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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/
*The url below is a button function for the bauaw.org website and does not work on the newsletter. You can access the Seize BP petition site at: http://www.seizebp.org/ as indicated above from the BAUAW NEWSLETTER.
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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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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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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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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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[Mumia's Birthday was April 24...bw]
Birthday Message of Thanks to the Movement
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
It may surprise you that for years I did not celebrate a birthday. Now, that's partly because of the everydayness, sameness of prison. It's also because I really didn't remember the day. And I was often surprised by a card from my mother, or from my children, or my wife. They surprised me that they remembered. Of course, that was years ago. But the freedom movement has grown. So has the significance of that movement; for the movement has kept me alive and engaged in struggle. For that, I thank you all. That's because movements can make social change. Some years ago, many years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Meade said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Here's the magic, it's that we were there. I thank you for all you have done and all you intend to do. I love you all. On the Move! Build the movement! From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
-Prisonradio.org, April 24, 2010
http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/2010MAJ/04Apr10/April24thMessage2010fromMumia.mp3
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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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URGENT: Support the Fight of Florida Students & Teachers Against Privatization of Public Schools and Resegregation and the Assignment of Students and Teachers in Black and Latina/o Areas to Permanent, Legal, Second-Class Status
Over 1500 Miami/Dade Teachers staged a sick-out and rally today (Monday, April 12) to demand that Governor Crist veto Senate Bill 6.
"If passed, this law will hasten the privatization of public education and the proliferation of charters in Florida, penalize teachers who teach the least privileged students and punish students who perform poorly on standardized tests (particularly English language learners) by withholding a high school diploma from even those who have earned the highest grades," said Ceresta Smith, a teacher from Dade County.
The 1500 teachers who called in sick assembled in Tropical Park, where they were joined by an additional 2500 supporters, including parents, students and community members.
"If passed, SB6 would assign both teachers and students in black and Latino areas to a permanent, legal, second-class status. In the south, where many charters are all white, the charter school movement has increased segregation - SB6 would accelerate this trend by widening the doors to publicly funded, privately-operated schools such as those that the segregationists founded in the 1950's to avoid the mandate of integration ordered by Brown v. Board of Education," said Shanta Driver, spokesperson for BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), the civil rights organization that sponsored a March on Washington to Defend Public Education last Saturday, and is supporting the fight of Florida teachers.
The teachers plan to caravan to Tallahassee later this week to protest at the Governor's office.
For more information and to support and build the movement, contact BAMN National Coordinator Donna Stern 313-468-3398 or letters@bamn.com.
Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) (313) 468-3398 letters@bamn.com
Equal Opportunity Now (NOW) Caucus
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Greetings All:
This letter was written by Yuri Kochiyama who has asked us to spread this letter far and wide. Please do :).
Kiilu
---
March 1, 2010
Dear Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal:
Mumia's birthday is April 24 and we would like to celebrate the whole month of April with a gigantic Freedom Birthday Remembrance for Mumia Abu Jamal.
Please join Pam and Ramona Africa and all who love and admire Mumia by avalanching him through the month of April with Freedom Birthday wishes. And, to those who can afford to, please send a few dollars through postal money orders. This would be helpful when he is released.
Mail cards to:
Mumia Abu Jamal AM 8335
SCI Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370-8090
Tell your family members, friends, fellow workers, neighbors, classmates, etc. Also, notify progressive radio stations, newspapers and organizations. Please do so immediately as April is almost upon us. Remember what Mumia has endured at the hands of the U.S. government and the Pennsylvania criminal justice system. Mumia has already done 32 years and is still on death row because of prosecutorial misconduct. Yet he is innocent! Act now before it is too late.
Don't let Mumia become another victim of a government's destructive history. Mumia's life is in peril and must be saved. He is needed to teach us how to fight for a better world for all. If ever Mumia was needed, it is now!
Join us in celebrating Mumia's birthday throughout April and let it be a celebration for Mumia's freedom!
Remember we need him more than he needs us. We need him, not only for today, but for all the tomorrows coming. Join us. Write to Mumia now.
From Friends and Family of Mumia Abu Jamal
Birthday Message of Thanks to the Movement
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
It may surprise you that for years I did not celebrate a birthday. Now, that's partly because of the everydayness, sameness of prison. It's also because I really didn't remember the day. And I was often surprised by a card from my mother, or from my children, or my wife. They surprised me that they remembered. Of course, that was years ago. But the freedom movement has grown. So has the significance of that movement; for the movement has kept me alive and engaged in struggle. For that, I thank you all. That's because movements can make social change. Some years ago, many years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Meade said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Here's the magic, it's that we were there. I thank you for all you have done and all you intend to do. I love you all. On the Move! Build the movement! From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
-Prisonradio.org, April 24, 2010
http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/2010MAJ/04Apr10/April24thMessage2010fromMumia.mp3
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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) The Cover-up: BP's Crude Politics and the Looming Environmental Mega-Disaster
Written by Wayne Madsen
This story contributed by the Wayne Madsen Report for Oilprice.com
May 7, 2010
http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spills/The-Cover-up-BP-s-Crude-Politics-and-the-Looming-Environmental-Mega-Disaster.html
2) Bill Targets Citizenship of Terrorists' Allies
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and CARL HULSE
May 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/07rights.html?ref=world
3) Regulator Deferred to Oil Industry on Offshore Rig Safety
By ERIC LIPTON and JOHN M. BRODER
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/us/08agency.html?ref=us
4) On 5th Ave., a Grandmothers' Protest as Endless as the Wars
By CLYDE HABERMAN
May 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/nyregion/07nyc.html?ref=nyregion
5) A Week in the Life of the Economy
Editorial
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/opinion/08sat1.html?hp
6) Workers on Oil Rig Recall a Terrible Night of Blasts
By IAN URBINA and JUSTIN GILLIS
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/us/08rig.html?hp
7) Resolved: Inmates Make Tough Debaters
By SUSAN DOMINUS
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/nyregion/08bigcity.htm
8) The Performance-Enhanced Military
By TIM HSIA
May 7, 2010, 11:47 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/the-performance-enhanced-military/
9) Walking Tentatively in Protesters' Shoes
By GEORGE VECSEY
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/sports/08vescey.html?ref=us
10) Kent State Firing Order Heard on 1970 Tape
New Analysis of Recording From Deadly Campus Shooting Reveals National Guard Troops Ordered to Prepare to Fire
CLEVELAND, May 8, 2010
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/08/national/main6469530.shtml
11) Oil spill containment box moved after ice crystals discovered inside
By The Associated Press
May 08, 2010, 2:55PM
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/oil_spill_containment_box_move.html
12) For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses
By JAD MOUAWAD
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09bp.html?hp
13) Greek Debt Woes Ripple Outward, From Asia to U.S.
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/global/09ripple.html?ref=world
14) BP Is in the Spotlight for Now, but 3 Other Companies Could Share the Blame
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09blame.html?ref=us
15) Lena Horne dies: 'I was a kind of black that white people could accept'
May 10, 2010 - 3:57PM
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/lena-horne-dies--i-was-a-kind-of-black-that-white-people-could-accept-20100510-unzq.html
16) Along Gulf, Many Wary of Promises After Spill
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/10claims.html?hp
17) Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html?ref=world
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1) The Cover-up: BP's Crude Politics and the Looming Environmental Mega-Disaster
Written by Wayne Madsen
This story contributed by the Wayne Madsen Report for Oilprice.com
May 7, 2010
http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spills/The-Cover-up-BP-s-Crude-Politics-and-the-Looming-Environmental-Mega-Disaster.html
WMR has been informed by sources in the US Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Florida Department of Environmental Protection that the Obama White House and British Petroleum (BP), which pumped $71,000 into Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign -- more than John McCain or Hillary Clinton, are covering up the magnitude of the volcanic-level oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and working together to limit BP's liability for damage caused by what can be called a "mega-disaster."
Obama and his senior White House staff, as well as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, are working with BP's chief executive officer Tony Hayward on legislation that would raise the cap on liability for damage claims from those affected by the oil disaster from $75 million to $10 billion. However, WMR's federal and Gulf state sources are reporting the disaster has the real potential cost of at least $1 trillion. Critics of the deal being worked out between Obama and Hayward point out that $10 billion is a mere drop in the bucket for a trillion dollar disaster but also note that BP, if its assets were nationalized, could fetch almost a trillion dollars for compensation purposes. There is talk in some government circles, including FEMA, of the need to nationalize BP in order to compensate those who will ultimately be affected by the worst oil disaster in the history of the world.
Plans by BP to sink a 4-story containment dome over the oil gushing from a gaping chasm one kilometer below the surface of the Gulf, where the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 workers on April 20, and reports that one of the leaks has been contained is pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration, according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources. Sources within these agencies say the White House has been resisting releasing any "damaging information" about the oil disaster. They add that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf.
Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a "national security issue." Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano's actual reasoning for invoking national security was to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.
From the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Coast Guard, and Gulf state environmental protection agencies, the message is the same: "we've never dealt with anything like this before."
The Obama administration also conspired with BP to fudge the extent of the oil leak, according to our federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day was gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day.
However, WMR has been informed that submersibles that are monitoring the escaping oil from the Gulf seabed are viewing television pictures of what is a "volcanic-like" eruption of oil. Moreover, when the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick -- which is larger than that being reported by the media -- it was turned down. However, National Geographic managed to obtain the satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site.
There is other satellite imagery being withheld by the Obama administration that shows what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public, according to our sources.
The Corps and Engineers and FEMA are quietly critical of the lack of support for quick action after the oil disaster by the Obama White House and the US Coast Guard. Only recently, has the Coast Guard understood the magnitude of the disaster, dispatching nearly 70 vessels to the affected area. WMR has also learned that inspections of off-shore rigs' shut-off valves by the Minerals Management Service during the Bush administration were merely rubber-stamp operations, resulting from criminal collusion between Halliburton and the Interior Department's service, and that the potential for similar disasters exists with the other 30,000 off-shore rigs that use the same shut-off valves.
