CIA Began Tracking Climate Impacts In 1990s - Mission Derailed Under Bush Now May Face Budget Cuts

[hatrack]

EDIT

Back in the 1990s, the CIA opened an environmental center, swapped satellite imagery with Russia and cleared U.S. scientists to access classified information. But when the Bush administration took power, the center was absorbed by another office and work related to the climate was broadly neglected. In 2007, a report by retired high-ranking military officers called attention to the national security implications of climate change, and the National Intelligence Council followed a year later with an assessment on the topic. But some Republicans attacked it as a diversion of resources. And when CIA Director Leon Panetta stood up the climate change center in 2009, conservative lawmakers attempted to block its funding. "The CIA's resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at the time.

Now, with calls for belt tightening coming from every corner, leadership in Congress has made it clear that the intelligence budget, which soared to $80.1 billion last year, will have to be cut. And after sweeping victories by conservatives in the midterm elections, many political insiders think the community's climate change work will be in jeopardy. Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.

"The whole group (of scientists) were patriots and this was an opportunity to help the country do something about the train wreck (we) saw coming" from climate change, said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA who received a security clearance when Medea started in 1992. Cleared scientists also helped the CIA interpret environmental data and improve collection methods, former CIA Director John Deutch said in a 1996 speech. But the Republican-controlled Congress gradually trimmed these programs, and after President George W. Bush took office in 2001, top-level interest in environmental security programs disappeared. Intelligence officials working on them were reassigned.

Terry Flannery, who led the CIA's environmental security center until 2000, said he had to tread lightly in his final years running it. "You had this odd thing where it became an interchange of science and politics," he said. "At times, it was just strange." Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said issues such as energy and water made Bush's daily briefings, but climate change was not a part of the agenda. "I didn't have a market for it when I was director," Hayden said in a recent interview. "It was all terrorism all the time, and when it wasn't, it was all Iran."

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/10/106406/why-the-cia-is-spying-on-a-changing.html

[jwirr]

1. So boooosh and Congress think it is okay to derail an issue of national

security? That seems to be the symbol of their patriotism. :sarcasm: