Commentary
Oregon Daily Emerald
Thesday, January 4, 2005
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■ Guest commentary
RiverBend hospital asking
for a future flood disaster
It is a pre-dawn morning during the winter
of 2008. It has been raining heavily for a week
straight. All the dams are filled to capacity.
The McKenzie and Willamette rivers are
flowing over their banks. At the new Sacred
Heart Hospital along the McKenzie River,
rising floodwaters have cut off vehicle access.
As in 1996, residents throughout Lane
County are waking to find they are stranded
and in need of help. Many have been injured
and some are missing. Unfortunately, most
regional rescue efforts must remain focused
on hospital evacuation. Water over two feet
surrounds the hospital and evacuation is
hazardous. News reports* air that the new
McKenzie Willamette Hospital at the EWEB
site is also facing rising floodwaters.
Most of Sacred Heart’s adjacent buildings,
housing and nearby commercial outlets suffer
major damage; several buildings have been
destroyed which were stocked with medical
supplies and hazardous materials. Moreover,
due to the displaced floodwaters from all
these buildings, every nearby residence
suffers extensive flood damage. Homes are
inundated and victims are trapped on roofs.
More deaths around Lane County occur be
cause of the strain on rescue personnel which
remain tied up with hospital evacuation.
Any part of this scenario is possible and
plausible! Something went wrong in the
hospital planning process for the new hospital
at RiverBend. They knew most of the
RiverBend site is really a flood plain.
Yet they plow forward with their so-called
experts to counter serious issues raised in the
planning process. They can elevate the
roadways and hospital itself, and build a dike
to protect it from rising floodwaters, but a
hospital threatened by a flood will still
command use of every available resource
and rescue personnel while taking away from
other countywide needs. Just where do this
giant flood-protected hospital and dozens
of other buildings force all the displaced
floodwaters? To the upstream, downstream and
adjacent properties.
Their experts cast aside very crucial issues
in assessing flood risk. Now they know that if
and when the river does change course,
which it will some day, they will be
held accountable. Rule No. 1: Communities
don’t build any emergency services (or muse
ums) and especially hospitals, in areas prone
to flooding!
The Sacred Heart hospital is being planned
next to a river meander. They were right in
naming it RiverBend. The Mathews’ house
was also located adjacent to a meander. These
wide turns are where the river is most likely
to change course when it cuts across the neck
of a U-shaped turn, leaving only an “oxbow
lake" where the channel used to be, and can
substantially reshape the river just upstream
and downstream.
Responding at the public meeting on the
loss of the Mathews’ property on Feb. 4, 2004,
Lane County Commissioner Bobby Green
stated, “We need to learn from this.” But
this community, so far, hasn’t learned
anything. For this community to consider
putting not just one, but two hospitals, in
areas at risk of flood danger could be the
most irresponsible, arrogant and idiotic
decisions this community’s leaders have ever
made. Knowing we could be without a
hospital when we need it most, during a cata
strophic flood, is unfathomable. It is negligent
to build emergency services in areas at any
risk of flood. McKenzie-Willamette better take
a second look as well.
Please understand, it is not so important
that our hospital rooms have a nice
river view.
David Rodriguez lives in Springfield, just
upstream from where the Mathews’ house
once stood, and has been involved with river
related issues since the mid-1990s
■ Editorial
White House skirts
moral high ground
by holding terrorists
The Bush Administration is
currently contemplating holding
certain suspected terrorists in
custody for their entire lives,
despite a lack of evidence
against them, according tb the
Washington Post.
This shouldn’t come as too
much of a surprise. White
House staff have never let little
things like a lack of evidence, in
ternational law or the Constitu
tion stop them from waging war
on terror in the past.
Nor have they let themselves
be handicapped by trying to
maintain the moral high ground
while prosecuting the war on ter
ror — just ask the prisoners at
Abu Ghraib. We have been per
fectly happy to be known
throughout the world as more
moral than Saddam Hussein and
the murderous insurgents. Why
set the bar too high? Morality is a
national security risk. Lowering
the world’s expectations is simply
part of protecting ourselves.
But detaining innocent people
without judicial review until they
die seems too horrific even for this
White House to contemplate. One
option under review involves
transferring the detainees from
Guantanamo Bay to U.S.-style
prisons in their home countries,
according to the Post.
In another proposal, the De
fense Department would ask Con
gress for $25 million to build a
more comfortable prison for the
detainees, called Camp 6. This fa
cility would hold around 200
inmates that are no longer useful
from an intelligence standpoint
but cannot go through a military
tribunal because the government
lacks evidence against them. Here
the inmates would live a more
comfortable existence and be al
lowed to socialize with other in
mates. Think of it as a suspected
terrorist retirement village.
Not everyone is loving these
plans. Republican Sen. Richard G.