The impact of the disaster became known to the Corps of Engineers and FEMA even before the White House began to take the magnitude of the impending catastrophe seriously. The first casualty of the disaster is the seafood industy, with not just fishermen, oystermen, crabbers, and shrimpers losing their jobs, but all those involved in the restaurant industry, from truckers to waitresses, facing lay-offs.
The invasion of crude oil into estuaries like the oyster-rich Apalachicola Bay in Florida spell disaster for the seafood industry. However, the biggest threat is to Florida's Everglades, which federal and state experts fear will be turned into a "dead zone" if the oil continues to gush forth from the Gulf chasm. There are also expectations that the oil slick will be caught up in the Gulf stream off the eastern seaboard of the United States, fouling beaches and estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay, and ultimately target the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.
WMR has also learned that 36 urban areas on the Gulf of Mexico are expecting to be confronted with a major disaster from the oil volcano in the next few days. Although protective water surface boons are being laid to protect such sensitive areas as Alabama's Dauphin Island, the mouth of the Mississippi River, and Florida's Apalachicola Bay, Florida, there is only 16 miles of boons available for the protection of 2,276 miles of tidal shoreline in the state of Florida.
Emergency preparations in dealing with the expanding oil menace are now being made for cities and towns from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Houston, New Orleans, Gulfport, Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa-St.Petersburg-Clearwater, Sarasota-Bradenton, Naples, and Key West. Some 36 FEMA-funded contracts between cities, towns, and counties and emergency workers are due to be invoked within days, if not hours, according to WMR's FEMA sources.
There are plans to evacuate people with respiratory problems, especially those among the retired senior population along the west coast of Florida, before officials begin burning surface oil as it begins to near the coastline.
There is another major threat looming for inland towns and cities. With hurricane season in effect, there is a potential for ocean oil to be picked up by hurricane-driven rains and dropped into fresh water lakes and rivers, far from the ocean, thus adding to the pollution of water supplies and eco-systems.
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2) Bill Targets Citizenship of Terrorists' Allies
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and CARL HULSE
May 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/07rights.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - Proposed legislation that would allow the government to revoke American citizenship from people suspected of allying themselves with terrorists set off a legal and political debate Thursday that scrambled some of the usual partisan lines on civil-liberties issues.
The Terrorist Expatriation Act, co-sponsored by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people who provide support to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or who attack the United States or its allies.
Some Democrats expressed openness to the idea, while several Senate Republicans expressed concern. Mr. Brown, who endorsed aggressive tactics against terrorism suspects in his campaign for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy's seat, said the bill was not about politics.
"It reflects the changing nature of war and recent events," Mr. Brown said Thursday. "War has moved into a new dimension. Individuals who pick up arms - this is what I believe - have effectively denounced their citizenship, and this legislation simply memorializes that effort. So somebody who wants to burn their passport, well, let's help them along."
Identical legislation is also being introduced in the House by two Pennsylvania congressmen, Jason Altmire, a Democrat, and Charlie Dent, a Republican. The lawmakers said at a news conference that revoking citizenship would block terrorism suspects from using American passports to re-enter the United States and make them eligible for prosecution before a military commission instead of a civilian court.
Citing with approval news reports that President Obama has signed a secret order authorizing the targeted killing of a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, Mr. Lieberman argued that if that policy was legal - and he said he believed it was - then stripping people of citizenship for joining terrorist organizations should also be acceptable.
Several major Democratic officials spoke positively about the proposal, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Noting that the State Department already had the authority to rescind the citizenship of people who declare allegiance to a foreign state, she said the administration would take "a hard look" at extending those powers to cover terrorism suspects.
"United States citizenship is a privilege," she said. "It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers - or in this case, foreign terrorists - are clearly in violation, in my personal opinion, of that oath which they swore when they became citizens."
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she supported the "spirit" of the measure, although she urged caution and said that the details of the proposal, like what would trigger a loss of citizenship, still needed to be fleshed out.
Several Republican officials, though, were skeptical of the idea. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, questioned the constitutionality of the proposal.
"If they are a U.S. citizen, until they are convicted of some crime, I don't see how you would attempt to take their citizenship away," Mr. Boehner said. "That would be pretty difficult under the U.S. Constitution."
The proposal would amend an existing, although rarely used, program run by the State Department. It dates to a law enacted by Congress in 1940 that allowed the stripping of citizenship for activities like voting in another country's elections or joining the army of a nation that is at war with the United States. People who lose their citizenship can contest the decision in court.
The Supreme Court later narrowed the program's scope, declaring that the Constitution did not allow the government to take away people's citizenship against their will. The proposal does not alter the requirement of evidence of voluntariness.
That means that if the proposal passed, the State Department would have to cite evidence that a person not only joined Al Qaeda, but also intended to relinquish his citizenship, and the advantages it conveys, to rescind it.
Several legal scholars disagreed about the legality and effectiveness of the proposal.
Kevin R. Johnson, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis, argued that it was "of dubious constitutionality" because merely joining or donating to a terrorist group fell short of unequivocal evidence that someone intended to relinquish his citizenship.
Peter H. Schuck, a Yale University law professor, said the Supreme Court might allow Congress to declare that joining Al Qaeda created a presumption that an American intended to relinquish his citizenship, so long as the program allowed the person to rebut that view.
Mr. Lieberman portrayed the proposal as a reaction to increasing involvement in Islamic terrorism by United States citizens, including Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American man who was arrested in connection with the failed attempt to set off a car bomb in Times Square last Saturday. Mr. Shahzad was granted American citizenship last year.
However, Mr. Lieberman emphasized, the measure would apply only to people who commit such acts in the future. Senate aides said that it would apply only to acts undertaken overseas.
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3) Regulator Deferred to Oil Industry on Offshore Rig Safety
By ERIC LIPTON and JOHN M. BRODER
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/us/08agency.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.
The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and with collecting royalties from it, never took steps to comprehensively address the issue, relying instead on industry assurances that they were on top of the problem, a review of documents shows.
In the intervening years, numerous blowout preventers and their control systems have failed, though none as catastrophically as those on the well the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was preparing when it blew up on April 20 - an accident that has left tens of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Agency records show that from 2001 to 2007, there were 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations, leading to 41 deaths, 302 injuries and 356 oil spills. Yet the federal agency continues to allow the oil industry largely to police itself, saying that the best technical experts work for industry, not for the government.
Critics say that, then and now, the minerals service has been crippled by this dependence on industry and by a climate of regulatory indulgence.
"Everything that's done by the oil industry is done for profit," said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who demanded this week that the Interior Department investigate these backup safety systems. "Throw in the fact that regulators have taken a lax attitude toward overseeing their operations, and you have a recipe for catastrophe."
Last year, BP, the owner of the well that blew in the gulf, teamed up with other offshore operators to oppose a proposed rule that would have required stricter safety and environmental standards and more frequent inspections. BP said that "extensive, prescriptive" regulations were not needed for offshore drilling, and urged the minerals service to allow it and other operators to define the steps they would take to ensure safety largely on their own.
Walter D. Cruickshank, the current deputy director of the Minerals Management Service, disputed the idea that the agency had a history of deference to the industry or a pattern of lax oversight.
"We have inspectors going off shore every day that the weather allows," Mr. Cruickshank said, citing orders to shut down oil operations 117 times last year. "The enforcement is quite strict."
He added that agency officials remained committed to adopting the new safety rule, despite industry objections. "I think you can assume that rule is going forward," he said.
Numerous congressional and internal investigations have called the oversight agency badly mismanaged and at times corrupt. It has been rocked with regular scandals, including disclosures in 2008 that agency officials took bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials. And its own scientists have said that senior agency officials in recent years revised staff reports to eliminate environmental concerns that might have complicated oil-company drilling applications for offshore sites in waters near Alaska.
"Problems at M.M.S. did not originate in this administration or its predecessor," said Representative Darrell E. Issa of California, the senior Republican of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. "There is a bureaucracy and dysfunctional culture that has to be held accountable."
Mr. Issa and other members of Congress are now asking why repeated warnings about potentially faulty safety equipment like the blowout preventers apparently went unheeded by the industry and unaddressed by the government.
Questions about the blowout preventers - which BP executives have said are at least partly to blame for the April 22 accident - date back at least to February 2000, when a rig in the Gulf of Mexico spilled oil into the sea after a crew member accidentally pushed the wrong button, severing the connection between the rig and its blowout prevention device, known as a BOP.
"The rig was not equipped with a secondary system capable of securing the well in the absence of the primary BOP controls," said a federal report on the accident.
To combat this serious safety flaw, the agency warned oil companies in 2000 and again in June 2009, after yet more problems emerged with a blowout preventer, reminding them that they needed to have "a reliable backup system in place." But the agency never tried to draft regulations that would detail the requirements for the backup systems.
Instead, more than a decade ago, with the support of the industry, the agency reduced the frequency of inspections of blowout preventers from once a week to once every 14 days, citing the disruptions that these tests caused to oil drilling and extraction efforts.
In the absence of government regulations, all 23 of the oil drilling rigs currently working in the Gulf of Mexico rely on a backup device known as a remotely controlled submersible vehicle to turn on the blowout preventers if primary controls fail. That was the case with the Deepwater Horizon rig as well.
But a consultant hired by the mineral service in 2003 warned that these machines were frequently unreliable during blowouts, moving too slowly and often lacking sufficient power to do the job.
Worse, the same consultant concluded in a federally financed study that even if rig crews managed to turn the blowout preventer on, the most critical safety component inside these machines - the shear ram, which is meant to cut quickly through the well pipe to stop the flow of oil and gas - was often not strong enough to cut through the modern types of pipe that drilling rigs now use.
