2. As in, not enough: Atlanta has 80 days of water left because of drought, and Florida now wants to scuttle a water sharing agreement to save their precious Apalachicola oysters... well, actually, that's a misleading way of framing the situation:
The drought plaguing parts of at least seven U.S. states in the Southeast has to do with exploding demand in some of the fastest growing areas of the United States, breakneck urban development that has paved over acres of natural wetlands, and poor planning by local authorities.
"It's very misleading when the debate is framed as people versus mussels," said Gil Rogers, a staff attorney in Atlanta for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
What politicians in the Southeast need to do is to look at the way "we're growing and whether there is water to maintain the lifestyle we all want," Rogers said. "Our political leadership has blinkers on when it comes to anything that might get in the way of unrestricted development."
3. As in, protect us from our water protectors:
A long-simmering dispute about whether a leading engineering organization whitewashed the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the failure of the levee system during Hurricane Katrina has broken into the open with a bitter YouTube spoof and a demand for an ethics investigation of the organization's staff.
...
The [American Society of Civil Engineers] is bristling at a video spoofing its levee investigation recently posted on the Internet site YouTube by the local advocacy group Levees.org. The video implies that ASCE engineers were "in some way bribed or corrupted by the corps," the association contends. They demanded it be taken down.
...
The video was produced by Stanford Rosenthal, a senior at Isidore Newman School and the son of Levees.org President Sandy Rosenthal, who said her group would remove the video from the Web by Tuesday night, although she believes the allegations it contains are accurate. It has become an Internet phenomenon, garnering tens of thousands of viewers in just a week.
...
"The reason we're taking it down, quite simply, is we just don't have the personnel or resources to wage a legal battle with the ASCE," Rosenthal said, "even though we stand by every word of the public announcement and contend it's completely accurate."
4. As in, waterboarding is dishonorable:
When the U.S. military trains soldiers to resist interrogation, it uses this torture technique, which originated in the Middle Ages. It is described in Army field manuals as torture, and s a Special Forces Green Beret in 1968 training at the JFK School for Special Warfare in Fort Bragg, N.C., I was taught exactly that.
...
My grandfather fought Nazis in North Africa and my father fought Imperial Japan in the Pacific. An uncle battled the Nazis in Europe and two other Marine uncles fought on Iwo Jima. All of them taught me that American fighting men were different because we always took the high road of honor when we captured enemies.
...
President Abraham Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. His order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and was the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention.
...
Authorization of the technique called "waterboarding" dishonors our nation.
5. As in, being tortured on a waterboard:
Henri Alleg, born to a French mother and Algerian father, was a journalist living in Algiers during the Algerian Revolution. For five years in the early 1950’s, he was editor-in-chief of the Alger Republicain, a Communist and anti-colonialist newspaper that called for freedom of speech and the right of redress for Algerian grievances.
In 1955, the French shut the paper down; shortly thereafter, Alleg went into hiding. In 1957, he was finally caught, by the 10th Paratrooper Division.
For one month, he was subjected to an array of the most brutal tortures imaginable. He was beaten on the genitals, his genitals and nipples were burnt with an open flame, he was repeatedly shocked, he was deprived of water for days. And, most relevant to today, he was subject to what the French called “la baignoire,” the bathtub – and what the U.S. government, perhaps wishing to evoke a summer day at an amusement park with the family, calls waterboarding.
He was strapped to a board and placed under a sink, with a rag covering his face, and the tap was turned on. After minutes of desperately trying to keep the water from filling up his lungs and drowning him, right when he was on the verge of suffocation, the water flow would be stopped. After he caught his breath, it would start again.
This was perhaps the most effective method the French had at their disposal and may well have won the Battle of Algiers for them.
Yet somehow, heroically, Alleg didn’t break, not even when the “Paras” took his wife into custody. He knew that if he did, the lives of all those who had helped him while he was in hiding would be forfeit.
...
Sadly, our mainstream journalists, no matter how assiduously some of them may work to discredit the Bush administration, are only capable of imagining life from on top; if they could even think for a minute or two about the effects of water, they would be more critical. They don’t need to be like Henri Alleg, they just need a little empathy.
6. As in, hole: after the hard rains two weeks ago, a sinkhole opened up and collapsed the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. It's right by the water meter, too, and my bill has skyrocketed.
Labels: ACoE, heroes, Iraq morass, levees, links, military, weather
