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Roger Waters - "We Shall Overcome" for Gaza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMMHepfYVc
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Bernadette McAliskey Quote on Zionists:
"The root cause of conflict in the Middle East is the very nature of the state of Israel. It is a facist state. It is a international bully, which exists not to protect the rights of the Jewish people but to perpetuate a belief of Zionist supremacy. It debases the victims of the holocaust by its own strategy for extermination of Palestine and Palestinians and has become the image and likeness of its own worst enemy, the Third Reich.
"Anyone challenging their position, their crazed self-image is entitled, in the fascist construction of their thinking, to be wiped out. Every humanitarian becomes a terrorist? How long is the reality of the danger Israel poses to world peace going to be denied by the Western powers who created this monster?"
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Rachel Maddow: Disgraceful response to the oil itself
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#37563648
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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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YES ON F, GIVE RENTERS A BREAK!
Just two weeks before the June 8 election and if we are going to give renters a break from rent increases we need your help now!
Thousands of San Francisco renters are unemployed and at risk of losing their homes--Prop F will let them delay any new rent increases and give them a chance to stay housed.
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National Days of Action
Seize BP's Assets NOW! Protests in 50+ cities
San Francisco Protest: Tues. June 8, 5pm
90 New Montgomery St.
The Seize BP! Campaign is garnering media attention nationwide! On June 3, CNN featured the Seize BP Week of Action on television. "We know millions of people are deeply concerned about what's going on in the Gulf right now," a Seize BP organizer told CNN. Click here to read the CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/03/gulf.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T1
The response to the call to action has been amazing. People across the country are mobilizing to take to the streets over the next seven days and demand: Seize BP! It is now clear that BP is incapable of solving the crisis, and oil will continue to gush until at least August. BP and the government are stalling, but the people of the Gulf coast and the environment can't wait. The time to take action is now!
More than 50 demonstrations that we know of are taking place. Among the cities that are holding protests are Atlanta, GA.; Tampa, FL.; Irving, TX; St. Joseph, Michigan; Front Royal and Virginia Beach, VA; Washington DC, New York Chicago and many more.
In San Francisco, the protest will take place on Tuesday, June 8, 5 pm at the BP offices, 90 New Montgomery St. (between Mission and Market St.). For more information call 415-821-6545. Volunteers are needed to help with the protest and the Seize BP campaign.
Be a part of this movement and help it grow! A partial list of recently announced actions can be found below, and a list that is being frequently updated can be found here:
http://www.pephost.org/site/News2?news_iv_ctrl=-1&page=NewsArticle&id=9593#demos
If you are organizing an activity in your area, or if you know of one that's being organized, be sure to click here and let us know so that we can post it to the website:
http://www.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=7080&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS
Volunteers are working around the clock in cities throughout the country. But we can't do it without funds. Please make your donation today by clicking this link:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2541&JServSessionIdr004=f9feb3ohv1.app209a
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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THE INNER TOUR - A touching film about the Palestinian right of return
June 10, 2010, 7:30 P.M.
ANSWER: San Francisco Bay Area
ATA Theater, 992 Valencia St. at 21st St., SF
$6 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
At time of the film's production in 2000-just months before the second Intifada-Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and were allowed into '48 Palestine on sightseeing tours.
The Inner Tour documents a three-day trip through Galilee to the Lebanon border, Tel Aviv and Jaffa where many of the passengers once lived. We hear conversations about occupation and loss. Several have been in Israeli prisons. Another sees his mother in Lebanon through barbed wire, unable to visit her. One woman tells how her husband was gunned down by Israeli soldiers while walking home. One man locates the site where his village once stood before it was destroyed by occupation forces, and finds his father's grave. 2002, Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles, 98 min.
For more info, call 415-821-6545.
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Mass Protest -- Beginning of Mehserle Trial -- Justice for Oscar Grant!!
Date: Monday, June 14, 2010
Time: 8:00am - 5:00pm
Location: All Out to the Courthouse
Street: Temple and Broadway
City/Town: Los Angeles, CA
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Please forward widely
Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart,
Forgive this hasty note updating Lynne's situation. I am off to Brazil shortly and must catch a plane soon.
I just spoke with Lynne's husband Ralph Poynter last night and learned the following.
A regularly scheduled follow up test to check on whether Lynne's breast cancel had reappeared revealed that Lynne now had a spot on her liver. Lynne struggled with prison authorities to have a required biopsy and related tests conducted at her regular, that is, non-prison, Roosevelt Hospital. Her requests were denied and she was compelled to have the biopsy done in a notoriously inferior facility where the results could not be determined for a week as compared to the almost immediate lab tests available at Roosevelt.
During Lynne's prison hospital stay she was shackled and handcuffed making rest and sleep virtually impossible. A horrified doctor ordered the shackles removed but immediately following his departure they were fastened on Lynne's feet and hands once again.
She is now back in her New York City prison cell. Her attorneys have filed for a postponement of her scheduled July 15 court appearance where Federal District Court sentencing Judge John Koeltl is to review the original 28-month jail sentence that he imposed last year.
This sentence was appealed by government prosecutors, who sought to order Koelt to impose a 30-year sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, was sympathetic to the government's position and essentially stated that Koeltl's 28-month sentence exceeded the bounds of "reasonableness." Koeltl was ordered to reconsider. A relatively recent Supreme Court decision granted federal district court judges wide discretion in determining the length of internment. Koeltl's decision took into consideration many factors that the court system allows in determining Lynne's sentence. These included Lynne's character, her service to the community, her health and financial history and more. He ruled, among other things that Lynne's service to the community was indeed a "credit to her profession and to the nation."
Contrariwise, the government and prison authorities see Lynne as a convicted terrorist. Lynne was the victim of a frame-up trial held in the post-911 context. She was convicted on four counts of "aiding and abetting terrorism" stemming from a single act, Lynne's issuance of a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind" Egyptian Shreik Omar Abdel Rachman. The press release, that the government claimed violated a Special Administrative Order (SAM), was originally ignored as essentially trivial by the Clinton administration and then Attorney General Janet Reno. But the Bush administration's Attorney General John Ashcroft decided to go after Lynne with a sledge hammer.
A monstrous trial saw government attorney's pulling out all the stops to convince an intimidated jury that Lynne was associated in some way with terrorist acts across the globe, not to mention with Osama bin Laden. Both the judge and government were compelled to admit in court that there were no such "associations," but press clippings found in Lynne's office were nevertheless admitted as "hearsay" evidence even though they were given to Lynne by the government under the rules of discovery.
It is likely that Lynne's request for a postponement will be granted, assuming the government holds to the law that a prisoner has the right to partake in her/his own defense. Lynne's illness has certainly prevented her from doing so.
In the meantime, Lynne would like nothing more than to hear from her friends and associates. Down the road her defense team will also be looking for appropriate letters to the judge on Lynne's behalf. More later on the suggested content of these letters.
Please write Lynne to express your love and solidarity:
Lynne Stewart 53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, New York 10007
In Solidarity,
Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
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Lynne Stewart and the Guantanamo Lawyers: Same Fact Patterns, Same Opponent, Different Endings?
Lynne Stewart will be re-sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.
By Ralph Poynter
(Ralph Poynter is the Life partner of Lynne Stewart. He is presently dedicated 24/7 to her defense, as well as other causes.)
Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com
In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.
In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge's protective court order. The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice. The results in each case were very different.
In March of 2010, a right wing group "Keep America Safe" led by Lynne Cheney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign. Initially they attacked the right of the detainees to be represented at all. This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16. This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge's protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act. These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials. They carried in news report of US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison. Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers "provided news outlets with 'interviews' of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations." When a partner at one of the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.
This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such "wayward" firms. Instead it is significant because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.
Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any "criminal" manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.
I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted. Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity. There was no press conference. The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer...NO.
Instead an "armada" of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade, papered the US District Courthouse in Washington D.C. They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power-- derived from the corporate world--and in 2006 "settled" the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment. Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters. There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.
Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison. It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.
This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system ---those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power--are treated differently. Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???
Lynne Stewart deserves Justice... equal justice under law. Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers. The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness. They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext. The sharp contrasts between the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal--one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our righteous resistance.
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INVITATION TO A NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
United National Peace Conference
July 23 - 25, 2010, Albany , NY
Unac2010@aol.com
UNAC, P.O. Box 21675
Cleveland, OH 44121
518-227-6947
www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Greetings:
Twenty co-sponsoring national organizations urge you to attend this conference scheduled for Albany , New York July 23-25, 2010. They are After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Bailout the People Movement, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Lawyers Guild, Peace Action, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, U.S. Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait.
The purpose of the conference is to plan united actions in the months ahead in support of demands for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq , and money for human needs, not for wars, occupations, and bail-outs. The peace movement is strongest and most effective when plans for united actions are made by the whole range of antiwar and social justice organizations meeting together and deciding together dates and places for national mobilizations.
Each person attending the conference will have voice and vote. Attendees will have the opportunity to amend the action proposal submitted by conference co-sponsors, add demands, and submit resolutions for consideration by the conference.
Keynoters will be NOAM CHOMSKY, internationally renowned political activist, author, and critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and DONNA DEWITT, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Co-Chair, South Carolina Progressive Network; Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War; Administrative Body, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
The conference's website is www.nationalpeaceconference.org and you will find there details regarding other speakers, workshops, registration, hotel and travel information, and how to submit amendments, demands, and resolutions. The action proposal has also been published on the website.
Please write us at UNAC2010@aol.com for further information or call 518-227-6947. We can fill orders for copies of the conference brochure. Tables for display and sale of materials can be reserved.
We look forward to seeing you in Albany on July 23-25.
In peace,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Peace Conference
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Education 4 the People!
October 7 Day of Action in Defense of Public Education - California
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference at SFSU on OCT 16th
Posted on May 24, 2010 by ooofireballooo
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference
@ San Francisco State University on October 16th
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
Proposal: Form a conference organizing listserve immediately!
Please join the google group today.
* Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/fallconferencesfsu
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Gulf Oil Spill?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAHS5z6QKok
Dear Readers,
If you are wondering why an antiwar newsletter is giving full coverage to the oil spill, it's because:
(1) "Supplying the US army with oil is one of BP's biggest markets, and further exploration in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico is part of its long-term strategy."*
(2) "The Senate on Thursday, [May 27, 2010] approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq..."**
The two are inextricably entwined and interdependent.
--Bonnie Weinstein
*The black hole at the bottom of the Gulf
No one seems to know the extent of the BP disaster
By David Randall and Margareta Pagano
Sunday, 23 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-black-hole-at-the-bottom-of-the-gulf-1980693.html
**Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars
By CARL HULSE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/politics/28cong.html?ref=us
Watch BP Live Video Webcam Camera Feed of Gulf Oil Spill Here! (Update 7)
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/20/live-video-feed-webcam-gulf-oil-spill/
What BP does not want you to see:
ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I've ever seen underwater."
Check out what BP does not want you to see. And please share this widely -- every American should see what's happening under the surface in the Gulf.
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
Live BP Gulf Oil Spill Webcam Video Reveals 5 Leaks
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/24/live-bp-gulf-oil-spill-webcam-video-reveals-5-leaks/
Stop Shell Oil's Offshore Drilling Plans in the Arctic
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/308597489?z00m=19844689
Sign the Petition to Ban Offshore Drilling Now!
http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31522015
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POEM ON WHAT ISRAEL DOES NOT ALLOW INTO GAZA - FROM THE IRISH TIMES / CARDOMAN AS A BIOLOGICAL WARFARE WEAPON
[ The poem does not mention that the popular herb cardamom is banned from importation into Gaza. Israel probably fears that cardamom can be used as a biological weapon. Rockets with cardamom filled projectiles landing in Israel could cause Israeli soldiers 'guarding' the border to succumb to pangs of hunger, leave their posts to go get something eat, and leave Israel defenseless. - Howard Keylor]
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet who lives in Co Tipperary. He is the author of eight books of poetry, the latest of which is Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2010 ), as well as several works of non-fiction
*
No tinned meat is allowed, no tomato paste,
no clothing, no shoes, no notebooks.
These will be stored in our warehouses at Kerem Shalom
until further notice.
Bananas, apples, and persimmons are allowed into Gaza,
peaches and dates, and now macaroni
(after the American Senator's visit).
These are vital for daily sustenance.
But no apricots, no plums, no grapes, no avocados, no jam.
These are luxuries and are not allowed.
Paper for textbooks is not allowed.
