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Lawmakers Sue Administration Over ABM Treaty Jim Burns, CNSNews.comFriday marks the day the United States will completely withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty commonly known as "ABM." But some members of Congress are angry and have filed suit against the Bush administration in federal court in Washington to prevent withdrawal. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and 30 other members of Congress are suing President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The plaintiffs are all Democrats, except for one independent, who usually votes with Democrats. They are requesting a decision on whether or not the Constitution permits the president to withdraw from the treaty without congressional consent. "With this suit, we are saying to the President: we will not stand idly by while the liberties enshrined in our Founding documents are trampled upon. We will not stand idly by while the rule of many is cast aside by the hubris of one," said Kucinich. Kucinich thinks the ABM treaty has served well for world security since it was implemented in 1972. "There is little evidence that dissolving the ABM Treaty will do any more than allow defense contractors to capture ever-greater sums of money from the federal government," he said. "And there is considerable evidence that the unpredictable every nation for itself nuclear policy set to replace the ABM Treaty architecture will be destabilizing." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the lawsuit was "highly likely heading toward dismissal," saying the president had the right to end treaties as long as their termination was in accordance with the treaty's provisions. Last December, the president announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the treaty, calling it a relic from the Cold War and an obstacle to the deployment of a missile defense system. "I have concluded the ABM Treaty hinders our government's ability to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks," said the president. Another factor in the president's decision was the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York. "We know that the terrorists and some of those who support them seek the ability to deliver death and destruction to our doorstep via missile. And we must have the freedom and the flexibility to develop effective defenses against those attacks," said Bush. 'Highest Priority' "Defending the American people is my highest priority as commander in chief, and I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses," Bush stressed. The treaty was signed in Moscow by then-President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on May 26, 1972, and became effective the following October. It prohibited the two nations from putting in place systems capable of defending their territories from intercontinental ballistic missile attacks. It also banned development, testing or deployment of mobile land-based, sea-based, air-based or space-based antiballistic missile systems. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) believes the treaty withdrawal will be bad for America. "Rather than waiting until the technical issues are addressed, it [the Bush administration] plans to rush immature defense systems into the field beginning in 2004, well before the testing program will have subjected the technology to anything like real-world conditions," said UCS senior scientist Dr. David Wright. "These systems will not provide 'emergency capability' against real-world threats, only the illusion of capability," Wright concluded. But the Project For the New American Century, a Washington-based national security think tank, believes the president's decision is "strategically sound." "The administration has, to its credit, been clear from the campaign on that it had every intention of not letting the treaty stand in the way of its ability to develop a national missile defense system. The decision was hardly made in haste or without a full debate," said Gary Schmitt, the project's executive director. "The real issue here, and the underlying question, is whether the decades-long effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them through arms control treaties has in fact worked. Withdrawing from the ABM Treaty is a tacit admission that it hasn't," Schmitt stressed. "Withdrawing from the ABM Treaty not only represents a sea-change in how we think about the nature of deterrence but it also marks the end of an era in which it was plausible to argue that our overall security was best served by a web of parchment accords, and not our own military capabilities," Schmitt concluded. Copyright CNSNews.com
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