LETTERS

...William Bettenberg is director of the Minerals Management Service...

...A recent House Appropriations Committee study charges that hundreds of millions a year are lost in underpayments...

...Refusing to substitute denunciation for analysis, I outlined a theory of terrorism's causes, nature, and consequences demonstrating, among other things, that this sort of violence does not liberate the oppressed, but tends rather to serve the interests of conservative nationalist elites...

...Eisendrath so faithfully exaggerates for your readers...

...I am amazed that he is the same reporter I spoke with for more than an hour and a half in December, and to whom I provided exhaustive documents on this agency's Royalty Management Program...

...As a territory, we have no presidential balloting, no voice in the Senate, and a lone (nonvoting) "resident commissioner" in the House...

...Does he recall that in the same period the London (Sunday) Observer was clearly much better written than the Sunday Herald Trib...

...There seemed to be an assumption that anyone reading the column could of course choose between whatever he/she was currently doing, and something else that might be more rewarding...

...At the very least we need: accurate valuation of the oil pumped from Indian lands...

...If Puerto Rico were a state, our population would entitle us to a half-dozen representatives, in ,addition to two senators and the right to participate in presidential elections...

...I may even send it to a friend of mine who's thinking about leaving an investment firm...

...But it irritated the hell out of me when I read: "...if you have a solid science or math major in college!' But what of those of us—still a majority of the population—who never went to college...

...I shared with him MMS's lengthy and well-documented response to that report...

...I read with great disappointment John Eisendrath's article...

...I enjoyed the article on C. E. Koop ["Warning: The Surgeon General May Be Good for Your Health," Paul Glastris, March], but since when has The New York Times been considered a liberal newspaper...

...I suppose it's a case of "misery loves company," but when one has been out of a job for over a year, reading about all the possible .choices is frustrating...

...I explained the problems with the report's calculations and conclusions...

...WILLIAM D. BETTENBERG Washington, D.C...

...I spoke with him candidly about the years of mismanagement that led to the creation of MMS and about the weaknesses that persist...

...stiff penalties for noncompliance...

...You are to be commended for the disclosures in the April issue of the public scandal involved in the mismanagement of federal, state, and Indian oil and gas royalties—losses amounting to 21 percent per annum, or about a billion dollars per year...

...Conclusion: the antidote to terrorism is not more imperialist violence, it is a more effective mass movement to liberate the opressed...

...I was addressing people who have a choice...

...These he reported...

...But I also told him about the progress made in the past three years, and our current efforts to resolve the problems that remain...

...Yet Secretary Hodel is now threatening to adopt a set of valuation standards reminiscent of the old "honor system" days, making industry declarations nearly unauditable...

...Yates stated in a hearing last year, Interior is not the best agency to which to assign this responsibility...

...Ironically, it has consistently been the reputedly civilandenvironmental rights-insensitive Republicans (and never the Democrats...

...When states and tribes protested, he told them to be less concerned about collecting every cent due and more solicitous about the domestic oil industry...

...On environmental issues and a host of others, Puerto Rico frequently endures federal government neglect for the most basic of reasons: it lacks political clout...

...April] must be younger than many of us, to have written about the Cicero affair that "It may not have made Hollywood...

...Joseph Kennedy is general counsel at the Government Accountability Project...

...From the perspective of 35-odd years, a damn good picture...

...This boondoggle is a prime example of bureaucratic sloth and ineptitude run amok...

...SHELLEY BAIN Des Moines, Iowa Presuming credentials The part of ["Tilting at Windmills"] in the February issue about doing what you want to do is undoubtedly good advice for those people who can afford it, and I suspect that most of your readers would qualify as yuppies (a marvelously descriptive term...

...Does he know that in the sixties three British newspapers—the Times, the Guardian, and the Telegraph—seemed to many of us just as literate as the Herald Tribune...

...Ask some of the minerals producers how they view MMS's royalty collection efforts...

...We do the jobs we're offered, and especially now, we don't have much of a choice, if we have a job at all...

...Perhaps, as Rep...

...prompt, complete, and accurate payment of royalties...

...This combination of legally vague relationships and privately determined value, without recourse to audit as we read it, will leave the federal government and states and Indian owners totally at the mercy of producers...

...who have openly endorsed Puerto Rico statehood in their quadrennial party platforms...

...Paper provincialism Douglas Kiker ["Political Booknotes," April] describes the Herald Tribune in the sixties as "the best written daily newspaper in the world!' Has Kiker any idea of how parochial that phrase appears, at least when read outside the United States...

...Congress, in the meantime, has taken only a few small steps that have not produced any results...

...Although the Senate Appropriations Committee has condemned this proposal as an effort to circumvent the Rules of Congress and amend the Mineral Leasing Act by indirection, the administration blithely reintroduces it year after year...