The terrorists could use it to print seditious material.
And why do you need textbooks
now that your schools are rubble?
No steel is allowed, no building supplies, no plastic pipe.
These the terrorists could use to launch rockets
against us.
Pumpkins and carrots you may have, but no delicacies,
no cherries, no pomegranates, no watermelon, no onions,
no chocolate.
We have a list of three dozen items that are allowed,
but we are not obliged to disclose its contents.
This is the decision arrived at
by Colonel Levi, Colonel Rosenzweig, and Colonel Segal.
Our motto:
'No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.'
You may fish in the Mediterranean,
but only as far as three km from shore.
Beyond that and we open fire.
It is a great pity the waters are polluted
twenty million gallons of raw sewage dumped into the sea every day
is the figure given.
Our rockets struck the sewage treatments plants,
and at this point spare parts to repair them are not allowed.
As long as Hamas threatens us,
no cement is allowed, no glass, no medical equipment.
We are watching you from our pilotless drones
as you cook your sparse meals over open fires
and bed down
in the ruins of houses destroyed by tank shells.
And if your children can't sleep,
missing the ones who were killed in our incursion,
or cry out in the night, or wet their beds
in your makeshift refugee tents,
or scream, feeling pain in their amputated limbs -
that's the price you pay for harbouring terrorists.
God gave us this land.
A land without a people for a people without a land.
--
Greta Berlin, Co-Founder
+357 99 18 72 75
witnessgaza.com
www.freegaza.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza
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Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) and the Murder of Black Panther Leaders
http://www.averdade.org.br/modules/news/article.php?storyid=451
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This is just inspiring! You have to watch it! ...bw
Don't Get Caught in a Bad Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79pX1IOqPU
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SEIZE BP!
[While this is a good beginning to a fight to put safety first--for workers and the planet--we must recognize that the whole thrust of capitalism is to get the job done quicker and cheaper, workers and the world be damned!
It is workers who are intimately aware of the dangers of production and the ways those dangers could be eliminated. And, if, say, a particular mine, factory, industry can't be made to be safe, then it should be abandoned. Those workers effected should simply be "retired" with full pay and benefits. They have already been subjected to the toxins, dangers, etc., on the job.
Basically, safety must be under worker's control. Workers must have first dibs on profits to insure safety first.
It not only means nationalizing industry--but internationalizing industry--and placing it under the control and operation of the workers themselves. Governmental controls of safety regulations are notoriously ineffectual because the politicians themselves are the corporation's paid defenders. It only makes sense that corporate profits should be utilized--under the worker's control--to put safety first or stop production altogether. Safety first has to be interpreted as "safety before profits and profits for safety first!" We can only hope it is not too late! ...bw]
SEIZE BP!
The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.
Take action now! Sign the Seize BP petition to demand the seizure of BP!
200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.
BP's Unmitigated Greed
This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an "Act of God" nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil's most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.
Under BP's CEO Tony Hayward's aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.
BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements
BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.
BP's executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.
Protecting BP's Super-Profits
BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.
Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million-a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation-but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?
The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.
People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP's actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP's multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.
Take Action Now
It is imperative that the government seize BP's assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.
Seize BP Petition button*: http://www.seizebp.org/
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Neil Young - Ohio - Live at Massey Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV0rAwk4lFE&feature=player_embedded#
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Rachel Carson's Warnings in "The Sea Around Us":
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. . ." http://www.savethesea.org/quotes
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Operation Small Axe - Trailer
http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/820-us-school-district-to-begin-microchipping-students.html
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Shame on Arizona
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It's legalized racial profiling, and it's an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It's completely unacceptable.
Join us in letting Arizona's leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support
"As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there."
Sign Petition Here:
http://presente.org/campaigns/shame?populate=1
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Collateral Murder
[COLD-BLOODED, OUTRIGHT MURDER OF UNARMED CIVILIANS--AND THEY LAUGH ABOUT IT AS THEY SHOOT! THIS IS A BLOOD-CURTLING, VIOLENT AND BRUTAL VIDEO THAT SHOULD BE VIEWED BY EVERYONE! IT EXPOSES, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING SAID, "THE BIGGEST PURVEYORS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD," THE U.S. BI-PARTISAN GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY THEY COMMAND. --BW]
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
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San Francisco City and County Tramples on Civil Liberties
A Letter to Antiwar Activists
Dear Activists:
On Saturday, March 20, the San Francisco City and County Recreation and Parks Department's Park Rangers patrolled a large public antiwar demonstration, shutting down the distribution of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. The rally in Civic Center Plaza was held in protest of the illegal and immoral U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Park Rangers went table-to-table examining each one. They photographed the Socialist Viewpoint table and the person attending it-me. My sister, Debbie and I, had set up the table. We had a sign on the table that asked for a donation of $1.25 for the magazine. The Park Rangers demanded that I "pack it up" and go, because selling or even asking for donations for newspapers or magazines is no longer permitted without the purchase of a new and expensive "vendors license." Their rationale for this denial of free speech is that the distribution of newspapers, magazines, T-shirts-and even food-would make the political protest a "festival" and not a political protest demonstration!
This City's action is clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution-the right to free speech and freedom of the press-and can't be tolerated.
While they are firing teachers and other San Francisco workers, closing schools, cutting back healthcare access, cutting services to the disabled and elderly, it is outrageous that the Mayor and City Government chose to spend thousands of dollars to police tables at an antiwar rally-a protest demonstration by the people!
We can't let this become the norm. It is so fundamentally anti-democratic. The costs of the permits for the rally, the march, the amplified sound, is already prohibitive. Protest is not a privilege we should have to pay for. It's a basic right in this country and we should reclaim it!
Personally, I experienced a deep feeling of alienation as the crisply-uniformed Park Ranger told me I had to "pack it up"-especially when I knew that they were being paid by the City to do this at this demonstration!
I hope you will join this protest of the violation of the right to distribute and, therefore, the right to read Socialist Viewpoint, by writing or emailing the City officials who are listed below.1
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Editorial Board Member, Socialist Viewpoint
www.socialistviewpoint.org
60 - 29th Street, #429
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
1 Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244
San Francisco, Ca 94102-4689
Board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department Park Rangers
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Park.patrol@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
recpark.commission@sfgov.org
Chief of Police George Gascón
850 Bryant Street, #525
San Francisco, CA 94103
(I could not find an email address for him.).
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FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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On June 30, an innocent man will be given a second chance.
In 1991, Troy Davis was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and seven out of nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony.
He was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit. But it's not too late to change Troy's fate.
We just learned today that Troy has been granted an evidentiary hearing -- an opportunity to right this wrong. Help give him a second chance by telling your friends to pledge their support for Troy:
http://www.iamtroy.com/
Troy Davis may just be one man, but his situation represents an injustice experienced by thousands. And suffering this kind of injustice, by even one man, is one person too many.
Thanks to you and 35,000 other NAACP members and supporters who spoke out last August, the U.S. Supreme Court is granting Troy Davis his day in court--and a chance to make his case after 19 years on death row.
This hearing is the first step.
We appreciate your continued support of Troy. If you have not yet done so, please visit our website, sign the petition, then tell your friends to do the same.
http://www.iamtroy.com
I will be in touch soon to let you know how else you can help.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Todd Jealous
President and CEO
NAACP
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
By John W. Dean
Created Jun 3 2010 - 11:16am
- from FindLaw [1]
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/
2) New Ship Heads to Gaza, and Israel Vows to Stop It
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:57 a.m. ET
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/04/world/middleeast/AP-EU-Turkey-Israel.html?hp
3) Another Torrent BP Works to Stem: Its C.E.O.
By JAD MOUAWAD and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04image.html?hp
4) Florida Beaches Full as Playtime Runs Short
By JOHN LELAND
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04pensacola.html?ref=us
5)Kellogg to Restrict Ads to Settle U.S. Inquiry Into Health Claims for Cereal
By SEWELL CHAN
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04ftc.html?ref=health
6) Disaster in the Amazon
By BOB HERBERT
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp
7) Pelicans, Back From Brink of Extinction, Face Oil Threat
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF and LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/05pelican.html?hp
8) Israeli Military Boards Gaza-Bound Aid Ship
By ETHAN BRONNER
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/middleeast/06flotilla.html?hp
9) Autopsy shows Gaza activists were hit 30 times: report
(Reuters) - Nine Turkish activists killed in an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship were shot a total of 30 times and five died of gunshot wounds to the head, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.
by Adrian Croft
World
June 4, 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536MF20100604
10) The Next Deepwater Horizon?
Obama halted new offshore drilling, but allowed existing production to continue-including another BP Gulf rig flying numerous red flags.
By Kate Sheppard
Fri Jun. 4, 2010 3:00 AM PDT
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/next-deepwater-horizon
11) Colombian Army Attacks Striking BP Workers
By Claire Hall, Espacio Bristol-Colombia
June 4, 2010
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2524-colombian-army-attacks-striking-bp-workers
12) In Gulf, It Was Unclear Who Was in Charge of Oil Rig
"Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer."
By IAN URBINA
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html?hp
13) Even With a Cleanup, Spilled Oil Stays With Us
"...the cleanup by BP workers will capture only a fraction of the crude belched up by the broken well. Much of the oil will be taken care of by nature; the rest is likely to stay with us for decades.... REMOVAL Armies of workers at the Exxon Valdez disaster - 11,000 at the effort's peak - removed less than half the oil that didn't evaporate or biodegrade."
By BILL MARSH
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/weekinreview/06marsh.html
14) Changes in China Could Raise Prices Worldwide
By DAVID BARBOZA
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/global/08wages.html?hp
15) Cameron Warns Britons of 'Decades' of Austerity
By SARAH LYALL
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/europe/08britain.html?hp
16) Coast Guard Sees Cleanup of Spill Lasting Until the Fall
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
June 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/us/07spill.html?hp
17) U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter / Wired
June 7th, 2010 7:22 AM
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/us-intelligence-analyst-arrested-wikileaks-video-probe
18) Human Experimentation at the Heart of Bush Administration's Torture Program
Sunday 06 June 2010
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/human-experimentation-heart-bush-administrations-torture-program60199
19) 'A Very Deep Hole'
By BOB HERBERT
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08herbert.html?hp
20) Plumes of Oil Deep in Gulf Are Spreading Far, Tests Find
By JUSTIN GILLIS, CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN BRODER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09spill.html?hp
21) With Strikes, China's Workers Seem to Gain Power
By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09labor.html?hp
22) CONFIRMED: Aerial Video Shows Second Leaking Rig Near The Deepwater Horizon
[There is a video of the Ocean Saratoga rig oil leak in addition to the Deepwater Horizon leak...bw]
By Gus Lubin
Jun. 8, 2010, 9:18 AM
http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
23) Spain Hit by Strike Over Austerity Measures
By RAPHAEL MINDER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/europe/09iht-spain.html?ref=world
24) Police Officers End a Mine Strike in Mexico
By ELISABETH MALKIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?ref=world
25)Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP
By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/us/08flow.html?ref=us
26) Military Taps Social Networking Skills
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/technology/08homefront.html?ref=us
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1) Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
By John W. Dean
Created Jun 3 2010 - 11:16am
- from FindLaw [1]
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/
This is the second in a two-part series of columns on the Obama Administration's apparent plans to create an exception to the 1966 Supreme Court ruling in Miranda v. Arizona to deal with terrorists. - Ed.
As I noted in my prior column in this series [2], Attorney General Eric Holder (sort of) announced on May 9th that the Obama Administration was considering a request to Congress for changes in the public-safety exception to the requirement that Miranda warnings be given, when it comes to terror suspects. On May 13th Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee [3], which was very interested in his announcement about Miranda, but he had little to add to his prior comments. Nonetheless, something seems to be cooking.
Sam Stein, of the Huffington Post, reported [4] earlier this week that on May 25th South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham told reporters that he been in talks with the administration "for quite a while now" to find a way to "statutorily codify the public-safety provision." It is not clear if the Senator's talk preceded or followed the Attorney General's comments (or both), but the fact that Graham is involved could be troubling, because he wants to deny anyone suspected of a terror tactic his or her Miranda warning. Indeed, he wants much more. More generally, he does not want suspected terrorists dealt with by our criminal-justice system.