"This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout," said the September 2004 report, written by West Engineering.
Industry executives say they have taken steps to address these concerns.
"It is a reliable piece of equipment," Robert Lanza, a Houston oil executive who serves as co-chairman of industry's powerful Offshore Operators Committee, said of blowout preventers.
Minerals Management officials have also pointed to statistics showing a decline in the number of offshore oil drilling blowouts and fatalities in recent years.
But in an interview this week, senior officials of the agency said that in light of the April accident, they could not confidently assert that the long-identified shortcomings with the blowout preventers have been adequately resolved.
"All of these things need to be re-examined," Mr. Cruickshank said.
Elsewhere around the world, the trend has been to split up agencies like Minerals and Management Service, separating the government officials who are responsible for overseeing natural resource extraction from those who are charged with ensuring its safety.
For example, in 2005, Australia created a separate regulator - the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority, following the lead of Britain, which severed these functions after a 1988 oil rig explosion in the North Sea, known as the Piper Alpha incident, that killed 167 people.
"It has to be that way," said David Doig, the chief executive of an industry-owned nonprofit organization in Britain, the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organization. "You need to divorce operations monitoring from the integrity monitoring, because operations will always be the one driving behavior. They're motivated by the need to keep things going, and the finances rolling."
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4) On 5th Ave., a Grandmothers' Protest as Endless as the Wars
By CLYDE HABERMAN
May 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/nyregion/07nyc.html?ref=nyregion
The late-afternoon sun was beginning a slow retreat on Wednesday when the grannies took up their positions on Fifth Avenue at the eastern entrance to Rockefeller Center.
As ever, they lined up at curbside. As ever, they unfurled banners and dangled placards from their necks, messages of opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As ever, they stood mostly in silence. Now and again, though, they broke into a chant. "Bring our troops home now," they cried, pausing before adding, "Alive!"
This was the 330th consecutive Wednesday, going back to Jan. 14, 2004, that the grannies gathered for an hour's demonstration against America's wars. Agree with their cause or not, theirs is an unusual record of persistence in an age when attention spans are often measured in seconds.
Technically, it was their 329th protest. Last Dec. 2, the police kept them from reaching their accustomed spot because of the annual Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center that evening. But they had tried their best to carry on as usual, so they get credit here for that Wednesday, too.
"We've been here even in the worst possible weather, in pouring rain and exhausting heat," said Joan Wile, 78, who came up with the idea for a weekly vigil.
Not all of the 21 people who showed up this past Wednesday were actually grannies. Five were men. A few of the women were relatively young, in their 50s. But most were women of years who belonged to antiwar groups with "grannies" and "grandmothers" in their titles. They wore those words proudly.
Anne Moy went there by bus from the Lower East Side. It was important to her, she said, to register her opposition to the wars. At 92, she was the oldest on the protest line. She beat Lillian Lifflander by two years. Jenny Heinz, 65, was another regular, even though she was in the midst of treatment for breast cancer. Bert Aubrey, 76, had to lean on a cane, his knees not what they used to be.
"We're still here, unfortunately," Mr. Aubrey said. The "unfortunately" referred to endless war, not to life.
On a gorgeous afternoon, the avenue was crowded. Most people walked by briskly without giving the protesters a glance. One or two slowed down long enough to call the demonstration misguided. But more than a few expressed approval. A young woman went down the line telling each protester, "I really appreciate what you're doing." Another woman, Anna Ungaro, was in town from Jersey City and had free time before an appointment. She joined the group.
Tourists stopped to take pictures, as if the grannies were just one more New York attraction. Ms. Heinz could have lived without that. "It's hard to have people pat you on the head," she said. "We get people saying we're cute. This isn't about being cute."
So what is it about? It isn't as if the government is about to change course because a few elderly women and men stand on Fifth Avenue. Why do this every week?
"The point is to interfere with the routine," Ms. Heinz said. "As people walk down the street, it has an impact on their consciousness. If it engages them, it's fine. If it infuriates them, it's fine."
Mr. Aubrey invoked Dylan Thomas's admonition to not go gentle into that good night. " 'Rage, rage,' " he said. "That's the way I feel. I have to do something." Next to him stood James Marsh, 73 - a "granduncle for peace." He said, "I don't want to say at the end of my life that I didn't stand up for peace and justice."
Another protester, Laurie Arbeiter, invoked words ascribed to the Rev. A. J. Muste, a prominent pacifist who died in 1967. During the Vietnam War, he was asked at a candlelight vigil outside the White House if he truly felt that such actions would alter national policy. "I don't do this to change the country," he said. "I do this so the country won't change me."
Ms. Wile allowed that a measure of fatigue had set in. The demonstrations of late are somewhat smaller than they used to be, especially since the election of President Obama, she said. Still, they continue.
Laurie Leon, a self-described "very senior senior," is a regular. She relies on Access-a-Ride to get to Midtown from Jamaica, Queens. She doesn't stand as straight as she once did. She needs a cane. But there she was, stepping off the protest line to hand out antiwar leaflets to passers-by. "It's not easy," Ms. Leon said. "But I won't stop till I drop."
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
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5) A Week in the Life of the Economy
Editorial
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/opinion/08sat1.html?hp
For all the recent talk about recovery, the economy's vulnerability was on full - at times stomach-dropping - display this week.
Job growth was up sharply in April, but unemployment also rose, as the number of out-of-work job seekers overwhelmed the number of jobs on offer. The stock market, which had surged most of this year, gyrated and sold off steeply, driven down mainly by fears of contagion from the Greek debt crisis.
For several minutes on Thursday, the market went into a tailspin, apparently accelerated by computerized trading strategies. By the end of the day on Friday, it had suffered a 771-point drop over four days and was down 5.7 percent for the week, its worst weekly decline in more than a year.
Political leadership also was put to the test this week, with uninspiring results. European leaders finally agreed to a rescue package for Greece, but there are serious fears that it may be too little and too late to stop the crisis from spreading.
In the United States, senators began a series of votes on a bill to reform the financial system; more votes are to come and a strong bill could still emerge. But for now it's not clear if lawmakers will do all that is needed to protect the taxpayers from another meltdown or bow to the banks and their lobbyists.
Both Congress and the White House need to show strong leadership. Congress has yet to make good on its promise to pass broad legislation to boost employment. What is needed is bolstered aid to states and an extension of unemployment benefits through the end of the year, as well as programs targeted on small-business lending, infrastructure projects, green technology and summer youth jobs.
Without a concerted job creation effort, recovery cannot take hold. The economy added an impressive 290,000 jobs in April, but job losses from 2008 to 2010 were so deep that it would take more than four years of monthly growth of that magnitude just to fill the hole.
On the Greek debt crisis and the threat of spillover damage, Europeans must take the lead. But Washington must use its considerable influence, as well as the strength of its example.
Bailouts and stimulus are contentious here. Republicans are determined to play their faux deficit hawk role - despite the utter hypocrisy and destructiveness - through the November polls. Expansionary policy, and its corollary, higher inflation, are especially distressing to European powers given their dark history. The potential alternatives - renewed, deep recession and rifts in the euro-era - would be even worse.
Market regulators must also act quickly to monitor and rein in trading techniques that may provoke the kind of volatility seen on Thursday. So-called high-frequency trading, flash trading and dark pools all employ a combination of speed, privileged information and opacity - violating principles of market fairness, transparency and efficiency. That is unacceptable under any circumstances, but especially dangerous now, when nervous markets are prone to panic.
And, yes, all this must occur against the backdrop of debate on financial reform. The past week provided more evidence, if any more were needed, that the system is still in need of repair.
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6) Workers on Oil Rig Recall a Terrible Night of Blasts
By IAN URBINA and JUSTIN GILLIS
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/us/08rig.html?hp
NEW ORLEANS - Nearly 50 miles offshore at the big oil rig floating on a glassy-calm sea, a helicopter landed early on the morning of April 20, carrying four executives from BP, the oil company. The men were visiting the Deepwater Horizon to help honor the crew for its standout safety record.
The rig workers were buzzing for another reason. They were nearly done with the latest job. It had been a little tricky, but it was nothing they could not handle.
As night fell, Micah Joseph Sandell, 40, was in the small cab of his crane, three stories above the bustling deck. Two floors down from the helipad, men in red coveralls waited for dinner in a hall lined with gold safety plaques. Eugene Dewayne Moss, a 37-year-old crane operator, realized he needed to tear himself away from a movie to get ready for his overnight shift.
"I thought, Oh man, I've got to go," Mr. Moss recalled. "I got up, turned my TV off."
Seconds later, a thundering explosion rocked the rig, the beginning of a terrifying night for the men who would survive one of the most harrowing disasters in the history of the oil business.
All over the ship, men snapped into action. Sleeping workers leapt from their beds. Then came a second explosion, even louder than the first. They later struggled to describe it - a tornado of fire, a nuclear bomb, a jet engine exploding. But a half-dozen rig workers interviewed this week all agreed on one thing, recalling that moment: "We all were sure we were going to die," said Dennis Dewayne Martinez, 30, a supervisor on the rig.
The Deepwater Horizon was one of the most sophisticated drilling rigs on the planet.
Commissioned in 2001, the ship, 396 feet from stem to stern, could park in the water, lock onto satellites to measure an exact position and shoot water out of a series of thrusters to maintain that position. Even with waves crashing against the keel, the rig could steady itself for the precision work of sending drill pipes more than six miles down, dead straight, through the ocean floor and deep into the earth's crust.
Only the year before, the Horizon had set a world record by punching through 35,000 feet of water and rock - nearly seven miles - in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a well called Tiber for BP, the oil giant once known as British Petroleum.
