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Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) and the Murder of Black Panther Leaders
http://www.averdade.org.br/modules/news/article.php?storyid=451
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Watch BP Live Video Webcam Camera Feed of Gulf Oil Spill Here! (Update 7)
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/20/live-video-feed-webcam-gulf-oil-spill/
What BP does not want you to see
ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I've ever seen underwater."
Check out what BP does not want you to see. And please share this widely -- every American should see what's happening under the surface in the Gulf.
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
Live BP Gulf Oil Spill Webcam Video Reveals 5 Leaks
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/24/live-bp-gulf-oil-spill-webcam-video-reveals-5-leaks/
Stop Shell Oil's Offshore Drilling Plans in the Arctic
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/308597489?z00m=19844689
Sign the Petition to Ban Offshore Drilling Now!
http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31522015
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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MARCH WITH T4SJ! PROTEST THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS!*
*Repeal SB1070 in Arizona!
Restore Ethnic Studies in Arizona
Unconditional amnesty in all 50 states!
March & Rally in San Francisco, CA
Date: Saturday, May 29th
Time: Assemble at "Justin Herman Plaza" at 4:00 p.m. March begins at 4:30 p.m.
Arrive at AT&T Park at 5:15 p.m. Game begins at 6:05 p.m.
March with Teachers 4 Social Justice behind our banner - meet at Justin Herman Plaza at 4:30pm!
The Arizona Diamondbacks are coming to town and we in San Francisco can take a stand against SB1070 and send a message to Arizona's lawmakers. Join the May Day 2010 Coalition to protest the Diamondbacks and to march in solidarity with the statewide protest in Arizona on May 29th. We will march to repeal SB1070 in Arizona and for full amnesty in all 50 states!
*Why protest the Diamondbacks? *The Arizona Diamondbacks organization led by Ken Kendricks is one of the primary funders of the Republican Party who pushed SB1070 through legislation. For an in-depth look at who the
Diamondbacks' owners really represent, read Dave Zirin's article 'No One is Illegal: Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks'. http://edgeofsports.com/2010-04-24-521/index.html
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YES ON F, GIVE RENTERS A BREAK!
Just two weeks before the June 8 election and if we are going to give renters a break from rent increases we need your help now!
Thousands of San Francisco renters are unemployed and at risk of losing their homes--Prop F will let them delay any new rent increases and give them a chance to stay housed. Here's how you can help pass Prop F:
YES on F Door-To-Door Literature Delivery, Saturday, May 29, 10:00 AM-1:00 PM
Just Cause (formerly St. Peter's Housing Committee), 474 Valencia (at 16th St.), Room 120, Saturday, June 5th, 11 AM at 24th/ Mission
Phonebanking, 5-7pm, Mon and Wed at SOMCAN, 1070 Howard Street
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Lynne Stewart and the Guantanamo Lawyers: Same Fact Patterns, Same Opponent, Different Endings?
Lynne Stewart will be re-sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.
By Ralph Poynter
(Ralph Poynter is the Life partner of Lynne Stewart. He is presently dedicated 24/7 to her defense, as well as other causes.)
Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com
In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.
In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge's protective court order. The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice. The results in each case were very different.
In March of 2010, a right wing group "Keep America Safe" led by Lynne Cheney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign. Initially they attacked the right of the detainees to be represented at all. This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16. This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge's protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act. These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials. They carried in news report of US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison. Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers "provided news outlets with 'interviews' of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations." When a partner at one of the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.
This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such "wayward" firms. Instead it is significant because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.
Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any "criminal" manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.
I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted. Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity. There was no press conference. The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer...NO.
Instead an "armada" of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade, papered the US District Courthouse in Washington D.C. They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power-- derived from the corporate world--and in 2006 "settled" the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment. Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters. There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.
Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison. It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.
This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system ---those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power--are treated differently. Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???
Lynne Stewart deserves Justice... equal justice under law. Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers. The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness. They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext. The sharp contrasts between the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal--one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our righteous resistance.
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INVITATION TO A NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
United National Peace Conference
July 23 - 25, 2010, Albany , NY
Unac2010@aol.com
UNAC, P.O. Box 21675
Cleveland, OH 44121
518-227-6947
www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Greetings:
Twenty co-sponsoring national organizations urge you to attend this conference scheduled for Albany , New York July 23-25, 2010. They are After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Bailout the People Movement, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Lawyers Guild, Peace Action, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, U.S. Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait.
The purpose of the conference is to plan united actions in the months ahead in support of demands for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq , and money for human needs, not for wars, occupations, and bail-outs. The peace movement is strongest and most effective when plans for united actions are made by the whole range of antiwar and social justice organizations meeting together and deciding together dates and places for national mobilizations.
Each person attending the conference will have voice and vote. Attendees will have the opportunity to amend the action proposal submitted by conference co-sponsors, add demands, and submit resolutions for consideration by the conference.
Keynoters will be NOAM CHOMSKY, internationally renowned political activist, author, and critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and DONNA DEWITT, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Co-Chair, South Carolina Progressive Network; Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War; Administrative Body, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
The conference's website is www.nationalpeaceconference.org and you will find there details regarding other speakers, workshops, registration, hotel and travel information, and how to submit amendments, demands, and resolutions. The action proposal has also been published on the website.
Please write us at UNAC2010@aol.com for further information or call 518-227-6947. We can fill orders for copies of the conference brochure. Tables for display and sale of materials can be reserved.
We look forward to seeing you in Albany on July 23-25.
In peace,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Peace Conference
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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From Gary Bledsoe, Texas President of the NAACP:
Have you heard about what's going on here in Texas? History is being rewritten. And not in a good way.
The state of Texas sets national standards for school textbooks -- and on Friday, the State Board of Education is casting its vote on updated social studies and history textbooks.
Those books are changing the record on slavery, celebrating the Confederacy and shedding a positive light on Jim Crow laws. And the Texas NAACP has spent the past several months fighting back. We've written thousands of emails, placed hundreds of calls, and people are starting to notice.
I'm writing because we need your help. No matter the result of tomorrow's vote, make sure these bad ideas don't spread into your state. Sign the Not in My State Pledge:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
The civil rights era was, and remains, one of the most significant and defining moments in U.S. history. Its leaders were true patriots -- fighting against oppression and for equality.
But if the proposed textbook changes happen, our children won't learn about them. They won't learn about brave men like Sam McCollough, who gave his life for Texas independence. And they won't learn that Texas seceded from the Union to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Rewriting history in the name of national pride isn't patriotic. It's ignorant.
Make it known throughout your state that if Texas textbook standards pass, they won't be coming into your classrooms. Sign the Not in My State Pledge to stop history from being rewritten:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
American history -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- is what makes our country what it is today. A reminder of that past helps ensure a better future for all of us.
Thank you for speaking out,
Gary Bledsoe
Texas President
NAACP
P.S. To find out the voting results and watch an interview with NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous, tune in to NBC Nightly News tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30/5:30 p.m. ET/CT.
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This is just inspiring! You have to watch it! ...bw
Don't Get Caught in a Bad Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79pX1IOqPU
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SEIZE BP!
[While this is a good beginning to a fight to put safety first--for workers and the planet--we must recognize that the whole thrust of capitalism is to get the job done quicker and cheaper, workers and the world be damned!
It is workers who are intimately aware of the dangers of production and the ways those dangers could be eliminated. And, if, say, a particular mine, factory, industry can't be made to be safe, then it should be abandoned. Those workers effected should simply be "retired" with full pay and benefits. They have already been subjected to the toxins, dangers, etc., on the job.
Basically, safety must be under worker's control. Workers must have first dibs on profits to insure safety first.
It not only means nationalizing industry--but internationalizing industry--and placing it under the control and operation of the workers themselves. Governmental controls of safety regulations are notoriously ineffectual because the politicians themselves are the corporation's paid defenders. It only makes sense that corporate profits should be utilized--under the worker's control--to put safety first or stop production altogether. Safety first has to be interpreted as "safety before profits and profits for safety first!" We can only hope it is not too late! ...bw]
SEIZE BP!
The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.
Take action now! Sign the Seize BP petition to demand the seizure of BP!
200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.
BP's Unmitigated Greed
This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an "Act of God" nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil's most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.
Under BP's CEO Tony Hayward's aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.
BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements
BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.
BP's executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.
Protecting BP's Super-Profits
BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.
Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million-a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation-but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?
The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.
People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP's actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP's multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.
Take Action Now
It is imperative that the government seize BP's assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.
Seize BP Petition button*: http://www.seizebp.org/
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Neil Young - Ohio - Live at Massey Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV0rAwk4lFE&feature=player_embedded#
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Rachel Carson's Warnings in "The Sea Around Us":
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. . ." http://www.savethesea.org/quotes
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Operation Small Axe - Trailer
http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/820-us-school-district-to-begin-microchipping-students.html
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Shame on Arizona
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It's legalized racial profiling, and it's an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It's completely unacceptable.
Join us in letting Arizona's leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support
"As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there."
Sign Petition Here:
http://presente.org/campaigns/shame?populate=1
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Collateral Murder
[COLD-BLOODED, OUTRIGHT MURDER OF UNARMED CIVILIANS--AND THEY LAUGH ABOUT IT AS THEY SHOOT! THIS IS A BLOOD-CURTLING, VIOLENT AND BRUTAL VIDEO THAT SHOULD BE VIEWED BY EVERYONE! IT EXPOSES, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING SAID, "THE BIGGEST PURVEYORS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD," THE U.S. BI-PARTISAN GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY THEY COMMAND. --BW]
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
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San Francisco City and County Tramples on Civil Liberties
A Letter to Antiwar Activists
Dear Activists:
On Saturday, March 20, the San Francisco City and County Recreation and Parks Department's Park Rangers patrolled a large public antiwar demonstration, shutting down the distribution of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. The rally in Civic Center Plaza was held in protest of the illegal and immoral U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Park Rangers went table-to-table examining each one. They photographed the Socialist Viewpoint table and the person attending it-me. My sister, Debbie and I, had set up the table. We had a sign on the table that asked for a donation of $1.25 for the magazine. The Park Rangers demanded that I "pack it up" and go, because selling or even asking for donations for newspapers or magazines is no longer permitted without the purchase of a new and expensive "vendors license." Their rationale for this denial of free speech is that the distribution of newspapers, magazines, T-shirts-and even food-would make the political protest a "festival" and not a political protest demonstration!
This City's action is clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution-the right to free speech and freedom of the press-and can't be tolerated.
While they are firing teachers and other San Francisco workers, closing schools, cutting back healthcare access, cutting services to the disabled and elderly, it is outrageous that the Mayor and City Government chose to spend thousands of dollars to police tables at an antiwar rally-a protest demonstration by the people!
We can't let this become the norm. It is so fundamentally anti-democratic. The costs of the permits for the rally, the march, the amplified sound, is already prohibitive. Protest is not a privilege we should have to pay for. It's a basic right in this country and we should reclaim it!
Personally, I experienced a deep feeling of alienation as the crisply-uniformed Park Ranger told me I had to "pack it up"-especially when I knew that they were being paid by the City to do this at this demonstration!
I hope you will join this protest of the violation of the right to distribute and, therefore, the right to read Socialist Viewpoint, by writing or emailing the City officials who are listed below.1
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Editorial Board Member, Socialist Viewpoint
www.socialistviewpoint.org
60 - 29th Street, #429
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
1 Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244
San Francisco, Ca 94102-4689
Board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department Park Rangers
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Park.patrol@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
recpark.commission@sfgov.org
Chief of Police George Gascón
850 Bryant Street, #525
San Francisco, CA 94103
(I could not find an email address for him.).
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FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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On June 30, an innocent man will be given a second chance.
In 1991, Troy Davis was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and seven out of nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony.
He was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit. But it's not too late to change Troy's fate.
We just learned today that Troy has been granted an evidentiary hearing -- an opportunity to right this wrong. Help give him a second chance by telling your friends to pledge their support for Troy:
http://www.iamtroy.com/
Troy Davis may just be one man, but his situation represents an injustice experienced by thousands. And suffering this kind of injustice, by even one man, is one person too many.
Thanks to you and 35,000 other NAACP members and supporters who spoke out last August, the U.S. Supreme Court is granting Troy Davis his day in court--and a chance to make his case after 19 years on death row.
This hearing is the first step.
We appreciate your continued support of Troy. If you have not yet done so, please visit our website, sign the petition, then tell your friends to do the same.
http://www.iamtroy.com
I will be in touch soon to let you know how else you can help.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Todd Jealous
President and CEO
NAACP
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Louisiana coast's battle against drifting oil expected to last months, if not years
By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
May 23, 2010, 9:00AM
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/louisiana_coasts_battle_agains.html
2) Signs of a Cover-Up After Killings in a Haitian Prison
By DEBORAH SONTAG and WALT BOGDANICH
"For 15 years, on and off, the international community has invested in Haiti's police, courts and prisons as a way to shore up its fragile democracy. The effort began in late 1994 when the Haitian Army, long an instrument of political terror, was disbanded."
May 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html?hp
3) Surveillance Is Suspected as Spacecraft's Main Role
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
May 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/science/space/23secret.html?hp
4) Despite Leak, Louisiana Is Still Devoted to Oil
"Though local and state politicians are railing against BP and what they consider lax industry regulation and enforcement, it is nearly impossible to find any of them calling for offshore drilling to cease, or even slow down. Louisiana's senators - Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican - have both scrambled to be the most prominent voice to argue that the country should not retreat from offshore drilling just because of the spill. Many of their constituents seem to agree."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/us/23drill.html?ref=us
5) E.P.A. Administrator to Visit Gulf as Spill Spreads
By REUTERS
"Iran, a fierce critic of Washington, repeated an offer to assist with the Gulf spill, calling it no great challenge compared to what Iran itself had dealt with."
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/05/23/us/news-us-oil-rig-leak.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
6) Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/economy/24childcare.html?hp
7) Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead
By IAN URBINA
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24moratorium.html?hp
8) We're braced for a heavy impact and the food-chain collapsing
By Melanie Driscoll
Monday, 24 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/melanie--driscoll-were-braced-for-a-heavy-impact-and-the-foodchain-collapsing-1981134.html
9) Screw the Environment: BP and the Audacity of Corporate Greed
By Dave Lindorff
05/23/2010 - 19:07
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/65
10) Following BP's Lead
By BOB HERBERT
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html
11) U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast
By MARK MAZZETTI
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/25military.html?hp
12) Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25spill.html?hp
13) In Standoff With Environmental Officials, BP Stays With an Oil Spill Dispersant
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25disperse.html?ref=us
14) Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border
[This is an outrage--especially when the BP/US Government oil catastrophe is worsening. The National Guard should be sent to help clean up the mess. In fact, all the troops should be brought home from around the world to help with the cleanup. It's going to take a massive army of clean-up workers to get the job done...bw]
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26border.html?ref=world
15) Bill Puts Scrutiny on Detainees' Lawyers
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?ref=world
16) BP's Ties to Agency Are Long and Complex
Ms. Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman, said that the accusation that the agency reacted slowly to the spill was unfair, and that 150 people at national laboratories had been working on it. [150 people? That's all they have working on it? This is criminal!...bw]
By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26energy.html?ref=us
17) More Scrutiny for Charter Schools in Debate Over Expansion
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and JENNIFER MEDINA
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/education/26charters.html?ref=education
18) After argument, BP official made fatal decision on drilling
Erika Bolstad, Joseph Goodman and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Wed, May. 26, 2010
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/26/94859/after-long-argument-bp-official.html
19) More Reports of Illness Emerge Among Gulf Cleanup Workers
by Marian Wang, ProPublica
May 26, 2010 12:09 pm EDT
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/more-reports-of-illness-emerge-among-gulf-cleanup-workers
20) Gov't Subsidizes Deep-Water Drilling With Big Tax Breaks
by Marian Wang, ProPublica
May 25, 2010 5:07 pm EDT
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/oil-companies-still-get-billions-in-incentives-to-drill-in-deep-water
21) Fishermen Say BP Not Allowing Protective Gear to Fight Oil
By Rocky Kistner
switchboard.nrdc.org, Rocky Kistner's Blog
May 25, 2010
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rkistner/fishermen_say_bp_not_allowing.html
22) Oil Flow Is Stemmed, but Could Resume, Official Says
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?hp
23) The Subprime Crisis of Student Debt
By RON LIEBER
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?hp
24) U.N. Official to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone Strikes
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/world/asia/28drones.html?hpw
25) BP's Effort to Plug Oil Leak Suspended a Second Time
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?ref=us
27) Workers on doomed rig: Corners cut to save money
By BEN EVANS and MIKE KUNZELMAN (AP) -
May 27, 2010 -- 21 hours ago
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h1LUMz2sj2uHiXQi0THdy71DzzmQD9FVG6203
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1) Louisiana coast's battle against drifting oil expected to last months, if not years
By Bob Marshall, The Times-Picayune
May 23, 2010, 9:00AM
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/louisiana_coasts_battle_agains.html
For those saddened by the scenes of thick oil washing into Louisiana's coastal wetlands a month after the BP oil disaster began, experts on oil spills and the coastal ecosystem have some advice: Get used to it.
The crews mopping up oil on beaches and marsh shorelines this week are fighting just the first of what will probably be a series of rolling skirmishes that will last for months, if not years -- even after the runaway well is finally capped. In fact, the untold millions of gallons of oil already fouling the Gulf off the Louisiana coast could stay in the area for at least a decade, and on the sea floor for more than 100 years.
"I'm afraid we're just seeing the beginning of what is going to be a long, ugly summer," said Ed Overton, an LSU professor who has consulted on oil spills for three decades.
"I hope and pray I'm wrong, but I think what we're in for is seeing a little bit come in each day at different places for a long, long time -- months and months.
"That's not what I said in the beginning of this. But events have made me amend my thoughts."
When it began April 20, Louisiana and the world feared a quick and dramatic result, a black tsunami washing over one of the world's most productive and valuable coastal ecosystems. Expecting a disaster with iconic images to rival the environmental mugging of Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez, the planet's media rushed to the scene. Within days fishing towns like Venice and Hopedale became datelines in newspapers from Paris to Hong Kong, which painted pictures of a culture bracing for ecosystem Armageddon.
But for weeks, little happened on shore. Even as the amount of crude spewing from the 19-inch hole in the Gulf climbed, the wetlands and its critters remained healthy.
That began to change this week. Thick oil invaded the wetlands of the Mississippi River delta, then began spreading westward, rolling up on coastal beaches and barrier islands from Grand Isle to Marsh Island in Vermillion Bay.
But even this hasn't been an inundation. The oil has been in long, narrow lines. And there seems to be no discernible weather pattern associated with the arrivals. They have cropped up on calm days and rough, and days with little tide range.