Eliminating Miranda By Making All Terror Suspects "Enemy Combatants"
At a Senate hearing on May 5th, following the arrest of Faisal Shahzad - the prime suspect in the attempt to detonate a car-bomb in Times Square - and before Shahzad had confessed, Senator Graham mounted his soapbox to proclaim that this naturalized American citizen should not be Mirandized. When "a suspect ... represents a military threat to our country even though they're a citizen, [we must] be able to gather intelligence before you [do] anything else," Graham demanded. For Graham, who constantly boasts his credentials as an attorney, suspected terrorists have lesser rights than run-of-the-mill serial killers.
Graham, and other like-minded conservatives, want terrorist suspects treated as "enemy combatants." And Graham lectured Attorney General Holder at length about his position during a hearing [5] late last year. Basically, Graham claims that if an American citizen is suspected of supporting declared enemies of the United States who employ terror tactics, then that citizen should not be entitled to the same rights that our system affords to the worst of criminals. Graham was one of the most active supporters of the Military Commission Act of 2006, which sought to give presidents this option. For Graham, to be an enemy of the United States and at war with the United States is more heinous than any crime and the Obama Administration - by not making terror suspects persons without rights - is downgrading war by criminalizing it. It is a powerful, but deeply flawed argument.
My fellow FindLaw columnist Joanne Mariner, a human rights attorney, explained (here [6] and here [7]) many of the problems that arise when analyzing the Military Commission Act of 2009, a law that Senator Graham seems to overlook, and the fact that it amended (read: cleaned up) the Military Commission Act of 2006. Not to draw too fine a point, but notwithstanding the Senator's call for designating terror suspects as Congressionally-defined "enemy combatants," they are now to be designated, if the president believes necessary, "unprivileged enemy belligerents." As Mariner notes, however, the difference is largely semantic: Unprivileged enemy belligerents, too, do not receive Miranda warnings, and are processed outside the criminal justice system.
Clearly, treating anyone who is suspected of terrorist activity or of providing support for such activity, and designating that person an unprivileged enemy belligerent, passes over any real presumption of innocence, which is the hallmark of our criminal justice system, and a component of the Constitution's promise of due process. As Chairman Leahy pointed out after Senator Graham lectured Attorney General Holder about how he should deal with terror suspects, designating them all "unprivileged enemy belligerents" is out of step with the views of most of the military leadership and the approach of the Bush and Obama Justice Departments, not to mention the conclusions of most Americans who have thought seriously about the prospect of the military policing and prosecuting Americans as terror suspects.
It strikes me - after observing Senator Graham's mode of operation since his days in the House of Representatives - that he is negotiating with the Obama Administration to codify the public-safety exception to the Miranda warning as a first step toward also codifying the stance that terror suspects do not belong in the criminal justice system at all. In short, Graham is not to be trusted, for he is simply trying to move the administration closer to his view of the world. Surely the Obama team knows this, so what are they doing messing with Miranda?
The Obama Administration's Terrorism Politics, Within Limited Options
After Eric Holder shared his thinking about the Miranda public-safety exception when he appeared on "Meet the Press" on May 9th, I have been asking people in Washington who know these things what, in fact, is going on. The short, and repeated answer, has been that this is mostly about politics, but the belief is also that, since there is an acknowledged public-safety exception to the Miranda requirements, it would not only be good politics but good law enforcement to try to codify that exception for the problem of dealing with terrorists.
I am told that the Obama Administration fully understands that it cannot ever please the Republicans, who were unhappy that George Bush pulled back from the efforts of his Vice President to think about waterboarding terror suspects first, and asking questions later. President Bush realized the damage he was doing to the image of America throughout the world - and his father no doubt had a few choice words to say about his concern about the excesses his son's presidency was employing in the name of fighting terrorists.
Obama's administration has, in fact, largely picked up where the Bush Administration left off, which is to abandon Dick Cheney's policies - but not George Bush's. While this approach has provoked squeals of displeasure from the former Vice President, Obama has been praised by the rest of the world. In fact, he has largely made public George Bush's approach, which he has only slightly modified. Obama appears totally uninterested, for the good of the nation, in the sort of world-wrath that Cheney's thinking produces, for Cheney's over-reaction not only hurts us, but was counterproductive to our goal of fighting terrorism. What Lindsey Graham and those who share his view are doing is to continue to embrace the Cheney approach. However, rather than lessening the risk of terrorism, these tactics proved in the past to be remarkably good recruiting tools for terrorists' leaders. The Obama team is not going to go there again.
I understand that the Obama Administration is working on an effort to provide law enforcement officers who are dealing with obvious terror suspects clear guidelines as to the type of questioning they can undertake to determine the threat to Americans, before giving Miranda warnings, without jeopardizing a future criminal prosecution in our criminal justice system - which was, of course, developed long before the current prevalence of terrorism. The thinking is that if there is bipartisan support for such a narrowly-drawn, but potentially important, proposal, then the Supreme Court - which created both the Miranda rule and the current exception - will likely make that proposal the law of the land.
Those who are working on this effort believe that bringing on board the Lindsey- Graham-type thinkers brings them closer to the worldview of President Obama, and further from the thinking of former Vice President Dick Cheney. They also explained that what can be done by Congress is very limited, since only the Supreme Court can resolve the question of the scope of the public-safety exception. But it is important that they do this, because the nation's appellate courts have reached no consensus as to the scope of this exception to Miranda.
I am told that we will see the resolution of this matter soon. Balancing the "rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" against one another has never been easy, nor simple, for each has inherent conflicts with the others. To protect life, history tells us, it may be necessary to sacrifice liberty and happiness. But without liberty and happiness, life itself has less value. During my own life, I have witnessed Hitler's fascism, Stalin's communism, and now Bin Laden's terrorism all threaten our fundamental rights, not to mention our ability to appropriately adjust the tensions between them. I trust the Obama Administration to find that balance.
Links:
[1] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20100528.html
[2] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20100514.html
[3] http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/real/judiciary/full/full05132010.smi
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/26/obama-and-graham-in-talks_n_590129.html
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTmLKUT817Y
[6] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20091104.html
[7] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20091130.html
[8] http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&title=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[9] http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&title=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[10] http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&title=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[11] http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&h=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[12] http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=add&bkmk=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&title=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[13] http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options&t=Messing With Miranda To Fight Terrorism: Obama's Playing Politics With Limited Options
[14] http://technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-w-dean/29225/messing-with-miranda-to-fight-terrorism-obamas-playing-politics-with-limited-options
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2) New Ship Heads to Gaza, and Israel Vows to Stop It
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:57 a.m. ET
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/04/world/middleeast/AP-EU-Turkey-Israel.html?hp
ISTANBUL (AP) -- An aid ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza could reach Israel's 20-mile (32-kilometer) exclusion zone by Friday afternoon, an activist said, but Israel's prime minister has vowed the ship will not reach land.
The dueling comments suggest a potential new clash over Israel's three-year-old blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip -- and come only four days after an Israeli commando raid on a larger aid flotilla left nine activists dead.
Greta Berlin, a spokesman for the Free Gaza group, says the 1,200-ton Rachel Corrie is heading directly to Gaza and will not stop in any port on the way. It is trying to deliver hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and concrete.
Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead McGuire and the former head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, Denis Halliday, are among the 11 passengers on board, she said.
The Irish vessel is named after an American college student crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while protesting house demolitions in Gaza.
Israel will not allow the aid ship to reach Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told senior Cabinet ministers late Thursday. According to a participant in the meeting, he said Israel made several offers to direct the ship to an Israeli port, where the aid supplies would be unloaded, inspected and transferred to Gaza by land, but the offers were rejected.
Netanyahu has hotly rejected calls to lift the blockade on Gaza, insisting that it prevents missile attacks on Israel. The Rachel Corrie's cargo of concrete is also a problem, because Israel considers that to have military uses.
Netanyahu also instructed the military to act with sensitivity in preventing the Rachel Corrie from landing and avoid harming those on board the ship, the participant said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.
Israel has rejected demands for an international panel to probe Monday's deadly commando raid on the aid ships, saying it can conduct a professional, impartial investigation on its own.
Activists say Israel sabotaged the previous aid flotilla, and Israeli defense officials said Friday only that unspecified ''actions'' were taken when the boats were still far from Gaza.
Without explicitly confirming sabotage, the officials say the Israeli actions only delayed the flotilla. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was classified.
In Istanbul, Turkey's deputy prime minister said Friday that economic and defense cooperation with Israel will be reduced amid tensions after the killing of nine Turkish activists by Israeli commandos on an aid ship.
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said all deals with Israel are being evaluated.
''We are serious on this issue. New cooperation will not start and relations with Israel will be reduced,'' he said.
Energy Minister Taner Yildiz has said discussions about extending a Russian natural gas pipeline to Israel and providing fresh drinking water to Israel from the Manavgat river were being shelved.
The pro-Palestinian activists' deaths on the aid ship increased tensions in the Mideast, especially with Turkey, an important ally of Israel. On Thursday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel's actions ''a historic mistake.''
Israel maintains its commandos opened fire Monday as a last resort after they were attacked, and released a video showing soldiers in riot gear descending from a helicopter into a crowd of men with clubs. Three or four activists overpowered each soldier as he landed.
Returning activists admitted fighting with the Israelis but insisted their actions were in self defense because the ships were being boarded in international waters by a military force.
Thousands jammed Istanbul on Thursday to pay tribute to those killed on the ship at a funeral service outside the Fatih mosque, and larger services were expected on Friday.
The youngest of the nine activists killed, Furkan Dogan, was to be buried Friday in his family's hometown in Kayseri in central Turkey.
Dogan, who was born in Troy, New York, moved to Turkey when he was two. The other eight activists were all Turkish nationals.
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Hadjicostis reported from Nicosia. Associated Press writers Mark Lavie and Matti Friedman in Jerusalem and Selcan Hacaoglu in Istanbul also contributed to this report.
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3) Another Torrent BP Works to Stem: Its C.E.O.
By JAD MOUAWAD and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04image.html?hp
BP, already bedeviled by an out-of-control well spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, now finds itself with one more problem: Tony Hayward, its gaffe-prone chief executive.
Among his memorable lines: The spill is not going to cause big problems because the gulf "is a very big ocean" and "the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest." And this week, he apologized to the families of 11 men who died on the rig for having said, "You know, I'd like my life back."
But rather than receiving a limited public role, Mr. Hayward, a geologist who has led the company for three years, has become even more the public face of the company. On Thursday, BP began showing a new television ad in which Mr. Hayward, speaking directly into a camera, pledges to spare no effort to clean up the spill.
It ends with a heartfelt promise: "We will get it done. We will make this right." (The same day, in an interview published in The Financial Times, he said, "What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit.")
Instead of reassuring the public, critics say, Mr. Hayward has turned into a day-after-day reminder of BP's public relations missteps in responding to the crisis, which began six weeks ago and looks likely to continue well into the summer.
Mr. Hayward and the company have repeatedly played down the size of the spill, the company's own role in the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, and the environmental damage that has occurred. At the same time, they have projected a tone of unrelenting optimism despite repeated failures to plug the well.
The chief executive's tendency to utter provocative statements has prompted a surge of criticism from politicians, bloggers and television pundits, who took particular offense at the "I'd like my life back" comment.
But Mr. Hayward, an earnest-looking man with cherubic red cheeks and a soft British accent, remains ever present in BP's response efforts.
One Louisiana congressman, Charlie Melancon, has started a petition campaign calling on BP's board of directors to fire Mr. Hayward, and financial analysts are increasingly predicting that he will get the boot before the crisis is over.
"People want to know someone is in charge, that the right person is there, but someone who says the stuff that Hayward has said doesn't engender confidence," said Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of strategy and leadership at Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business. "We understand he is overwhelmed, but that also might suggest he's not the right man for the job."
Robert Wine, a BP spokesman, said that Mr. Hayward "has the full support of the board, and he is very much at the heart of the response managing everything we are doing."
Mr. Hayward, 53, ascended to the top job when his predecessor, John Browne, resigned after a personal scandal and a series of major accidents. Mr. Hayward promised to refocus the company culture on safety.
Much is at stake for BP, the top oil and gas producer in the United States and the largest deepwater operator in the Gulf of Mexico. The company has already spent about $1 billion to deal with the accident, and it faces billions of dollars in additional damage claims and government penalties, with the liability growing every day that the leak continues. In addition, the Justice Department, an independent panel and numerous Congressional committees are investigating the company.
Shareholders are worried about the cost to the company, based in London, whose stock has fallen about 35 percent since the explosion.
To be sure, BP is facing an unprecedented technological and engineering challenge, battling formidable odds in trying to plug a damaged oil well in the darkness and pressure found 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. After several efforts to stop the oil flow failed, the company is now seeking to install a temporary dome to capture most of the spilled oil until it can drill two relief wells.