This time, the Horizon was drilling an exploratory well about 47 miles off the Louisiana coast, in a stretch of the sea floor known as Mississippi Canyon Block 252. BP and some partners had paid the federal government $34 million for the lease, and the Horizon crew had celebrated when they found oil there.
But the Horizon was a drill ship, not a production vessel, so the workers had been told to cap the well for later use and move on to the next job.
Up on the bridge that April night, the officers were keeping close watch on the Damon B. Bankston, a 260-foot cargo ship that was pumping special drilling mud through a hose from the rig.
The job of sinking the well had gone relatively smoothly - extending the well, pipe by pipe, until it punched through to the oil below. Then the crew shoved a final long stretch of pipe deep into the reservoir.
Trouble With Gas Buildup
As the job unfolded, however, the workers did have intermittent trouble with pockets of natural gas. Highly flammable, the gas was forcing its way up the drilling pipes.
This was something BP had not foreseen as a serious problem, declaring a year earlier that gas was likely to pose only a "negligible" risk. The government warned the company that gas buildup was a real concern and that BP should "exercise caution."
At one point during the previous several weeks, so much of it came belching up to the surface that a loudspeaker announcement called for a halt to all "hot work," meaning any smoking, welding, cooking or any other use of fire. Smaller belches, or "kicks," had stalled work as the job was winding down.
By mid-April, the crew was in the mop-up stages of the operation. The day before the blast, workers from Halliburton, the oil services contractor, had finished one of the trickiest tasks in building a well: encasing it in cement, with a temporary plug of cement near the bottom of the pipe to seal the well.
The Halliburton workers used a less common technique for the cement, whipping nitrogen gas into it to create a kind of mousse. This type of cement, if used correctly, forms a tighter seal, but it is trickier to handle.
Still, all in all, it had been a pretty routine job for the Horizon.
"Almost there," said one supervisor as he left the 11 a.m. daily meeting on April 20. "We're almost done, baby!"
Some of the men had heard they might even get a bonus for finishing ahead of deadline.
Explosive Fury
It happened so fast.
Just before 10 p.m., the crew was using seawater to flush drilling mud out of the pipes. Suddenly, with explosive fury, water and mud came hurtling up the pipes and onto the deck, followed by the ominous hiss of natural gas. In seconds, it touched some spark or flame.
Three stories above the deck, the blast blew Mr. Sandell out of his seat and to the back of his cab. As he scrambled down the ladder, fire leaped up to envelop him. Another explosion sent him flying 25 feet to the ground.
"I took off running," Mr. Sandell said. "How, I can't tell you."
He joined the other men in a sprint to the two lifeboats on the rig's bow. Men were climbing over one another to get inside the covered lifeboats, which look like capsules and can hold up to 50 men each.
The assistant driller who was supposed to take muster - or roll call - panicked. Instead, he handed Mr. Martinez the clipboard before climbing into a lifeboat.
"Hurry up!" the men already in the boats screamed. "Lower the lifeboat!"
Mr. Martinez said they needed to wait for others. The men in the boats yelled that there was no more time - the 242-foot steel tower in the center of the rig was engulfed in flames. They were certain it was going to fall their way.
In one lifeboat, a worker lay on the deck, trying to stanch the blood flowing from a deep gash in his neck. Others tried to rub the insulation from their eyes, after the walls of their cabins collapsed. Still others were caked in the clay-brown mud that had shot out of the well after the first explosion.
Most of the men had on bright orange life jackets. Some men, having been thrown from their bunks, wore little else.
Not everyone could get to the boats. Through a porthole, Mr. Moss watched as some co-workers - black silhouettes against the flames - jumped from the rig. "You can't see them good enough to tell if they had life jackets on or anything," he said.
Within 10 minutes, the two lifeboats closed their doors and dropped about 100 feet down to the water below.
A small boat was nearby. Albert Andry III, a recreational fisherman, and his buddies were bobbing near the rig, trying to catch the fish that schooled near it.
When Mr. Andry - who was contacted by a reporter after he posted an account of his experience on the Internet - noticed water gushing from the center of the rig, one of his friends, who had worked on rigs, knew something was wrong.
"Go! Go! Go! Go! Gooooo!" the friend yelled. Mr. Andry opened his throttle wide, covering 100 yards or so before the rig exploded.
"The rig blew a few more explosions after that and began to burn down," he wrote later on a Web message board, where he also posted photos and videos of the scene. "Some of the rig began dripping into the water and the platform tilted in and turned RED HOT."
From their lifeboats, the Horizon crew radioed for help. The Bankston, the cargo boat that was attached to the rig when the blowout began, had managed to pull away, and now the captain was pulling survivors off the lifeboats.
Frantic emergency calls summoned planes, helicopters and Coast Guard fireboats to the stricken rig.
Radio Silence
On the Bankston, the men cried. They prayed. Nobody talked much as they watched the orange tongues of flame from the Horizon lick the sky, reflecting off the still water.
The men were kept aboard the rescue ship, in the middle of the ocean, for a full 12 hours. Worse than the wait, they said, was being forbidden to call their families. The men were told that the Coast Guard wanted to conduct interviews before the workers spoke to family or anyone else.
Rumors spread that the BP executives who had visited the rig were up on the Bankston's bridge using the ship's radio or a satellite phone to call home.
Helicopters thwocked overhead. Boats darted around the rig searching for survivors. Word soon came that 11 were missing. (Of the 126 on board at the time of the disaster, 115 survived, of whom 17 were injured.)
As he watched the hulking rig, his home for much of the past eight years, slowly tilt and falter, Mr. Martinez thought about his father's ring. The only time he ever took the ring off was when he was working. It was now headed to the bottom of the sea.
"I lost my daddy when I was 23, he was 46," he said.
Another worker, startled by a memory, jammed his hand into his pocket. He pulled out a small photograph of his son. He caught his breath, stared at it, then exhaled.
Finally, the Bankston started its 12-hour journey back to shore. It stopped on the way to pick up a couple of medics from another rig. At a second stop, it picked up Coast Guard officials, who immediately began passing out forms for the men to fill out and to describe what they saw. Some were pulled aside for interviews.
Some relief arrived: blankets, and for supper, pork chops and hot dogs.
Conversation followed, but mostly they just traded questions. What could possibly have gone so horribly wrong? If the cement job worked, how had gas leaked up the pipe and sparked? Others wondered about a device on the sea floor called a blowout preventer and why it did not seem to have activated.
Pulling in to Port Fourchon, the men fell silent again.
"To me it all felt like a nightmare," Mr. Sandell said. "And I still wasn't sure if I was awake."
As he and others climbed off the Bankston, they were greeted by several Coast Guard and company officials sitting around a table stacked with forms.
Behind the table was a row of portable toilets. And as the crew members approached, each was handed a cup for a mandatory drug test. The search for an explanation would begin with them. That search continues.
Ian Urbina reported from New Orleans, and Justin Gillis from New York. Andrew Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and Clifford Krauss from Houma, La. Toby Lyles contributed research.
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7) Resolved: Inmates Make Tough Debaters
By SUSAN DOMINUS
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/nyregion/08bigcity.html?hp
The two debate teams sat across a large room on Thursday night waiting for their face-off to begin. On one side were the visitors, four undergraduates at the New School, and their equally young coach poring over documents and comparing last-minute notes. Across the room the home team, four men in their 30s and 40s, leaned back in their seats, pictures of poise, their neatly arranged index cards at the ready but untouched.
The students from the Eugene Lang College of the New School were nervous because their team had lost here the previous year; in fact, the opposing team was undefeated in its two-year history, besting opponents like St. John's University and New York Law School. The students were nervous because they were young and earnest and, as one of them put it, "afraid of offending someone."
And they were, as one put it, "meta-nervous," perhaps because they had to argue that the government should not finance higher education in prisons, right there at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, against a team of incarcerated men who could be seen as Exhibit A for the opposing view.
So the Arthur Kill team had the home-turf advantage, plus passion, not to mention direct personal experience - of the four debaters, three are currently special students at the New School, as are many of the two dozen inmates who were on hand to watch. Then there's the advantage of general life experience, on the outside and in.
"I'm kind of used to public speaking," Andrew Cooper, 43, said.
In his dark green uniform and wire-rimmed glasses, Mr. Cooper had the look of a graduate student working some night shift to play the bills. He said that he had done some teaching while in prison, and that he occasionally spoke to at-risk youth about the consequences of "bad choices." Fifteen years ago, while a student at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, he made a bad choice and joined a robbery on Long Island. "I was a fair student," Mr. Cooper said. "But I went for the quick fix."
He and his teammates displayed a consistently confident, Obama-inspired style: some measured, almost soothing oratory; some strategic finger-pointing; some appeals to reason. Statistics poured out at a steady rate, about the country's high recidivism problem and the links between higher education in prisons and lower recidivism rates. Higher education, Mr. Cooper argued, represents "the last bastion of civility and the last hope for inmates to slip the bonds of incarceration and become tax-paying, productive, caring members of society."
The New Schoolers could not quite bring themselves, as one of them, Santiago Posas, put it, to make some "Republican we-can't-coddle-criminals argument." Instead, they went nuclear, debate-style, rejecting the education system altogether: Even if higher education in prisons is ethical, Mr. Posas argued, that premise "does not address the basis for true equality within our society that is structured by complex and hierarchal racist, classist and gendered norms that produce the prison-industrial complex."
Why import into prisons the same flawed educational system that landed inmates there in the first place? The undergraduates spoke of "the dominant discourse" and "hegemony"; there was talk of "the revolutionary praxis" and, of course, Foucault.
There were also more than a few awkward pauses. "I was reading my speech about how to deal with the fact that education comes from the oppressors to the oppressed, using big words sometimes I myself don't understand," Mr. Posas said later. "And I'm thinking: I'm the oppressor! I'm the oppressor here!"
