Our Media Fail To Inform the Public Yet Again:

We Need the ABCs About the ABM Abrogation

Please, somebody! Explain to us why George W. Bush gets to abrogate a US treaty all by himself. The Constitution requires that a treaty be ratified by the US Senate. Shouldn’t the Senate therefore be asked to ratify a treaty’s abrogation? Or does each treaty contain a kick-out clause of some sort that’s approved as part of the initial treaty package?

In the case of the ABM Treaty, Bush has announced the US will no longer abide by it. Simple as that.

But our media haven’t provided us with a clue about the legal process of treaty abrogation. A search of media websites produced only one reference to this point of law (or what ought to be a point of law). The Los Angeles Times, at the end of a story about the ABM abrogation, has Tom Daschle saying that Bush can do this. That’s the only reference--and what good is that? Daschle provides no legal citations or precedents, and the reporter apparently didn’t think to ask for them.

Over the holiday, we wrote email messages to both Sen. Sarbanes and Sen. Mikulski, asking them to explain why the US Senate is not involved in the abrogation process. To date--two weeks later--there has been no response from them.

Now we’re left wondering: What other treaties may be unilaterally abrogated in the future by a president without any “advise and consent” from the US Senate?

Of course, that’s not all the public should know about the ABM treaty. For example, did you know that right at this very minute both the US and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger-alert status? Do we want more such weapons to be tested and deployed? Because that’s the purpose of the ABM treaty: to limit the expansion of nuclear arms, whose existence destabilizes international security. Without the treaty, it’ll be open season for nukes. It would also be helpful for the public to know that Bush’s announced ABM withdrawal would allow the US (or should we just go ahead and say “allow corporate friends of the Bush administration to profit from the US decision”) to begin work next spring on the construction of missile “defense” facilities in Alaska.

Still, even if a “missile defense system” could be made to work, it wouldn’t be workable for several years. Why abrogate the ABM Treaty now? And why aren’t our media asking that question as well?

One answer: ideologues in the Bush Administration want to eliminate arms control so the the US can act unilaterally abroad. So what if the rest of the world disapproves? We’re the big enchilada, these people think, so why should we be told by our inferiors what we can and cannot do? The nonprofit Council for a Livable World suggests this same ideology caused the Bush administration to “scuttle the Geneva, Switzerland conference to review and strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention,” held last month. (And did our media tell us about that?)

The Council for a Livable World lays it out like this: “This decision to speed up construction of facilities in Alaska does not appear to be based on any new assessment of the threats facing the United States from long-range ballistic missiles. It is more likely that the President wants to fulfill a campaign pledge by installing some missile defense system in Alaska by 2004, even if it does not work.”

Treaties be damned, then, when there are profits to be made by special interests on the backs of clueless (thanks to its appallingly inadequate “free press”) taxpayers. The rest of the world be damned, then, because it’s weak.