Those relief wells, which would be used to inject cement into the damaged well to permanently kill it, are not expected to be completed before August, and the environmental damage would linger well after that - which means that the company and Mr. Hayward face a public relations crisis that will last for many months.
The company has enlisted the help of the Brunswick Group, a public relations and crisis management firm, to deal with the accident. It has dedicated the home page of its Web site, BP.com, to the crisis and taken out full-page advertisements in major newspapers.
BP has also hired a new head of media relations in the United States, Anne Womack Kolton, who worked at Brunswick and is a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and Energy Department spokeswoman.
In Washington, BP has become a toxic political symbol that is a target on all fronts, even as it is seeking to work with the government get out of its current predicament.
Before the spill, BP had maintained a low profile in Washington relative to other companies, with its lobbying work and political contributions usually trailing other oil-and-gas giants like Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Conoco Phillips. Unlike many other companies with federal interests, BP kept most of its lobbying work in-house, although it had retained several prominent Washington lobbyists, including Ken Duberstein and Tony Podesta, to make its case on issues including tax incentives for gas production and climate control regulations.
From the start, BP promised to be transparent about the spill. But the company has wavered between providing information to the public and strictly limiting it. For example, it resisted for weeks putting up a live video feed of the underwater spill, agreeing to it only after intense pressure from Congress. The company has consistently refused to use widely used scientific techniques to measure the spill, saying it was focused on shutting down the well.
Administration officials and Congressional leaders have accused BP of hiding the true dimensions of the leak for financial reasons. Carol M. Browner, the White House energy and environment adviser, has noted that BP has a "vested financial interest" in minimizing the size of the leak because the fines the company will eventually pay will in part be based on the amount of oil that has escaped.
BP and the government initially estimated the well was leaking 1,000 barrels a day. But since then, government scientists have come up with a new and much larger rate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
"They have tried to control the message, including controlling facts, because they have a direct financial interest in this," said David Pettit, a senior lawyer with Natural Resources Defense Council. "The government is letting BP clean up their own crime scene. On TV cop shows, they don't do that."
Perhaps trying to tamp down the outcry over his own comments, Mr. Hayward's remarks to reporters on Thursday in Houston were more tame. He promised that the company would clean up every drop of oil and "restore the shoreline to its original state."
The chief executive added: "We will be here for a very long time. We realize this is just the beginning."
Jad Mouawad reported from New York and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington and Stuart Elliott from New York.
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4) Florida Beaches Full as Playtime Runs Short
By JOHN LELAND
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04pensacola.html?ref=us
PENSACOLA, Fla. - When Tony and Jodie Delatte watched the gloomy news Wednesday night - sticky blobs of oil landing on the white beaches of Mississippi and Alabama - they knew right away what they had to do.
The next morning they left their home in Gonzalez, Miss., for Pensacola Beach in Florida. By afternoon they were on the beach and in the water, not even waiting for a morning thunderstorm to shed its last drops.
"It might be our last chance to come," Mr. Delatte said.
The oil from the Deepwater Horizon is now on collision course with one of America's money-making icons, Florida tourism, threatening a core business of a state already in the throes of a severe fiscal crisis.
But this week, Pensacola Beach is reveling in what may be its last glory days of summer. Hotel prices were higher than last year and discounts were rare.
The Hilton on the beach sold out in midweek. Julian McQueen, head of Innisfree Hotels, which owns the Hilton and three other beachfront hotels in Pensacola and Gulf Shores, Al., with a total of 1,000 rooms, said his hotels had lost half or more of their advance reservations since the start of the oil spill on April 20. But sudden arrivals had made up much of this loss.
At the Fish House, which serves 10,000 people a week, Shelly Yates, the marketing director, said "the bar business has been good."
"It's hard to say if the crisis in the gulf is contributing to that," she added. "We're all on pins and needles."
Pensacola Beach has not needed cleanup crews to walk the beaches (no tar balls yet). But it is still woefully underprepared, said Buck Lee, executive director of the Santa Rosa Island Authority, which governs the shoreline.
"We should've done everything we needed to have done in two weeks," postspill, he said, including getting sifters to remove oil from sand and absorbent material to soak up oil. "That's the problem with having BP and the federal government running the recovery." He feels they have been unresponsive to local needs.
The Delattes probably would have to cancel their plans to come back in July, they said. But for now? "I did tell him if he found a glob of oil he had to throw it at someone else," Ms. Delatte said.
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5)Kellogg to Restrict Ads to Settle U.S. Inquiry Into Health Claims for Cereal
By SEWELL CHAN
June 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/business/04ftc.html?ref=health
WASHINGTON - Maybe it should have just stuck with Snap, Crackle and Pop.
The Kellogg Company has agreed to advertising restrictions to resolve an investigation into its claims about the health benefits of its Rice Krispies cereal, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.
The agreement expands on a settlement order that Kellogg agreed to last July over similar claims that another cereal, Frosted Mini-Wheats, was "clinically shown to improve kids' attentiveness by nearly 20 percent."
The commission acted against Kellogg as public health researchers and obesity opponents have intensified their challenges to the marketing of sugary foods.
"We expect more from a great American company than making dubious claims - not once, but twice - that its cereals improve children's health," Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the F.T.C., said in a statement.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said it was unusual for the commission to act in a case involving health claims made for food products, an area traditionally handled by the Food and Drug Administration.
Last summer, Kellogg unveiled product packaging claiming that Rice Krispies "now helps support your child's immunity" and that the cereal "has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy."
In the order covering Frosted Mini-Wheats, Kellogg had agreed to stop making claims about benefits to "cognitive health, process or function provided by any cereal or any morning food or snack food" unless the claims were true and substantiated.
The new expanded order bars the company from making "claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading."
In a statement, Kellogg, based in Battle Creek, Mich., said it had "a long history of responsible advertising," but did not specifically address the latest accusations.
"We stand behind the validity of our product claims and research, so we agreed to an order that covers those claims," the company said. "We believe that the revisions to the existing consent agreement satisfied any remaining concerns."
Jennifer L. Harris, a psychologist who studies food marketing at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, said the agreement highlighted the need to tighten requirements so that all health-related claims on packaging are based on scientific evidence, which is not the case now.
"As parents become more health-conscious, these claims try to make high-sugar cereals healthier than they really are," she said.
A study by the Rudd Center found that the least healthful cereals were the ones most heavily marketed to children, and that children were exposed to more advertising for highly sweetened cereals than for any other kind of packaged food.
William Neuman contributed reporting from New York.
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6) Disaster in the Amazon
By BOB HERBERT
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/opinion/05herbert.html?hp
BP's calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.
"As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse," said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.
It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.
What's not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador's northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.
Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.
A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: "It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor - pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating 'black rain' which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms."
The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature's wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.
Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.
The oil companies don't care. Shell can't wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won't happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.
Their assurances mean nothing.
President Obama has suspended Shell's Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we've learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.
They're dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.
Chevron doesn't believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.
The indigenous residents may be suffering (they're in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.
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7) Pelicans, Back From Brink of Extinction, Face Oil Threat
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF and LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/05pelican.html?hp
FORT JACKSON, La. - For more than a decade, the hundreds of brown pelicans that nested among the mangrove shrubs on Queen Bess Island west of here were living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could come back and thrive.
The island was one of three sites in Louisiana where the large, long-billed birds were reintroduced after pesticides wiped them out in the state in the 1960s.
But on Thursday, 29 of the birds, their feathers so coated in thick brown sludge that their natural white and gray markings were totally obscured, were airlifted to a bird rehabilitation center in Fort Jackson, the latest victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Another dozen were taken to other rescue centers.
Six more pelicans were brought here on Friday, and as visitors to the center looked on, the birds huddled together in makeshift plywood cages and, in their unnatural stillness, looked as if the gooey muck had frozen them solid. The 29 pelicans brought in Thursday were being treated in hot rooms by workers in protective clothing.
"The pelicans are in dire trouble," said Doug Inkley, a senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, who worried that the oil spill could put an end to the bird's recovery in Louisiana.
The images of oil-covered birds - pelicans, northern gannets, laughing gulls and others - are eerily reminiscent of the Exxon Valdez disaster 21 years ago, and have in recent days have become the most vivid symbol of the damage wrought by the hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil that have poured into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20. Since the spill, 612 damaged birds had been cataloged as of Friday, most dead but some alive and drenched in oil, federal officials said.
Yet the brown pelican, because of its history of robust recovery in the face of extreme peril, has a special significance for the public.
The birds were once so common on the coastline here that they grace the state flag. They were frequent companions for fishermen, who shared their waters and admired their skill at spotting fish from afar and diving from great heights to scoop them up in their bills.
At the turn of the 20th century, observers estimated the brown pelican population in Louisiana at close to 50,000. But by 1961, no nesting pair could be spotted along the state's entire coast, according to LaCoast, a Coast Guard Web site. Like another subspecies of the brown pelican found in California, the local birds had been hard hit by DDT and other pesticides, which acted to thin the shells of their eggs. The eggs were crushed when the adults sat on them. (DDT was banned in the United States in 1972.)
In 1968, Louisiana took birds from a surviving Florida colony and reintroduced them along the state's southern coast in three spots. One was Queen Bess Island, which had been the site of one of the last breeding pairs before extinction, said Kerry St. Pé, program director of the nearby Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.
Still, the birds struggled, threatened this time by the loss of their habitat. The local wetlands, hurt by levees in the Mississippi that blocked sediment from flowing downstream and by canals cut by oil companies looking to lay pipe, were sinking into the gulf at an astonishing rate. Queen Bess was going under as well until 1990, when a coastal restoration project financed a rock barrier around the island, which stabilized it. The pelican colony began to flourish and the birds' offspring helped repopulate the coastline, Mr. St. Pé said.
Last year, the birds were officially taken off the endangered species list. But the oil spill, experts said, could change that. Like all birds, pelicans are very sensitive to oil, said Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society's Louisiana Coastal Initiative. It prevents them from regulating their body temperature when it gets on their feathers, she said, and in Louisiana the pelicans are subject to overheating. The oil can also poison the fish the pelicans feed on and seep through the shells of pelican eggs, killing the embryos.
The potential for damage was frighteningly apparent at the rescue center set up here by the International Bird Rescue Research Center with BP and federal and state officials. All day Thursday, oiled birds, including the 29 brown pelicans, arrived at the makeshift veterinary emergency room built in a hangar on a former military base. They were carried from Coast Guard helicopters in dog kennels and cardboard boxes with air holes punched in them.
Most of the birds were so thoroughly coated in crude that they could not stand up. Some were stuck to the floor of their cages. Workers wiped off thick globs of oil with towels, then gave them fluids and fed them a fish slurry.
The pelicans were placed in plywood pens covered with blankets. The next morning, workers began to clean them using hot water and Dawn, a mild dish detergent.
So far, even the most heavily oiled pelicans have survived. Had they not been treated immediately, however, they would have almost certainly drowned or died of starvation or exposure, according to a veterinarian with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
The birds at the rehabilitation center, said Sharon Taylor, a veterinarian here, represent a lucky few - far more are certain to die in the wild.
"A lot of them will just disappear into the environment," she said. "We will probably only find a very, very small percentage of what's been impacted out there."
Still, she worried that because there are so many large rookeries nearby, far more pelicans would soon be headed to the center.
"Tomorrow or tonight we could get a hundred pelicans, we could get a thousand pelicans," Ms. Taylor said.
John Collins Rudolf reported from Fort Jackson, La., and Leslie Kaufman from New York.
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8) Israeli Military Boards Gaza-Bound Aid Ship
By ETHAN BRONNER
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/middleeast/06flotilla.html?hp
ASHDOD, Israel - Israel prevented a new attempt to break its blockade of Gaza on Saturday when its naval commandos boarded an Irish-owned vessel carrying humanitarian supplies and prominent activists and steered it to this Israeli port.
There were no attempts at resistance or reports of violence, the Israeli military said.
The interception, 23 miles off the coast, took place less than a week after an Israeli commando raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish ship turned violent, leaving nine Turkish activists dead and creating an international crisis that severely damaged Israeli-Turkish relations.