Listening to revolutionary fervor delivered in academia's native tongue, the Arthur Kill debaters looked amused. "I think they misinterpreted," one said to the others as they conferred during a short break. "I think they're misquoting Foucault."
George Milligan, a lanky man with a smile that flashed gold, finished strong for the Arthur Kill team. "We agree it would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize a correlation between education and crime," said Mr. Milligan, 40, who was convicted of robbery and assault 19 years ago.
But he hammered back the points about recidivism - sure, failing public schools might essentially funnel poor black men into prison, but once they're there, receiving some higher education seems to help keep them out, and keep the citizenry safer. Then he asked, "So why are we allowing the criminal justice system to function in a way that does not protect us?"
It came as a surprise to no one when the three judges decreed the debaters from Arthur Kill the victors. But their winning streak - does that surprise the Arthur Kill team, considering they're up against law students, criminal justice students and, in the case of the New School, theory-happy academics?
"Yes," said Leonardo Cepeda, who is 30 and serving time for robbery. "They have the upper hand. They have the Internet."
E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com
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8) The Performance-Enhanced Military
By TIM HSIA
May 7, 2010, 11:47 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/the-performance-enhanced-military/
The military has received much scrutiny in recent years for allegedly overmedicating soldiers who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or from other mental illnesses associated with combat.
Although there has been much attention devoted to the military's use of drugs to medicate mental illnesses, there has been little attention focused on the sharp rise of supplements used by service members.
During my deployments in Iraq there were often rumors that certain soldiers were taking steroids because of their sudden increase in physical size. When the unit deployed these soldiers looked no different from the average soldier, but upon completion of the deployment they looked Rambo-esque. Some soldiers felt that others were getting away with steroid use because these soldiers were rarely seen in the gym and because drug testing through urinalysis was rarely done by units while deployed. Moreover, many soldiers believe that although the military frequently tests for drugs like cocaine and marijuana, tests for steroids are conducted with less frequency.
While the use of steroids by soldiers when deployed is rumor, the use of supplements to become bigger, stronger and faster is a fact. When I had to conduct a health and welfare inspection, I was shocked by the profusion and variety of pills and powders I found in the rooms of soldiers. A few rooms could have been confused for mini-pharmacies.
In my unit's soldier-run PX, among the most popular items purchased were supplements to increase body mass. During the summer months, my unit's leadership became increasingly concerned with heat injuries and with the physician assistant's research and recommendation, the leadership decided to place warning labels near supplements in order to warn soldiers of the possible dangers associated with these supplements.
The use of supplements in the military is not limited to simply those that make one stronger. Upon reflection, my first encounter with performance enhancing supplements was at West Point during my junior year. After waking up from a nap at the library I met a classmate and told him I was struggling to stay awake in preparation for an exam. This classmate, a distinguished cadet who was ranked at the top of my class academically, told me he used "stuff" to help him stay awake and study . I disregarded this fellow cadet's remarks, as it seemed merely in sync with the academy's culture, which prides itself on toughness and in which boasting about lack of sleep is commonplace. A common refrain heard by cadets and soldiers is that "sleep is a crutch."
Looking back, I'm assuming this cadet meant that he was taking Adderall.
The favorite drink of deployed soldiers in my unit was Rip It, an energy drink. When platoons had to go on extended patrols their supply sergeants often did not ask for more M.R.E.'s but instead asked for more Rip It. The noncommissioned officer in charge of the chow hall told me that although "the quality of chow was a major concern, an overriding concern was the quantity of Rip Its in storage." Occasionally he would have to ration these energy drinks, and when this occurred, his soldiers working in the mess hall were bound to receive disgruntled remarks from people who were told they could only take a couple when leaving the mess hall.
Many soldiers who use supplements rationalize the use of these pills or powders by asking, "What is the difference between a Gatorade, Rip It, and supplements in pill or powder form?" Is conflating energy drinks with supplements such as creatine and weight-loss products an overgeneralization or a fair one?
The military seeks a force composed of physically strong and tough soldiers who are mentally sharp. But this demand for a more perfect soldier has begun to run up against potential dangers associated with the use of supplements. Despite the widespread use of supplements from muscle building to weight loss to stimulants, the military has not spent adequate effort and time educating soldiers on the possible dangers associated with the use of certain supplements.
Some have also argued that the use of supplements is really no different than the use of amphetamines by Air Force pilots to help them stay awake and mentally sharp while flying. Nonetheless, there are also risks associated with the use of these drugs in combat; in 2003 Air Force pilots blamed the use of amphetamines for the killing of four Canadians in an airstrike.
When visiting a military PX today, one will likely stumble upon a "health and wellness" store located near the PX, which is really just a provider of supplements. When I first entered the military these stores were nonexistent on military bases; now they are widespread. The use of supplements has sharply increased, and it would be an oversight by senior military leadership to ignore the possible dangers associated with the improper use of these supplements.
There is a subtle yet definite pressure soldiers feel about being stronger and tougher. These pressures can greatly impact the decision making of junior soldiers who seek recognition and who lack experience.
In their haste to become better soldiers, some soldiers could be imperiling their long-term health because they are not properly educated about the risks of certain supplements.
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9) Walking Tentatively in Protesters' Shoes
By GEORGE VECSEY
May 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/sports/08vescey.html?ref=us
When the Phoenix Suns wore the name Los Suns on their jerseys Wednesday night, it was construed by many of their fans as a political statement against the new Arizona law regarding illegal immigrants.
But as Phoenix Coach Alvin Gentry noted, the Suns had worn Los Suns twice during the season before the law was passed - and now have won all three games in the jerseys. Plus, Wednesday was Cinco de Mayo, the celebration of Mexican heritage.
As a political gesture, it fell far below the black gloves worn by two American sprinters in the 1968 Olympics. However, there definitely was a measure of criticism of the law from high up on the team - including from the Suns' owner, Robert Sarver; the general manager, Steve Kerr; and players like Grant Hill, Amar'e Stoudemire and Steve Nash.
It was refreshing to hear reaction to current events from sports figures. It is easy to take pot shots at athletes and team officials for living in a bubble, isolated by money and fame. When athletes care about something, conservative or liberal, it is a sign they are alive.
But nobody should be waiting for basketball or baseball players to dump over their water pails and walk out of the mine - the signal for a wildcat strike in coal country. These lads are not going out.
The new law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, and apparently supported by a slim majority of Americans, empowers law-enforcement officers to stop anybody who appears to be an illegal immigrant.
Kerr described the new law as something out of Nazi Germany. He is entitled to his vision of what happens when passion and prejudice get out of hand, inasmuch as his father, Malcolm H. Kerr, was assassinated in 1984 while serving as president of the American University in Beirut.
Nash, a Canadian originally from South Africa, has his world view, as does Hill, whose parents, Calvin and Janet, are prominent in public life.
Some baseball players have also spoken out against the law, raising the prospect of players' developing the Arizona Flu heading toward the 2011 All-Star Game, currently scheduled for Phoenix.
Only recently diagnosed, the Arizona Flu manifests itself with a low-grade ache, a few twinges of migrainelike headache, vague tightness in the hamstrings, throbbing in the rotator cuffs. From what I hear, it tends to strike professional athletes.
This illness is nothing like the Blue Flu, that mysterious ailment that strikes police officers suddenly, overnight, during times of labor disagreements, causing them to miss a shift.
However, there will be no outbreak of any flu, Arizona or Blue, leading to that All-Star Game. Baseball is particularly sensitive to the new law because 30 percent of its players are Latino and because half of the 30 teams now train in Arizona.
Michael Weiner, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, recently criticized the law and said he hoped it would be "repealed or modified promptly," or else the union would consider "additional steps," which he did not specify.
One of the steps will not be a walkout because the current contract is not believed to permit any form of strike.
Still, if enough players expressed symptoms of the Arizona Flu, this might even force Commissioner Bud Selig to take pro-active steps to move the All-Star Game out of Arizona. But the implications of the new law are much too serious to be foisted on Selig, who is just one person, serving 30 owners.
The new law mandates that officers pick out illegal immigrants among people walking the street. It's easy to spot them, Rep. Brian Bilbray, Republican from California, recently told Chris Matthews on MSNBC - just check out his footwear.
"They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there's different type of attire, there's different type of right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes," Bilbray said. "But mostly by behavior, it's mostly behavior."
With guidelines like this, it is not hard to imagine a visiting athlete walking down the street in Phoenix, wearing some cutting-edge shoes with faux mud on them, holes in the knees of his $1,000 jeans, a designer T-shirt that said Alcatraz on it, and getting hauled off by somebody with a badge and a pistol. Then who's going to play center field that night?
One thing the new Arizona law might do is encourage solidarity among players of color. Torii Hunter of the Angels, a really good guy, recently made an ill-phrased comment, including the word "impostors," about Latino players being counted with black players. Hunter knows better. The fear is real that anybody in Arizona, any athlete, anybody of color, could get hauled in by the shoe posse.
Speaking as somebody with relatives of various hues and backgrounds, I wouldn't want them going to Arizona during the current time of the troubles. I also worry about the health of the ballplayers.
If any All-Stars feel the Arizona Flu coming on, they should lie down and rest.
E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com
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10) Kent State Firing Order Heard on 1970 Tape
New Analysis of Recording From Deadly Campus Shooting Reveals National Guard Troops Ordered to Prepare to Fire
CLEVELAND, May 8, 2010
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/08/national/main6469530.shtml
(AP) A new analysis of a 40-year-old audio recording reveals that someone ordered National Guard troops to prepare to fire on students during a deadly Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in 1970, two forensics experts said.
The recording was enhanced and evaluated by New Jersey-based audio experts Stuart Allen and Tom Owen at the request of The Plain Dealer newspaper. Both concluded that they hear someone shout, "Guard!" Seconds later, a voice yells, "All right, prepare to fire!"