That random pattern, experts now say, is probably the best guess of what the state should expect for many months ahead. And they stress the "guess" part, because the location of the runaway well and the environment into which it is flowing make it unprecedented in the history of oil disasters.
"We learn from experience, and the last experience we had with a big spill was the Exxon Valdez, so naturally people expected similar results," said LSU oceanography professor Robert Carney, who has done extensive research on the Gulf of Mexico.
"But everything about this is so radically different."
The Exxon Valdez accident released 11 million gallons of crude from a tanker onto the surface of an enclosed body of water close to a rocky, static shoreline, Carney said. The BP disaster is pouring tens of millions of gallons from the floor of the Gulf 5,000 feet below in an open sea, and 50 miles from the nearest land, which is a composed of broken marshes, river deltas, open bays and barrier islands.
"Because no one has experience with a situation like this, all we can really do is take educated guesses," Carney said. "There are so many things to consider when trying to track the oil plume."
The biggest unknown is the oil's journey to the surface -- and that is what has made predicting where and how it will come ashore such a challenge, scientists said. That difficulty was clear in initial estimates of how long the oil would take to get to the surface. "Originally it was three hours to 30 days," Overton said. "That shows you just how many variables are involved."
In a static and shallow environment, oil, which is much lighter than sea water, would zip to the surface like an ice cube from the bottom of a glass of water. But nothing is static in this environment.
Researchers say there are numerous currents in that part of the Gulf between 5,000 feet and the surface, each of which can grab some of the plume and shuttle it in different directions. There also are different temperatures layers that also can redirect portions of the plume. At a depth of about 1,500 feet, a cold layer meets a much warmer layer of water, and the change in density creates a virtual wall that can trap particles.
"Anything that stays below 1,500 feet can stay in deep circulation in the Gulf for an extended period of time," Carney said. "I would say deep oil might be detectable in that environment for 10 years."
Misconceptions about the nature of the flow also abound, Overton said. The oil spewing from that open pipe is not the pure viscous liquid that pours from an oil can. Instead, it's natural gas mixed with oil droplets that probably vary in size from an egg to ink dots, blasting out of the Gulf floor with the force of a powerful fire hose at full throttle, he said.
Video from the scene shows billowing clouds of the mixture spilling from the break. What it doesn't show, Overton said, is what type of plume that mixture is forming.
"We really need to know that, but we can only guess," he said. "And my guess is that it's been spreading out across a large area, sort of like the way smoke from a forest fire spreads across the landscape on a calm day."
It's obviously not all rushing to the surface like that ice cube in the glass of water, Overton said. That complicates the job of collecting it and predicting when, where and in which quantities it will come ashore.
A further complication has been the undersea use of dispersants, Overton said. Breaking the oil into small "micro" droplets at that depth may be reducing its buoyancy, causing it either to sink to the bottom or stay suspended somewhere under the surface.
"They will float below the surface, where they can't be reached by the weathering agents like sun and wind and air," Overton said. "Eventually they will stick together and form larger droplets and begin moving toward the surface.
"But that could take month or years. We could be seeing these things rise and wash up on the coast for years to come."
Overton said this week's oiled beaches strengthened that hunch.
"The pictures I saw included a lot of black oil," he said, "and that tells me it could be oil that just came to the surface. If that's the case, then a lot of this oil is still suspended, moving to the coast without being weathered on the surface, probably because of the subsea dispersants.
"So the reason we haven't seen big coatings, may be because much of it is still below the surface."
In fact, the consensus building among scientists and oil spill experts this week was that BP's mistake likely will never result in a black wave soaking miles of coast in thick layers of black oil. Instead, Louisiana is probably in for a years-long war of mostly small skirmishes against random, low-volume oilings of coastal marshes and beaches.
"I think we're looking at many months of intense activity, but then years of follow-up work," said Robert Barham, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
"I've been told by the ocean experts this stuff could hang out there on the bottom of the Gulf for more than 100 years. And as long as it's out there, it can come ashore.
"We might not see big black waves, but we may be seeing a smaller, but serious problem, for years and years to come."
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2) Signs of a Cover-Up After Killings in a Haitian Prison
By DEBORAH SONTAG and WALT BOGDANICH
"For 15 years, on and off, the international community has invested in Haiti's police, courts and prisons as a way to shore up its fragile democracy. The effort began in late 1994 when the Haitian Army, long an instrument of political terror, was disbanded."
May 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html?hp
LES CAYES, Haiti - When the earth shook violently on Jan. 12, the inmates in this southern city's squalid prison clamored to be released, screaming: "Help! We're going to die in here."
Elsewhere in Haiti, inmates were fleeing largely undeterred. But here, where the prison itself sustained little damage, there was no exit. Instead, conditions worsened for the inmates, three-quarters of them pretrial detainees, arrested on charges as petty as loitering and locked up indefinitely alongside convicted felons.
After the earthquake, guards roughed up the noisiest inmates and consolidated them into cells so crowded their limbs tangled, former prisoners said. With aftershocks jangling nerves, the inmates slept in shifts on the ground, used buckets for toilets and plotted their escape.
The escape plan, set in motion on Jan. 19 by an attack on a guard, proved disastrous. With Haitian and United Nations police officers encircling the prison, the detainees could not get out. For hours, they rampaged, hacking up doors and burning records, until tear gas finally overwhelmed them.
In the end, after the Haitian police stormed the compound, dozens of inmates lay dead and wounded, their bodies strewn through the courtyard and crumpled inside cells. The prison smoldered, a blood-splattered mess.
Haitian officials here say they did not use lethal force but rather found lifeless bodies when they entered the prison. They attribute the killings to a prison ringleader who, they say, slaughtered his fellow inmates before hopping over the wall and disappearing.
But an investigation by The New York Times casts doubt on the official version of events and instead indicates that Haitian authorities shot unarmed prisoners and then sought to cover it up. Many of the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave.
Kesnel Jeudi, a recently released inmate, said in an interview that nobody was dead when the police rushed the prison. "They shouted: 'Prisoners, lie down. Lie down. Lie down,' " he said. "When the prisoners lay down - while the prisoners were lying down - they began firing."
Mr. Jeudi, 28, said the police shootings involved some settling of scores: "There were people they selected to kill."
Four months later, the death toll remains unknown. But most accounts place it between 12 and 19, with up to 40 wounded. The local morgue attendant, Georges Raymond, said that he initially registered 11 dead detainees, with several more arriving later after they died of bullet wounds at the adjacent hospital.
Prison officials would not allow The Times to enter the walled prison compound, which sits directly behind the police station in the heart of town. But reporters interviewed six witnesses to the disturbance as well as five others who visited the prison either immediately after the shootings or the next day. None saw inmates firing weapons or any evidence that inmates killed inmates. Instead, witnesses said the police shot unarmed prisoners, some in the prison yard, others in their cells. Afterward, the authorities failed to notify inmates' relatives of the deaths, buried bodies without conducting autopsies and burned the surviving prisoners' bloodstained clothing and shoes.
Myrtil Yonel, a human rights leader here, said, "For us, we consider this to be a massacre."
Under a bare bulb in his office beside the prison, Olritch Beaubrun, the superintendent of the antiriot police unit, scoffed at this accusation. He said that a detainee nicknamed Ti Mousson had slaughtered inmates who resisted his escape plan.
"Ti Mousson put down the 12 detainees," Superintendent Beaubrun said. "We did not. We never fired our guns."
This assertion is at odds with what The Times found after reviewing confidential Haitian and United Nations reports and conducting interviews with former detainees, guards, prison cooks, wardens, police officials, judicial officials and relatives of dead prisoners.
Among other things, United Nations police officers noted that day in an internal incident report that the Haitian police had used firearms. The cooks, three women trapped inside during the riot, said that the detainees did no shooting. No weapons were recovered. Ti Mousson - whose real name is Luguens Cazeau - escaped. And the authorities did not treat the prison as the crime scene of what they portrayed as a mass murder by Mr. Cazeau, who was awaiting trial on charges of stealing a satellite dish.
The Haitian government said that it was conducting three separate investigations into the episode. But witnesses and others interviewed by The Times during two visits here last month said that they had never spoken to investigators. The inmates' bodies had not been exhumed, and there was no indication that basic forensic evidence had ever been collected.
The detainees' relatives say they feel not only bereft but also abandoned. During an interview, the widow of Abner Lisius - arrested on suspicions of stealing a cellphone, now dead at 45 - wiped away tears. "My husband was murdered by the authorities," said Marie Michel Laurencin, the widow.
For four months, American and United Nations officials have made no public comments about the killings at Les Cayes, saying they were urging the Haitians to handle the matter themselves. But after The Times repeatedly raised questions about the case with American officials, the United States Embassy sent a human rights officer to Les Cayes.
The United Nations mission chief in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, has now ordered the United Nations police commissioner here to begin an independent inquiry.
Last week, the United Nations spokesman in Haiti, David Wimhurst, expressed frustration with the Haitian investigations to date, saying that "incomplete and inaccurate" official statements about what happened in Les Cayes suggested a possible cover-up.
"We've waited and waited for the government to do its thing and now we're going to do our thing," Mr. Wimhurst said. "It's a delicate political business being in Haiti and supporting the government. We're not here to undermine them, but nor are we here to turn a blind eye to gross human rights violations."
A Fragile Justice System
How Haiti now deals with the killings in Les Cayes offers a test case for this country's commitment to human rights at a time when the world is poised to help rebuild its troubled justice system after the earthquake. The State Department and the Agency for International Development have requested $141.3 million for that purpose.
For 15 years, on and off, the international community has invested in Haiti's police, courts and prisons as a way to shore up its fragile democracy. The effort began in late 1994 when the Haitian Army, long an instrument of political terror, was disbanded.
"After many years of dictatorship, there was no independent police force and no independent judiciary, and the prisons were hellholes," said William G. O'Neill, director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council. "The goal was to create institutions that would respect human rights and allow the rule of law to flourish."
But to date the international investment, focused on police and judicial training in an official culture rife with corruption and cronyism, has netted modest returns. Haiti's corrections system has made few gains.
Before the earthquake, the country's 17 prisons "fell far short of international standards," the Haitian government acknowledged in a post-disaster needs assessment. Prisons were dilapidated and severely overcrowded; guards, far fewer than needed, were poorly equipped. And - the persistent core problem - most detainees were held in prolonged pretrial detention, often for minor crimes or for things like commercial debt, witchcraft and werewolfery.
"Understand, you can be arrested in Haiti for practically nothing," said Maurice D. Geiger, an American contractor working on justice reform in Haiti. "And once you are arrested and go to prison, it is not only possible but likely that you will stay there for an extended period of time without seeing a judge."
Prisons were widely viewed as "powder kegs awaiting a spark," as a 2007 report by the International Crisis Group put it. And the earthquake provided it.
On Jan. 12, the largest prison in the country, the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, emptied completely not long after a section of its surrounding wall collapsed. Guards fled along with inmates, including a few hundred prisoners considered a serious risk to the country's security.
Looking back, police officials said they should have anticipated a "contagion" of escape attempts at other prisons after that.
Panic After a Quake
In Les Cayes, Haiti's third largest city, the earthquake was far less destructive than in Port-au-Prince. But the earth did shake, violently and laterally. And, although children at an orphanage in the city marveled at how the trees danced, adults panicked, dashing into the streets, screaming, crying.
Inside the prison complex, where corroding concrete cellblocks frame a desolate courtyard, inmates hollered, trying to wrench open the doors to their cells.
Built in the 19th century, the prison held 467 detainees in 14 cells that day, more than four times its intended capacity. The ruckus was ear-splitting. When the inmates did not quiet down, Pierre Eddy Charlot, the supervisor, called in reinforcements from the adjacent police station and the United Nations police unit stationed in town.
"Measures were taken to prevent the worst," Mr. Charlot scribbled in a memo that night.
According to prisoners released after the disturbance, those measures included an effort to silence forcibly the troublemakers. Mr. Jeudi said he watched the guards remove the noisiest detainees from their cells, beat them with batons and then cram them into a few particularly crowded units. Twice-a-day bathroom privileges were eliminated.
Tensions escalated. "The prisoners were riled up," said one former detainee, recently released. The young man spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. "When they beat us, we said, 'Damn,' " he said. "Now, you know prisoners. We tried to make a plan to get out."
Cell 3 was planning central, home to Mr. Cazeau, or Ti Mousson, who had been roughed up by a guard after the quake, according to former detainees. The inmates in that cell got busy, digging holes in the walls, sharpening a toothbrush to a fine point.
Their plotting was no secret. "There was a guy in Cell 3, a former police officer," Mr. Jeudi said. "Two days before the prison fell apart, he was in the cell when Ti Mousson counted who was with him and who was not. So that guy asked for the warden and informed on what the prisoners were planning. And the warden did nothing."
After the earthquake, the warden, Inspector Sylvestre Larack, put out a "maximum alert" calling his 29 guards back to duty. But on Jan. 19, with much of Les Cayes still in a post-quake state of emergency, only five guards showed up to work inside the prison.
In the early afternoon, when the cells were to be opened for the dumping of the waste buckets, Inspector Larack left to put gas in his car, said Mr. Yonel, the southern regional director of Haiti's Network for the Defense of Human Rights. Given the long lines at the service stations, this was bound to take time.
For the escape planners, "the stars had aligned," Mr. Yonel said.
A Cell Erupts
Thélèmaque Guerson, the guard with the keys, found nothing out of the ordinary when he unlocked Cell 1 and then Cell 2.
When he opened Cell 3, however, dozens of detainees "formed a coalition and pushed out together at the same time," he said in an interview. They threw a bucket of urine at him and pounced, fists first. Mr. Cazeau grabbed him by the chest, saying, "Give me the prison keys." Mr. Guerson, 28, said he threw the keys in the hopes that the other guards would retrieve them.
The other guards, however, "must have been distracted," said an internal United Nations report. That report said it was a United Nations police officer patrolling the prison roof who first spied the detainees attacking Mr. Guerson.
Mr. Guerson said he struggled, but, outnumbered, could not stand his ground. He was stabbed in the head and neck with the sharpened toothbrush. Finally, he managed to extricate himself and ran out the front gate. All the other guards fled, too, and they did not lock the door after themselves.
The inmates controlled the prison.
Key ring in hand, Mr. Cazeau opened cell after cell. Inmates poured into the yard. Some rushed the front door. But by this point, United Nations officers and soldiers, who had formed a perimeter around the compound, blocked the entrance, pointing their guns. Detainees withdrew back inside, where they easily found the tools to vent their frustrations, like propane tanks to set fires and pickaxes to chop up the doors.
Although prisons are not supposed to keep firearms, and especially not unsecured firearms, the inmates also found a couple of old guns in the clerk's office, according to some accounts. Mr. Guerson and the former detainees said they thought the guns either did not work or did not have ammunition.
The police station stands directly in front of the prison. Superintendent Beaubrun, who runs the Departmental Unit for the Maintenance of Order, said that he was sitting out front under a tamarind tree when he heard a blast - "Boom!" Running toward the noise - its origin unclear - he saw Mr. Guerson dash out, his head bleeding.
Still, Superintendent Beaubrun said, the police could not intervene without orders from his superior, whom he said he had difficulty reaching by cellphone.
So while the inmates ransacked the prison, the guards were outside, the police were outside and the United Nations officers were outside, too. "We spent three hours discussing what to do," Superintendent Beaubrun said.
Handling a riot is a delicate affair for prison officials. International standards encourage the use of mediation and nonlethal restraint; law enforcement officers are supposed to use lethal force only after all other means have been exhausted. Haitian officials ordered the United Nations officers, who were better equipped, to enter the prison and open fire on the prisoners, according to the United Nations report. The United Nations officers, most from a Senegalese police unit, vehemently refused.
"It was not right!" Abdou Mbengue, the reporting officer for the Senegalese, said at his office here last month. His commander, Lt. Col. Ababacar Sadikh Niang, said that they were not authorized to discuss the matter but added, emphatically, "It must be said that the Senegalese did not fire a single shot."
Haitian officials blamed the United Nations officers' "indifference" for allowing the situation to escalate.
Officer Mbengue, in turn, in a report that he wrote the night of the shootings, deplored "the amateurism, the lack of seriousness and the irresponsibility of the Haitian National Police officers." The senior police official in the region - Superintendent Beaubrun's boss - did not arrive on the scene for more than an hour, he wrote.
With night falling, Superintendent Beaubrun said, the police grew concerned about three female prison cooks who they believed had been taken hostage inside the prison. "They were screaming: 'Don't kill me. Don't kill me. Don't kill me,' " he said.
The three women, interviewed while cooking outside the prison last month, said they never feared that the detainees would kill them. They said that some detainees considered using them "as a shield" if the police came in but that others did not permit that. Generally, the detainees were protective of them and did not threaten or harm them, the cooks said.
"Because we used to take good care of the detainees, maybe that's why they did not try to hurt us," said one, Marie Florence Degan, as she tended a huge metal kettle of rice and beans over a wood fire.
Around 5 p.m., Haitian police officials decided to enter the prison compound. They used tear gas first, hurling 30 grenades that had been given to them by the Senegalese officers.
"A lot of gas," Mr. Jeudi said. "Myself, personally, I took a T-shirt, wrapped it around my nose and put toothpaste around my mouth" to combat the effects. "I was crying."
Detainees ran into the infirmary and hid in cells. Some escaped, climbing up and over the walls or through holes they had dug. Mr. Cazeau, the ringleader, fled in plain view, using a prison ladder, according to a report by Mr. Yonel's human rights group.
The Police Take Over
By the time the police penetrated the northern wall to enter the prison, the detainees had been overcome by the gas and were breathing hard, former detainees said.
The prison warden's report said the police, accompanied by guards, were greeted by "a hailstorm of rocks and ammunition coming from the detainees."
The cooks said the detainees never fired a shot. "No detainees did any shooting," one of the cooks, Charita Milien, said. No officers were killed, and none were wounded by gunfire, according to police reports.
On entering, the warden's report said, officers found on the ground "detainees who had been executed by the leaders of the movement for refusing to cooperate."
But two cooks said that they saw no dead detainees on the ground at the moment the police arrived. And, like other detainees interviewed, Mr. Jeudi said, "No one was killed before the police entered the prison."
Superintendent Beaubrun said that the detainees' account could not be trusted. "The detainees were arrested by us," he said. "They will never say good things about us. Escape is good for them. If you prevent them from escaping, they won't like you."
Mr. Jeudi and other former detainees said the police entered firing. "When they started to shoot, people were screaming and crying," Mr. Jeudi said. Many detainees dropped facedown on the ground and laced their fingers behind their heads.
One middle-aged former prisoner said he was standing on the sidelines trying to calm Fredely Percy, a 27-year-old inmate serving time for marijuana possession. "My friend, Fredely, was standing next to me and we were discussing what to do," the former prisoner said in an interview. "At that moment, I heard 'Pow,' and he got hit and fell down."
