Indonesia Digs Helipad Inside Botanical Gardens For Bush Visit - Locals Pissed - ENN

[hatrack]

JAKARTA — The construction of a helipad in Indonesia's famed botanical gardens for an upcoming visit by U.S. President George W. Bush will damage protected plants, an opposition party said on Tuesday. Bush will visit Indonesia this month on a brief stopover after attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam on Nov. 18.

Details on the Bush visit have not been officially announced, but Indonesian media reports say it will take place on Nov. 20. Bush is due to meet President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the summer palace in Bogor, located inside the 87-hectare Bogor Botanical Gardens, south of the capital.

The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said using the gardens as a landing place for helicopters would hurt the fragile environment. "This means the (Indonesian) president is sacrificing environmental conservation for the sake of political interests," PDI-P said in a statement.

The Rakyat Merdeka daily, which showed picture of a mechanical excavator digging earth inside the gardens to prepare for the helipad, also criticised the cost of the Bush visit. The paper's Tuesday edition ran a story with a headline: "Bush in Bogor costs 1 billion rupiah ($110,000) an hour."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11604

[JuniperLea]

1. Didn't he pull a similar stunt in England a couple of years ago? eom

[Poiuyt]

3. The Queen was furious with Bush over that

Queen's fury as Bush goons wreck garden

The Queen is furious with President George W. Bush after his state visit caused thousands of pounds of damage to her gardens at Buckingham Palace.

Royal officials are now in touch with the Queen's insurers and Prime Minister Tony Blair to find out who will pick up the massive repair bill. Palace staff said they had never seen the Queen so angry as when she saw how her perfectly-mantained lawns had been churned up after being turned into helipads with three giant H landing markings for the Bush visit.

The rotors of the President's Marine Force One helicopter and two support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria's reign.

And Bush's army of clod-hopping security service men trampled more precious and exotic plants...

more -

http://billmon.org/archives/000903.html

[JuniperLea]

4. Clod-hopping... perfect term

My very British Great-Grandmother used it when the kids would stomp through her house... she was not amused.

Clod-hopping... what BushCo does best.

[jilln]

2. I really can't think of anything more fitting

This suits him to a T.

[silverweb]

5. And in Senegal.

He shut down the whole island, searched peoples' homes, had them held on a fenced-in soccer field, and cut down century-old trees.

"On the way from the airport to the presidential palace, where jubilant crowds of thousands had lined the streets to cheer the entrance of President Clinton in 1998, Bush's motorcade sped by buildings ordered shut and small numbers of spectators, many of them staring impassively, arms folded. A Senegalese activist reported that trees, some more than a century old, had been cut down everywhere the President was scheduled to pass."

<snip>

"In each house, the residents were ordered out and led to a soccer field ringed with metal cordons, where they were forcibly held without food for six hours until Bush's safe departure, "like sheep" said 15-year-old Mamadou to a Reuters correspondent. Reporters described the normally bustling tourist destination as looking like a "ghost town," its bright shutters tightly drawn, fishermen's pirogues idle in the bay--patrolling US Secret Service agents with dogs and frogmen swimming through the shallows provided the only signs of life."

_article_

:grr:

[YankeyMCC]

6. Not just incompetent and misguided about

the natural world but actively destructive. Its utterly disgusting.