"Get down!" someone shouts, presumably in the crowd. A voice then says, "Guard!..." followed two seconds later by a booming volley of gunshots.
Four Kent State students were killed and nine were wounded.
"I think this is a major development," said Alan Canfora, who was shot and wounded in the right wrist during the protest on May 4, 1970. Canfora, who has long believed that the troops were ordered to fire, located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed.
The original reel-to-reel audio recording was made by Terry Strubbe, a student who placed a microphone in a window sill of his dormitory that overlooked the anti-war rally.
Allen, president and chief engineer of the Legal Services Group in Plainfield, N.J., removed extraneous noises - wind blowing across the microphone, for example - that obscured voices on the recording.
Without a voice sample for comparison, the new analysis can't determine who might have issued such a command or why.
Most of the senior Ohio National Guard officers directly in charge of the troops have died.
Ronald Snyder, a former Guard captain who led a unit that was at the Kent State protest but was not involved in the shootings, said the prepare-to-fire phrasing does not seem consistent with how military orders are given.
The FBI investigated whether an order had been given to fire and said it could only speculate. One theory was that a guardsman panicked or fired intentionally at a student and others fired when they heard the shot.
In 1974, eight guardsmen tried on federal civil rights charges were acquitted by a U.S. judge. The surviving victims and families of the dead settled a civil lawsuit for $675,000 in 1979, agreeing to drop all future claims against the Guardsmen.
The significance of the new audio analysis may be more historical than legal, said Sanford Rosen, one of plaintiffs' attorneys in the civil lawsuit.
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11) Oil spill containment box moved after ice crystals discovered inside
By The Associated Press
May 08, 2010, 2:55PM
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/oil_spill_containment_box_move.html
ON THE GULF OF MEXICO -- Icelike crystals encrusting a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box meant to contain oil gushing from a broken well deep in the Gulf of Mexico forced crews Saturday to back off a long-shot plan to contain the leak.
The buildup on the specially constructed containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said. Workers who had carefully lowered the massive box over the leak nearly a mile below the surface had to lift it and move it to the side. Now they're trying to unplug it while they look at other solutions.
More than 200,000 gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf since a rig exploded April 20, killing 11. The containment box, a method never before attempted at such depths, had been considered the best hope of stanching the flow in the short term.
"I wouldn't say it's failed yet," Suttles said. "What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work."
The blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.
While the precise cause is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.
Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.
A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project's safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.
Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.
Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.
As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, Bea said.
"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."
Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.
"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."
The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.
"That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. "The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below."
According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set "everything on fire," the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.
BP spokesman John Curry would not comment Friday night on whether methane gas or the series of events described in the internal documents caused the accident.
"Clearly, what happened on the Deepwater Horizon was a tragic accident," said Curry, who is based at an oil spill command center in Robert, La. "We anticipate all the facts will come out in a full investigation."
The BP executives were injured but survived, according to one account. Nine rig crew on the rig floor and two engineers died.
"The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they managed to get in the life boats with assistance from others," said the transcript.
The reports made Bea, the 73-year-old industry veteran, cry.
"It sure as hell is painful," he said. "Tears of frustration and anger."
On Saturday, the boat with the plumbing equipment for the containment box was about 1.5 miles from the vessel that lowered the box, which company officials hope can capture up to 85 percent of the oil and feed it into a tanker on the surface.
The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.
A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo -- arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons -- is drawing ever closer to Louisiana's coastal communities.
The Coast Guard and BP said Saturday about 2.1 million gallons of an oil-water mix had been collected, with about 10 percent being oil and the rest water. More than 160 miles of boom to contain the oil has been put out and crews have used nearly 275,000 gallons of chemicals to break up the oil on the water's surface.
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12) For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses
By JAD MOUAWAD
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09bp.html?hp
After BP's Texas City, Tex., refinery blew up in 2005, killing 15 workers, the company vowed to address the safety shortfalls that caused the blast.
The next year, when a badly maintained oil pipeline ruptured and spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska's North Slope, the oil giant once again promised to clean up its act.
In 2007, when Tony Hayward took over as chief executive, BP settled a series of criminal charges, including some related to Texas City, and agreed to pay $370 million in fines. "Our operations failed to meet our own standards and the requirements of the law," the company said then, pledging to improve its "risk management."
Despite those repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety, according to federal officials and industry analysts. Many problems still afflict its operations in Texas and Alaska, they say. Regulators are investigating a whistle-blower's allegations of safety violations at the Atlantis, one of BP's newest offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now BP is in the spotlight because of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, which killed 11 people and continues to spew oil into the ocean. It is too early to say what caused the explosion. Other companies were also involved, including Transocean, which owned and operated the drilling rig, and Halliburton, which had worked on the well a day before the explosion.
BP, based in London, has repeatedly asserted that Transocean was solely responsible for the accident.
However, lawmakers plan to question BP executives about their overall commitment to safety at Congressional hearings this week on the Gulf incident.
"It is a corporate problem," said Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, who has been particularly critical of BP's operations in Alaska and will lead the House committee hearing, on Wednesday. "Their mentality is to get in the foxhole and batten down the hatch. It just seems there is this pattern."
The oil industry is inherently more dangerous than many other industries, and oil companies, including BP, strive to reduce accidents and improve safety.
But BP, the nation's biggest oil and gas producer, has a worse health, environment and safety record than many other major oil companies, according to Yulia Reuter, the head of the energy research team at RiskMetrics, a consulting group that assigns scores to companies based on their performance in various categories, including safety.
The industry standard for safety, analysts say, is set by Exxon Mobil, which displays an obsessive attention to detail, monitors the smallest spill and imposes scripted procedures on managers.
Before drilling a well, for example, it runs elaborate computer models to test beforehand what the drillers might encounter. The company trains contractors to recognize risky behavior and asks employees for suggestions on how to improve safety. It says it has cut time lost to safety incidents by 12 percent each year since 2000.
Analysts credit that focus, in part, to the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding, which spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska.
"Whatever you think of them, Exxon is now the safest oil company there is," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University.
In an interview last week, Mr. Hayward, BP's chief executive, conceded that the company had problems when he took over three years ago. But he said he had instituted broad changes to improve safety, including setting up a common management system with precise safety rules and training for all facilities.
"You can't change an organization of 100,000 people overnight, but we have made extraordinary strides in three years," Mr. Hayward said.
Ms. Reuter agrees that the company has made improvements during that time, resulting in fewer spills and injuries.
Yet some government officials say that they are troubled by the continuation of hazardous practices at BP's refineries and Alaskan oil operations despite warnings from regulators.
For example, last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 violations at the Texas City refinery - many concerning faulty valves, which are critical for safety given the high temperatures and pressures. The agency fined BP a record $87.4 million, which was more than four times the previous record fine, also to BP, for the 2005 explosion.
Another refinery, in Toledo, Ohio, was fined $3 million two months ago for "willful" safety violations, including the use of valves similar to those that contributed to the Texas City blast.
"BP has systemic safety and health problems," said Jordan Barab, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. "They need to take their intentions and apply them much more effectively on the ground, where the hazards actually lie."
BP said it was in full compliance and had contested the OSHA findings at Texas City and Toledo. Since the 2005 blast in Texas, BP has invested $1 billion to improve the refinery, it said.
Problems also remain in Alaska. In January, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent BP a letter highlighting "serious safety and production incidents" over the last two years in Prudhoe Bay, the nation's largest oil field.
In October 2009, gas at the field's central processing plant leaked because of a stuck valve. BP operators were unaware of the leak because a pilot flame was not lit and security cameras were not pointed in the right direction, the committee said.
"This incident could have caused an explosion," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and Mr. Stupak told BP in the letter.
Mr. Hayward acknowledged that the gas leak could have been serious but insisted "it wasn't an incident."
As for its Atlantis offshore platform, BP said it had found no evidence to support a whistle-blower's allegations that it was operating without all the right paperwork. A spokesman for the company said, "Platform personnel have access to the information they need for the safe operation of the facility."
The identity of the whistle-blower, and the exact nature of the person's evidence, have not been made public. The federal Minerals Management Service is conducting the investigation.
Some analysts say the safety problems indicate that BP has not yet reined in the culture of risk that prevailed under Mr. Hayward's predecessor, John Browne, who transformed BP from a sleepy British oil producer into one of the world's top explorers through the acquisitions of Amoco and Atlantic Richfield.
Mr. Browne set aggressive profit goals, and BP managers drastically cut costs to meet their quarterly targets. After the 2005 explosion in Texas City, investigators found that routine maintenance that might have averted the accident had been delayed because of pressure to reduce expenses.
In 2007, an independent review panel appointed by BP and led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, painted a scathing portrait of cultural failure at BP, finding that the company put profits before safety.
Mr. Browne, through a representative, declined to comment for this article.
One person brought in to address BP's lapses was Robert A. Malone, the chairman of BP America from 2006 to 2009.
"What I saw were breakdowns in a culture of safety," said Mr. Malone. "But to say there was something systemic - I couldn't see that."
Until the Deepwater Horizon accident, BP had not been involved in a fatal accident in the Gulf of Mexico. But between 1996 and 2009, according to the Minerals Management Service, BP-operated platforms spilled a total of about 7,000 barrels of oil - 14 percent of the amount spilled in the Gulf by any company. In that period, BP accounted for 15 percent of the oil production in the Gulf.
Now, the government says, nearly that much oil is pouring out every day from the current spill.
Clifford Krauss, Julie Werdigier, Andrew W. Lehren and Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.
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13) Greek Debt Woes Ripple Outward, From Asia to U.S.
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/global/09ripple.html?ref=world
The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy, from the ability of Asian corporations to raise money to the outlook for money-market funds where American savers park their cash.