Another former detainee, a scrappy man in his 20s, said, in broken English: "They shoot a lot of people. There was a lot of blood on me. Blood, blood. Everybody in the prison have blood on them."
He said the police shot indiscriminately. "All them people they killed, it's not even like they were going to escape," he said. "They just shoot them. Like they nervous, they shoot people."
Mr. Yonel said he believed that some of the victims were singled out. A former prisoner said that the police executed one of the ringleaders, a man serving a life sentence for murder, after the situation had calmed. The officers found the man in his cell, took him into the infirmary, beat him and shot him, the former inmate said.
"They decided because he had escaped death earlier to kill him," the former inmate said. He added, "They never liked him."
A Priest's Witness
The next day, the Rev. Marc Boisvert, an American priest who runs a large orphanage on the outskirts of town, heard about the prison violence from a radio report. Father Boisvert, a former United States Navy chaplain, has operated a vocational program at the prison for years, training convicts to be tailors. He immediately got in his car and drove to the prison.
"It was a real mess," he said. "The place was still smoldering."
The warden, Inspector Larack, welcomed him, he said. "They brought me in to see the damage that had been caused by the prisoners," Father Boisvert said. "Especially they wanted to show me the bad side: 'The prisoners did this. Imagine that. Look at the holes in the walls. Look at the ceilings. They burnt the kitchen out.' "
Well before the riot, conditions at the prison were "subhuman," Father Boisvert said. After the riot, with more than 400 prisoners locked down in five or six small cells, the conditions became "seriously inhumane," he said.
Father Boisvert found several wounded detainees languishing without medical treatment.
One detainee showed him the pellets in his back from a shotgun blast; he said he had been shot at close range, through the bars of his cell. Another detainee, shot by a small-caliber handgun, was writhing in pain, a bullet lodged in his chest. A third had a bloody eye that appeared to be from a bullet casing being ejected, Father Boisvert said.
In the prison yard, one inmate lay catatonic on a bare mattress, apparently in shock from what he had witnessed, Father Boisvert said.
"It was crazy," he said. "People just lost it. People with guns lost it, and other people lost their lives."
After Father Boisvert volunteered to provide food to the detainees, he gained relatively free access to the prison, and prisoners began telling him what had happened.
"They all claim that when the shooting started, they had their hands up and were surrendering," he said. "That the shooting seemed to be at close range, through bars into cells where the people inside had nowhere to go.
"Essentially, when the authorities finally got their act together, they came in full force and shot people indiscriminately in their cells," he said.
Like Father Boisvert, Ms. Laurencin, 42, also heard about the disturbance at the prison on the radio. She said she was not worried about her husband, Mr. Lisius, the father of her three daughters and a cabinetmaker by trade. In prison since November without having seen a judge, he was too timid to have taken part in an uprising, she said.
Ms. Laurencin said she prepared his favorite dish - fish and plantains - and took it to the prison. But the guards would not let her in. The next day, she returned twice, and the second time she made her way into the yard where she saw prisoners on their knees. They called to her: "Your husband is dead."
Stunned, Ms. Laurencin went to the morgue to look for her husband's body. What she saw then haunts her now, she said: a bullet hole in his caved-in head, and his rotted entrails spilling out. He was too damaged for a proper funeral, she said, so she and a couple of friends buried him themselves in the town cemetery.
Since his death, the authorities have never contacted her, she said last month.
Gruesome Photographs
On Jan. 19, after the prison was calmed, a United Nations officer took pictures inside the compound. Those photographs, closely guarded by the United Nations, appear to be the only documentary evidence of the killings.
They show bodies in the prison yard and bodies in cells, according to three people who have viewed them. Several bodies bear multiple gunshot wounds. The images are gruesome, said Mr. Geiger, the American contractor working in Haiti on a justice reform project.
Mr. Geiger, a former Justice Department official, said that a picture of two bodies slumped inside one cell, and a third, half in, half out, most disturbed him. "Unarmed prisoners in a cell are not a danger to anybody," he said. "Any competent and responsible prison authority knows how to take care of a situation where people in a cell are disturbing, hollering or whatever."
After the episode was over, prison officials summoned the local justice of the peace, Michel Seide, "to certify the damage incurred in the course of the riot," according to the warden's incident report.
When Mr. Seide stepped inside, he immediately saw two bodies on the ground, "one with a big hole in his head, next to his neck," he said in an interview. The other bodies lay scattered through the main yard, he said. He counted a total of 10, none inside cells, he said. He said he did not know if bodies had been moved before his arrival.
While he was writing a report, a truck arrived to collect the bodies, he said, and the authorities asked a couple of prisoners in good standing to help move them.
One was Mr. Jeudi, who was just completing a five-year sentence for armed robbery. He said that he transported a dozen dead detainees to the hospital, including one found outside the compound, apparently shot while escaping.
"I carried 12 cadavers," Mr. Jeudi said. "I was sick about it."
Mr. Jeudi said he also ferried eight wounded detainees to the hospital.
After the bodies had been removed, Alix Civil, the local prosecutor, arrived at the scene, which he described in an interview as "a catastrophic situation." He said he saw damaged walls, broken cell doors and blood everywhere - details not included in the report he received from the justice of the peace.
"A lot of things were missing from that report," Mr. Civil said. "It was written only to please the chief of the prison."
He ordered Mr. Seide to redo his report. Mr. Seide said that he interviewed hospitalized detainees who told him the police shot them, but he would not divulge the conclusion of his second report, which could form the basis for a local prosecution of the officers.
A few days after the shootings, Antoinetta Dorcinat arrived at the morgue just in time to retrieve the body of Mr. Percy, her boyfriend. Ms. Dorcinat said she gave the morgue attendant a bribe of $6.50 "so they wouldn't throw Fredely away with the others."
Mr. Yonel, the human rights leader, said the morgue sent 11 bodies to the local cemetery. He said that the cemetery caretaker showed him the muddy clearing where the bodies had been buried.
Detainees' relatives were not notified before the burial. Lisette Charles said she still did not know where her 21-year-old son, Jacklyn Charles, was buried.
"I didn't know about what happened until about five days afterward," Ms. Charles said. "I was told several of them were put in large zippered body bags and piled up at the cemetery. I don't know what hole they buried him in."
After word spread, Mr. Yonel said, detainees' relatives kept showing up at his office, a cubbyhole with books and files piled high, asking: "Why? Why? Why?" Over 26 days, his staff investigated, concluding that the police killed the detainees without justification, and he delivered his findings to the local authorities. "I went before the court and said: 'You have to have an investigation. You can't just let this pass,' " he said.
But many months did pass, during which the only thing that happened was that Inspector Larack was transferred to the top warden job in the country at the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, which is slowly filling back up with prisoners.
At the penitentiary, Inspector Larack declined to discuss the violence under his watch. He welcomed reporters into the prison's rubble-strewn courtyard, "my new office." But he turned rigid when the episode in Les Cayes was raised. He blocked a video camera with his hand - "Stop!" he said - and demanded the videotape.
A Police Report
A couple of weeks later, the Haitian National Police inspector general's office completed its investigation of the disturbance in Les Cayes and recommended Inspector Larack's demotion. The investigation focused on only prison officials. The police were not questioned, judging by a confidential inspector general's report. The catalyst for the inquiry appeared to be growing concern about the prison escapes across the country - and not concern about the deaths at Les Cayes.
The inspector general, Fritz Jean, blamed Inspector Larack for failing to take steps to prevent the disturbance. He also accused him of lying to investigators about who shot the detainees by accusing Mr. Cazeau of mass murder.
The detainees were actually killed, the inspector general's report said, after Mr. Cazeau, the ringleader, escaped and the police entered the prison.
The inspector general's report does not raise any questions about the police shootings and whether they were justified. It concludes that the police and prison officials did "estimable work" and should be commended for preventing a majority of the prisoners from fleeing.
Shown a copy of the inspector general's report, Mr. O'Neill, who served as an adviser to Haiti's justice reform effort for many years, said it looked like "a whitewash."
A crucial component of the justice reform effort in Haiti has been to wipe out a culture of impunity, "where government officials literally could get away with murder," Mr. O'Neill said.
"If things like this can happen in a state-run institution, and it's not handled properly, that's a very bad precedent for the future," he said. "If whoever killed these people are not brought to justice, it sets a bad tone for post-earthquake reconstruction."
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that finances foreign aid programs, said that how Haiti ultimately handled the case in Les Cayes would show if it was serious about justice.
"Absent the will to see justice done," Mr. Leahy said, "we should not waste our money."
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3) Surveillance Is Suspected as Spacecraft's Main Role
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
May 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/science/space/23secret.html?hp
A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation's first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.
Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.
In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.
The secretive effort seeks "no offensive capabilities," Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. "The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development."
The secretive flight, civilian specialists said in recent weeks, probably centers at least partly on testing powerful sensors for a new generation of spy satellites.
Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called "a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites."
In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky.
"This looks very, very good," Mr. Molczan said of the identification. "We got it."
In moving from as far as 40 degrees north latitude to 40 degrees south latitude, the military spacecraft passes over many global trouble spots, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.
Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.
Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up - standard for a space shuttle - and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so.
A fair amount is known publicly about the features of the X-37B because it began life 11 years ago as a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the nation's space shuttles. The Air Force took over the program in 2006, during the Bush administration, and hung a cloak of secrecy over its budget and missions.
The X-37B has a wingspan of just over 14 feet and is 29 feet long. It looks something like a space shuttle, although about a quarter of the length. The craft's payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites. The X-37B can stay aloft for as long as nine months because it deploys solar panels for power, unlike the space shuttle.
Brian Weedon, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a private group based in Superior, Colo., said the duration of the X-37B's initial flight would probably depend on "how well it performs in orbit."
The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the "development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems."
Mr. Payton, a former astronaut and senior NASA official, has acknowledged that the spacecraft is ultimately meant to give the United States new advantages on terrestrial battlefields, but denies that it represents any kind of space weaponization.
On April 20, two days before the mission's start, he told reporters that the spacecraft, if successful, would "push us in the vector of being able to react to war-fighter needs more quickly." And, while offering no specifics, he added that its response to an "urgent war-fighter need" might even pre-empt the launching of other missions on expendable rockets.
But he emphasized the spacecraft's advantages as an orbiting laboratory, saying it could expose new technology to space for a long time and then "bring it back" for inspection.
Mission control for the X-37B, Mr. Payton said, is located at the Air Force Space Command's Third Space Experimentation Squadron, based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. He added that the Air Force was building another of the winged spaceships and hopes to launch it next year.
The current mission began on April 22, when an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida fired the 5.5-ton spacecraft into orbit.
Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, said the secrecy surrounding the X-37B even extended to the whereabouts of the rocket's upper stage, which was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. In one of his regular Internet postings, he said that appeared to be the first time the United States had put a space vehicle into a solar orbit that is "officially secret."
David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said many aerospace experts questioned whether the mission benefits of the X-37B outweighed its costs and argued that expendable rockets could achieve similar results.
"Sure it's nice to have," he said. "But is it really worth the expense?"
Mr. Weedon of the Secure World Foundation argued that the X-37B could prove valuable for quick reconnaissance missions. He said ground crews might rapidly reconfigure its payload - either optical or radar - and have it shot into space on short notice for battlefield surveillance, letting the sensors zoom in on specific conflicts beyond the reach of the nation's fleet of regular spy satellites.
But he questioned the current mission's secrecy.
"I don't think this has anything to do with weapons," Mr. Weedon said. "But because of the classification, and the refusal to talk, the door opens to all that. So, from a U.S. perspective, that's counterproductive."
He also questioned whether the Pentagon's secrecy about the spacecraft's orbit had any practical consequences other than keeping the public in the dark.
"If a bunch of amateurs can find it," Mr. Weedon said, "so can our adversaries."
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4) Despite Leak, Louisiana Is Still Devoted to Oil
"Though local and state politicians are railing against BP and what they consider lax industry regulation and enforcement, it is nearly impossible to find any of them calling for offshore drilling to cease, or even slow down. Louisiana's senators - Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican - have both scrambled to be the most prominent voice to argue that the country should not retreat from offshore drilling just because of the spill. Many of their constituents seem to agree."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/us/23drill.html?ref=us
MORGAN CITY, La. - In some parts of the country, the sight of oil drifting toward the Louisiana coast, oozing into the fragile marshlands and bringing large parts of the state's economy to a halt, has prompted calls to stop offshore drilling indefinitely, if not altogether.
Here, in the middle of things, those calls are few. Here, in fact, the unfolding disaster is not even prompting a reconsideration of the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival.
"All systems are go," said Lee Delaune, the festival's director, sitting in his cluttered office in a historic house known as Cypress Manor. "We will honor the two industries as we always do," Mr. Delaune said. "More so probably in grand style, because it's our diamond jubilee."
Louisiana is an oil state, through and through. A gushing leak off of its coast has not, apparently, changed that.
Though local and state politicians are railing against BP and what they consider lax industry regulation and enforcement, it is nearly impossible to find any of them calling for offshore drilling to cease, or even slow down. Louisiana's senators - Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican - have both scrambled to be the most prominent voice to argue that the country should not retreat from offshore drilling just because of the spill. Many of their constituents seem to agree.
"They're angry, they're frustrated, they're feeling helpless, but they still understand that it is part of the culture and the fabric of the economy," said Representative Charlie Melancon, whose district encompasses all of the areas where oil has come ashore. "It is what it is."
In a state that is particularly sensitive to the health of its coastal wetlands, which serve as a barrier against hurricanes, such an attitude might seem odd - even self-defeating. But as the legendary Gov. Huey P. Long believed with great conviction, a state willing to let others exploit its resources is also a state with considerable leverage.
But while Long's taxes on oil paid for schoolbooks, the terms of the trade-off in the coming years may become more directly equivalent: the costly restoration of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, which for decades have been slashed by oil pipelines and canals and are now threatened by crude itself, may be financed in large part by offshore drilling.
In the months after Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Landrieu helped push through a federal bill that allowed for greatly expanded deepwater drilling in the gulf but required that 37.5 percent of federal revenues generated be divided among the coastal states.
According to a formula based on factors including proximity to wells and miles of coastline, Louisiana is the biggest beneficiary of that revenue. And under a state constitutional amendment, it is required to spend the money exclusively on hurricane protection measures and coastal restoration.
Until 2017, the revenue sharing applies only to new wells, so for now Louisiana is drawing only a small fraction of the royalties it eventually will. (Ms. Landrieu has said that she wants it to apply immediately to existing wells.)
But Garret Graves, the chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, said that these potential royalties were not a factor in the state's approach to its natural resources. While officials have pushed for revenue sharing, he said, the oil industry will continue to play a big role here with or without such payments. "Our state has carried the torch for the country in terms of the oil and gas for years," Mr. Graves said. "It's part of the culture."
In this he echoed a common refrain: as long as the country maintains its insatiable appetite for oil, Louisiana will be willing to bear many of the risks. The awareness of those risks does not seem to change the state's vigorously pro-industry outlook, though it does reinforce a belief that Louisianans should be compensated for the downsides.
Cathy Norman, manager of the roughly 40,000 acres of coastal wetlands in the Edward Wisner Donation land trust, knows the risks as well as anyone.
The land trust she manages includes much of Port Fourchon, the largest onshore support harbor for the deepwater industry in the gulf, but also pristine beaches and mangrove marshlands where, to her horror, she has seen tar balls, sheen and even emulsified crude. Ms. Norman's late husband, Shea Penland, a geologist who died in 2008, was one of the country's most forceful advocates for preservation of the Louisiana's coastal wetlands.
"We are a working coastline," Ms. Norman said. "Part of the reason that we are so prolific is because of the delta and because of the geology and geography of the area. It all fits in. It is what we are."
Since 1901, when a man named Jules Clement noticed some curious bubbles on his rice farm, this has been an oil state. Nearly 90 percent of the country's offshore rigs and platforms are located on the outer continental shelf off Louisiana, according to the state's office of economic development. The revenue stream from them and from onshore facilities filters throughout the economy, from supply boat companies to rig workers themselves.
It also seeps into politics, of course, with oil and gas interests routinely showing up as top campaign donors to both parties.
Skeptics are now emboldened by the ugly display of the industry's risks.
"Somehow some folks have sold our community and citizens the myth that if you don't cooperate, we're just going to go away and you're not going to have a good economy here," Marylee Orr, director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a nonprofit group.
Despite its pro-industry policies, Ms. Orr said, Louisiana has continued to be one of the poorest states in the country, raising serious questions as to whether the downsides are worth it.
"Welcoming all this industry has not made us a wealthy state," she said.
And yet, while the state's recreational and commercial fishing is now severely at risk, even fishing guides, though angry about the spill, have not soured on offshore drilling. The waters around the rigs and platforms provide them with some of the richest fishing grounds, they say, and the high salaries in the oil industry provide the extra disposable income that fuels their business.
"We just want them to clean it up, that's all," said Michael Ballay, manager of the Cypress Cove Marina, as he sat in the Harbour Bar and Grill in Venice and surveyed the slips full of luxury fishing boats. "A lot of our customers that own yachts made their money from the oil field business."
And so at the end of summer, the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival will take place as scheduled, with the golf tournament sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, the blessing of the boats by the parish priest and the coronation of the Shrimp and Petroleum king and queen.
In fact, Mr. Delaune said, curious outsiders have been calling to ask about this odd mix of oilmen and shrimpers. He thinks attendance this year could set a record.
James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting from Venice, La.
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5) E.P.A. Administrator to Visit Gulf as Spill Spreads
By REUTERS
"Iran, a fierce critic of Washington, repeated an offer to assist with the Gulf spill, calling it no great challenge compared to what Iran itself had dealt with."
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/05/23/us/news-us-oil-rig-leak.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Filed at 11:57 a.m. ET
VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The U.S. government is forced to rely on BP and the private oil sector to try to plug the gushing Gulf of Mexico well because only they have the technical know-how to stop the spill at those depths, the Coast Guard chief said on Sunday.
Admiral Thad Allen, who heads the oil spill response operation, also said he trusted BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward at a time when U.S. government and public criticism of the company and its executives over the spill is mounting daily.
More than a month after a rig explosion triggered what President Barack Obama has described as an unprecedented environmental disaster, oil is still spewing unchecked from BP's ruptured well a mile down on the ocean floor.
Iran, a fierce critic of Washington, repeated an offer to assist with the Gulf spill, calling it no great challenge compared to what Iran itself had dealt with.
Sheets of heavy oil have washed ashore in Louisiana's fragile marshlands and lesser "oil debris" has also reached the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama in what is seen as an ecological and economic catastrophe for the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Given the lack of a solution so far and the doubts over BP, Allen was asked on CNN's "State of the Nation" show on Sunday why the U.S. federal government did not completely take over the spill containment operation from the London-based firm.
