Babbitt

The young soldier died like so many others, ambushed while on patrol in Baghdad, Iraq. Medics rushed him to a field hospital but couldn't get his heart beating again. What set Army Spc. Travis Babbitt's last moments in Iraq apart was that he confronted them in front of a journalist's camera. An Associated Press photograph of the mortally wounded Babbitt remains a rarity - one of a handful of pictures of dead or dying American service members to be printed in this country since the start of the Iraq war more than two years ago. A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action.

An excerpt from a recent Providence Journal-Bulletin editorial: ATTORNEY General Janet Reno was correct to authorize the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Mr. Babbitt is accused of lying to Congress about whether he based a policy decision on financial contributions to the Democratic Party. These serious charges deserve to be thoroughly probed.Mr. Babbitt said the pending appointment of an independent counsel means that "the list of hidden costs one has to pay for public service has just grown a little longer."

PHILADELPHIA -- Visitors to national parks can expect to pay more, walk more and have a harder time finding lodging.Laying out an ambitious plan for the parks system, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt pledged yesterday that no new hotels and no new roads will be built in the parks as long as he leads the Interior Department.The trade-off, Mr. Babbitt said, is that visitors will better enjoy the nature and history the parks were created to preserve.He also said that entry fees should be raised, particularly at large Western parks, which often are destinations for vacationers.

WASHINGTON -- There was a certain irony in the fact that Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt was cleared by a special prosecutor while the Senate was debating whether to outlaw "soft money" in political campaigns.If soft money, meaning totally unregulated contributions to political parties, had not been part of the process, Mr. Babbitt would not have been the subject of the special investigation in the first place.The issue in the Babbitt case was whether the Interior secretary rejected a plan to operate a casino put forward by Indian tribes in Wisconsin because other tribes running competing casinos contributed $230,000 in soft money to the Democratic Party.

WASHINGTON -- After a year of resisting an independent campaign finance inquiry, Attorney General Janet Reno changed direction yesterday, formally asking a judicial panel to appoint an outside prosecutor to investigate Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's role in his agency's action to kill an Indian gambling project.Reno asked the panel to instruct the new counsel, the sixth one to be appointed during the Clinton administration, to look at whether Babbitt lied to Congress and whether the decision to kill the project was "criminally corrupted."

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said yesterday that he felt "put upon" by Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to seek an outside prosecutor to investigate his role in his department's rejection of an Indian casino. But he declared he would cooperate and in the end "be vindicated."Babbitt, who was in Florida to meet with agricultural and environmental interests and present $46 million in federal money for Everglades restoration, called the atmosphere in Washington corrosive" and said an independent counsel inquiry was unnecessary after three investigations, one by the Justice Department and two by congressional committees."

For the sake of the nation's rivers and fish, Americans need to realize that the age of dam-building is over and trade in their steam shovels for sledgehammers, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt told a gathering of environmental scientists in Baltimore yesterday.That process is already under way in the Chesapeake Bay region, where more than 2,500 dams and other river blockages prevent seven varieties of migratory fish from reaching their upstream spawning grounds in the region's rivers.Under the auspices of the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program, more than 30 dams are slated to be demolished or altered to allow fish like shad, herring, alewife, striped bass and perch to reach their traditional spawning sites.

DENVER -- Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt favors a policy change that would allow members of the Hopi tribe to remove golden eagles from a national monument in northern Arizona, a move that critics fear could open the door to hunting in national parks.The issue at the Wupatki National Monument near Flagstaff, Ariz., has been percolating since summer, when the Hopi requested permission to take eaglets for use in a religious ceremony. Taking or hunting of animals in national parks is prohibited, but Babbitt said in an interview that he favors allowing an exception in this case.

FRUITA, Colo. -- But for the dusty hiking boots and fleece pullover, Bruce Babbitt could have been a game show host: gripping a microphone, swishing the cord out of the way and announcing to the audience, "Let's have at it!"With gusto, the Interior secretary launched into a two-hour free-for-all with a not-totally, friendly gathering of local residents at the Colorado National Monument last week, listening to land-use concerns while selling his message of accelerated public lands conservation to a crowd of skeptical Westerners.

WASHINGTON -- Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has said that his biggest mistake in the Wisconsin casino controversy was meeting privately with one of the lobbyists involved in the fight. If so, it appears to be a mistake he repeated on another occasion on a different issue.The issue this time: whether officials in Volusia County, Fla., including the resort town of Daytona Beach, should be required to ban driving on beaches to spare baby sea turtles, which are on the federal government's list of threatened species.