What was once a local worry about the debt burden of one of Europe's smallest economies has quickly gone global. Already, jittery investors have forced Brazil to scale back bond sales as interest rates soared and caused currencies in Asia like the Korean won to weaken. Ten companies around the world that had planned to issue stock delayed their offerings, the most in a single week since October 2008.
The increased global anxiety threatens to slow the recovery in the United States, where job growth has finally picked up after the deepest recession since the Great Depression. It could also inhibit consumer spending as stock portfolios shrink and loans are harder to come by.
"It's not just a European problem, it's the U.S., Japan and the U.K. right now," said Ian Kelson, a bond fund manager in London with T. Rowe Price. "It's across the board."
The crisis is so perilous for Europe that the leaders of the 16 countries that use the euro worked into the early morning Saturday on a proposal to create a so-called stabilization mechanism intended to reassure the markets. On Sunday, finance ministers from all 27 European Union states are expected to gather in Brussels to discuss and possibly approve the proposal.
The mechanism would probably be a way for the states to guarantee loans taken out by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, to support ailing economies. European leaders including the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said Saturday morning that the union should be ready to activate the mechanism by Monday morning if needed.
In Spain Saturday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. underscored the importance of the issue after meeting with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. "We agreed on the importance of a resolute European action to strengthen the European economy and to build confidence in the markets," Mr. Biden said. "And I conveyed the support of the United States of America toward those efforts."
Beyond Europe, the crisis has sent waves of fear through global stock exchanges.
A decade ago, it took more than a year for the chain reaction that began with the devaluation of the Thai currency to spread beyond Asia to Russia, which defaulted on its debt, and eventually caused the near-collapse of a giant American hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.
This crisis, by contrast, seemed to ricochet from country to country in seconds, as traders simultaneously abandoned everything from Portuguese bonds to American blue chips. On Wall Street on Thursday afternoon, televised images of rioting in Athens to protest austerity measures only amplified the anxiety as the stock market briefly plunged nearly 1,000 points.
"Up until last week there was this confidence that nothing could upset the apple cart as long as the economy and jobs growth was positive," said William H. Gross, managing director of Pimco, the bond manager. "Now, fear is back in play."
While the immediate causes for worry are Greece's ballooning budget deficit and the risk that other fragile countries like Spain and Portugal might default, the turmoil also exposed deeper fears that government borrowing in bigger nations like Britain, Germany and even the United States is unsustainable.
"Greece may just be an early warning signal," said Byron Wien, a prominent Wall Street strategist who is vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners. "The U.S. is a long way from being where Greece is, but the developed world has been living beyond its means and is now being called to account."
If the anxiety spreads, American banks could return to the posture they adopted after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, when they cut back sharply on mortgages, auto financing, credit card lending and small business loans. That could stymie job growth and halt the recovery now gaining traction.
Some American companies are facing higher costs to finance their debt, while big exporters are seeing their edge over European rivals shrink as the dollar strengthens. Riskier assets, like stocks, are suddenly out of favor, while cash has streamed into the safest of all investments, gold.
Just as Greece is being forced to pay more to borrow, more risky American companies are being forced to pay up, too. Some issuers of new junk bonds in the consumer sector are likely to have to pay roughly 9 percent on new bonds, up from about 8.5 percent before this week's volatility, said Kevin Cassidy, senior credit officer with Moody's.
To be sure, not all of the consequences are negative. Though the situation is perilous for Europe, the United States economy does still enjoy some favorable tailwinds. Interest rates have dropped, benefiting homebuyers seeking mortgages and other borrowers. New data released Friday showed the economy added 290,000 jobs in April, the best monthly showing in four years.
Further, crude oil prices fell last week on fears of a slowdown, which should bring lower prices at the pump within weeks. Meanwhile, the dollar gained ground against the euro, reaching its highest level in 14 months.
While that makes European vacations more affordable for American tourists and could improve the fortunes of European companies, it could hurt profits at their American rivals. A stronger dollar makes American goods less affordable for buyers overseas, a one-two punch for American exporters if Europe falls back into recession. Excluding oil, the 16 countries that make up the euro zone buy about 14 percent of American exports.
For the largest American companies, which have benefited from the weak dollar in recent years, the pain could be more acute. More than a quarter of the profits of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index come from abroad, with Europe forming the largest component, according to Tobias Levkovich, Citigroup's chief United States equity strategist. All this could mean the difference between an economy that grows fast enough to bring down unemployment, and one that is more stagnant.
The direct exposure of American banks to Greece is small, but below the surface, there are signs of other fissures. Even the strongest banks in Germany and France have heavy exposure to more troubled economies on the periphery of the Continent, and these big banks in turn are closely intertwined with their American counterparts.
Over all, United States banks have $3.6 trillion in exposure to European banks, according to the Bank for International Settlements. That includes more than a trillion dollars in loans to France and Germany, and nearly $200 billion to Spain.
What is more, American money-market investors are already feeling nervous about hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term loans to big European banks and other financial institutions. "Apparently systemic risk is still alive and well," wrote Alex Roever, a J.P. Morgan credit analyst in a research note published Friday. With so much uncertainty about Europe and the euro, managers of these ultra-safe investment vehicles are demanding that European borrowers pay higher rates.
These funds provide the lifeblood of the international banking system. If worries about the safety of European banks intensify, they could push up their borrowing costs and push down the value of more than $500 billion in short-term debt held by American money-market funds.
Uncertainty about the stability of assets in money market funds signaled a tipping point that accelerated the downward spiral of the credit crisis in 2008, and ultimately prompted banks to briefly halt lending to one other.
Now, as Europe teeters, the dangers to the American economy - and the broader financial system - are becoming increasingly evident. "It seems like only yesterday that European policy makers were gleefully watching the U.S. get its economic comeuppance, not appreciating the massive tidal wave coming at them across the Atlantic," said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor of international finance who also served as the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. "We should not make the same mistake."
James Kanter contributed from Brussels.
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14) BP Is in the Spotlight for Now, but 3 Other Companies Could Share the Blame
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09blame.html?ref=us
As Congress prepares to hold hearings into the April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a billion-dollar question is bobbing on the oil-slicked waves: Whose fault is it?
So far, BP, the British company that leased the deepwater rig, has commanded the spotlight. But the oil giant is emphatic about blaming the rig's owner and operator, a Swiss company called Transocean, for the accident.
Two other companies - Halliburton, which handled a critical procedure about a day before the accident, and Cameron International, which made the blowout preventer that failed to engage - have also found themselves caught in the swirl of litigation and finger-pointing.
The Coast Guard has officially named both BP and Transocean as "responsible parties" in the incident. But representatives from all four companies have been summoned to Capitol Hill to answer questions about the accident.
While many Americans are already familiar with BP, the hearings are likely to represent a crash course in the patchwork of businesses that peddle their equipment and expertise in the fast-expanding deepwater drilling market.
Transocean, which was based in Houston for decades before moving to Switzerland via the Cayman Islands, is a leader in the field of offshore oil drilling, with a global fleet of more than 130 mobile offshore drilling platforms - massive, highly complex structures of floating engineering, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
Last year, BP accounted for 12 percent of Transocean's operating earnings of $11.5 billion, according to company filings. The Deepwater Horizon, a nine-year-old rig designed to send a drill miles below the ocean's surface, was being leased to BP at a daily rate of about $500,000.
Analysts describe Transocean as having a "solid reputation" within the offshore industry, and just two years ago, it received the industry's top safety award from the federal Minerals Management Service.
Still, it eliminated bonuses for its top executives last year, citing the deaths of four rig workers in safety-related accidents. The move was meant "to promote the goal of an incident-free workplace and, in particular, the avoidance of future fatal accidents," the company said in its annual report.
Speaking to investors in a conference call on Thursday, Transocean's chief executive, Steven L. Newman, was quick to push back against BP over blame for the spill. He said that "environmental exposures related to the hydrocarbons released from the well are the responsibility of BP."
Some experts have suggested shoddy cement work at the drill site as one possible cause of the blowout. Halliburton, which provides oil services in more than 70 countries for the biggest private and national oil companies, had that particular task. Halliburton has been accused of doing a poor cement job before - most recently off the coast of Australia last year, where a shallower well blew out, leaking oil for months. A Halliburton employee testified to Australian authorities that he repumped concrete, a procedure he characterized as ill-advised but directed by the rig operator, a Thai company.
Robert MacKenzie, a former cement engineer in the oil industry and now an analyst at FBR Capital Markets, co-wrote a recent report that said, "Had cement isolated the production zone, there would be no flow." But he also wrote that several factors could have explained the failure, including poor engineering, poor procedures and incomplete mud removal.
Halliburton has said that its application of the cement at the Deepwater Horizon project was consistent with industry standards and the well design. The company, based in Houston, said that it was cooperating with the investigations and that it would be premature to speculate on any causes of the accident.
Another question in the most recent accident is why a device aboard the Deepwater Horizon, known as a blowout preventer, was not activated. It is supposed to seal off the well and stop the oil flow in an emergency. Cameron, its manufacturer, has maintained a low profile.
"Everyone has questions as to what may have caused this accident to occur," said Jack B. Moore, the company's chief executive, during a call with investors shortly after the accident. "While I'm sure that this answer will come once the full investigation is completed, our focus at this time is on assisting Transocean and BP to get this well shut in."
Based in Houston, Cameron serves a variety of industries, but it is best known for providing valves and other equipment to the oil and gas business. The company is by far the king of blowout preventers, with operating revenue of $5.3 billion and more than 400 of its devices on rigs at varying depths around the globe, according to Rigzone, a drilling industry publication.
It remains unclear why Cameron's device did not activate.
Lynnley Browning and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting.
