by Jeffrey St. Clair

Like Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the Forest Service under George W. Bush runs on pr, corporate cronyism, an obsession with secrecy and the rapid-fire deployment of fabricated justifications for cutting down old-growth forests.

In Bush's war on the wild, the trees themselves are portrayed as standing weapons of mass destruction, which must be leveled by chainsaws before they ignite into raging wildfires that threaten to incinerate the towns of the rural West. Such is the tale of the spin, any way.

The 1.6 million acre Bitterroot National Forest straddles the border between west-central Montana and northern Idaho and includes the rugged, Alp-like mountains of the Bitterroot Range.

By the time the Forest Service released their Final Environmental Impact Statement, the "recovery plan" called for logging on 46,239 acres, with over 55% of the logging planned for unroaded wildlands or core habitat of endangered bull trout and threatened cutthroat trout.