On Friday, the Israeli and Irish governments reached an agreement to unload the vessel's cargo in Ashdod, in southern Israel, and transport most of it to Gaza, but the group sponsoring both this ship and the Turkish flotilla, the Free Gaza Movement, rejected the deal. The 11 activists and 8 crew members on board the 1,200-ton cargo ship had made clear at the outset that they would not resist and that they had no arms. The passengers included Mairead Maguire, an Irish Nobel Peace laureate; Denis Halliday, a former United Nations assistant secretary general from Ireland; and Mohd Nizar bin Zakaria, a member of the Malaysia's Parliament.
It was not possible to reach the boat because communications were jammed but an Israeli journalist embedded with the navy filed an account of the takeover that confirmed the military's report of the events.
The journalist, Ron Ben-Yishai of Ynet News, said the takeover, shortly before 12:30 p.m., took five minutes and involved two missile boats carrying about 20 combat soldiers.
A spokeswoman for the Free Gaza group, Greta Berlin, told The Associated Press that the takeover was "another outrage to add to the nine murdered," and that the group would be sending more ships to Gaza. The group aims to end the three-year blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is intended to prevent the infiltration of weapons and militants into the Hamas-run territory.
The Israeli military said that the ship, Rachel Corrie, had been asked three times to dock in Ashdod, change course or face a naval takeover and that the requests had been ignored. The operation did not involve an airdrop as in the raid last Monday.
A military spokeswoman here, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, said the passengers would be questioned by the police, processed through customs and deported. Those who refused deportation could face jail, she said.
A senior naval commander said that the cargo would be inspected here and that anything that would not serve Hamas for weapons or defense would be sent over land to Gaza.
The commander, who spoke by telephone to journalists under military rules of anonymity, was asked why Israel did not agree to inspect the cargo at sea and then permit the boat to reach Gaza.
"It is not possible to inspect thousands of bags inside a vessel," he said. "You have to unload it in port and examine it there."
He said everything the boat was carrying, except items like cement that could be used to build bunkers, tunnels or rockets, would be delivered to Gaza.
Defending Israel's blockade of Gaza, which some experts in international law say is illegal, he said, "Everyone understands that the regime there is in a state of armed conflict with us and that with such material they can build more rockets."
Israel has been widely condemned for its blockade. After last Monday's raid, when Israeli commandos met fierce resistance and opened fire on the anti-blockade activists, Israel has said it is open to new ways to ensure that civilian goods can enter Gaza while meeting Israeli security needs. It is unclear what the new ways would include.
The Rachel Corrie, named after an American activist killed in 2003 as she tried to prevent an Israeli bulldozer from razing a Palestinian home, had been due to join the other boats in the flotilla last week but was delayed by technical problems.
Hamas, which rejects Israel's existence, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006. Israel then began to reduce trade and relations with Gaza. When Hamas militants seized an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in a raid that June, Israel further reduced what was permitted in and out of the coastal territory.
A year later, after Hamas fighters drove the more moderate Fatah movement from Gaza, Israel imposed a full closure on Gaza, permitting in only basic humanitarian goods.
While international aid agencies say there is no starvation or acute medical crisis there, malnutrition is creeping up, water treatment and sewage are problematic and the economy has been almost entirely shut down by the blockade, which is also enforced by Egypt. The United States and other world powers say that the situation is untenable and that a new approach must be found.
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9) Autopsy shows Gaza activists were hit 30 times: report
(Reuters) - Nine Turkish activists killed in an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship were shot a total of 30 times and five died of gunshot wounds to the head, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.
by Adrian Croft
World
June 4, 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536MF20100604
Autopsy results showed the men were hit mostly with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range, the Guardian said, quoting Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine which carried out the autopsies on Friday.
Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla of aid ships planning to break the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza on Monday. The deaths, which all took place on one ship, the Mavi Marmara, drew widespread condemnation.
Israel said the marines who rappelled onto the Mavi Marmara fired in self-defense after activists attacked them with clubs and knives as well as two pistols snatched from the commandos.
The autopsy results showed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back, the Guardian said.
A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has U.S. citizenship, was shot five times from less than 45 cm (18 inches) away, in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back, it said.
Two other men were shot four times. Five of those killed were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, the Guardian quoted Buyuk as saying.
In addition to those killed, 48 others suffered gunshot wounds and six activists were still missing, he added.
Israel said the multiple gunshot wounds did not mean the shots were fired other than in self defense.
"The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation," the Guardian quoted a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London as saying.
"Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation," the spokesman said.
The newspaper quoted Haluk Ince, chairman of the council of forensic medicine in Istanbul, as saying that in only one case was there a single bullet wound, to the forehead from a distant shot, while every other body showed multiple wounds.
He said all but one of the bullets retrieved from the bodies came from 9mm rounds. Of the other round, Ince said: "It was the first time we have seen this kind of material used in firearms. It was just a container including many types of pellets usually used in shotguns. It penetrated the head region in the temple and we found it intact in the brain."
No-one at Turkey's forensic laboratory could immediately be reached for comment.
Turkey, Israel's only Muslim ally, stepped up its rhetoric over the killings on Friday, accusing the Jewish state of betraying its own biblical law.
(Reporting by Adrian Croft)
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10) The Next Deepwater Horizon?
Obama halted new offshore drilling, but allowed existing production to continue-including another BP Gulf rig flying numerous red flags.
By Kate Sheppard
Fri Jun. 4, 2010 3:00 AM PDT
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/next-deepwater-horizon
Last week, President Barack Obama put new deepwater drilling operations on hold [1] for another six months. With the Gulf of Mexico spill entering its fifth week, this move was meant to show that the administration is taking a more cautious approach to offshore drilling, after it had announced a vast expansion just weeks before the BP disaster.
Many news accounts on the moratorium extension implied that all deepwater Gulf operations had been shut down. But that's not the case. The administration is allowing deepwater drilling operations already in production in the Gulf to continue-including some that may pose a greater risk than the Deepwater Horizon. Exhibit A: BP's other major Gulf operation, the Atlantis, which sits 124 miles off the Louisiana coast.
Kenneth Abbott, a project control supervisor BP contracted to work on the Atlantis, and the environmental group Food & Water Watch filed suit against the federal government on May 17 [2] seeking a temporary injunction to force the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to shut down the platform. Abbott claims that his contract was terminated shortly after he alerted management to the rig's lack of crucial engineering documents in late 2008.
According to Abbott, the BP Atlantis lacks more than 6,000 documents that are key to operating the rig safely. Abbott has said that the vast majority of the project's subsea piping and instrument diagrams were not approved by engineers, and the safety systems are out of date. In March 2009, Abbott took his concerns about the rig to MMS, the Department of Interior office responsible for regulating offshore drilling. He says the agency requested some of these documents from BP, but failed to seek specific diagrams of key components necessary for ensuring the rig's secure operation.
An internal BP email that came out in the course of Abbott's dispute refers to the potential for "catastrophic operator errors" on the rig due to these lapses. The suit argues that without these documents, the rig operators "are flying blind, and have no way to assure the safety of offshore drilling operations." Food & Water Watch began pushing for lawmakers to intervene on the rig back in August 2009.
A group of 19 Democratic House lawmakers raised concerns about the Atlantis in a letter to MMS in February [3], noting "disturbing reports" of safety lapses and warning of the "risk of a catastrophic accident." In a May 19 letter, those lawmakers, led by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), urged Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to call for "an immediate shutdown [of the Atlantis rig] until it can be shown that this platform is operating safely." The Atlantis, which produces 200,000 barrels of oil a day, operates 7,000 feet below the sea surface-2,000 feet deeper than the Deepwater rig. That suggests that if a blowout occurred, the Atlantis could release far more oil than the Deepwater well. "We are very concerned that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis," the House members wrote.
MMS promised House members after their initial letter that the agency would conduct an audit of the Atlantis and issue a report by the end of May. But that report has been delayed due to the Gulf disaster, according to the agency.
Elizabeth Birnbaum, who served as head of MMS until she resigned amid criticism [4] of the beleaguered agency last month, told a House panel on May 26 that the agency has reviewed operations at the Atlantis and has "not found anything" indicating that the rig should be shut down. But Grijalva believes that the agency may just be inspecting the inadequate paperwork that it has already approved without giving the rig any closer scrutiny.
This contention is also supported by Food & Water Watch, which submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on March 1 to MMS for records related to agency employees conducting inspections of the Atlantis rig's subsea documents. The request was rejected-an MMS FOIA officer stated that the agency [5] doesn't require documentation of the subsea components as they were built. Food & Water Watch says that without reviewing those documents, MMS would be unable to truly determine whether or not the rig was safe.
In the past weeks, Obama has repeatedly criticized the "cozy" relationship between oil companies and federal regulators. And the Department of Interior's report on the offshore operations calls for new inspection and reporting procedures, tighter enforcement of existing rules, and the development of "new, faster ways of stopping blowouts in deepwater," among other recommendations. Yet at a Senate hearing last month, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar shrugged off the suggestion that the administration should pause operations that were approved under the same lax system that allowed the Deepwater rig in the first place. "We were not going to have those stopped mid-way," Salazar told senators.
"We're missing an opportunity, the administration is, by not insisting that production be suspended until we fully investigate the allegations," says Grijalva in an interview. "There's not only urgency to it, but it would be a prudent, politically smart thing for them to do as well."
"It's clear to us that while there are problems with the entire industry, BP is probably the worst actor in terms of cutting corners, not having safety procedures, not having the necessary safety tech for operating platforms," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "There should be a review by MMS of all the operating platforms to make sure safety documents and procedures are in place." (A spokesperson for Abbott could not be reached for comment.) The Center for Biological Diversity has also filed suit against the Department of Interior for granting waivers to the National Environmental Protection Act for Gulf leases, and has signaled that it intends to sue over non-enforcement of both the Marine Mammals Protection Act and Endangered Species Act in the Gulf.
Meanwhile, the group of House members are going to continue to push for a halt on all drilling operations. Says Grijalva, "Given the track record of industry and the track record of the agency in charge of oversight, it just seems to be the one safe route to take right now to assure the American people that another catastrophe won't happen."
Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/05/obama-faces-press-bp-spill
[2] http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/press/press-releases/food-water-watch-sues-feds-for-ignoring-problems-at-operating-bp-platform/
[3] http://motherjones.com/files/Congressional_Letter_re_BP-1.pdf
[4] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/05/mms-head-fired
[5] http://motherjones.com/files/MMS_response_to_fww_third_Foia_request.pdf
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11) Colombian Army Attacks Striking BP Workers
By Claire Hall, Espacio Bristol-Colombia
June 4, 2010
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2524-colombian-army-attacks-striking-bp-workers
A five month long mobilisation against BP in the Casanare region of Colombia has escalated after the Colombian army entered the BP installations with force this week and confronted workers who have been peacefully occupying BP installations since May 23 to protest BP´s failure to conclude negotiations with the workers and community.
At midday on Wednesday a heavily armed commando group of the National Colombian Army leapt over the security fence of the Tauramena Central Processing Facility and subjected the group of workers to physical and verbal aggression. Oscar Garcia, of the National Oil Workers Union said "this war-like handling of a group of workers is an excessive use of force and treats a labour conflict as though it were an issue of public order. This shows how BP is bent on war against workers who are only demanding that their fundamental rights be respected."[i]
The calm response by the striking workers brought the situation temporarily under control but the army remains present and tensions are high. Colombia continues to have the highest level of trade union murders in the world with 17 trade unionists murdered so far this year.
"It is no secret that since BP arrived in the early nineties we have not been able to organize workers until now due to the presence of paramilitary groups operating in the oil fields," said Edgar Mojica from the National Oil Workers Union.
At night workers sleep chained to machinery under temporary shelters as a precaution against any further attempts to violently remove them.
"BP thinks that we will give up, tired and afraid but we will put up with these conditions as this is a struggle for everyone," said Ramiro from the Movement for Dignity of Casanare. "We will only leave here when BP signs an agreement on salary increases, more dignified working conditions, security guarantees for all involved in the mobilisations, and honours the pre-agreements made in the environmental, human rights, social investment and goods and services commissions."