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15) Lena Horne dies: 'I was a kind of black that white people could accept'
May 10, 2010 - 3:57PM
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/lena-horne-dies--i-was-a-kind-of-black-that-white-people-could-accept-20100510-unzq.html
Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialise with them, has died aged 92.
Horne died on Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.
Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said.
"I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical Stormy Weather.
Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.
On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like The Lady Is a Tramp and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of Jamaica in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time".
Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs".
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.
"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out ... it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.
Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt" she once said.
Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions - one straight and the other gut-wrenching - of Stormy Weather to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless. ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiselled, burnished, refined her".
When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of colour who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie.
Dropping out of school at 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England.
An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography Stormy Weather, author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him".
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16) Along Gulf, Many Wary of Promises After Spill
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/10claims.html?hp
GULFPORT, Miss. - People who live along the Gulf Coast know that a promise of money is not nearly as nice as it sounds. It means waiting and waiting, and raising a fuss, and then waiting some more, and consulting lawyers and talking to bureaucrats, and still waiting, and in some cases just giving up.
And now, after almost five years of fighting insurance companies and government agencies to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, they are contemplating the prospect of going through all of that again.
It is too early to tell how the maddeningly unpredictable oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico will affect the economies that depend on the ocean and its edible inhabitants. And it is too early to judge how BP will act in providing compensation for economic losses. But recent experience does not provide comfort.
"The insurance industry and big corporations have a history of stall, deny and kind of wait you out," said Kevin Buckle, who works for Ship Island Excursions, a charter boat company here. Mr. Buckle had such a bad experience after Hurricane Katrina that he has been pushing for a state insurance bill of rights. Like most everyone else, he is in a wait-and-see mode.
BP says it has a "robust process to manage claims" and "is committed to pay legitimate claims" for loss or damage caused by the spill, all in addition to footing the cleanup costs.
There is a toll-free telephone number to call, and if the claim is small enough - generally, immediate loss of pay fits this category - an operator can walk a person through the process and have the claim paid within 48 hours, said Bill Salvin, a company spokesman. Any person accepting such a payment does not waive any rights against future litigation or claims. Larger claims, Mr. Salvin said, would require an investigation by adjusters.
So far, around 4,700 claims have been filed, a BP spokesman said, with a little over 800 paid, almost all of them for loss of income.
Along the bayous of southern Louisiana and along the docks of Mississippi harbors, it is difficult to find someone who has even heard that the toll-free number exists. And those who have called often report difficulty getting through to an operator. So BP is enlisting churches and community groups to get the word out, as well as setting up offices in vacant storefronts along the coast to deal with claimants in person.
This sounds good to coastal residents. But they want it in writing.
"I mean, Exxon came out and said the same stuff after Valdez," said Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, who describes himself as a "veteran of the insurance wars" after Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. Hood said he was cautiously optimistic after his conversations with BP's lawyers, who are expected to formalize some of their assurances in writing early this week.
The question of liability is likely to be unsettled for some time. BP officials said that the $75 million limit on the company's liability, as set forth in the law that governs oil spills, is "not relevant" in this case, and some United States senators seem to agree, having proposed legislation that would retroactively raise the cap to $10 billion.
But with several companies involved in the drilling rig that caused the spill, including the rig's owner, Transocean, there will most likely be protracted legal battles that will determine who actually owes whom for what. For now it is BP, the self-acknowledged "responsible party," that is spending the money.
BP is, obviously, interested in where that money goes, hence the need for adjusters on the large claims and the comment by Tony Hayward, the company's chief executive, to The Times of London: "This is America - come on. We're going to have lots of illegitimate claims."
It is true that fraud cases related to Hurricane Katrina continue to trickle into federal courts. But the burden of the term "legitimate claims" has given some people pause. The unease is especially keen here, given the often arbitrary-seeming reasons for denials of coverage after the storm and the fact that many of those likely to be affected by the slick lack the legal education - or in the case of the large community of Vietnamese, the language ability - to know what kind of agreements they have made.
The worries were heightened by early incidents that BP officials have tried to put behind them. In one case, BP officials were making boat owners, many of whom have been temporarily put out of work by the spill, sign agreements to work in the cleanup effort that included waivers of certain kinds of liability. BP dropped the clauses, which Mr. Hayward referred to as a "misstep," but not without facing widespread public outrage and a ruling in Federal District Court.
Then the Alabama attorney general condemned reports that a BP employee had offered quick $5,000 settlements for economic damages in exchange for waivers of future liability. Several BP spokesmen said they were not aware that such an offer was ever made, though Mr. Hayward appeared to confirm it last week when he told reporters it was a "screw-up" by a few employees.
A response this big is going to have glitches, Mr. Salvin said. While this is true, these particular glitches worried coastal residents because they conformed to the worst fears.
"That's the kind of deal they would do," said Brent Coon, a lawyer who sued on behalf of victims of the BP Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that left 15 dead, and who has filed a suit in this disaster as well. "Let's go ahead and just buy them off quick and cheap now before they realize how bad this is going to be."
Meanwhile, a fleet of lawyers is already massing, with new class-action suits being filed seemingly by the hour. Even some plaintiff attorneys here worry that fishermen could see badly-needed claims payments eaten up by the fees of less-scrupulous lawyers.
But the last five years have taught vigilance.
"I don't trust much," said Loc Nguyen, 46, smoking Marlboro Reds on the stern of his shrimp boat in the harbor of Pass Christian, Miss. "If you want money, you have to go see lawyer first."
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17) Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan.
Mr. Holder proposed carving out a broad new exception to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling. It generally forbids prosecutors from using as evidence statements made before suspects have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.
He said interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions.
The proposal to ask Congress to loosen the Miranda rule comes against the backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects - including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case - should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants.
For months, the administration has defended the criminal justice system as strong enough to handle terrorism cases. Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration's stance as a "new priority" and "big news" in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"We're now dealing with international terrorists," he said, "and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face."
The conclusion that Mr. Shahzad was involved in an international plot appeared to come from investigations that began after his arrest and interrogation, including inquiries into his links with the Taliban in Pakistan.
"We know that they helped facilitate it," Mr. Holder said of the Times Square bombing attempt. "We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot."
Mr. Holder's statement, and comments by President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, were the highest-level confirmation yet that the authorities believe the Pakistani branch of the Taliban was directly involved. Investigators were still pursuing leads based on what Mr. Shahzad has told them, and the officials did not describe their evidence in detail.
Mr. Brennan appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.
"He was trained by them," Mr. Brennan said. "He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack."
He added: "We have good cooperation from our Pakistani partners and from others. We're learning more about this incident every day. We're hopeful we're going to be able to identify any other individuals that were involved."
Even before the attempted Times Square attack, the administration had been stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned without being warned of their rights.
After the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet on Dec. 25, for example, the F.B.I. questioned the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for about 50 minutes without reading him his rights. And last week, Mr. Brennan said, the F.B.I. interrogated Mr. Shahzad for three or four hours before delivering a Miranda warning.
In both cases, the administration relied on an exception to Miranda for immediate threats to public safety. That exception was established by the Supreme Court in a 1984 case in which a police officer asked a suspect, at the time of his arrest and before reading him his rights, about where he had hidden a gun. The court deemed the defendant's answer and the gun admissible as evidence against him.
Conservatives have long disliked the Miranda ruling, which is intended to ensure that confessions are not coerced. Its use in terrorism cases has been especially controversial because of concerns that informing a suspect of his rights could interrupt the flow of the interrogation and prompt him to stop disclosing information that might prevent a future attack.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on "This Week" on ABC that he supported Mr. Holder's proposal. However, he also suggested that enacting it would not quell conservative criticism, arguing that it would be even better to hold suspects like Mr. Shahzad as military detainees for lengthier interrogation.
"I would not have given him Miranda warnings after just a couple of hours of questioning," Mr. Giuliani said. "I would have instead declared him an enemy combatant, asked the president to do that, and at the same time, that would have given us the opportunity to question him for a much longer period of time."
Any effort to further limit the Miranda rule will be likely to face challenges. In a 2000 case, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to strike down a statute that essentially overruled Miranda by allowing prosecutors to use statements defendants made voluntarily before being read their rights.
Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations.
For example, even after Mr. Shahzad was read his rights, he waived them and continued talking. With Mr. Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to light a bomb hidden in his undergarments, the pre-Miranda interrogation lasted until he was taken into surgery for the burns he suffered. Afterward, he did not resume cooperating and was also read his Miranda rights, although the sequence of events is uncertain. Relatives later persuaded him to start talking again.
In Congressional testimony last week, Mr. Holder defended the legality of the delays in both cases, noting that the Supreme Court had set no time limit for use of the public-safety exception. But on Sunday, he seemed to indicate uneasiness about the executive branch unilaterally pushing those limits, and called for Congressional action to allow lengthier interrogations without Miranda warnings in international terrorism cases.
"If we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception," Mr. Holder said. "And that's one of the things that I think we're going to be reaching out to Congress to do: to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face."
Philip B. Heymann, a Harvard law professor and high-ranking Justice Department official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, said the Supreme Court was likely to uphold a broader emergency exception for terrorism cases - especially if Congress approved it. "Not having addressed how long the emergency exception can be, the Supreme Court would be very hesitant to disagree with both the president and Congress if there was any reasonable resolution to that question," he said.
Still, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress had no authority to "chip away" at the Miranda ruling because it was based in the Constitution. He predicted that any effort to carve a broader exception would be vigorously contested.
"The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America's legal standing," he said. And Virginia E. Sloan, president of the bipartisan Constitution Project, said the existing public safety exception to Miranda seemed to be working, so there was no need to erode constitutional protections in ways that could later be expanded to other kinds of criminal suspects.
"It makes good political theater," she said, "but we need to have a clear problem that we are addressing and a clear justification for any change. I haven't seen that yet."
Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.
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