Phase III – Stealth Is.

The stated reason for their attack was that “Europe is moving backwards not forwards” on GMOs, with “France playing a leading role, along with Austria, Italy and even the [EU] Commission.” The Ambassador was concerned that France and others would put a ban on the cultivation of Monsanto’s GM corn seeds called Mon 810, engineered with a gene that produces a toxic insect-killing pesticide in every cell. Mon 810 is the first GM crop approved for planting EU-wide and has been a test case for biotech expansionism into the continent.

According to the cable, the Ambassador also rejected the France’s new “Grenelle” environment process, which looks beyond just the science of new technologies to also take into account “common interest.” Evidently a government that looks out for common interest is just too much for Ambassador Stapleton. He wrote, “Combined with the precautionary principle, this is a precedent with implications far beyond MON-810 BT corn cultivation.”

He was also upset about France’s draft biotech law that “would make farmers and seed companies legally liable for pollen drift.” This concept that the “polluter pays” is a foundational principle of US law–except for GMOs. Here Stapleton also wants France to give a free pass for Monsanto and the other GM seed companies.

The French government and EU Commission tried to placate the US suggesting that the rejections of Mon 810 “are only cultivation rather than import bans.” But Stapleton says, “We see the cultivation ban as a first step, at least by anti-GMO advocates, who will move next to ban or further restrict imports.”

In 2007, Senator Rockefeller began steering the Senate Intelligence Committee to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who were accused of unlawfully assisting the National Security Agency (NSA) in monitoring the communications of American citizens (see Hepting v. AT&T).[9]

This was an about-face of sorts for Senator Rockefeller, who had hand-written a letter to Vice President Cheney in 2003 expressing his concerns about the legality of NSA’s warrantless wire-tapping program. Some have attributed this change of heart to the spike in contributions from telecommunications companies to the senator just as these companies began lobbying Congress to protect them from lawsuits regarding their cooperation with the NSA[10].

Between 2001 and the start of this lobbying effort, AT&T employees had contributed $300 to the senator.[10]. After the lobbying effort began, AT&T employees and executives donated $19,350 in 3 months[10]. The senator has pledged not to rely on his vast fortune to fund his campaigns[11], and the AT&T contributions represent about 2% of the money he raised during the previous year[10].

[edit] Retroactive immunity for torture

Though publicly deploring torture, Rockefeller was one of two Congressional Democrats briefed on waterboarding and other secret CIA practices in the early years of the Bush Administration, as well as the existence of taped evidence of such interrogations (later destroyed).[12] In December 2007, Rockefeller opposed a special counsel or commission inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, stating “it is the job of the intelligence committees to do that.”[13]