million in funds awarded the tribe by the Indian Land Claims Commission. Most of it will go to 6,000 or so eligible tribal members, with a separate revenue stream set aside for educational purposes.

The commission acted on findings that following the Ruby Valley Treaty, which permitted non-Indian miners access to the tribal lands, a "gradual encroachment" took place that supposedly nullified the treaty. According to the government the "gradual encroachment" theory obviated any need for official cession of land by sovereign Western Shoshone governments, a sticking point to this day with foes of the funds distribution.

The commission based its original $27 million award (enacted by its successor organization, U.S. Court of Federal Claims) on land valuation in effect in 1872 - 15 cents an acre, with no interest on the loss over time.

Because acceptance of the award would create the perception that any claims to their land have been relinquished, the majority of Western Shoshone governments have steadfastly refused the money. Despite the July 7 signing, several Western Shoshone tribes and tribal members said they will continue to rely on the Ruby Valley Treaty to press their land claims.

This has never been easy for them. Another sticking point in the process of seizure has been a court ruling that the tribe could not litigate the award once its trustee, the Interior Department, accepted receipt of it.

Although tribal sovereignty is not vested in individuals but in tribes, Congress has relied on individual votes, cast in rather stage-managed proceedings, to determine that a "majority" of Western Shoshone tribal members favor distribution of funds and the resulting extinction of their land claims. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his Republican ally in the House of Representatives, fellow Nevadan James Gibbons, persuaded their colleagues to pass the embattled bill mainly on the strength of vote tallies in proceedings that had no official sanctioning process across all the Western Shoshone tribes, but concentrated on Nevada tribes.

The Ruby Valley Treaty lands are rich in resources, including gold, water and geothermal energy. Multinational mining companies are standing by to operate within the Ruby Valley lands through "privatization" bills brought forward by Gibbons. Gibbons and Reid are among Congress’ leading recipients of mining company contributions.

In addition, President Bush has designated Yucca Mountain, a site within the Ruby Valley lands, as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. full article