"What makes this an unprecedented anomalous event is access to the discharge site is controlled by the technology that was used for the drilling, which is owned by the private sector," Allen said. "They have the eyes and ears that are down there. They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved," he added.
Pressed about BP CEO Hayward, who has been widely criticized for public comments apparently downplaying the size of the spill and its likely environmental impact, Allen said: "I trust Tony Hayward. When I talk to him, I get an answer"
"FIGHTING A MULTI-FRONT WAR"
In Tehran, Mehran Alinejad, head of special drilling operations at the National Iranian Drilling Co., said Iran had successfully dealt with past huge oil leaks, particularly when rigs were bombed during a war with Iraq in the 1980s.
"Iranian technical teams have had major achievements in oil well capping compared with which the Gulf of Mexico oil rig is no feat," he told IRNA news agency.
After the failure so far of containment methods to stem the gushing oil flow, BP engineers are now preparing a "top kill" - pumping heavy fluids into the ruptured well to try to shut it off - in an operation that would begin late Tuesday or early Wednesday, BP Managing Director Bob Dudley told CNN.
Other possible short-term options include a "junk shot" of pieces of rubber and other materials into the failed blowout preventer on top of the leaking well. Allen added another option was the fitting of a new blowout preventer.
But Dudley cautioned: "There is no certainty (of success) at these kind of depths".
Dudley said BP would nevertheless press ahead with all of these while also drilling a relief well -- widely viewed as the plugging option with the best chance of success -- expected to be finished in August. "We will keep trying, we will not wait until August," Dudley told CNN.
Allen compared the battle to contain the spill and its spreading slick to "fighting a multi-front war".
He added that when the leak was finally sealed, the total amount of oil spilled would "probably start to approach" the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, the worst U.S. oil spill. The tanker accident spilled 11 million gallons (41 million liters) of crude.
But many scientists believe the Gulf spill has already eclipsed this, and warn the spreading oil could increasingly be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf on Sunday to monitor the EPA's response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to the BP Command Center in Houston.
RISING STAKES
Their missions underscored the rising stakes for the Obama administration in dealing with the disaster.
Obama at the weekend formally established a commission to investigate the disaster and also made his first reference to the possibility of a criminal probe. But he is facing increasing pressure to do more to solve the problem.
"The federal government should have stepped into this thing immediately, to help make sure that the appropriate steps are being taken by BP ... here we are, almost a month and a half later, and it's still spilling oil," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told ABC's "This Week".
"Right now, the federal government is not moving forward on BP and cleaning up that mess," Steele added.
The Democratic president, in his weekly radio and Internet address, said offshore drilling could go forward only if there were assurances that such accidents would not happen again.
The spill has raised major questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation. Analysts say ecological and economic damage from the spill could become a political liability before November congressional elections.
While also promising to hold Washington accountable for proper oversight of the industry, Obama ramped up pressure on companies linked to the spill: BP, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd. He believed a "breakdown of responsibility" between them led to the disaster.
BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.
Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil -- often defended by BP executives -- as ridiculously low and say it could be 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day or more.
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington, Hashem Kalantari in Tehran; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Jackie Frank)
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6) Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/business/economy/24childcare.html?hp
TUCSON - Able-bodied, outgoing and accustomed to working, Alexandria Wallace wants to earn a paycheck. But that requires someone to look after her 3-year-old daughter, and Ms. Wallace, a 22-year-old single mother, cannot afford child care.
Last month, she lost her job as a hair stylist after her improvised network of baby sitters frequently failed her, forcing her to miss shifts. She qualifies for a state-run subsidized child care program. But like many other states, Arizona has slashed that program over the last year, relegating Ms. Wallace's daughter, Alaya, to a waiting list of nearly 11,000 eligible children.
Despite a substantial increase in federal support for subsidized child care, which has enabled some states to stave off cuts, others have trimmed support, and most have failed to keep pace with rising demand, according to poverty experts and federal officials.
That has left swelling numbers of low-income families struggling to reconcile the demands of work and parenting, just as they confront one of the toughest job markets in decades.
The cuts to subsidized child care challenge the central tenet of the welfare overhaul adopted in 1996, which imposed a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance. Under the change, low-income parents were forced to give up welfare checks and instead seek paychecks, while being promised support - not least, subsidized child care - that would enable them to work.
Now, in this moment of painful budget cuts, with Arizona and more than a dozen other states placing children eligible for subsidized child care on waiting lists, only two kinds of families are reliably securing aid: those under the supervision of child protective services - which looks after abuse and neglect cases - and those receiving cash assistance.
Ms. Wallace abhors the thought of going on cash assistance, a station she associates with lazy people who con the system. Yet this has become the only practical route toward child care.
So, on a recent afternoon, she waited in a crush of beleaguered people to submit the necessary paperwork. Her effort to avoid welfare through work has brought her to welfare's door.
"It doesn't make sense to me," she says. "I fall back to - I can't say 'being a lowlife' - but being like the typical person living off the government. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to use this as a backbone, so I can develop my own backbone."
As the American social safety net absorbs its greatest challenge since the Great Depression, state budget cuts are weakening crucial components. Subsidized child care - financed by federal and state governments - is a conspicuous example.
When President Clinton signed into law the changes he declared would "end welfare as we know it," he vowed that those losing government checks would gain enough support to enable their transition to the workplace.
"We will protect the guarantees of health care, nutrition and child care, all of which are critical to helping families move from welfare to work," Mr. Clinton pledged in a radio address that year.
Now, with the jobless rate hovering near double digits and 6.7 million people unemployed for six months or longer, some states are rolling back child care.
"We're really reneging on a commitment and a promise that we made to families," said Patty Siegel, executive director of the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, an advocacy organization. "You can't expect a family with young children to get on their feet and get jobs without child care."
As part of last year's package of spending measures aimed at stimulating the economy, the Obama administration added $2 billion for subsidized child care programs for 2009 and 2010, on top of the expected $5 billion a year. The administration has proposed a $1.6 billion increase for 2011. But even as this extra money has limited cuts and enabled some states to expand programs, officials acknowledge that it has not kept pace with the need.
"To say that we are in a difficult environment in terms of state budgets would be the understatement of the century," said Sharon Parrott, an adviser to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, which administers federal grants to states for child care. "It's just not possible for the federal government to fill the entire hole, but the Recovery Act has provided critical help."
Even some architects of the mid-1990s welfare overhaul now assert that low-income families are being denied resources required to enable them to work.
"We're going the wrong way," said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a Republican Congressional aide and was instrumental in shaping welfare changes. "The direction public policy should move is to provide more of these mothers with subsidies. To tell people that the only way they can get day care is to go on welfare defeats the purpose of the whole thing."
Here in Tucson - a city of roughly 500,000 people, sprawling across a parched valley dotted by cactus - Jamie Smith, a 23-year-old single mother, once had subsidized child care. That enabled her to work at Target, where she earned about $8 an hour. She paid $1.50 a day for her 3-year-old daughter, Wren, to stay at a child care center. The state picked up the rest.
She was aiming to resume college and then find a higher-paying job. But in December, she missed by a day the deadline to extend her subsidy. When she went to the state Department of Economic Security to submit new paperwork, she learned that all new applicants were landing on a waiting list.
Ms. Smith sought help from Wren's father to look after their daughter. But he had his own job delivering pizza, limiting his availability.
"Some days, I'd just have to call in sick," she said.
By March, she had missed so many days that Target put her on a leave of absence, telling her to come back after securing stable child care, she said.
Without the state program, she sees no viable options.
She, too, is contemplating going on welfare.
"It's a blow to my own self-image and self-worth as a person who can take care of myself," she says. "I'm totally able, physically and intellectually, to continue working. But I can't work without child care, and I can't afford child care without work."
A Major Cost
In many low-income working families, child care is one of the largest expenditures after housing. Among families with working mothers and incomes below the poverty line - $18,310 for a family of three - child care absorbs nearly a third of total household budgets, according to census data.
Yet long before the recession assailed state budgets, subsidized child care was not reaching the vast majority of families in need.
In 2000, only one in seven children whose families met federal eligibility requirements received aid, according to an analysis by the Center for Law and Social Policy, which advocates for expanded programs. In 2003, the Bush administration found that in the smaller group of children eligible under more restrictive state criteria, only 30 percent received subsidized care.
Until the Obama administration increased financing last year, federal support for subsidized child care had been steady for a decade. From 2001 to 2008, direct federal spending for subsidized child care through the Child Care and Development Fund - the primary source - nudged up to $5 billion a year, from about $4.6 billion, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
During the same years, the number of children receiving subsidized child care under the program fell to 1.6 million in 2008, from an average of 1.8 million a month in 2001.
Data for last year has yet to be compiled, but federal officials and poverty experts assume the number of families eligible for help has climbed, given broad cuts in working hours and other sources of income.
At least nine states, including Illinois and Indiana, used increased federal aid through the stimulus package to begin offering child care support to parents looking for work. Thus they expanded the case loads of such programs or lengthened the duration of the benefits, according to data compiled by the National Women's Law Center, an advocacy group in Washington.
But at least nine other states, including Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts and North Carolina, have cut access to subsidized child care programs or the amounts they pay.
New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico resorted to waiting lists. Ohio reduced its income eligibility from twice the poverty line to 150 percent - $33,075 annually for a family of four.
"The social safety net was always in patches, and now it's more frayed," said Helen Blank, director of leadership and public policy at the National Women's Law Center. "For a single mom, it's a lottery in many states whether she gets child care or not."
This year, California altered its welfare reform program, cutting $215 million from child care financing given to counties and allowing families with young children to draw aid without looking for work. But it also means that those who want to pursue careers may effectively be consigned to the old welfare system, receiving monthly checks without support like child care.
"These women desperately want to be off cash aid," said Ms. Siegel, at the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network. "That door has essentially been shut."
Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed scrapping California's entire welfare-to-work program, including child care and cash assistance, as the state grapples with a $19 billion budget shortfall - an action that would eliminate aid for roughly a million children.
In Arizona last year, stimulus funds prevented budget cuts that would have eliminated care for 15,000 eligible children. But as the budget crisis has ground on, the state has added names of eligible children to the wait list, a term that social service agencies deride as a euphemism.
"It's really a turn-away list," says Bruce Liggett, executive director of the Arizona Child Care Association, a Phoenix-based advocacy group. "The program has been shut down."
For Mr. Liggett, this amounts to a bitter turn. In the mid-1990s, he was a deputy director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, where he helped put in place the new welfare-to-work program.
"We've seen devastating cuts," he says. "For those families working to stay off welfare, we're denying help. Welfare reform in Arizona is certainly a broken promise."
Path to Welfare
Alexandria Wallace grew up in a middle-class home topped by Spanish tile, with a swimming pool out back and a view of jagged reddish mountains. Her decline from work to welfare began in the spring of 2009.
She was working three days a week at a call center for Verizon Wireless, earning about $9.50 an hour while attending beauty school at night to earn a license as a cosmetologist. She aimed to use earnings from that profession as a springboard to nursing school.
Alaya was enrolled at a child care center, with a state subsidy, and Ms. Wallace was pleased with the girl's experiences there - singing songs, learning to share. But when Ms. Wallace sent in the forms to extend the program, she received a rude surprise: a recent raise - less than 50 cents an hour - had bumped her above the income limit.
With no one to watch her daughter on a regular basis, she quit her job at the call center and began working at her mother's thrift store for $7.50 an hour while she finished beauty school.
Ms. Wallace reapplied for child care. Now she qualified, but she landed on the wait list.
She shared a two-bedroom apartment with a couple and their 5-year-old daughter, and she sometimes paid them $25 to look after Alaya. But the woman worked, and the man seemed more interested in his PlayStation than the children, Ms. Wallace said.
"I'd come home from work in the afternoon, and Alaya would still be in her pajamas," she said. "It's so hard to find someone to really take care of your kid."
Her younger brother sometimes helped, but reluctantly and irregularly.
A classmate at beauty school offered to watch Alaya during the day. In exchange, Ms. Wallace took care of her friend's 18-month-old boy every evening.
Her days tending to customers gave way to nights caring for a baby in a cramped apartment while cooking dinner and cleaning her house. Alaya was jealous and demanded extra attention. Ms. Wallace was perpetually exhausted.
Still, this arrangement provided enough stability that Ms. Wallace began cutting hair at a nearby salon. Her first month, she brought home about $500. She felt confident her clientele would grow.
Then, her friend canceled the swap, forcing Ms. Wallace to bring Alaya to the salon, where she tried to keep her occupied with cartoons in a back room.
Soon her car broke down, forcing her to rely on family and the public bus to get to work, which did not always happen.
Her boss had been kind, but patience wore thin.
"She was like, 'Your baby sitter bailed on you, your car broke down. What do you have left?' " Ms. Wallace said. "She said, 'If you can't get something worked out, I'm going to have to let you go.' "
Even after she lost that job, Ms. Wallace remained confident she could find another.
Then it dawned on her. Given the state of the social safety net, unemployment might provide the solution. She could qualify for cash assistance, which would require her to enroll in a state jobs program and would include help securing child care.
"It's something I have to do to get where I need to go," she said.
She plans to stay on cash assistance long enough to gain child care, then find another job. She would then lose cash assistance, but could hang onto child care as long as her income stayed below the eligibility limit.
These were her thoughts as she stood in an airless office, amid the sounds of unhappy children in the arms of tired women, waiting to hand in the forms to receive welfare.
"Oh no," she said, peeking inside a white envelope full of documents and spotting a brown smudge. "My kid got chocolate on her birth certificate."
She ducked into the ladies room and dabbed the stain with wet paper towel.
When she stepped outside an hour later, beneath a pounding Arizona sun, $220 a month was headed her way. Her daughter was waiting at her parents' house. Her future - a working car, a steady job - was waiting out there, too, she told herself, though it had a way of coming in and out of focus.
"I'm just trying to get my life situated to where I can look beyond the day to day," she said. "I hope it all falls together the way it all fell apart."
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7) Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead
By IAN URBINA
May 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24moratorium.html?hp
WASHINGTON - In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.
The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.
Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.
But critics say the moratorium has been violated or too narrowly defined to prevent another disaster.
With crude oil still pouring into the gulf and washing up on beaches and in wetlands, President Obama is sending Mr. Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano back to the region on Monday.
In a toughly worded warning to BP on Sunday, Mr. Salazar said at a news conference outside the company's headquarters in Houston, "If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately."
Mr. Salazar's position conflicted with one laid out several hours earlier, by the commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Adm. Thad W. Allen, who said that the oil conglomerate's access to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.
"They have the eyes and ears that are down there," the admiral said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved."
Since the explosion, federal regulators have been harshly criticized for giving BP's Deepwater Horizon and hundreds of other drilling projects waivers from full environmental review and for failing to provide rigorous oversight of these projects.
In voicing his frustration with these regulators and vowing to change how they operate, Mr. Obama announced on May 14 a moratorium on drilling new wells and the granting of environmental waivers.
"It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies," Mr. Obama said. "That cannot and will not happen anymore."
"We're also closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews," he added in reference to the environmental waivers.
But records indicated that regulators continued granting the environmental waivers and permits for types of work like that occurring on the Deepwater Horizon.
In testifying before Congress on May 18, Mr. Salazar and officials from his agency said they recognized the problems with the waivers and they intended to try to rein them in. But Mr. Salazar also said that he was limited by a statutory requirement that he said obligated his agency to process drilling requests within 30 days after they have been submitted.
"That is what has driven a number of the categorical exclusions that have been given over time in the gulf," he said.
But critics remained unsatisfied.
Shown the data indicating that waivers and permits were still being granted, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said he was "deeply troubled."
"We were given the clear impression that these waivers and permits were not being granted," said Mr. Cardin, who is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where Mr. Salazar testified last week. "I think the presumption should be that there should be stronger environmental reviews, not weaker."
None of the projects that have recently been granted environmental waivers have started drilling.
However, these waivers have been especially troublesome to environmentalists because they were granted through a special legal provision that is supposed to be limited to projects that present minimal or no risk to the environment.
At least six of the drilling projects that have been given waivers in the past four weeks are for waters that are deeper - and therefore more difficult and dangerous - than where Deepwater Horizon was operating. While that rig, which was drilling at a depth just shy of 5,000 feet, was classified as a deep-water operation, many of the wells in the six projects are classified as "ultra" deep water, including four new wells at over 9,100 feet.
In explaining why they were still granting new permits for certain types of drilling on existing wells, Department of the Interior officials said some of the procedures being allowed are necessary for the safety of the existing wellbore.
Pending the recommendations of the 30-day safety review, the officials said, drilling under permits approved before April 20 "may go forward, along with applications to modify existing wells and permits, if those actions are determined to be appropriate."
But Interior Department officials have also explained that one of the main justifications of the moratorium on new drilling was safety. The moratorium was meant to ensure that no new accidents occurred while the administration had time to review the regulatory system.
And yet, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has classified some of the drilling types that have been allowed to continue as being as hazardous as new well drilling. Federal records also indicate that there have been at least three major accidents involving spills, leaks or explosions on rigs in the gulf since 2002 caused by the drilling procedures still being permitted.
"The moratorium does not even cover the dangerous drilling that caused the problem in the first place," said Daniel J. Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, adding he was not certain that the Interior Department was capable of carrying out the needed reforms.
The moratorium has created inconsistencies and confusion.
While Interior Department officials have said certain new drilling procedures on existing wells can proceed, Mr. Salazar, when pressed to explain why new drilling was being allowed, testified on May 18 that "there is no deep-water well in the O.C.S. that has been spudded - that means started - after April 20," referring to the gulf's outer continental shelf.
However, Newfield Exploration Company has confirmed that it began drilling a deep-water well in 2,095 feet of water after April 20. Records indicate that Newfield was issued a permit on May 11 to initiate a sidetrack drill, with a required spud date of May 10. A sidetrack is a secondary wellbore drilled away from the original hole.
Among the types of drilling permits that the minerals agency is still granting are called bypass permits. These allow an operator to drill around a mechanical problem in the original hole to the original target from the existing wellbore.
Five days before the explosion, the Deepwater Horizon requested and received a revised bypass permit, which was the last drilling permit the rig received from the minerals agency before the explosion. The bore was created and it was the faulty cementing or plugging of that hole that has been cited as one of the causes of the explosion.
In reviewing the minerals agency, federal investigators are likely to pay close attention to how permits and waivers have been granted to drilling projects.
Even before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the use of environmental waivers was a source of concern. In September 2009, the Government Accountability Office released a report concluding that the waivers were being illegally granted to onshore drilling projects.
This month, the Interior Department announced plans to restrict the use of the waivers onshore, though not offshore. It also began a joint investigation of the offshore waiver process with the Council on Environmental Quality, an environmental arm of the White House.