Lugar, chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, called the
proposal a “bad idea.” Democratic
Sen. Carl Levin, on the Senate
Armed Services Committee,
questioned the proposal’s consti
tutionality. “There must be some
modicum, some semblance of due
process,” he said. One CIA officer
quoted in the Post called the
practice “kidnapping.”
It is time that we abandon this
barbaric form of justice popular
ized by right wing pundits and
country music singers. It is time
for real American justice to reach
the detainees. If the government
has evidence of their links to
terrorism, then they should be
brought before a court of law. If
there is not enough evidence, then
they should be freed.
We are a strong and secure
superpower. We do not need to
lower ourselves to the terrorists’
level in order to protect
ourselves. We can have both
security and liberty. Anybody
who says otherwise is giving the
terrorists too much credit.
■ Guest commentary
Alberto Gonzales loyal only to Bush, not law
(U-WIRE) NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Back
in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft
ordered the semi-nude “Spirit of Justice”
statue to be covered, at a cost of about
$8,000 to American taxpayers. With Presi
dent Bush’s nomination of Alberto
Gonzales to replace Ashcroft, Americans
should spring for another $8,000 to cover
the poor lady’s eyes, too. Justice, and any
one interested in her preservation, isn’t
going to like Gonzales very much.
Gonzales’ story is compelling. He is a
child of immigrants and a Harvard Law
graduate. He has served in the Air Force,
the Texas Supreme Court and the White
House. But this record of achievement ob
scures a crucial fact: Gonzales also has a
record of dispensing incredibly bad advice.
His most famous mispractice came in
2002 when he advised Bush that “the war
on terrorism renders obsolete Geneva’s
strict limitation on questioning of enemy
prisoners and renders some of its provi
sions quaint.” In other memoranda, he
argued that Geneva and other statutes
covering war crimes should be ignored
completely at the president’s discretion.
Gonzales’ arguments contributed signifi
cantly to the culture that produced the Abu
Ghraib scandal. The resulting human
rights violations punctured American
moral exceptionalism and set the
campaign to win Iraqi “hearts and minds”
back by decades.
It will be interesting to watch Senator
John McCain, who was imprisoned in a
Vietnamese torture camp for five years,
vote to confirm a man who views Geneva
protections the way most people view the
warnings on mattress tags.
Gonzales has had practice when it
comes to obviating human rights
concerns. Throughout the ‘90s, when
then-Governor Bush was setting a record
for executions, he asked then-Justice
Gonzales to review each death row inmate
on the morning of his scheduled demise.
Gonzales took the duty less than serious
ly. According to legal analyst Alan Berlow,
“A close examination of the Gonzales
memoranda suggests that Governor Bush
frequently approved executions based on
only the most cursory briefings on the
issues in dispute. In fact, in these
documents, Gonzales repeatedly failed to
apprise the governor of crucial issues in
the cases at hand.”
The casual observer might conclude
that Gonzales has declared a personal ji
had on human rights. But this conclusion
is wrong: Gonzales is no ideologue. On the
Texas Supreme Court, he was moderate in
opinion and temperament. Indeed, it is
commonly believed that he was nominat
ed for attorney general because Bush’s
far-right base found him insufficiently
conservative to make a viable Supreme
Court nominee. But progressives who
might be tempted to celebrate Gonzales’
moderation should keep that champagne
on ice. Gonzales signals an alarming trend
in the second Bush Administration: the
replacement of experienced ideologues
with partisan hacks who willingly place
Bush’s preferences over the dictates of law.
Bush took office in 2001 as a
lightweight. His 2000 campaign was
premised on the idea that, at least on for
eign policy matters, experts like Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza
Rice, and Colin Powell would be in charge.
Bush comes off of the 2004 election in a
very different position. He won based
largely on a foreign policy vision that he
has made very much his own. He no
longer desires tutoring by his father’s
friends or Clinton-era holdovers. Bush has
earned some personal capital.
The effect of this change first became
apparent when Bush appointed Porter
Goss, a Florida congressman and Bush’s
point man on intelligence issues. He
now heads the CIA, and The New York
Times recently reported that Goss’
loyalty to the White House has thrown
the agency into “turmoil.”
In Gonzales, Bush has found another
Goss: a man who is willing, if not eager, to
put aside law and custom to accommodate
the president’s agenda. In any other
administration, this might not be terrible;
cabinet officials often advocate the
president’s positions. But Gonzales would
exacerbate Bush’s most glaring failures as
a leader. Bush is ineffective at extracting
unvarnished opinions from subordinates,
and is notoriously unable to adjudicate
disputes among them. When you add to
this mix people like Gonzales, who seek to
justify Bush’s decisions rather than inform
them, the result is a complete perversion
of the decision-making process.
In John Ashcroft, Americans had an
attorney general who could competently
steer the vehicle of state, albeit often in the
wrong direction. In Alberto Gonzales,
Americans have one whose loyalty to an
incompetent navigator will consistently
supersede his own judgment. America’s
next destination on the legal landscape is
now anybody’s guess.
Daniel Munz writes for the Yale Herald