...Nor does he perceive that in a world dominated by killer nation-states, the abuse of power is a greater evil than the abuse of powerlessness...

...Eisendrath clearly did a fair amount of homework on the history of royalty management and illustrates the program's troubled past...

...Ambassador...

...These he did not report...

...In his zeal to convict me of being soft on terrorism, Mr...

...RICHARD E. RUBENSTEIN Washington, D.C...

...Additionally, it's the National Organization for Women, not of Women...

...LETTERS Mineral morass The Washington Monthly deserves credit for zeroing in on the unglamorous but significant subject of federal minerals management ["You Think the NSC is Screwed Up...

...Congress should move swiftly to enact these provisions—if not for the country, then for themselves...

...The Conference of Western Attorneys General has been monitoring the program since 1979 when they became concerned at GAO reports that the Mineral Leasing Act's mandates were not being carried out...

...ROBERT COULSON Hartford City, Indiana Charles Peters replies: Anyone who has read Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts knows how I felt when I read this letter...

...Coulson, resent the assumption that I did...

...HELEN N. ELDERKIN Santa Rosa, California What comes with the territory "The Turtles of Mona Island" [Russell Wild, March] was magnificent, but this rare Washington Monthly article on a Puerto Rican topic omitted any reference to a chronic dilemma confronting not only wildlife but also 3.3 million United States citizens...

...By way of settlement, the department offered to let state and tribal auditors examine the books of their more than 18,000 leases...

...JOAN CLAYBROOK Washington, D.C...

...It did indeed make Hollywood, in "Five Fingers" with James Mason playing the spy, Walter Hampden the ambassador, and—was it Danielle Darrieux?— the femme fatale...

...According to David Ignatius, reviewing the book in your April issue, this approach is "outrageous...

...Interior's new definition of "arms length" encompasses any relationship except dealing with a subsidiary...

...Celluloid clarification Priscilla Witt ["Do You Want Any More Secret Documents Put in the Safe, Mr...

...To add insult to injury, the administration is vigorously renewing an attempt to do states out of an additional $55 million by forcing them to help finance the costs of the federal lease management program from their share of revenues...

...Measuring abuse I wrote Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World in the conviction that a certain kind of shallow moralism was a major obstacle to understanding terrorism clearly...

...At the same time, I insisted that much terrorism is both a response to .imperialist violence and an imitation of its style...

...I told him that none of the audit organizations familiar with royalty collections, including the General Accounting Office and the Inspector General, believes we are undercollecting royalties by 21 percent...

...Unfortunately, although much has been accomplished, the Department still shows signs from time to time of reverting to its old practices...

...Restoring a billion dollars a year to the federal treasury is a great way to pay for their recently enacted salary hikes...

...Would he care to rewrite his boast to read, "the best written daily newspaper in the United States...

...During our interview, we spoke at length about the report prepared by the staff of Rep...

...regular audits...

...Obviously, these regulations should be rewritten to reflect the intent of Congress and the courts...

...JOSEPH B. KENNEDY Washington, D.C...

...JOHN K. VAN DE KAMP Sacramento, California John Van De Kamp is attorney general of the state of California...

...Joan Claybrook is president of Public Citizen...

...ROBERT FULFORD Toronto, Ontario Conservative media establishment...

...In 1980, California sued then-Secretary Watt, asking for an accounting and for implementation of an effective program...

...Bravo to John Eisendrath for his incisive report on the Department of the Interior's royalty management program...

...Companies will be able to charge the owners a very high percentage of the royalties owed, for transportation and other producer expenses...

...Ignatius resorts frequently to a word beloved by political smear artists everywhere: "almost?' Thus I am said to be "almost enthusiastic" about the prospect of increased terrorism in the United States...

...GEORGE McDOUGALL San Juan, Puerto Rico George McDougall is Government Affairs Committee chairman of San Juan...

...a redefinition of the "arms length" relationship between buyers and sellers of the oil...

...John Eisendrath, April...

...I've lectured at a few colleges, but I never attended one...

...For the last 30 years various government agencies have looked the other way as oil companies pocketed money that rightfully belonged to the American public...

...It is disturbing that your magazine willfully elected to repeat unsupportable and responsibly discredited conclusions...

...They complain that we are relentless and demanding...

...Thirty years is long enough for any organization to try, and fail repeatedly...

...Has he thought at all about how well written the newspapers of Berlin, Frankfurt, Milan, and Paris were during those years...

...The reviewer is apparently unable to understand that one can oppose terrorism strongly without approving a counterterrorist jihad against its practitioners...

...In several years of auditing, over $45 million in underpayments has already been collected...

...Most standard royalty contracts preclude such charges from being passed back to the owner...

...Sidney Yates, the report that Mr...

...If I did not feel I had a choice, I would, like Mr...