The investigation, however, is likely to take months, and in the meantime the waivers are continuing to be issued. There is also a 60-day statute of limitations on contesting the waivers, which reduces the chances that they will be reversed if problems are found with the projects or the Obama administration's review finds fault in the exemption process.
At least three lawsuits to strike down the waivers have been filed by environmental groups this month. The lawsuits argue that the waivers are overly broad and that they undermine the spirit of laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, which forbid drilling projects from moving forward unless they produce detailed environmental studies about minimizing potential risks.
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8) We're braced for a heavy impact and the food-chain collapsing
By Melanie Driscoll
Monday, 24 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/melanie--driscoll-were-braced-for-a-heavy-impact-and-the-foodchain-collapsing-1981134.html
It's really hit hard in the past couple of days. It seemed, initially, that it was little fingers of oil that would come in then get washed out again by the tide. Now it's coming in with thick waves. Heavy oil is washing up.
Behind it, more oil is spewing from the Gulf and that means there's a mass of oil that will continue to break up on to those shores and beaches.
We've been working there for 20-hour days. We're trying to work on this at a strategic level with a long-term conservation plan about how we maintain and protect habitats into the future as, hopefully, the leaking oil gets capped.
But we're bracing for a really heavy impact on the habitat and the birds. The area is incredibly rich. It's both rich in diversity but also in abundance. There are vast marshes and miles and miles of beaches and, at this time of the year, birds are just packed into those areas for breeding. The impact on the migrant birds will be very heavy, [especially on] the breeding terns and the breeding marsh birds. We're mobilising volunteers to help with individual birds, planning and documenting the effects of the spill.
While there's this large mass of oil that we can see on the surface, there are untold volumes of oil under the surface. We could see the food chain collapsing, which could cause as much damage to the birds as the oil. We could see the young born early being fed with tainted fish or abandoned because the parents die and don't come back.
What we're seeing now is very distressing. We've been working to save some of these habitats for years. I spoke to some of my co-workers - and we've been dealing with this for a month - and I have never heard them sound so depressed. They told me that they went to a restaurant on Grand Isle and the manager there started to cry. After all, it's her home.
Melanie Driscoll is the director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society's Louisiana programme
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9) Screw the Environment: BP and the Audacity of Corporate Greed
By Dave Lindorff
05/23/2010 - 19:07
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/65
Even as BP's blown well a mile beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush forth an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea, and the fragile wetlands along the Gulf begin to get coated with crude, which is also headed into the Gulf Stream for a trip past the Everglades and on up the East Coast, the company is demanding that Canada lift its tight rules for drilling in the icy Beaufort Sea portion of the Arctic Ocean.
In an incredible display of corporate arrogance, BP is claiming that a current safety requirement that undersea wells drilled during the newly ice-free summer must also include a side relief well, so as to have a preventive measure in place that could shut down a blown well, is "too expensive" and should be eliminated.
Yet clearly, if the US had had such a provision in place, the Deepwater Horizon blowout could have been shut down right almost immediately after it blew out, just by turning of a valve or two, and then sealing off the blown wellhead.
A relief well is "too expensive"?
The current Gulf blowout has already cost BP over half a billion dollars, according to the company's own information. That doesn't count the cost of mobilizing the Coast Guard, the Navy, and untold state and county resources, and it sure doesn't count the cost of the damage to the Gulf Coast economy, or the cost of restoration of damaged wetlands. We're talking at least $10s of billions, and maybe eventually $100s of billions. Weigh that against the cost of drilling a relief well, which BP claims will run about $100 million. The cost of such a well in the Arctic, where the sea is much shallower, would likely be a good deal less.
An oil spill under the ice would be impossible to stop or clean up.
Such is the calculus of corruption. BP has paid $1.8 billion for drilling rights in Canada's sector of the Beaufort Sea, about 150 miles north of the Northwest Territories coastline, an area which global warming has freed of ice in summer months. and it wants to drill there as cheaply as possible. The problem is that a blowout like the one that struck the Deepwater Horizon, if it occurred near the middle or end of summer, would mean it would be impossible for the oil company to drill a relief well until the following summer, because the return of ice floes would make drilling impossible all winter. That would mean an undersea wild well would be left to spew its contents out under the ice for perhaps eight or nine months, where its ecological havoc would be incalculable.
BP and other oil companies like Exxon/Mobil and Shell, which also have leases in Arctic Waters off Canada and the US, are actually trying to claim that the environmental risks of a spill in Arctic waters are less than in places like the Gulf of Mexico or the Eastern Seaboard, because the ice would "contain" any leaking oil, allowing it to be cleared away. The argument is laughable.
This is not like pouring a can of 10W-40 oil into an ice-fishing hole on a solidly frozen pond, where you could scoop it out again without its going anywhere. Unlike the surface of a frozen pond, Arctic sea ice is in constant motion, cracking and drifting in response to winds, tides and currents. Moreover, the blowout in the Gulf has taught us that much of the oil leaked into the sea doesn't even rise to the surface at all. It is cracked and emulsified by contact with the cold waters and stays submerged in the lower currents, wreaking its damage far from wellhead and recovery efforts.
Finally, as difficult a time as BP has had rounding up the necessary containment equipment and personnel in the current blowout 50 miles from the oil industry mecca of Texas and Louisiana, the same task would be far harder to accomplish in the remote reaches of the Beaufort, far above the Arctic Circle, where there aren't any roads, much less rail lines or airports.
In fact, it was the remoteness of the Arctic staging area, and the lack of infrastructure, that has been the oil industry's main argument against a mandatory simultaneous relief well drilling requirement for offshore Arctic drilling. The industry claims it would be "too difficult" to drill two wells simultaneously, as this would require bring in and supplying double the personnel, and two separate drilling rigs.
In a hearing in Canada's Parliament last week, Ann Drinkwater, president of BP Canada, told stunned and incredulous members of Parliament that she had never compared US and Canadian drilling regulations. In fact, whether by design or appalling ignorance, she had precious little in the way of information to offer them about anything to do with drilling rules, effects of spills, or containment strategems. All she wanted was relief from "expensive" regulation, so BP could go about its business of putting yet another region of the earth and its seas at risk in the pursuit of profits.
Asked if BP knew how it would clean up oil spilling out under the winter ice in a blowout, Drinkwater told the parliamentary hearing, "I'm not an expert in oil-spill techniques in an Arctic environment, so I would have to defer to other experts on that."
"You'd think coming to a hearing like this that British Petroleum would have as many answers as possible to assure the Canadian public. We got nothing today from them," groused Nathan Cullen of the left-leaning New Democrats, after hearing from the ironically named Drinkwater.
The fundamental problem in the US is that politicians purchased by campaign contributions are unwilling to look at the real risks of offshore drilling, whether on the two coasts or up in the Arctic region. With luck, maybe at least the Canadian government will conclude that such drilling in their northern seas makes no economic or environmental sense. In both countries, the amount of oil provided from offshore drilling would, over the next decade, be less than could be saved by simply making automobile mileage standards stricter.
All this is even more true when the drilling in question is in the fragile ecological environs of the Arctic Ocean.
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10) Following BP's Lead
By BOB HERBERT
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25herbert.html
Old Shell Beach, La.
I asked the sheriff of St. Bernard Parish, Jack Stephens, if he was at all optimistic about BP stopping the gusher of oil that is fouling the Gulf of Mexico in time to prevent a long-term environmental catastrophe in the southern Louisiana wetlands.
The sun was high in the sky, and the day was hot. The sheriff was in a small boat, patrolling the waterways that wend their way through the delicate marshes. He thought for a long moment. Oil was already seeping into the marshes, getting into the soil and plant life and coating some of the wildlife.
"I'll tell you the truth," said Mr. Stephens. "It may already be too late."
Traveling along the Gulf Coast, past idled boats with names like Big Shrimp and Blessed Assurance, past dead trees and hurricane fortifications and other signs of the area's perpetual vulnerability, you can't help but wonder how a company like BP, with its awful record of incompetence and irresponsibility, was ever allowed to drill for oil a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
It's not as if we didn't know that BP was a menace. On March 23, 2005, a series of explosions and fires at the BP Texas City refinery killed 15 people and injured 180 others in what was described by investigators as "one of the worst industrial disasters in recent U.S. history." John Bresland, the chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, reminded us in March, on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, that an intensive investigation by the board had "found organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation."
The Texas City conflagration was just part of BP's execrable pattern. On Oct. 25, 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice issued the following announcement:
"British Petroleum and several of its subsidiaries have agreed to pay approximately $373 million in fines and restitution for environmental violations stemming from a fatal explosion at a Texas refinery in March 2005, leaks of crude oil from pipelines in Alaska, and fraud for conspiring to corner the market and manipulate the price of propane carried through Texas pipelines."
Nice outfit, this BP. Anyone who thought this London-based wrecking crew gave a rat's whisker about harming the Gulf of Mexico or threatening the environment of the Louisiana wetlands - or the livelihoods of families living here - has been inhaling way too much of BP's toxic fumes.
Yet there was our government not only giving BP's reprobates the go-ahead to drill for oil a mile deep in the gulf but also handing them a waiver, allowing them to avoid a detailed analysis of the effect of their operations on the surrounding environment. Giving an environmental waiver to a company as contemptuous of the environment as BP shows just whose side the government is on in the face-off between predatory giant corporations and the interests of ordinary American citizens.
BP got off much too easy with the fines it agreed to in 2007. And for some odd reason, it's being treated much too deferentially now. This crisis has gone on for more than a month, and neither BP nor the Obama administration seems to know what to do.
No one has a handle on how much oil is gushing out of control into the gulf. No one understands the environmental impact of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants that BP is injecting into the gulf. No one has any idea how far this awful stain on the environment will spread.
President Obama should have taken charge of the response to the oil spill - which he called a "potentially unprecedented" environmental calamity - from jump street. He should have called in the very best minds and operatives from the corporate and scientific worlds and imposed an emergency plan of action - to be carried out by BP and all others who might be required. Instead, after all this time, after more than a month of BP's demonstrated incompetence, the administration continues to dither.
Incredibly, until The Times blew the whistle in an article on Monday, environmental waivers were still being offered for oil drilling in the gulf. What will it take for sanity to prevail? How many people have to die or face ruin, and how much of nature has to be despoiled before we rein in the cowboys of these runaway corporations?
Steadily increasing numbers of anxiety-ridden coastal residents are watching not just their livelihoods but an entire way of life slip away. Even as BP's lawyers are consumed with the task of limiting the company's liability, the administration continues to insist it has little choice but to follow the company's lead in fighting the spill. That is dangerous nonsense.
President Obama has an obligation to make it unmistakably clear that BP's interests are not the same as America's interests. He needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who are taking the brunt of this latest corporate outrage. The oil has now stained nearly 70 miles of the Louisiana Coast. No one can say what terrible toll the gusher is taking in the depths of the gulf. And spreading right along with the oil is a pervasive and dismaying sense of helplessness from our leaders in Washington.
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11) U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast
By MARK MAZZETTI
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/25military.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.
The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.
While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could "penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy" Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to "prepare the environment" for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.
In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.
General Petraeus's order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.
But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen - which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation - or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.
The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.
Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.
The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country's nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.
"The Defense Department can't be caught flat-footed," said one Pentagon official with knowledge of General Petraeus's order.
The directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed Sept. 30, may also have helped lay a foundation for the surge of American military activity in Yemen that began three months later.
Special Operations troops began working with Yemen's military to try to dismantle Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden's terror network based in Yemen. The Pentagon has also carried out missile strikes from Navy ships into suspected militant hideouts and plans to spend more than $155 million equipping Yemeni troops with armored vehicles, helicopters and small arms.
Officials said that many top commanders, General Petraeus among them, have advocated an expansive interpretation of the military's role around the world, arguing that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.
The order, which an official said was drafted in close coordination with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command, calls for clandestine activities that "cannot or will not be accomplished" by conventional military operations or "interagency activities," a reference to American spy agencies.
While the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have often been at odds over expansion of clandestine military activity, most recently over intelligence gathering by Pentagon contractors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there does not appear to have been a significant dispute over the September order.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to confirm the existence of General Petraeus's order, but said that the spy agency and the Pentagon had a "close relationship" and generally coordinate operations in the field.
"There's more than enough work to go around," said the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. "The real key is coordination. That typically works well, and if problems arise, they get settled."
During the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed clandestine military operations, arguing that Special Operations troops could be as effective as traditional spies, if not more so.
Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president's approval or regular reports to Congress, although Pentagon officials have said that any significant ventures are cleared through the National Security Council. Special Operations troops have already been sent into a number of countries to carry out reconnaissance missions, including operations to gather intelligence about airstrips and bridges.
Some of Mr. Rumsfeld's initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.
A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.
In contrast, General Petraeus's September order is focused on intelligence gathering - by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others - to identify militants and provide "persistent situational awareness," while forging ties to local indigenous groups.
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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12) Oil Hits Home, Spreading Arc of Frustration
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25spill.html?hp
This article is by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder.
PORT FOURCHON, La. - For weeks, it was a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there.
Not anymore. In the last week, the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico has revealed itself to an angry and desperate public, smearing tourist beaches, washing onto the shorelines of sleepy coastal communities and oozing into marshy bays that fishermen have worked for generations. It has even announced its arrival on the Louisiana coast with a fittingly ugly symbol: brown pelicans, the state bird, dyed with crude.
More than a month has passed since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up, spewing immeasurable quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and frustrating all efforts to contain it. The billowing plume of undersea oil and water has thwarted the industry's well-control efforts and driven government officials to impotent rage.
It has demonstrated the enduring laxity of federal regulation of offshore operations and has shown the government to be almost wholly at the mercy of BP, the company leasing the rig, to provide the technology, personnel and equipment to stop the bleeding well.
Senators and administration officials visiting the southern Louisiana town of Galliano lashed out again at BP on Monday, saying they were "beyond patience" with the company. The day before, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who early in the crisis vowed to "keep the boot on the neck" of BP, threatened to push the company out of the way.
But on Monday, Mr. Salazar backed off, conceding to the reality that BP and the oil companies have access to the best technology to attack the well, a mile below the surface, even though that technology has proved so far to have fallen short of its one purpose. The government's role, he acknowledged, is largely supervisory and the primary responsibility for the spill, for legal and practical reasons, remains with the company.
"The administration has done everything we can possibly do to make sure that we push BP to stop the spill and to contain the impact," Mr. Salazar said. "We have also been very clear that there are areas where BP and the private sector are the ones who must continue to lead the efforts with government oversight, such as the deployment of private sector technology 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface to kill the well."
Oil industry experts said they did not take seriously the sporadic threats by the administration that the federal government might have to wrest management of the effort to plug the well from BP. The experts said that the Interior and Energy Departments do not have engineers with more experience in deepwater drilling than those who work for BP and the array of companies that have been brought into the effort to stem the leak.
"It's worse than politics," said Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, which is partly financed by the oil industry. "They have had the authority from Day 1. If they could have handled this situation better, they would have already."
As the verbal warfare between officials and company executives escalated, the slick from the April 20 well blowout continued to spread in billowing rust-colored splotches in the gulf, raising urgent questions about what lay beneath.
On land, shrimpers were stuffing their catch into coolers in hopes of having some in store if the season ends altogether. Hotel owners all along the gulf were trying to persuade tourists to keep their vacation plans. But as they looked to BP and the authorities for help, or at least direction, there has only been frustration.
"I never thought it would come to this," said Ryan Lambert, a charter boat operator in Buras, La., who spoke to the federal delegation on Monday. "My guys look to me and say 'What do I do, boss?' And I don't have an answer."
Several things have become clear over the past month. Neither BP nor the government was prepared for an oil release of this size or at this depth. The federal Minerals Management Service, charged with overseeing offshore oil development, has for too long served as a handmaiden of industry. Laws governing deepwater drilling have fallen far behind the technology and the attendant risks. And no one can estimate the extent of the economic and environmental damage, or how long it will last.
"Just under 70 miles of our coast have been hit by oil," said Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican, who criticized the disjointed response effort that he said has allowed oil to come ashore unnecessarily. "Let's make no mistake that what is at threat here is our way of life."
The crude has been flowing at a rate still unknown nearly a mile below the surface, escaping in quantities far greater than the small amount of oil that has been burned off, collected with booms or sucked from the broken drill pipe lying on the ocean floor.
Using conservative government and BP estimates, more than seven million gallons of oil have been released from the crippled well, nearing the size of the spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Independent estimates of the gulf spill place it many times higher than the official figure, rendering the statistics about how much oil has been collected thus far nearly useless in gauging the effectiveness of the response.
For weeks BP tried without success to reactivate the seal-off valves on the dead blowout preventer, the tower of pipes designed to shut the well. Then it lowered a 40-foot steel containment chamber in an effort to funnel escaping oil to a ship on the surface, but that failed when an icy slush of gas and water stopped up the device.
In recent days, BP attached a mile-long tube into the leaking well designed to divert oil to a drill ship before it leaked into the gulf. But the company said the rate it has been able to capture has varied from day to day, between 1,360 and 3,000 barrels, far below even the most conservative estimates of how much oil was leaking.
The recriminations over the performance of BP and the Obama administration could subside if the latest effort to kill the well, now scheduled for Wednesday morning, succeeds.
In a maneuver called a "top kill," BP is planning to pump heavy drilling fluids twice the density of water through two narrow lines into the blowout preventer to essentially plug the runaway well.
"The top kill operation is not a guarantee of success," warned Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, who added that it had never been tried before in deep water under high pressures.
"If the government felt there were other things to do it is clearly within the power of the government to do that," Mr. Suttles said. "Everyone is very, very frustrated."
Mr. Suttles said that if the top kill did work, the leak could be stopped as early as Wednesday night. Then engineers could either fill the well with cement or replace the failed blowout preventer.
Shortly after officials lambasted his company in Galliano, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, invited reporters to follow as he walked along the beach at Port Fourchon, which was crowded with workers in yellow Hazmat suits picking up shovelfuls of chocolate-colored crude off the sand.
Asked about the top kill, Mr. Hayward acknowledged that it was far from a sure fix.
"We rate the probability of success between 60 percent and 70 percent," he said. "Beyond that, there is a third and fourth and fifth option around both containment and elimination."
Campbell Robertson reported from Louisiana, Clifford Krauss from Houston and John M. Broder from Washington.
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13) In Standoff With Environmental Officials, BP Stays With an Oil Spill Dispersant
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
May 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25disperse.html?ref=us
In a tense standoff, BP continued to spray a product called Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday to break up a vast oil spill despite a demand by federal regulators that it switch to something less toxic.
The Environmental Protection Agency had set a Sunday night deadline for BP to stop using two dispersants from the Corexit line of products. The oil company has defended its use of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the agency used to estimate its toxicity.
At a news conference Monday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that she was "dissatisfied with BP's response" and had ordered the oil giant to take "immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants."