The workers are saddened but not surprised at the measures they are forced to take to try to reach agreements with BP. The mobilisation started in February of this year. Workers were forced to take direct action and block access roads to BP's installations after the oil corporation refused to recognise the workers rights to a union and to a collective bargaining agreement. The blockades were violently attacked by ESMAD, the notorious Colombian riot police, in an operation to end the protest.[ii]
This is not the first time that civil society movements against BP have been met with violence. In 2003, communities protested against BP, demanding action on ecological, social and labour issues. BP refused to negotiate. In the months following community leaders involved in the mobilisation were assassinated (2004 Oswaldo Vargas, 2005 Parmenio Parra).[iii] Furthermore, a preliminary public hearing held in 2007 in the UK on BP's activities in Colombia confirmed that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that BP has a case to answer that it is complicit in the extermination of social organisations in Casanare as part of direct strategy to maximise profits."[iv]
Despite the history of repression, the response to the ESMAD attack in February was overwhelming. Two thousand people marched in support, fifteen more road blockades spontaneously sprung up, community members and local businesses joined the strike and the Movement for the Dignity of Casanare was born. BP was forced to listen and agreed to participate in the five commissions. Popular assemblies where held to decide on the bargaining demands which were later presented to BP on March 23. However, after two months of dialogue, the labour commission had made no advances and the current strike began.
Casanare is a region characterised by extreme levels of poverty, in spite of the oil that flows out of the region to the United States. This poverty has been worsened by the environmental degradation caused by the oil exploration and extraction, and the susbequent contamination and loss of water sources, according to local farmers whose livelihoods depend on water.
"We have heard about the BP incident in the USA. We send our condolences to the families and fellow workers of those who died due to the failure of BP to take the necessary measures to ensure safe operations and protect the lives of people working for them," said Garcia of the National Oil Workers Union. "Here in Colombia, BP has also shown their lack of respect for life. They have brought about a war that has left over 9000 people dead."
He added, "We categorically hold BP to blame for this latest catastrophe in the USA and we demand that BP repairs to the extent possible the damage they have caused. We extend our solidarity to the Northamerican people affected and we ask for your solidarity with the Casanarean people and you are welcome to visit and see how things are here."
BP continues to provide support to the 16th Brigade, which was created in 1991 in order to provide security to the oilfields in Casanare. They have a long, cruel and documented history of human rights violations, including: extrajudicial executions, disappearances, murders, torture, rape and the forced displacement of campesino communities. However the grave humanitarian crisis in Casanare and its relationship to the oil industry - in particular to BP - is not deterring the Movement for the Dignity of Casanare.
"Despite BP´s misinformation campaign we are determined and united and we will keep resisting with dignity," said Ramiro. "And if we can unite with people from the USA we will be even stronger and achieve much more."
Notes:
[i] http://usofrenteobrero.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=840:arremetida-del-ejercito-nacional-contra-trabajadores-en-tauramena-casanare&catid=35:nacional&Itemid=143
[ii] http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/events/26-upcoming-events/493-police-assault-bp-oil-workers-in-colombia
[iii] http://espacio.org.uk/bp/CasanareMission2007Report.pdf
[iv] http://espacio.org.uk/bp/PUBLIC_DECLARATION_Glasgow.pdf
Espacio Bristol-Colombia is an autonomous collective of people working in solidarity with communities and organisations fighting for peace with social justice in Colombia. We are based in and around the city of Bristol (England), with a growing membership from across the country, and are part of the international Network of Friendship and Solidarity with Colombia (Red de Hermandad).
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12) In Gulf, It Was Unclear Who Was in Charge of Oil Rig
"Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer."
By IAN URBINA
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html?hp
NEW ORLEANS - Over six days in May, far from the familiar choreography of Washington hearings, federal investigators grilled workers involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a chilly, sterile conference room at a hotel near the airport here.
The six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials pressed for answers about what occurred on the rig on April 20 before it exploded. They wanted to know who was in charge, and heard conflicting answers.
They pushed for more insight into an argument on the rig that day between a manager for BP, the well's owner, and one for Transocean, the rig's owner, and asked Curt R. Kuchta, the rig's captain, how the crew knew who was in charge.
"It's pretty well understood amongst the crew who's in charge," he said.
"How do they know that?" a Coast Guard investigator asked.
"I guess, I don't know," Captain Kuchta said. "But it's pretty well - everyone knows."
Looking annoyed, Capt. Hung Nguyen of the Coast Guard, one of the chief federal investigators, shook his head. The exchange confirmed an observation he had made earlier in the day at the hearing.
"A lot of activities seem not very tightly coordinated in the way that would make me comfortable," he said. "Maybe that's just the way of business out there."
Investigators have focused on the minute-to-minute decisions and breakdowns to understand what led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 people and setting off the largest oil spill in United States history and an environmental disaster. But the lack of coordination was not limited to the day of the explosion.
New government and BP documents, interviews with experts and testimony by witnesses provide the clearest indication to date that a hodgepodge of oversight agencies granted exceptions to rules, allowed risks to accumulate and made a disaster more likely on the rig, particularly with a mix of different companies operating on the Deepwater whose interests were not always in sync.
And in the aftermath, arguments about who is in charge of the cleanup - often a signal that no one is in charge - have led to delays, distractions and disagreements over how to cap the well and defend the coastline. As a result, with oil continuing to gush a mile below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, the laws of physics are largely in control, creating the daunting challenge of trying to plug a hole at depths where equipment is straining under more than a ton of pressure per square inch.
Tad W. Patzek, chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas, Austin, has analyzed reports of what led to the explosion. "It's a very complex operation in which the human element has not been aligned with the complexity of the system," he said in an interview last week.
His conclusion could also apply to what occurred long before the disaster.
Exceptions Are the Rule
Deepwater oil production in the gulf, which started in 1979 but expanded much faster in the mid-1990s with new technology and federal incentives, is governed as much by exceptions to rules as by the rules themselves.
Under a process called "alternative compliance," much of the technology used on deepwater rigs has been approved piecemeal, with regulators cooperating with industry groups to make small adjustments to guidelines that were drawn up decades ago for shallow-water drilling.
Of roughly 3,500 drilling rigs and production platforms in the gulf, fewer than 50 are in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. But the risks and challenges associated with this deeper water are much greater.
"The pace of technology has definitely outrun the regulations," Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom of the Coast Guard, who inspects the rigs, said last month at a hearing.
As a result, deepwater rigs operate under an ad hoc system of exceptions. The deeper the water, the further the exceptions stretch, not just from federal guidelines but also often from company policy.
So, for example, when BP officials first set their sights on extracting the oily riches under what is known as Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico, they asked for and received permission from federal regulators to exempt the drilling project from federal law that requires a rigorous type of environmental review, internal documents and federal records indicate.
As BP engineers planned to set certain pipes and casings for lining the well in place in the ocean floor, they had to get permission from company managers to use riskier equipment because that equipment deviated from the company's own design and safety policies, according to internal BP documents obtained by The New York Times.
And when company officials wanted to test the blowout preventer, a crucial fail-safe mechanism on the pipe near the ocean floor, at a lower pressure than was federally required, regulators granted an exception, documents released last week show.
Regulators granted yet another exception when BP sought to delay mandatory testing of that blowout preventer because they had lost "well control," weeks before the rig exploded, BP e-mail messages show.
The Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, went along with these requests partly because the agency has for years had a dual role of both fostering and policing the industry - collecting royalty payments from the drilling companies while also levying fines on them for violations of law.
Its safety inspections usually consist of helicopter visits to offshore rigs to sift through company reports of self-administered tests.
Even Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, who oversees the minerals agency, has said that oil companies have a history of "running the show" at the agency, a problem he has vowed to correct.
The minerals agency shares responsibility for oversight of drilling in the gulf with many others. The Environmental Protection Agency and others review offshore drilling for potential damage to wildlife and the environment. The Coast Guard inspects vessels for seaworthiness and licenses crew members to work on the rigs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors dangerous weather conditions over deep seas.
And regulatory duties extend even past the federal government. Foreign countries, or "flag states," where many oil rigs are registered, have their own sets of safety requirements and inspections.
Regulations have not kept up with the risks that deepwater drilling poses.
On the Deepwater Horizon, for example, the minerals agency approved a drilling plan for BP that cited the "worst case" for a blowout as one that might produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day, federal records show. But the agency did not require the rig to create a response plan for such a situation.
If a blowout were to occur, BP said in its plan, the first choice would be to use a containment dome to capture the leaking oil. But regulators did not require that a containment dome be kept on the rig to speed the response to a spill. After the rig explosion, BP took two weeks to build one on shore and three days to ship it out to sea before it was lowered over the gushing pipe on May 7. It did not work.
(The rig's "spill response plan," provided to The Times, includes a Web link for a contractor that goes to an Asian shopping Web site and also mentions the importance of protecting walruses, seals and sea lions, none of which inhabit the area of drilling. The agency approved the plan.)
More broadly, regulators have not required technology and strategies for dealing with deepwater spills to be improved.
Engineers trying to control the blowout are using the same tactics they used in 1979 when the Ixtoc I well blew up in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico. In the earlier blowout, they first tried lowering a containment dome over the leak. When that failed, they unsuccessfully tried to inject golf balls and other material in a move called a junk shot, which was also tried and abandoned for the Deepwater Horizon.
Questions of oversight also came up in the New Orleans hearings last month. For example, Michael J. Saucier, an official with the Minerals Management Service, said that his agency "highly encouraged" - but did not require - companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.
"Highly encourage?" Captain Nguyen of the Coast Guard asked. "How does that translate to enforcement?"
"There is no enforcement," Mr. Saucier answered.
Problems Early On
In some ways it was jinxed from the start.
As early as June 2009, BP engineers had expressed concerns in internal documents about using certain casings for the well because they violated the company's safety and design guidelines. But they proceeded with those casings.
Mechanical problems started in March with the Deepwater, setting the stage for the April 20 explosion.
More than five weeks before disaster, the rig was hit by several sudden pulsations of gas called "kicks" and a pipe had become stuck in the well. The blowout preventer, designed to seal the well in an emergency, had been discovered to be leaking fluids at least three times.
Dealing with these problems required teamwork, a challenge to the throng of different companies with responsibilities on the rig. Of the 126 people present on the day of the explosion, only eight were employees of BP. The interests of the workers did not always align.
In testimony to government investigators, rig workers repeatedly described a "natural conflict" between BP, which can make more money by completing drilling jobs quickly, and Transocean, which receives a leasing fee from BP every day that it continues drilling.
Halliburton was also on hand to provide cementing services, while a subsidiary monitored various drilling fluids. A different company provided drilling fluid systems, another provided technicians to operate the remote-control vehicles that are they eyes of the rig crew deep underwater, and yet another provided the well casing.
Amid this tangle of overlapping authority and competing interests, no one was solely responsible for ensuring the rig's safety, and communication was a constant challenge.
"I don't have a feeling that there is somebody who has a handle on the coordination of all the activities on this vessel, going from routine to crisis," Captain Nguyen said during one hearing. "BP is in charge of certain things, Transocean is in charge of certain things."
Financial concerns added pressures on the rig.
BP had fallen behind schedule and over budget, paying roughly $500,000 a day to lease the rig from Transocean. The rig was 43 days late for starting a new drilling job for BP by the day of the explosion, a delay that had already cost the company more than $21 million.
With the clock ticking, bad decisions went unchecked, warning signs went unheeded and small lapses compounded.
On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP's use of cement "was against our best practices."
An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices, this time saying that a "severe" gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.
Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of collapsing.
Despite noticing cementing problems, BP skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe. Federal regulators also gave the rig a pass at several critical moments. After the rig encountered several problems, including the gas kicks and the pipe stuck in the well, the regulators did not demand a halt to the operation. Instead, they gave permission for a delay in a safety test of the blowout preventer.
An initial investigation by BP points to a range of missteps.
Tests shortly before the well blew out found a buildup of pressure that was an "indicator of a very large abnormality," BP concluded and disclosed to Congress in a preliminary report last month. Yet, the rig team was satisfied after another test was deemed successful, and it proceeded.
About 10 hours before the explosion, the challenges of trying to keep the pressure in the well under control led to an argument among the workers about how best to finish the well and move the rig to the next site.
Douglas Brown, a Transocean mechanic on the rig, told investigators that an unnamed BP official whom he called "the company man" had instructed rig workers to execute a new plan for removing the riser and sealing the well. Mr. Brown testified that workers thought the plan was too risky. But he could not hear details of the argument that ensued.
"The company man was basically saying, 'Well, this is how it's going to be,' " Mr. Brown told investigators at a hearing on May 26 near New Orleans, adding that the Transocean rig workers "reluctantly agreed."
When the explosion occurred around 9:50 p.m. on April 20, there was pandemonium on the rig. Most workers headed for lifeboats. Others rescued shipmates trapped under equipment. On the bridge, Captain Kuchta gathered with at least eight other managers and crew members to decide on an emergency plan.
