Saturday, May 28, 2005

Rewriting History
Does the Sith... I mean BushCo have absolutely no scruples? Seems a brochure produced for the recent nuclear arms control conference fiasco was edited down a timeline of US disarmament achievements:

 
With a few keystrokes, an official U.S. brochure on disarmament eliminated some historic arms-control deals and showed once again that what is left out of a report can be as telling as what's put in.

In this case, the publication's "rewriting of history," as one critic put it, also illustrates in black and white a dispute that has helped bog down the 188-country conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
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The brochure, produced by the U.S. State Department and distributed to hundreds of delegates, lists milestones in arms control since the 1980s, while touting reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

But the timeline omits a pivotal agreement, the 1996 treaty to ban nuclear tests, a pact negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 countries but now rejected by President George W. Bush.

Further along, the brochure skips over the year 2000 entirely, a snub of the treaty review conference that year, when the United States and other nuclear-weapons states committed to "13 practical steps" to achieve nuclear disarmament - including activating the test-ban treaty, negotiating a pact to ban production of bomb material and "unequivocally undertaking" to totally eliminate their arsenals.

Bush administration officials now suggest the 2000 commitments are outdated. Other delegations reject that, however, demanding a reaffirmation of the goals in a final document at the current conference.

Few expect that, and they cite the blank spots in the brochure as another piece of evidence.

"Official disdain for these agreements seems to have turned into denial that they existed," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms-control specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who accused the State Department of rewriting history.

"Does this mean that, because we have a change of administration, we are not accountable to other countries?" asked another disarmament advocate, Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute.
 


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