Ms. Jackson called BP's safety data on dispersants insufficient and said government scientists would conduct their own tests to decide which dispersant was best to use. She said the amount of chemicals applied to control the oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon well - more than 700,000 gallons so far on the gulf's surface and a mile underwater at the leaking well head - was "approaching a world record."
Ms. Jackson said that in theory, BP's deployment of dispersant directly onto the l well head, a novel use of the chemicals, would reduce the amount of oil on the surface and the need for application of dispersant there. She said the company could reduce its use by 50 percent to 75 percent, regardless of which dispersant was used.
Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said that while the government had approved the use of dispersant beforehand, "no one anticipated that it would ever be used at this scale and this scope."
Admiral Landry said the preferred method of responding to oil on the ocean was to burn it or to soak it up with devices like absorbent booms. Dispersant applications should be a second line of defense, for when the weather is too severe to rely on other techniques, she said.
It was not clear how the environmental agency would enforce the demand that BP reduce its use of the dispersant.
"We are continuing to use Corexit while we're still working with E.P.A. on alternatives," Mark Salt, a spokesman for the oil company, said by telephone from Texas on Monday morning. Asked Monday evening about the request that the company at least reduce its use of the Corexit dispersant, he said he had not heard about the proposal and added, "Again, We're still working closely with EPA."
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a leading critic of BP since the spill, and chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, welcomed the E.P.A.'s latest actions. "We know almost nothing about the potential harm from the long-term use of any of these chemicals on the marine environment in the Gulf of Mexico," he said, "and even less about their potential to enter the food chain and ultimately harm humans."
Last Wednesday evening the E.P.A. ordered BP to propose one or more alternative dispersants to regulators within 24 hours. Once it received a response, it said, the company would have 72 hours to stop using Corexit and make a switch.
But it also said that if BP were "unable to identify available alternative dispersant products," it could provide a detailed description of the dispersants it had investigated and the reasons it did not believe they met the required standards.
On Thursday, BP invoked the second option. In a letter, it ticked off some of the alternative dispersants it considered and outlined why it believed each was problematic, often because of toxicity issues.
In the 12-page letter and in subsequent meetings with federal officials, BP contended that some of the dispersants that met the agency's criteria for being "less toxic" were in some ways more harmful than Corexit. The company said they contained molecules that could interfere with endocrine function and so affect sexual reproduction.
While the Corexit products, made by the Nalco company of Naperville, Ill., are the time-tested old faithfuls of oil spill treatment, they were developed in the 1980s and '90s, and critics say that less toxic and more effective products are now available.
Dispersants are detergents and at best are mildly toxic, so applying them requires a careful calculation about whether the dispersant-oil mixture will cause more or fewer problems than untreated crude oil would. Their effectiveness and the wisdom of their continued use can be assessed only by careful, ongoing measurements, experts say.
The purpose of the chemicals is to break up the oil into tiny droplets that sink and can be more readily dispersed by ocean currents, to diminish the oil's effect on sea life and shore habitats.
Complicating the standoff between the company and regulators, there are many methods for estimating the toxicity of chemical oil dispersants and no single standard prevails.
The Corexit dispersants were removed from a list of approved dispersants in Britain a decade ago because one type of test used in that country found them to be unduly dangerous to animals like limpets near rocky shores. But they are still approved for use in the United States and Canada, which rely on different types of testing.
Although the E.P.A. placed BP's letter on its Web site, many specifics about particular products are redacted because the information is regarded as a trade secret.
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14) Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border
[This is an outrage--especially when the BP/US Government oil catastrophe is worsening. The National Guard should be sent to help clean up the mess. In fact, all the troops should be brought home from around the world to help with the cleanup. It's going to take a massive army of clean-up workers to get the job done...bw]
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26border.html?ref=world
LOS ANGELES - President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek increased spending on law enforcement there to combat drug smuggling after demands from Republican and Democratic lawmakers that border security be tightened.
The decision was disclosed by a Democratic lawmaker and confirmed by administration officials after Mr. Obama met on Tuesday with Republican senators, several of whom have demanded that troops be placed at the border. The lawmakers learned of the plan after the meeting.
But the move also reflected political pressure in the president's own party with midterm election campaigns under way and with what is expected to be a tumultuous debate on overhauling immigration law coming up on Capitol Hill.
The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into something of a corner. As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other efforts by Mr. Obama had made the border "as secure now as it has ever been."
The troops will be stationed in the four border states for a year, White House officials said. It is not certain when they will arrive, the officials said.
The troops will join a few hundred members of the Guard already assigned there to help the police hunt for drug smugglers. The additional troops will provide support to law enforcement officers by helping observe and monitor traffic between official border crossings. They will also help analyze trafficking patterns in the hope of intercepting illegal drug shipments.
Initial word of the deployment came not in a formal announcement from the White House - indeed, it was left to administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to fill in some details - but from a Democratic member of the House from southern Arizona who is running in what is expected to be a competitive race for re-election.
"The White House is doing the right thing," the congresswoman, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said in a statement announcing the decision. "Arizonans know that more boots on the ground means a safer and more secure border. Washington heard our message."
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican whose opponent in a coming primary has relentlessly criticized him on immigration, said Tuesday that he welcomed Mr. Obama's move but that it was "simply not enough."
Mr. McCain called for the introduction of 6,000 National Guard troops to police the Southwestern border, with 3,000 for Arizona alone. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, two Obama administration officials said that the proposal infringed on his role as commander in chief and overlooked gains in border security.
Calls for sending the Guard to the border grew after the shooting death of an Arizona rancher in March that the police suspect was carried out by someone involved in smuggling. Advocates of the controversial Arizona state law giving the police a greater role in immigration enforcement played up what they described as a failure to secure the border as a reason to pass the law.
Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican who is running for a full term, has requested Guard troops at the border but decided not to use her authority to do it herself, citing the state's tattered finances. The governors of New Mexico and Texas also pleaded for troops.
From 2006 to 2008, President George W. Bush made a larger deployment of Guard troops under a program called Operation Jump Start. At its peak, 6,000 Guard troops at the border helped build roads and fences in addition to backing up law enforcement officers.
Those Guard troops contributed to the arrest of more than 162,000 illegal immigrants, the rescue of 100 people stranded in the desert and the seizure of $69,000 in cash and 305,000 pounds of illicit drugs.
The soldiers will not directly make arrests of border crossers and smugglers, something they are not trained to do.
Rick Nelson, a senior fellow who studies domestic security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the additional spending could improve security over the long term but that the National Guard deployment was not sufficient for "an overwhelming change that will change the dynamics on the border."
"This is a symbolic gesture," he said. "At the end of the day, the face of border security is still going to be Customs and Border Protection, the law enforcement community. It's not going to be the National Guard."
Democrats and Republicans who agreed with the move rushed to take credit for it, including Ms. Brewer, who said her signing of the new Arizona law had pushed the administration.
"I am pleased that President Obama has now, apparently, agreed that our nation must secure the border to address rampant border violence and illegal immigration without other preconditions, such as passage of 'comprehensive immigration reform,' " she said.
Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general and a Democrat running for governor, released a statement with the headline "Goddard Secures Administration Commitment for $500 million for National Guard, Border Security." In an interview, Mr. Goddard said, "I think it is a good indication that the administration is taking us seriously."
But some Democrats were skeptical.
Representative Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, a Democrat facing re-election in a Republican-leaning district, said it was "going to take much more to secure the border." He proposed a minimum of 3,000 troops.
Some Republicans said the deployment of the troops should not overshadow the need for a comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem.
"Arizona and other border states are grateful for the additional resources at the border," said Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona. "But I hope that this is merely the first step in a process that culminates in Congress passing comprehensive immigration reform."
Obama administration officials had resisted sending Guard troops to the border but had never ruled it out. They pointed to a variety of improvements at the border, including a record seizure of drug-related cash and guns, falling or flat rates of violent crime in border towns, and record lows in the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. Analysts give the dismal economy much of the credit for that.
In his meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said improving border security alone would not reduce illegal immigration and reiterated that a reworking of the immigration system could not be achieved without more Republican support.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.
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15) Bill Puts Scrutiny on Detainees' Lawyers
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - A provision tucked into a defense bill before Congress would direct the Pentagon's inspector general to investigate any suspected misconduct by lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees, opening a new chapter in a recurrent political controversy over legal ethics and the representation of terrorism suspects.
The measure is part of a major defense bill that the full House of Representatives is expected to begin debating this week. It was added late last week, shortly before the House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved the legislation.
The provision would require the Pentagon inspector general to investigate instances in which there was "reasonable suspicion" that lawyers for detainees violated a Pentagon policy, generated "any material risk" to a member of the armed forces, violated a law under the inspector general's exclusive jurisdiction, or otherwise "interfered with the operations" of the military prison at Guantánamo.
The inspector general would be required to report back to Congress within 90 days after the provision became law about any steps the Pentagon had taken in response to such conduct by either civilian or military lawyers.
Lawyers for Guantánamo detainees have reacted with outrage to the proposal, saying it would have a chilling effect on their efforts to help detainees get habeas corpus hearings or to defend them in military commission trials. They are organizing to try to persuade Congress to strip the language before enacting the final bill, which must also still pass the Senate.
"No lawyers could possibly predict what conduct might fall within the law," said David Remes, who represents several detainees. "It would therefore be impossible for Guantánamo lawyers to represent their clients effectively and zealously."
In introducing the proposal last week, Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida, focused on the John Adams Project, a joint enterprise of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. It provides research and legal assistance to the uniformed lawyers defending detainees who are facing prosecution before a military commission.
Mr. Miller characterized the John Adams Project as a "treacherous enterprise," referring to accusations that its researchers took pictures of interrogators and gave them to military defense lawyers, who in turn showed them to detainees.
The lawyers have defended the legality and propriety of their efforts. They contend that the detainees were illegally tortured in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency, and they want to raise that issue at trial. To do so, they need to identify potential witnesses to the interrogation sessions.
But Mr. Miller said the effort was "disloyal" and illegal. He said the "intelligence community deserves a complete and honest investigation" into whether laws or policies were violated. (The Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned three military lawyers about the photographs in August 2009, but it is not clear whether the investigation remains open.)
Democrats on the committee agreed to Mr. Miller's proposal after several modifications. One change added the requirement of "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing before a lawyer would be investigated by the inspector general. Another enabled Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to halt such an inquiry if it would interfere with a related criminal investigation.
Detainee lawyers argue that even with such modifications, Mr. Miller's amendment is broad enough to give pause to all lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees - including the far larger numbers who have sought judicial hearings for prisoners who contend that they are not terrorists and are being held by mistake.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Guantánamo detainees had a right to such habeas corpus hearings. To date, judges have ordered 35 such detainees freed after reviewing the evidence against them, while upholding the continued detention of 14, Mr. Remes said.
The legislation is the latest attack on lawyers representing detainees. Although such lawyers have tended to espouse civil libertarian views, some conservative critics have imputed to them a lack of patriotism and sympathy for the cause of Islamist terrorism.
Such attacks have also prompted a strong reaction, including by other conservatives who have defended the tradition in the American legal system of lawyers representing unpopular clients.
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16) BP's Ties to Agency Are Long and Complex
Ms. Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman, said that the accusation that the agency reacted slowly to the spill was unfair, and that 150 people at national laboratories had been working on it. [150 people? That's all they have working on it? This is criminal!...bw]
By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26energy.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Three years ago, the national laboratory then headed by Steven Chu received the bulk of a $500 million grant from the British oil giant BP to develop alternative energy sources through a new Energy Biosciences Institute.
Dr. Chu received the grant from BP's chief scientist at the time, Steven E. Koonin, a fellow theoretical physicist whom Dr. Chu jocularly described as "my twin brother." Dr. Koonin had selected the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, over other universities in the United States and Britain in part because of Dr. Chu's pioneering work in alternative fuels.
Today, Dr. Chu is President Obama's energy secretary, and he spent Tuesday in Houston working with BP officials to try to find a way to stop the unabated flow of oil from a ruptured well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.
Dr. Koonin, who followed Dr. Chu to the Energy Department and now serves as under secretary of energy for science, is recused from all matters relating to the disaster because of his past ties to BP, said Stephanie Mueller, an Energy Department spokeswoman.
Dr. Chu, she said, "has never had a financial interest in BP."
Ms. Mueller added, "No one in their right mind would suggest that Dr. Chu is beholden to oil companies, especially since he's spent the past decade working to cut America's dependence on oil and move us toward a clean-energy economy."
The relationships among Dr. Chu, Dr. Koonin and BP illustrate the complexity of the ties between the company and the government now playing out along the Gulf Coast as they struggle to cope with one of the nation's worst environmental disasters. Just as the Pentagon and military contractors develop symbiotic business, technical and political interdependencies, the government in this case needs BP's offshore drilling technology and well-control equipment; the company needs the government's logistical and scientific expertise, including that of Dr. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.
Some critics say the Obama administration has relied too heavily on BP's assessment of the blowout and its solutions for addressing it. But government officials say that BP is legally responsible for plugging the well and cleaning up the oil. And they acknowledge that government lacks the know-how to deal with the problem on its own.
While there is no evidence that Dr. Chu or Dr. Koonin have represented BP's viewpoints in internal deliberations or sought to influence administration policy in a way that would benefit BP, the mere fact of their shared history brought expressions of concern from environmentalists and other critics of the White House's response to the spill.
"The fact that Steven Chu selected Steve Koonin, BP's chief scientist, to be his under secretary could predispose them to think that they could maybe negotiate with BP, could be more like partners regarding the oil cleanup," said Jennifer Washburn, the author of a coming report by the Center for American Progress called "Big Oil Goes to College," which examines the BP-Berkeley venture. "It makes it more likely for them to see BP as a legitimate partner in handling the cleanup operation.
"Unfortunately," Ms. Washburn added, "what people are questioning, with good reason, is whether the government has been too soft on BP."
Added John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog: "From what I've seen, the Energy Department's response has been less than rapid to this oil spill. This whole thing just underscores that corporate interests have created, over time, these relationships that give them unfair access to policy makers."
Ms. Mueller, the Energy Department spokeswoman, said that the accusation that the agency reacted slowly to the spill was unfair, and that 150 people at national laboratories had been working on it. [150 people? That's all they have working on it? This is criminal...bw]
Public anger is mounting at both BP, which says it will try again on Wednesday to plug the spill using a method called top kill, and at Mr. Obama, who announced a major expansion of offshore oil drilling in March before first tending to what Mr. Obama himself described two weeks ago as an often cozy relationship between government regulators and oil companies.
On Monday, BP announced another $500 million grant, this one to study the impact of the spill on the marine and coastal environment, with the first award to go to Louisiana State University. An independent panel will decide which institutions will receive the rest of the money, the company said in a news release.
A White House official said Tuesday that the Energy Department "doesn't have jurisdiction over the oil spill." Dr. Chu - who, according to an Energy Department news release was in Houston on Tuesday "to continue engagement on strategies to stop the oil spill" - is "just volunteering because he's one of the most brilliant scientists around," the official said. Dr. Chu canceled a trip to China in order to deal with the crisis, the Energy Department said.
On May 12, Mr. Obama sent Dr. Chu to BP's command center in Houston to meet with top engineers and scientists. After meeting with BP, Dr. Chu told reporters that he believed that "things are looking up," and that he felt "more comfortable than I was a week ago" with progress toward containment. Along with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department has jurisdiction over the spill, Dr. Chu appeared beside Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden the next day as Mr. Obama angrily assailed the three companies involved in the oil spill.
No one has accused Dr. Chu or Dr. Koonin of direct conflict of interest or questioned their scientific credentials. Before taking over the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, which is supported by the Department of Energy, in 2004, Dr. Chu had been chairman of the physics department at Stanford University and won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with laser-cooled atoms.
Dr. Koonin was a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology for nearly three decades and served from 1995 to 2004 as Caltech's provost. He was hired by BP in 2004 as its chief scientist, responsible for long-range planning for the company's energy portfolio, as the company likes to say, beyond petroleum. In his financial disclosure form submitted for his government post, he said that he had tens of thousands of unvested BP shares and options and that he was working out a fair value for them with the company.
The BP-Berkeley project led to protests on the Berkeley campus when it was unveiled in 2007, as student groups and some professors expressed fears that the alliance could harm the university's reputation for academic integrity. Dr. Chu's "name recognition and his backing" of the project helped to ease some of those fears, said Ms. Washburn, an expert in university-industry relations and a fellow at New York University.
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17) More Scrutiny for Charter Schools in Debate Over Expansion
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and JENNIFER MEDINA
May 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/education/26charters.html?ref=education
ALBANY - During its first years of operation, the Niagara Charter School in Niagara Falls spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets, restaurant meals and alcohol, and more than $100,000 on no-bid consulting contracts. Yet the school's teachers resorted to organizing a fund-raiser to buy playground equipment.
When the Roosevelt Children's Academy, a charter school on Long Island, fired its management company after paying it more than $1 million a year, it hired two of the school's board members as new managers - and paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And in the Bronx, the Family Life Charter School pays $400,000 annually to rent classroom space from the Latino Pastoral Action Center, a "Christ-centered holistic ministry" led by the Rev. Raymond Rivera. Mr. Rivera also happens to be the school's founder.
Charter school advocates, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, are vigorously lobbying for a bill that would more than double the number of charters in New York State and send at least $2 billion in taxpayer money a year into the charter system.
Supporters want the Legislature to pass the bill before the June 1 deadline by which states must apply to win a share in Race to the Top federal education grants that place a premium on an expansion of charter schools. New York's potential share is $700 million.
Charter school advocates argue that the schools' freedom from traditional rules enables them to make major improvements. But that same freedom can present problems: a review of public documents shows that many charter schools have spent money in questionable ways and have experienced significant conflicts of interest.
The documents, including state Education Department reports, federal tax filings and audits of charter schools prepared by outside firms, were obtained by the state teachers union, and provided to The New York Times, which corroborated the data. Teachers unions have traditionally been sharply critical of charter schools, whose teachers usually are not unionized.
The problems underscore what many critics say is a weak system in New York for policing spending by charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately run.
Charter schools, for example, are not specifically prohibited by state law from hiring their own board members or employees as consultants. While the state comptroller's office - the state government's fiscal watchdog - can audit public schools, it is prohibited by a court ruling from examining charter schools.
Before that court ruling was issued last year, the comptroller's office completed audits of 18 charter schools around the state. Fourteen had significant financial irregularities, including one school that spent $67,951 on staff trips to the Caribbean, according to officials.
"We don't have enough oversight, and that is clear," said State Senator Bill Perkins, a Harlem Democrat and charter critic. "I'm not suggesting that this is rampant, but it undermines the integrity of the public's faith in charters."
Several New York agencies can issue charters: the State Board of Regents, the State University of New York and, in New York City, the city's Education Department. In other cities, local school boards also have the ability to allow charter schools to open.