Steve Bertone, the chief engineer for Transocean, wrote in his witness statement that he ran up to the bridge where he heard Captain Kuchta screaming at a worker, Andrea Fleytas, because she had pressed the distress button without authorization.
Mr. Bertone turned to another worker and asked him if he had called to shore for help but was told he did not have permission to do so. Another manager tried to give the go-ahead, the testimony said, but someone else said the order needed to come from the rig's offshore installation manager.
A Strained Partnership
After the spill, the government and BP were supposed to cooperate, partly a consequence of laws written after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill that were intended to make polluters more accountable for cleaning up their own messes.
One example of what was supposed to be a unified front was the Joint Information Center. Housed in a Shell-owned training and conference center in Robert, La., the center includes roughly 65 employees, 10 of whom work for BP. Together, they write and issue news releases and coordinate posts on a Web site, Facebook and Twitter.
But the partnership between BP and the government has strained along with the failure of efforts to plug the well. Mr. Salazar, for example, assured the public on May 2 that the administration was keeping its "boot on the neck" of BP. Next he was being publicly chastised by President Obama for using antagonistic language.
BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, told reporters at one point that the spill was "relatively tiny." Federal officials soon released estimates indicating that the spill had far outpaced the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Under intense media scrutiny, at least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response, making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.
In one stark example of government disputes, internal e-mail messages from the minerals agency obtained by The Times reveal a heated debate over whether to ignore some federal environmental laws about gas emissions in an effort to speed the drilling of relief wells.
One agency official, Michael Tolbert, warned colleagues on April 24 that emissions of nitrous oxide from the well were "pretty far over the exemption level," an issue that his colleague Tommy Broussard said could result in "BP wasting time" on environmental safeguards in a way that would be "completely stupid."
But a third colleague, Elizabeth Peuler, intervened to demand that the agency take "no shortcuts."
"Not even for this one," she said. "Perhaps even especially for this one."
Debates over the speed - or lack thereof - of the government response have also played out in Louisiana, where state officials spent much of May repeatedly seeking permission from the federal government to construct up to 90 miles of sand barriers to prevent oil from reaching the wetlands.
For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore, officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach.
They ultimately approved the use of only one barrier, called a berm, to be paid for by BP.
Comparing the federal government's response to "telling a drowning man to wait," Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana asked: If one berm is safe, then why not the 23 others that he had requested? Slowly, the federal government approved more berms.
From the start, BP had played down the extent of the problem in miscalculating the rate of the leak and in denying the existence of underwater oil plumes. By deferring to the company, federal officials underestimated the problem they were facing and thus what was needed to respond to it.
It took more than a week after the explosion for the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, to declare, on April 29, "a spill of national significance" a legal categorization that was needed before certain federal assistance could be authorized.
Because of such delays, critics have charged, more coastline will be hit, more animals will die, more habitats will be ruined and more money will be lost in tourism, fishing and real estate.
And yet, the administration is limited in its ability to divorce itself from BP, because federal officials rely on the company for technology, personnel and financing for the cleanup. The relationship reached a turning point last week when the administration said the national incident commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, would start giving solo briefings. He will no longer share a podium with BP, which will offer its own briefings.
That move, however, does not resolve the matter of who is actually in charge in the gulf - of ensuring safety and regulating the dangerous extraction of vast riches under the deepest waters there, as well as of handling the continuing emergency.
The question is proving equally vexing as investigators try to place blame for events on the rig the day of the explosion- as was clear on Tuesday when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had begun a criminal investigation.
Citing "a wide range of possible violations," Mr. Holder declined to specify the target of the investigation, because, he said, the authorities were still not clear on "who should ultimately be held liable."
Robbie Brown contributed reporting from New Orleans, and Tom Zeller from New York.
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13) Even With a Cleanup, Spilled Oil Stays With Us
"...the cleanup by BP workers will capture only a fraction of the crude belched up by the broken well. Much of the oil will be taken care of by nature; the rest is likely to stay with us for decades."
By BILL MARSH
June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/weekinreview/06marsh.html
BP, in a series of newspaper advertisements about the Deepwater Horizon disaster, says it is "working around the clock to contain and collect most of the leak" and it will "take full responsibility for cleaning up the spill."
But if past catastrophes are guides, the cleanup by BP workers will capture only a fraction of the crude belched up by the broken well. Much of the oil will be taken care of by nature; the rest is likely to stay with us for decades.
In Alaskan coastal zones fouled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989, scientists discovered oil, scarcely changed, 16 years later. In some areas, its composition had not altered much from the toxic clumps and goo that had formed just weeks after the spill.
Contrary to early expectations, oil still oozes from Alaska's beaches, toxins intact, and is expected to remain - perhaps even for centuries.
The BP disaster differs greatly from the Valdez. In the Gulf of Mexico, vast plumes of oil, attacked with harsh chemical dispersants, churn up from mile-deep waters. In Alaska, a surface slick swept over more than a thousand miles of rocky coast. Spilled oil behaves in many ways, but here, based on sad experience, is some of what to expect in the gulf.
How it Disappears
EVAPORATION Some oil on the water surface evaporates within days. The lighter the oil, the more evaporation: half or more of light crudes can evaporate; medium crudes, up to 40 percent evaporate; heavy crudes as low as 10 percent. The spilled oil in the gulf is light crude, according to Edward B. Overton, an environmental sciences professor at Louisiana State University; Exxon Valdez oil was heavier.
DISPERSAL Oil may be reduced to tiny droplets by wave action or chemicals. Droplets are more readily consumed by microbes, but the effects of toxic chemical dispersants used in the gulf are not known.
EATEN BY BACTERIA If conditions are right, microbes can consume a great deal of spilled oil. But this is not always possible in oxygen-starved environments, like the deep sea or where oil has seeped into beach sediments.
REMOVAL Armies of workers at the Exxon Valdez disaster - 11,000 at the effort's peak - removed less than half the oil that didn't evaporate or biodegrade. Here is what happened to the more than 40,000 tons of Valdez oil, according to a study conducted three years after the spill.
What Remains
OIL 'MOUSSE' Residual emulsified oil - a gooey mix of crude from the Exxon disaster and water, remains in beaches in Alaska.
BURIED OIL Crude that penetrated into coastal sediments remains in dismaying amounts in Alaska. When sand and rock is disturbed - by burrowing or foraging animals, or surf - oil may leach out. Otherwise the oil remains intact and resistant to degradation. Pictured above: oil from a small hole dug on May 5 on Eleanor Island, Alaska.
TAR BALLS AND ASPHALT Congealed oil forms tar balls that resist weathering and can last for years; mix sand or beach gravel with oil and you get asphalt, which also resists erosion. Tar balls washed up on Florida beaches in the early days of the gulf spill, but they were not from Deepwater Horizon - they may have formed from other spills, or occurred naturally from oil seeps in the ocean. Pictured above: a tar ball in Pensacola, Fla. on Friday.
INTO THE FOOD CHAIN Oil and toxins concentrate in filtering animals like mussels, oysters and clams and are then ingested by their predators. The long-term effects of this are not fully understood, but oil ingestion is known to damage animals' immune systems and organs and cause behavioral changes that affect the ability to find food or avoid predators.
SLOWED RATES OF OIL LOSS Most of the oil from the 1989 Valdez disaster disappeared in the first few years. Scientists had hoped that almost all the remaining oil would disappear soon after, based on how quickly the oil was degrading in the early 1990s.
But later surveys showed that this oil was much slower to degrade, leading scientists to fear that it may persist for decades. About 100 tons of oil was still in the beaches of Prince William Sound as of 2001, out of more than 20,000 tons deposited there. And it is easily uncovered there today.
Sources: Gail V. Irvine, U.S. Geological Survey; Lisa Suatoni, Natural Resources Defense Council; Edward B. Overton, Louisiana State University; Chris Reddy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; United States Fish and Wildlife Service; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council; Environmental Science and Technology
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14) Changes in China Could Raise Prices Worldwide
By DAVID BARBOZA
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/global/08wages.html?hp
SHANGHAI - The cost of doing business in China is going up.
Coastal factories are raising salaries, local governments are hiking minimum wage standards and if China allows its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate against the U.S. dollar later this year, as many economists are predicting, the cost of manufacturing in China will almost certainly rise.
Although the salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe (the minimum wage in southern China is close to $125 a month), economists say the changes will eventually ripple through the global economy, driving up the prices of everything from T-shirts and sneakers to computer servers and smart phones.
"For a long time, China has been the anchor of global disinflation," said Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse, referring to how the two decade-long shift to manufacturing in China helped many global companies lower costs and prices. "But this may be the beginning of the end of an era."
The shift was dramatized Sunday, when Foxconn Technology, one of the world's largest contract electronics manufacturers and the maker of everything from the Apple iPhone to Dell computer parts, said that within three months it would double the salaries of many of its assembly line workers.
The announcement follows a spate of suicides at two Foxconn campuses in southern China and criticism of the company's labor practices.
Taiwan-based Foxconn, which has more than 800,000 workers in China, said the salary increases are meant to improve the lives of its workers.
Last week, the Japanese auto maker Honda said it had agreed to give about 1,900 workers at one of its plants in southern China raises of between 24 percent and 32 percent in the hopes of ending a two week-long strike, according to people briefed on the agreement.
The changes are coming about because of the growing clout of workers in China's sizzling economy, analysts say, and because soaring food and housing prices are eroding the spending power of migrant workers.
But there are other reasons. Analysts say Beijing is backing wage increases as a way to spur domestic consumption and make the country less dependent on low-priced exports. The government hopes the move will force some export-oriented companies to invest in more innovative or higher-value goods.
But Chinese policymakers also favor higher wages because they could help ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
Last Thursday, the Beijing municipal government said it would raise its minimum wage 20 percent to about $140 a month; several other cities are preparing to implement similar increases.
Big manufacturers are moving to raise salaries because they are desperate to attract new workers at a time when many coastal factory cities are struggling with labor shortages.
A Foxconn executive said last week that the turnover rate at its two Shenzhen campuses - which employ over 400,000 - is about five percent a month, meaning that an astounding 20,000 workers are leaving every month and need to be replaced.
Marshall W. Meyer, a China specialist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says demographic changes in China are reducing the supply of young workers entering the labor force, and that's behind some of the wage pressure.
"Demography will do what the Strategic & Economic Dialogue hasn't: raise the cost of Chinese goods," he said, referring to U.S.-China talks on Chinese currency reform and other economic issues. "There is no way out."
Economists say many of the same forces that were at work in 2007 and 2008 - when China's economy was overheating - have returned and even intensified this year.
Local governments have stepped up enforcement of labor and environmental regulations, driving up production costs.
And perhaps most troubling for companies here is the prospect of an appreciating Chinese currency, which would make their exports more expensive overseas.
Beijing has long promised to allow its currency to fluctuate more freely. But when the global financial crisis shuttered many Chinese factories, the government effectively re-pegged the renminbi to the dollar. That was a way to protect exporters.
Even though labor accounts for a small percentage of the final cost of many products, salary increases are expected to affect much of the supply chain and force companies to raise prices.
For many exporters, profit margins are already razor thin, and raising prices could hurt business.
"They're going to have to find a way to pass this on to the end user," says Mr. Tao at Credit Suisse.
Still, economists say a necessary restructuring is under way, one that should allow the nation's huge "floating population" of migrant workers to better share in the benefits of growth and spur domestic consumption.
United States and European Union officials have been pressing China to help improve the health of the global economy by consuming more and reducing the country's massive trade surpluses.
Rising labor costs here aren't the end of cheap production in China, analysts say, but they are likely to help change the country's manufacturing mix.
"China isn't going to lose its manufacturing base because it's got a huge domestic market," said Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. "But it will move them toward higher-end goods. And that matches the Chinese government's ambition. They don't just want to be the workshop of the world. They want to produce high-tech goods."
Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.
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15) Cameron Warns Britons of 'Decades' of Austerity
By SARAH LYALL
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/europe/08britain.html?hp
LONDON - Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that Britain's financial situation was "even worse than we thought" and that the country would have to make savage spending cuts to bring its swelling deficit under control.
Stern and grim-faced in a speech in Milton Keynes, just north of London, Mr. Cameron said, "How we deal with these things will affect our economy, our society - indeed our whole way of life."
"The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country," he said. "And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades, to come."
Mr. Cameron said that at more than 11 percent, Britain's budget deficit was the largest ever faced by the country in peacetime. But he warned that the structural deficit was more worrisome. Britain currently owes a total of more than $1.12 trillion , he said, and in five years will owe nearly double that if nothing is done now.