The issue of accountability has emerged as a major sticking point in negotiations over the bill, which would raise the cap on charters to 460 from 200. The bill has been passed by the Senate but remains stalled in the Assembly.
Even as the Obama administration promotes charter schools as integral to its education agenda, the inspector general in the federal Education Department has raised concern about growing accusations of financial fraud at schools around the country.
In New York, the Merrick Academy in Queens, which was founded by State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors over the possible misuse of school money to benefit Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, who is no longer affiliated with the school, has denied wrongdoing.
State officials acknowledge the need for better oversight, and the State Education Department has reorganized the office that reviews charter schools. The goal, said Sally Bachofer, who now heads the office that oversees charters, is to hold "schools to high academic and operational standards."
Jonas Chartock, the executive director of the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, said that the institute's focus was academic performance but that officials routinely checked for financial malfeasance.
In the past decade, the institute has refused to renew the charters of eight schools for poor academic performance, poor financial controls or both. The Regents have once refused to renew a charter.
In New York City, the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, has ordered the closing of East New York Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn at the end of this academic year following revelations that the school's founder and principal had named herself superintendent and granted herself a $60,000 raise.
But charter schools have at times resisted tougher monitoring. In 2007, a group of charter schools and advocates sued the comptroller's office, challenging its right to audit the finances and academic performance of such schools. Critics said the comptroller's office had no expertise to assess academics.
Last year, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that charter schools were in effect independent contractors and beyond the comptroller's reach.
Michael Duffy, who heads the charter school office for the city, said every school was monitored by the State Education Department and must select an auditor to scrutinize its record annually, then submit the findings to education officials.
"I'd leave the questions of whether it's enough up to others," Mr. Duffy said, "but we have a fairly robust set of measures that allow the public a window on how these schools are operating."
In some cases, however, officials in charge of overseeing charters have reauthorized schools even after finding significant evidence of financial mismanagement. The problems at the Niagara Charter School, for example, were uncovered by investigators from the State Education Department and detailed in a 2008 report to senior department officials.
Among other findings, the school could not explain to investigators' satisfaction how the board had determined the salary of its chief executive at the time, Gary Stillman, who also appeared to be simultaneously employed by another charter school in the area, Enterprise Charter School, which shares some board members with Niagara.
The report concluded that Niagara suffered from "the pervasive appearance of financial mismanagement and less than ethical behavior on the part of the Board of Trustees and school administration."
Yet last year, John B. King Jr., the state's senior deputy education commissioner, recommended to the State Board of Regents that Niagara's charter be renewed.
In a statement, Dr. King defended his decision and said that before the renewal was granted, the department took steps to ensure that Niagara's problems would be fixed.
"It's important to note that student achievement is also improving at Niagara Charter, a school with a large percentage of high-need students," Dr. King said.
The president of Niagara's board, James Muffoletto, said that Mr. Stillman was no longer working at the school and that the school had disputed some of the findings of state education officials.
Teachers unions say they want charter schools to face the same financial scrutiny as traditional public schools.
"There's clearly a double standard in the way the law is written," said Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, New York State United Teachers. "It clearly points to a lack of transparency."
In some cases, union officials have found, charters entered into complex and eyebrow-raising transactions to secure space, which most charters, unlike traditional schools, must obtain on their own.
The Oracle Charter School in Buffalo, for example, will make more than $5 million in payments to a real estate partnership called KBSD to eventually own a building that sold for $875,000. The annual interest rate, according to loan documents, is 20 percent. Two years after the transaction was arranged, a KBSD partner joined Oracle's board.
A lawyer for the school, Peter Morrow, said Oracle had turned to KBSD because no local bank would extend to the school a line of credit. The deal had been structured to give KBSD a reasonable rate of return, he said, while saving the school more than $1 million in property taxes it would otherwise owe.
KBSD, Mr. Morrow said, is "taking a greater risk than the bank would take."
In the case of the Family Life Charter School in the Bronx, Mr. Rivera said the SUNY Charter Schools Institute had approved the plan for the school to rent the space from his ministry because the rent was below market value.
"They assured us there was nothing illegal about it," he said. "They're using most of the space in the building now. There's nothing wrong with that."
Nicholas Confessore reported from Albany, and Jennifer Medina from New York.
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18) After argument, BP official made fatal decision on drilling
Erika Bolstad, Joseph Goodman and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Wed, May. 26, 2010
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/26/94859/after-long-argument-bp-official.html
last updated: May 26, 2010 07:29:33 PM
WASHINGTON - Company executives and top drill hands on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig argued for hours about how to proceed before a BP official made the decision to remove heavy drilling fluid from the well and replace it with lighter weight seawater that was unable to prevent gas from surging to the surface and exploding.
One employee was so mad, the rig's chief mechanic Doug Brown testified, that he warned they'd be relying on the rig's blowout preventer if they proceeded the way BP wanted.
"He pretty much grumbled, 'Well, I guess that's what we have those pinchers for,' " Brown said of Jimmy Harrell, the top Transocean official on the rig. "Pinchers" was likely a reference to the shear rams in the blowout preventers, the final means of stopping an explosion.
Brown said in sworn testimony on Wednesday that the BP official stood up during the meeting and said, "This is how it's going to be."
It was the kind of power struggle that's common on all offshore rigs, but the fight on the Deepwater Horizon had deadly consequences, employees and experts testified Wednesday at a government inquiry in Louisiana.
Tuesday night, a House of Representatives committee released a memo outlining some of those decisions, saying that the crew of the Deepwater Horizon had a number of warning signs extending over five hours that conditions were worsening deep underwater before the oil rig exploded in the Gulf on April 20.
Their memo, based on a briefing by BP's own investigators, provided fresh information about the failures on the ill-fated rig. However, the oil company's own inquiry continues to skirt a central question that may emerge in the Louisiana hearings being conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service: Why were so many warnings ignored and why did BP move forward with removing the drilling mud?
In its briefing to congressional committees, BP said that crews noticed unusual pressure and fluid readings that should have alerted them not to remove heavy drilling lubricants known from the well - a move that apparently allowed a sudden upwelling of gas that led to the explosion and sinking of the rig about 50 miles from the Louisiana coast.
"That's something you learn at well-control school," said Carl Smith, a former U.S. Coast Guard captain and expert witness. "If you're circulating fluid, you need to monitor how much is going in and how much is coming out. If you got more fluid out than in, it's an indicator that something's going on."
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19) More Reports of Illness Emerge Among Gulf Cleanup Workers
by Marian Wang, ProPublica
May 26, 2010 12:09 pm EDT
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/more-reports-of-illness-emerge-among-gulf-cleanup-workers
Fishermen hired by BP to help with the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico are coming down sick with "severe headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing [1]" after working long hours in oil- and dispersant-contaminated waters, according to the Los Angeles Times.
This follows a report we flagged on Tuesday about fishermen coming down sick [2]. This one, done by a New Orleans TV station, told a similar story [3]-fishermen reported feeling "drugged and disoriented," "coughing up stuff," and feeling "weak."
Cleanup workers told the Times that they were not given protective equipment-no gloves, no respirators. Here's BP's response on the issue, from the Times piece:
BP spokesman Graham McEwen said Tuesday he was unaware of any health complaints among cleanup workers, noting that the company had taken hundreds of samples of so-called volatile organic carbons, such as benzene, and all the levels were well within federal safety standards.
McEwen said the fishermen the company is training are not being deployed into areas that require respirators or breathing apparatus. Those who are working for BP laying booms or skimming oil are issued protective coveralls and gloves, he said.
Note that in that excerpt, BP said it took samples of the possible health risks to cleanup workers.
It has. But as we've pointed out, BP's not releasing that data to the public [4], and has shared it only with "legitimate interested parties," including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And when OSHA, a federal agency, was asked by McClatchy about releasing the data, it said the data was BP's, and "not ours to publish."
While there's no direct evidence that the illnesses are linked to BP's continued use of a dispersant called Corexit, as we've noted, this dispersant has been linked to human health problems [5] in the past, and concerns about toxicity were enough to prompt the EPA-after initially approving it-to order BP to switch to a less toxic dispersant [6]. BP has not done so yet [7].
One marine toxicologist and activist, Riki Ott, studied the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and told the Times that these illnesses emerging from the Gulf were "déjà vu ... What we saw with Exxon Valdez was a parallel track-sick animals and sick people."
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20) Gov't Subsidizes Deep-Water Drilling With Big Tax Breaks
by Marian Wang, ProPublica
May 25, 2010 5:07 pm EDT
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/oil-companies-still-get-billions-in-incentives-to-drill-in-deep-water
By now there's little debate that the technology used to obtain oil in deeper waters was developed and rapidly put into use before safety technology could keep up [1]. As we've noted, that's a development that regulators allowed, despite their concerns.
But the expansion of deep-water drilling wasn't solely a result of industry's rushing into deeper waters and toward greater profit. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was also encouraged by the federal government, which gave oil companies tens of billions [2] in tax breaks, subsidies and royalty relief. Many of these incentives have outlasted their initial purpose, according to the Times [3]:
The royalty waiver program was established by Congress in 1995, when oil was selling for about $18 a barrel and drilling in deep water was seen as unprofitable without a subsidy. Today, oil sells for about $70 a barrel, but the subsidy continues.
... Congress had originally intended to provide royalty relief only when oil prices were especially low. But an Interior Department error in the drafting of contracts in the 1990s led the industry to argue against pegging the relief to oil prices.
The oil industry argues that government subsidies and tax breaks for deep-water drilling have opened up domestic oil production and created jobs. This continued benefit to the industry, however, has long been flagged by watchdogs as a direct loss to taxpayers.
A March 2007 report [4] [PDF] by the Government Accountability Office noted that "deep water regions are particularly costly to explore and develop," but "as production from these leases has grown, and as oil and gas prices have risen dramatically in recent years, serious questions have been raised about the extent to which royalty relief has been in the interest of taxpayers."
Senators have introduced a bill to close some of the tax loopholes enjoyed by the oil industry, according to the L.A. Times. Given that robust lobbying by industry has defeated previous efforts to curtail these incentives, it remains unclear whether the latest attempt will succeed.
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21) Fishermen Say BP Not Allowing Protective Gear to Fight Oil
By Rocky Kistner
switchboard.nrdc.org, Rocky Kistner's Blog
May 25, 2010
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rkistner/fishermen_say_bp_not_allowing.html
As the oily tide washes over the bayous and fragile marshlands of Louisiana, fishermen are complaining they are not allowed to wear proper protective gear on cleanup jobs in the middle of the oil plume miles out to sea.
Clint Guidry, acting president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, testified yesterday before a delegation of U.S. senators and state and federal officials that fishermen are being told not to wear respirators while working in potentially dangerous pools of oil.
"I am being told by workers and family members that reparatory equipment is not being provided to fishermen workers," Guidry told the delegation in Galliano, LA. "There has been no respiratory protective PPE [1] (personal protective equipment) issued to workers working over this most dangerous area, even as a precaution to have available given they are working 60 miles offshore. In fact when some individuals brought their own respirators, they were told by BP representatives on site that if they wore the respirators they would be released from the job. That disturbs me greatly."
Guidry worries there is not proper health and safety monitoring being done out at sea.
"These are third party contractors paid by BP to do safety monitoring. They are reporting what BP tells them to do," he says. "The same thing happened with the Exxon Valdez."
Other residents of the bayou also are reporting problems with the fishermen who are now contracted by BP to do oil cleanup work but are told not to talk publicly about it. Venice, LA, resident Kindra Arnesen says she spoke to a fisherman today whose sinuses were burning from doing oil clean up far out at sea in the thick of the oil.
"He went out and purchased his own respirator and he was told if he wears the respirator his charter (boat) would be terminated. BP is telling them not to wear them. People here are scared to talk about it because they don't want to lose their jobs."
Tonight residents of Venice will have a chance to sound out their concerns in a meeting with Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.
Shrimp fisherman Clint Guidry says, despite the dangers, fishermen feel they don't have a choice but to go out anyway to get by. "Guys are refusing my advice. They can't fish and they have families to feed."
Guidry says for the fishing communities that survived the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, this disaster is turning out to be even a worse nightmare, one that doesn't look like it will end anytime soon. "It's like a bad dream. I can't believe it's happening."
Meanwhile, deep in the lush estuaries of the delta, the oil just keeps coming.
[1] Check out this informative video by NRDC Senior Scientist Gina Solomon who describes the health risks associated with oil exposure and demonstrates ways to use proper protective gear. Scroll to bottom of page at:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rkistner/fishermen_say_bp_not_allowing.html
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22) Oil Flow Is Stemmed, but Could Resume, Official Says
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?hp
HOUSTON - By injecting solid objects overnight as well as heavy drilling fluid into the stricken well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, engineers appeared to have stemmed the flow of oil, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, said on Friday morning. But he stressed that the next 12 to 18 hours would be "very critical" in permanently stanching what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
Admiral Allen, who spoke on ABC's "Good Morning America," said the biggest challenge would be to sustain the "top kill" effort, which involves pumping material into the well to counteract the upward pressure of the gushing oil so that the well can be sealed.
"They've been able to push the hydrocarbons and the oil down with the mud," he said, referring to the heavy drilling fluid. "The real challenge is to put enough mud into the well to keep the pressure where they can put a cement plug over the top."
Admiral Allen was accompanying President Obama on a tour Friday of the area. In Port Fourchon, the president and Admiral Allen were joined by the Lafourche parish president Charlotte Randolph. Mr. Obama walked along a beach dotted with balls of tar and covered with booms that looked like a line of cheerleader pom-poms strung together. Next, the president was heading Grand Isle for a formal briefing from Admiral Allen. The governors of Louisiana, Florida and Alabama are expected to join him there.
As the president surveyed the damage and cleanup effort, the top kill effort continued.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said on "Good Morning America" that efforts to plug the well were "going pretty well according to plan."
"Much of the volume you see coming out of the well in the last 36 hours is mud," he said, referring to live video shots of the oil leak.
He said that overnight, workers pumped what is known as "junk shot," a mix of more substantial materials, like golf balls and shredded tires, into the well, and he said they would follow with more mud later Friday. The junk shot serves as a "bridge," he said, for the mud injections, to strengthen their ability to counteract the leaking oil.
While he was optimistic, Mr. Hayward gave the effort a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of success because it had never been tried in water this deep.
On CNN Friday, Mr. Hayward said it would be at least 48 hours before the success of the effort could be fully assessed, but he acknowledged that much damage had already been done.
"This is clearly an environmental catastrophe," he said. "There is no two ways about it." The effort to plug the well has proceeded in fits and starts. BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early Thursday that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping on Wednesday night when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil. At a news conference in Washington on Thursday, the president said he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis.
"Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don't know the facts," Mr. Obama said. "This has been our highest priority."
But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a "cozy and sometimes corrupt" relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service. Earlier Thursday, the chief of the Minerals Management Service for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.
Mr. Salazar on Friday said he would name Bob Abbey, the director of the department's Bureau of Land Management, as interim director of the scandal-ridden agency responsible for oversight of offshore drilling.
Mr. Abbey, a longtime state and federal lands public lands official will run the agency as it is being dismantled over the next several months. Mr. Salazar announced last week that he intends to break the agency into three parts to handle leasing and oil extraction; safety and environmental oversight; and revenue collection. Currently all those functions are combined, leading to numerous conflicts of interests, with the same group of officials responsible for collecting fees from oil drilling on public lands and offshore while also policing their operations.Mr. Obama ordered a suspension on Thursday of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.
Mr. Obama's trip Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, will be his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.
Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said oil and gas from beneath the Gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation's energy supply for years to come.
"It has to be part of an overall energy strategy," Mr. Obama said. "I mean, we're still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we're going to be using oil. And to the extent that we're using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports."
In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.
As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume.
That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as "drilling mud" were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.
Thursday morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. "The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped," Admiral Allen told CNN.
And Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, said on the "Today" program on NBC that the top kill "was moving the way we want it to."
It was not until late Thursday afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday.
After the resumption, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed.
"It's quite a roller coaster," Mr. Suttles said. "It's difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow."
Engineers had feared the top kill was risky because the high-pressure mud could have punctured another gaping hole in the pipes, or dislodged debris clogging the blowout preventer and pipes and intensified the flow.
The engineers also said that the problem they encountered was not entirely unexpected, and that they believed that they would ultimately succeed.
Mr. Obama's action halted planned exploratory wells in the Arctic due to be drilled this summer and planned lease sales off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf of Mexico. It also halts work on 33 exploratory wells now being drilled in the gulf.
The impact of the new moratorium on offshore drilling remains uncertain. Mr. Obama ordered a halt to new leasing and drilling permits shortly after the spill, but Minerals Management Service officials continued to issue permits for modifications to existing wells and to grant waivers from environmental assessments for other wells.
Shell Oil had been hoping to begin an exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would delay. Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was frustrated because the decision "will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation's energy needs."
"The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore," Mr. Begich said in a statement. "But Shell has updated its plans at the administration's request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the gulf spill."
Environmental advocates, however, expressed relief.
"We need to know what happened in the gulf to cause the disaster, so that a similar catastrophe doesn't befall our Arctic waters," said William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society.
Admiral Allen on Thursday approved portions of Louisiana's $350 million plan to use walls of sand in an effort to protect vulnerable sections of coastline.
The approved portion involves a two-mile sand berm to be built off Scofield Island in Plaquemines Parish - one of six projects that the Corps of Engineers has approved out of 24 proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
"What Admiral Allen told us today is that if the first one is effective, then they will consider moving on to the next one," Mr. Jindal, a Republican, said at an afternoon news conference in Fourchon, La.
Investigators also continued their efforts to understand what caused the explosion of the rig, which killed 11 workers.
At a hearing in New Orleans, the highest ranking official on the Deepwater Horizon testified that he had a disagreement with BP officials on the rig before the explosion.
Jimmy Harrell, a manager who was in charge of the rig, owned by Transocean, said he had expressed concern that BP did not plan to conduct a pressure test before sealing the well closed.
It was unclear from Mr. Harrell's testimony whether the disagreement took place on the day of the explosion or the previous day.
The investigative hearings have grown increasingly combative. Three scheduled witnesses have changed their plans to testify, according to the Coast Guard. Robert Kaluza, a BP official on the rig on the day of the explosion, declined to testify on Thursday by invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Another top ranking BP official, Donald Vidrine, and James Mansfield, Transocean's assistant marine engineer on the Deepwater Horizon, both told the Coast Guard that they had medical conditions.
Jackie Calmes contributed from Port Fourchon, La.; Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Kenner, La.; Campbell Robertson from Venice, La.; Maria Newman from New York; and John Collins Rudolf from New York.
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23) The Subprime Crisis of Student Debt
By RON LIEBER
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?hp
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday - just like the mortgage lenders who didn't ask borrowers to verify their incomes.
Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn't have a lot of good options for digging out.
It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it's a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.
But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.
How many people are like her? According to the College Board's Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor's degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That's a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.
The Family
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. Ms. Munna's father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn's credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor's degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn't afford. So before Cortney's junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn't she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? "All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her," Cathryn said. "All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part."
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. "To me, it would be an uncharitable reading," she said. "My mother has tried her best, and I don't blame her for anything in this."
The Lender
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a "no doc" or at least a "low doc" subprime mortgage loan.
A Citi spokesman declined comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.
Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can't get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.
The University
The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families' financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn't N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she'd passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?
"Had somebody called me and said, 'Do you have a clue where this is all headed?', it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed," said Cathryn Munna. "When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying 'You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.' "
That's not a role that the university wants to take on, though. "I think that would be completely inappropriate," said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. "Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I'm not sure that's always the best decision, but it's one that they really have to make themselves."
The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don't always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna's loans, though.)
Then there's a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That's hardly an ideal outcome either.
Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. "Aid administrators want to keep their jobs," said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "If the administration finds out that you're encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don't think they can handle the debt load, I don't think that's going to mesh very well."
That doesn't change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren't willing to advise students to attend another college.
Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.
The Options
The balance on Cortney Munna's loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can't help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she'd have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren't good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren't being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.
She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.
Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me."
Correction: An earlier version of this column online misstated the benchmark year in a study by the Project on Student Debt.
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24) U.N. Official to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone Strikes
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/world/asia/28drones.html?hpw
WASHINGTON - A senior United Nations official is expected to call on the United States next week to stop Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda, complicating the Obama administration's growing reliance on that tactic in Pakistan.
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the "life and death power" of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies. He contrasted how the military and the C.I.A. responded to allegations that strikes had killed civilians by mistake.
"With the Defense Department you've got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan," he said in an interview. "The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about."
Mr. Alston's views are not legally binding, and his report will not assert that the operation of combat drones by nonmilitary personnel is a war crime, he said. But the mounting international concern over drones comes as the Obama administration legal team has been quietly struggling over how to justify such counterterrorism efforts while obeying the laws of war.
In recent months, top lawyers for the State Department and the Defense Department have tried to square the idea that the C.I.A.'s drone program is lawful with the United States' efforts to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees accused of killing American soldiers in combat, according to interviews and a review of military documents.
Under the laws of war, soldiers in traditional armies cannot be prosecuted and punished for killing enemy forces in battle. The United States has argued that because Qaeda fighters do not obey the requirements laid out in the Geneva Conventions - like wearing uniforms - they are not "privileged combatants" entitled to such battlefield immunity. But C.I.A. drone operators also wear no uniforms.
Paula Weiss, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, called into question the notion that the agency lacked accountability, noting that it was overseen by the White House and Congress. "While we don't discuss or confirm specific activities, this agency's operations take place in a framework of both law and government oversight," Ms. Weiss said. "It would be wrong to suggest the C.I.A. is not accountable."
Still, the Obama administration legal team confronted the issue as the Pentagon prepared to restart military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay. The commissions began with pretrial hearings in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee accused of killing an Army sergeant during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when Mr. Khadr was 15.
The Pentagon delayed issuing a 281-page manual laying out commission rules until the eve of the hearing. The reason, officials say, is that government lawyers had been scrambling to rewrite a section about murder because it has implications for the C.I.A. drone program.
An earlier version of the manual, issued in 2007 by the Bush administration, defined the charge of "murder in violation of the laws of war" as a killing by someone who did not meet "the requirements for lawful combatancy" - like being part of a regular army or otherwise wearing a uniform. Similar language was incorporated into a draft of the new manual.
But as the Khadr hearing approached, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, pointed out that such a definition could be construed as a concession by the United States that C.I.A. drone operators were war criminals. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, and his staff ultimately agreed with that concern. They redrafted the manual so that murder by an unprivileged combatant would instead be treated like espionage - an offense under domestic law not considered a war crime.
"An accused may be convicted," the final manual states, if he "engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war."
Under that reformulation, the C.I.A. drone operators - who reportedly fly the aircraft from agency headquarters in Langley, Va. - might theoretically be subject to prosecution in a Pakistani courtroom. But regardless, the United States can argue to allies that it is not violating the laws of war.
Mr. Alston, the United Nations official, said he agreed with the Obama legal team that "it is not per se illegal" under the laws of war for C.I.A. operatives to fire drone missiles "because anyone can stand up and start to act as a belligerent." Still, he emphasized, they would not be entitled to battlefield immunity like soldiers.
Mary Ellen O'Connell, a Notre Dame University law professor who has criticized the use of drones away from combat zones, also agreed with the Obama administration's legal theory in this case. She said it could provide a "small modicum" of protection for C.I.A. operatives, noting that Germany had a statute allowing it to prosecute violations of the Geneva Conventions, but it does not enforce domestic Pakistani laws against murder.
In March, Mr. Koh delivered a speech in which he argued that the drone program was lawful because of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the principle of self-defense. He did not address several other murky legal issues, like whether Pakistani officials had secretly consented to the strikes. Mr. Alston, who is a New York University law professor, said his report would analyze such questions in detail, which may increase pressure on the United States to discuss them.
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25) BP's Effort to Plug Oil Leak Suspended a Second Time
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
May 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?ref=us
HOUSTON - BP's renewed efforts at plugging the flow of oil from its runaway well in the Gulf of Mexico stalled again on Friday, as the company suspended pumping operations for the second time in two days, according to a technician involved with the response effort.
In an operation known as a "junk shot," BP engineers poured pieces of rubber, golf balls and other materials into the crippled blowout preventer, trying to clog the device that sits atop the wellhead. The maneuver was designed to work in conjunction with the continuing "top kill" operation, in which heavy drilling liquids are pumped into the well to counteract the pressure of the gushing oil.
If the efforts succeeded, officials intended to pump cement into the well to seal it. But the company suspended pumping operations at 2:30 a.m. Friday after two "junk shot" attempts, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the efforts.
The suspension of the effort was not announced, and appeared to again contradict statements by company and government officials that suggested the top kill procedure was progressing Friday.
Admiral Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, said Friday on ABC's Good Morning America" that, "They've been able to push the hydrocarbons and the oil down with the mud."
But the technician working on the effort said that despite the injections at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well. He said that was barely an improvement on Wednesday's results when the operation began and was suspended in its 11th hour of operations. BP resumed the pumping effort Thursday evening for about 10 more hours.
"I won't say progress was zero, but I don't know if we can round up enough mud to make it work," said the technician. "Everyone is disappointed at this time."
Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman, said he would not give "blow by blow commentaries." He added, "the operation is by definition a series of phases of pumping mud and shooting bridging materials and junk and reading pressure gauges. It is going to keep going, perhaps 48 more hours."
If the top kill and junk shots options fail, BP officials planned to try again to place a containment vessel over the leak, which might allow them to capture the oil but would not stop the leak. A previous attempt to do this failed.
Admiral Allen was accompanying President Obama on a tour Friday of the area. In Port Fourchon, the president and Admiral Allen were joined by the Lafourche parish president Charlotte Randolph. Mr. Obama walked along a beach dotted with balls of tar and covered with booms that looked like a line of cheerleader pom-poms strung together. Next, the president was heading Grand Isle for a formal briefing from Admiral Allen. The governors of Louisiana, Florida and Alabama are expected to join him there. As the president surveyed the damage and cleanup effort, the top kill effort continued.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said on "Good Morning America" that efforts to plug the well were "going pretty well according to plan."
"Much of the volume you see coming out of the well in the last 36 hours is mud," he said, referring to live video shots of the oil leak.
While he was optimistic, Mr. Hayward gave the effort a 60 percent to 70 percent chance of success because it had never been tried in water this deep.
"Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don't know the facts," Mr. Obama said. "This has been our highest priority."
But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a "cozy and sometimes corrupt" relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service. Earlier Thursday, the chief of the Minerals Management Service for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office.
Mr. Salazar on Friday said he would name Bob Abbey, the director of the department's Bureau of Land Management, as interim director of the scandal-ridden agency responsible for oversight of offshore drilling.
Mr. Abbey, a longtime state and federal lands public lands official will run the agency as it is being dismantled over the next several months. Mr. Salazar announced last week that he intends to break the agency into three parts to handle leasing and oil extraction; safety and environmental oversight; and revenue collection. Currently all those functions are combined, leading to numerous conflicts of interests, with the same group of officials responsible for collecting fees from oil drilling on public lands and offshore while also policing their operations.Mr. Obama ordered a suspension on Thursday of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient.
Mr. Obama's trip Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, will be his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.
Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said oil and gas from beneath the Gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation's energy supply for years to come.
"It has to be part of an overall energy strategy," Mr. Obama said. "I mean, we're still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we're going to be using oil. And to the extent that we're using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports."
In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor.
As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume.
That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as "drilling mud" were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.
Thursday morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. "The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped," Admiral Allen told CNN.
And Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, said on the "Today" program on NBC that the top kill "was moving the way we want it to."
It was not until late Thursday afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday.
After the resumption, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed.
"It's quite a roller coaster," Mr. Suttles said. "It's difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow."
Engineers had feared the top kill was risky because the high-pressure mud could have punctured another gaping hole in the pipes, or dislodged debris clogging the blowout preventer and pipes and intensified the flow.
The engineers also said that the problem they encountered was not entirely unexpected, and that they believed that they would ultimately succeed.
Mr. Obama's action halted planned exploratory wells in the Arctic due to be drilled this summer and planned lease sales off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf of Mexico. It also halts work on 33 exploratory wells now being drilled in the gulf.
The impact of the new moratorium on offshore drilling remains uncertain. Mr. Obama ordered a halt to new leasing and drilling permits shortly after the spill, but Minerals Management Service officials continued to issue permits for modifications to existing wells and to grant waivers from environmental assessments for other wells.
Shell Oil had been hoping to begin an exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would delay. Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was frustrated because the decision "will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation's energy needs."
"The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore," Mr. Begich said in a statement. "But Shell has updated its plans at the administration's request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the gulf spill."
Environmental advocates, however, expressed relief.
"We need to know what happened in the gulf to cause the disaster, so that a similar catastrophe doesn't befall our Arctic waters," said William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society.
Admiral Allen on Thursday approved portions of Louisiana's $350 million plan to use walls of sand in an effort to protect vulnerable sections of coastline.
The approved portion involves a two-mile sand berm to be built off Scofield Island in Plaquemines Parish - one of six projects that the Corps of Engineers has approved out of 24 proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
"What Admiral Allen told us today is that if the first one is effective, then they will consider moving on to the next one," Mr. Jindal, a Republican, said at an afternoon news conference in Fourchon, La.
Investigators also continued their efforts to understand what caused the explosion of the rig, which killed 11 workers.
At a hearing in New Orleans, the highest ranking official on the Deepwater Horizon testified that he had a disagreement with BP officials on the rig before the explosion.
Jimmy Harrell, a manager who was in charge of the rig, owned by Transocean, said he had expressed concern that BP did not plan to conduct a pressure test before sealing the well closed.
It was unclear from Mr. Harrell's testimony whether the disagreement took place on the day of the explosion or the previous day.
The investigative hearings have grown increasingly combative. Three scheduled witnesses have changed their plans to testify, according to the Coast Guard. Robert Kaluza, a BP official on the rig on the day of the explosion, declined to testify on Thursday by invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Another top ranking BP official, Donald Vidrine, and James Mansfield, Transocean's assistant marine engineer on the Deepwater Horizon, both told the Coast Guard that they had medical conditions.
John M. Broder contributed reporting from Washington; Jackie Calmes from Port Fourchon, La.; Robbie Brown from Kenner, La.; Campbell Robertson from Venice, La.; Maria Newman from New York; and John Collins Rudolf from New York.
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26) [Are you worried no one is paying attention to the war?...bw]
Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars
By CARL HULSE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/politics/28cong.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - The Senate on Thursday approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as House Democrats struggled to round up votes for a major package of business tax breaks and safety-net programs for the long-term unemployed.
Senators delivered a bipartisan 67-to-28 vote for the war financing bill after rejecting a series of Republican proposals on border protection as well as a plan by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to require President Obama to produce a timetable for withdrawing from Afghanistan.
With lawmakers eager to begin a Memorial Day recess, House Democratic leaders ran into stiff resistance from rank-and-file members uneasy about supporting the approximately $143 billion tax and unemployment measure. More than $80 billion of it would be deficit spending - a hot-button issue in the midterm Congressional campaigns and an increasingly frequent line of Republican attack.
"Democrats are still committed to their out-of-control spending spree," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Thursday.
Trying to win over moderate and conservative Democrats by reducing the legislation's impact on the deficit, Democratic leaders said they intended to break up the measure and jettison some provisions like health insurance subsidies for the unemployed. Votes were expected Friday.
Even if the House passes the legislation, no final action will occur for at least a week since Senate leaders said Thursday night that they would be unable to consider the measure before the Memorial Day break. As a result, tens of thousands of Americans could face an interruption in their unemployment benefits as of next week. The House bill would extend jobless pay through November for those who have exhausted their initial benefits. Senate officials said they would try to restore the jobless pay when Congress reconvenes on June 7.
Besides the aid to the unemployed, the House measure included about $32 billion in tax breaks, including a popular business credit for research and development.
The Senate spending measure provides $33.5 billion for the Pentagon and fully pays for the additional 30,000 troops in the administration's buildup in Afghanistan. It also sets aside $13 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat veterans disabled by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. It shifts $5 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prevent it from running out of disaster relief. The bill would also give Haiti more than $1 billion for earthquake relief and recovery.
The effort by Mr. Feingold, an opponent of the war in Afghanistan, was defeated on a vote of 80 to 18. He noted that his proposal was nonbinding and decried the lack of discussion about the nation's role in Afghanistan even as Congress was providing new financing for the almost nine-year-old conflict.
"I'm disappointed we are about to pass a bill providing tens of billions of dollars to keep this war going with so little public debate about whether this approach even makes sense," Mr. Feingold said. "I hope my colleagues will agree that the American people deserve an answer to the question: How much longer?"
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, called Mr. Feingold's plan ill advised and noted that Mr. Obama had already said he would begin withdrawing forces in July 2011.
"It is already a deep-seated fear in Afghanistan that the United States will abandon the region," Mr. Levin said. He said it would be a mistake to exacerbate those fears "while our forces are still deploying to Afghanistan and while the Taliban is doing everything it can to convince the Afghan people that U.S. forces are unable to protect them."
The debate over the timeline put some Democrats in the position of opposing a proposal that they had supported during the Bush administration's management of the war. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said the current situation was different since Mr. Obama had already outlined a withdrawal plan.
"I have always believed that our commitment in Afghanistan should not be open-ended, which is why I continue to support the president's plan," Mr. Reid said.
During the debate, the Senate also rejected Republican proposals that would have gone beyond the new White House plan to send 1,200 members of the National Guard to increase security along the border with Mexico in the Southwest.
The House is just beginning its consideration of a much more costly war financing measure that includes a series of domestic initiatives not considered by the Senate. As a result a final version of the legislation is not likely to be sent to the president's desk until later this summer.
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27) Workers on doomed rig: Corners cut to save money
By BEN EVANS and MIKE KUNZELMAN (AP) -
May 27, 2010 -- 21 hours ago
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h1LUMz2sj2uHiXQi0THdy71DzzmQD9FVG6203
WASHINGTON - Two workers injured when an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico told Congress on Thursday that the companies in charge of the doomed drilling operation cut corners and neglected maintenance in a race toward higher profits.
Oil has been spewing since the Deepwater Horizon blew up off the coast of Louisiana April 20, killing 11 workers. More than 100 others escaped.
"They gambled with our lives," laborer Stephen Stone told the House Judiciary Committee. He said the accident was "set in motion years ago by these companies needlessly rushing to make money faster, while cutting corners to save money."
The rig was owned by Transocean Ltd. and operated by oil giant BP PLC.
But the Transocean employee in charge of drilling said at a separate hearing near New Orleans that he never felt pressure to accelerate the pace at the expense of safety.
"Not at all," Jimmy Harrell, the rig's offshore installation manager, told a panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials.
MMS official Jason Mathews, one of the panelists who questioned Harrell, noted that the project was several weeks behind schedule, a delay that had cost more than $20 million at a daily rate of $525,000.
"I'm sure at times people want to get it done and meet timelines, but (we) never jeopardize safety," Harrell responded.
Harrell also denied reports he engaged in a "heated debate" with a BP official on the day of the accident over a decision to displace drilling fluid with seawater in the rig's riser pipe. Seawater would have provided less weight to counteract the surging pressure from the ocean depths.
"There's a big difference between an argument and a disagreement," Harrell said. "Everything was sorted out, and the proper tests were being performed."
Harrell's assurances were at odds with testimony in Washington from Stone and Doug Brown, the rig's chief mechanic.
Brown, an Army veteran who suffered a broken leg and other injuries, told lawmakers the crew was often weeks or months behind on preventative maintenance because Transocean had cut the engine-room staff in half from the initial number or six workers in 2002.
"Three people were left to do six people's jobs," he said. Workers complained but didn't get anywhere, he said. "They just kept telling us they would see what they could do," said Brown, who says he witnessed a dispute among managers on the day of the explosion.
Stone said the Deepwater operation showed signs of problems leading up to the accident as the well continued leaking mud that he and others were pumping into it. The operation plowed ahead even though workers on four occasions had to stop pumping mud and instead used a heavy sealant to try to stop the leaks - either because drilling too quickly caused cracks or because the underground formation was unstable, he said.
Keith Jones, whose 28-year-old son, rig engineer Gordon Jones, was killed in the accident, urged the lawmakers to rewrite the law's governing liability limits for such events. Jones, a Louisiana attorney, said current laws making the companies responsible only for economic damages, such as loss of income, are "offensive."
"No amount of money will ever compensate us for Gordon's loss. But reckless acts by employees of corporations performed to try to make the most money the fastest will never be deterred by the payment of mere compensatory damages," Jones said. "You must make certain they are exposed to pain in the only place they can feel it - their bank accounts."
Edward "Ned" Kohnke, a lawyer representing Transocean at the hearing outside New Orleans, expressed frustration that the panel has been grilling Transocean employees but isn't able to question at least one top BP worker who was aboard the rig.
Robert Kaluza, BP's well site leader on the Deepwater Horizon, was scheduled to testify but has exercised his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself.
Kohnke also said BP has balked at sharing critical documents with Transocean, including well pressure data.
"What was going on down in the hole? They know that. We're not seeing what they know," Kohnke said. "I don't know that it's a stall tactic. I don't know what it is. All I know is that we want this information."
Kunzelman reported from Kenner, La.
Copyright (c) 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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