The country already spends more on interest payments on its debt than it does running its schools, he said, adding that how to reduce the deficit and cut down on borrowing was "the most urgent issue facing Britain today."
Mr. Cameron's government, a coalition of Conservatives from his party and Liberal Democrats led by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, faces a difficult political road. With its grip on power untested, it will have to contend with critics on the right and left of both parties to get its spending plans through Parliament.
At the same time, the government risks alienating Britons, particularly workers in the state sector, which Mr. Cameron singled out as an example of a public spending run amok.
Mr. Cameron tried to soften the blow by saying that the cuts would not disproportionately affect the vulnerable. Mr. Clegg told The Observer newspaper over the weekend that Britain would not face "a repeat of the 1980s" and the budget cuts of the Margaret Thatcher years.
Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, a union that represents many public service workers, nonetheless told the Press Association news agency that Mr. Cameron's speech was "a chilling attack on the public sector, public sector workers, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable, and a warning that their way of life will change."
The prime minister laid the blame for the situation squarely on what he called "reckless" spending by the Labour government, which was in power for 13 years before being defeated in last month's election. He said that as the financial crisis was "Labour's legacy," so, too, would be the spending cuts.
"Nothing illustrates better the total irresponsibility of the last government's approach than the fact that they kept ratcheting up unaffordable government spending even when the economy was shrinking," he said.
Labour argued that spending would help boost the economy, Mr. Cameron said, "conveniently forgetting that if you start with a large structural deficit, ramping up spending even further is likely to undermine confidence and investment, not encourage it."
Details of proposed spending cuts have not been public. The chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, plans to set out the principles underlying his spending plans on Tuesday and to announce an emergency budget on June 22.
Mr. Cameron said that the cuts would come after wide consultation with members of the British public, driving home a recurring theme in his election campaign that "we're all in this together."
"It is precisely because these decisions are so momentous, because they will have such enormous implications, and because we cannot afford either to duck them or to get them wrong that I want to make sure we go about the urgent task of cutting our deficit in a way that is open, responsible and fair," he said.
He said the financial situation had been worsened by the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. "The global financial markets are no longer focusing simply on the financial position of the banks," he said. "They want to know that the governments that have supported the banks over the last 18 months are taking the actions to bring their own finances under control."
As a cautionary tale, he mentioned Greece, where profligate spending led to a huge budget deficit and eventually a downgrading on financial markets.
While Britain's economic position is stronger than that of Greece, he said, "Greece stands as a warning of what happens to countries that lose their credibility, or whose governments pretend that difficult decisions can be avoided."
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16) Coast Guard Sees Cleanup of Spill Lasting Until the Fall
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
June 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/us/07spill.html?hp
HOUSTON - The Coast Guard commander in charge of the federal response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico warned on Sunday that even if the flow of crude was stopped by summer, it could take well into autumn - and maybe much longer- to deal with the slick spreading relentlessly across the gulf.
The assessment came as the sheer volume of oil gushing from the out-of-control well forced BP to temporarily halt its attempts to close all four vents on a capping device designed to capture the oil. Even with three vents still open, the cap was capturing so much oil - more than 10,000 barrels a day, an improvement over any previous containment attempt - that the company did not have adequate equipment at hand to process any more.
The well, like a raging undersea beast, has continued to stymie BP and government officials. One technician, amazed at the power of the oil gushing from its depths, called it "one hell of a well."
Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander, said on "Face the Nation" on CBS that BP officials were working to secure the cap over the wellhead and to gradually increase the amount of oil recovered. But he said the only solution to the problem would be the successful completion of relief wells to finally stop the flow from the bottom of the 18,000-foot-deep well, a job that will not be completed until August at the earliest.
"The spill will not be contained until that happens," Admiral Allen said. "But even after that, there will be oil out there for months to come. This will be well into the fall."
He added: "This is a siege across the entire gulf. This spill is holding everybody hostage, not only economically but physically. And it has to be attacked on all fronts."
Officials said Sunday that they were collecting more than 10,000 barrels a day from the well, but it was impossible to gauge what fraction of the total flow that represented.
A federal panel has estimated that 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day is flowing from the well. But those calculations were made before BP cut the riser pipe last week to accommodate the capping device, which administration officials have said could increase the flow rate by as much as 20 percent.
The area of gulf shoreline potentially affected by the spill has continued to grow, extending from central Louisiana to Port St. Joe in the middle of the Florida Panhandle, a 400-mile front in a widening sea, air and land war. Admiral Allen, who appeared on four television programs on Sunday morning to discuss the disaster, said he was fighting the oil and the elements with a flotilla of skimmers and boom-laying boats to try to keep the oil from making landfall.
"The problem we have, this is not a large, monolithic spill anymore," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "It is an aggregation of thousands of smaller spills that could come ashore at any particular time based on wind and current."
It was too early to judge the degree of success of BP's latest maneuver to control the leak, although company officials continued to express optimism that the containment cap and a new device to be installed later in the week could eventually collect the majority of the oil.
After two days of trying to gradually close the four vents on the capping device, engineers on Sunday decided to keep some open when they realized that more oil was being captured than could be processed on a drill ship floating in the gulf above. In a statement late Sunday, the company said it "may leave some" of the valves open "to ensure system stability."
Engineers had feared that the volume and velocity of oil escaping might create so much friction on the new pipe that it might force it entirely off the cap. All day Saturday they worked to shut two of the vents, and they spent the afternoon measuring the results, mindful that if they closed the vents too quickly, water could rush in and form the kind of icy hydrates that doomed a previous containment effort.
But while the cap remained snugly in place and there were no signs of significant hydrate formation, by nightfall Saturday the engineers suddenly were forced to deal with another problem: the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship can only handle 15,000 barrels a day, and the capping device was trapping almost that amount without the vents shut.
"We're maxed out," said the technician, who is working on the operation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. He said the capping device was capturing 10,000 to 15,000 barrels a day.
"There is no chance to close the vents when you are at maximum production," he said. "You wish desperately you could capture it all, but it depends on the volume coming out of well. And you know how people are arguing about that."
The problem may be only a temporary one. The limitations of the Discoverer Enterprise to handle oil are mainly due to the size and capacity of the machines it has on board to separate the oil, gas and water for storage. The ship has the capacity to store 139,000 barrels of oil, a quantity that may be reached in a matter of days. Shuttle barges carry oil from the ship to storage tanks on shore.
BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, in a British television interview broadcast Sunday, said another containment device would be deployed by next weekend. That device is a free-standing riser pipe that would siphon oil through the manifold that was built during a failed operation known as top kill. Another pipe will be also used to take oil from the well to a second container ship, the Q4000.
Taken together, BP executives say, they should be able to eventually contain a vast majority of the leaking oil. By early July, BP plans to replace the new containment cap with another device called an "overshot tool," which is heavier and more tightly sealed. "That would capture even more oil" than the current cap, said Toby Odone, a BP spokesman.
The struggle to fully deploy the new containment device has raised renewed questions about just how much oil is spewing from the well. Official government and BP estimates began at 1,000 barrels a day, then increased to 5,000 barrels a day.
In recent days government scientists estimated the leak at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels, and Admiral Allen on Sunday put the upper range at 25,000 barrels. Some independent scientists say the number could be far higher, and they question why BP has not made an active effort to estimate the size of the leak.
Some questioned whether BP knew or even wanted to know how much oil was escaping.
"BP still does not appear to know precisely how much oil is actually escaping, which is discouraging," Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a letter he wrote to BP on Sunday.
Government officials and BP executives say the containment efforts should help them come up with a more solid number.
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and John M. Broder from Washington. Henry Fountain contributed reporting from New York.
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17) U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter / Wired
June 7th, 2010 7:22 AM
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/us-intelligence-analyst-arrested-wikileaks-video-probe
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he's being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing "almost criminal political back dealings."
"Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning wrote.
Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voice mail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.
The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.
Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, "If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn't have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law."
Manning's arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.
"If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" Manning asked.
From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.
When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.
Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning - he says he's frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he's never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning's actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.
"I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger," says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning's arrest. "He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air."
Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained "incredible things, awful things ... that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC."
He first contacted Wikileaks' Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. "I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward," he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was "a source, not quite a volunteer."
Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title "Collateral Murder," shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man's two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.
"At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter," Manning wrote of the video. "No big deal ... about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer's directory. So I looked into it."
In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he'd gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. "He wanted to do the right thing," says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. "That was something I think he was struggling with."
Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the U.S.
"He would message me, Are people talking about it?... Are the media saying anything?," Watkins said. "That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?... He didn't want to do this just to cause a stir. ... He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn't happen again."
Watkins doesn't know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.
The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.
As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.
Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.
The networks, he said, were both "air gapped" from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
"I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like 'Lady Gaga', erase the music then write a compressed split file," he wrote. "No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will."
"[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history," he added later. "Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm."
Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.
Manning's aunt, with whom he lived in the U.S., had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.
She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn't discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.
The message reads: "Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com."
An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. "He hasn't seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video," Van Alstyne said.
Manning's father said Sunday that he's shocked by his son's arrest.
"I was in the military for 5 years," said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. "I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn't open up to anything."
His son, he added, is "a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing."
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he's now concerned about the soldier's status and well-being. The FBI hasn't told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.
The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.
That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
"Everywhere there's a U.S. post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed," Manning wrote. "It's open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It's Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It's beautiful, and horrifying."
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18) Human Experimentation at the Heart of Bush Administration's Torture Program
Sunday 06 June 2010
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/human-experimentation-heart-bush-administrations-torture-program60199
High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration's "war on terror," who were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as "guinea pigs" to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors' organization.
PHR, based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the US Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal interrogations.
"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program." "Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
The report is based on extensive research of previously declassified government documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in establishing and justifying the legality of the Bush administration's torture program. Many of the details contained in the document has already been painstakingly documented by Marcy Wheeler at her blog Emptywheel, and Truthout's own Jeffrey Kaye on his blog Invictus and in articles published on this web site and at Firedoglake.
Written by medical and psychological experts, some of who have worked with victims of torture, the report said the research and experimentation on detainees violate medical professional standards, the Geneva Conventions on treatment of detainees, and international law based on the Nuremberg principles that were embraced by the civilized world after it was revealed that the Nazis engaged in medical atrocities on prisoners during World War II.
"The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs," the PHR report said.
Frank Donaghue, PHR's chief executive officer, said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."
Waterboarding and Combined Techniques
For example, CIA medical personnel obtained experimental research data by subjecting more than 25 detainees to individual and combined torture techniques, including sleep deprivation and stress positioning, as a way of understanding "whether one type of application over another would increase the subjects' susceptibility to severe pain," the report said, adding that the information derived from that research informed "subsequent [torture] practices."
The study of combined and individual torture tactics "appears to have been used primarily to enable the Bush administration to assess the legality of the tactics, and to inform medical monitoring policy and procedure for future application of the techniques," the report said.
Drawing from the study of torture tactics, Steven Bradbury, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), prepared a memo in 2005 that approved combinations of torture tactics, including forced nudity, "wall-slamming," stress positions and repeated periods of sleep deprivation.
PHR's analysis on sleep deprivation concluded that "government lawyers used observational data collected by health professionals from varying applications of sleep deprivation to inform legal evaluations regarding the risk of inflicting certain levels of harm on the detainee, and to shape policy that would guide further application of the technique."
PHR also said the drowning method known as waterboarding was monitored in early 2002 by medical personnel who collected data about how detainees responded to the torture technique. The data was then given to Bradbury, who cited it in advising CIA interrogators how to administer the technique.
"According to the Bradbury memoranda, [CIA Office of Medical Services] teams, based on their observation of detainee responses to waterboarding, replaced water in the waterboarding procedure with saline solution ostensibly to reduce the detainees' risk of contracting pneumonia and/or hyponatremia, a condition of low sodium levels in the blood caused by free water intoxication, which can lead to brain edema and herniation, coma, and death," the report said.
In Bradbury's memo urging revised techniques - what the PHR report termed "Waterboarding 2.0" - the Bush lawyer wrote that "based on advice of medical personnel, the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia ... if the detainee drinks the water."
The Bush administration also used the medical studies to mitigate any blame that might be placed on CIA interrogators or their superiors, by suggesting that doctors were involved to protect the health of the detainees even if a side benefit was to make the torture more effective, the report said.
Shielding Torturers
But the administration apparently anticipated accusations of human experimentation by adding language in the 2006 Military Commissions Act. The PHR's report noted that the law amended the War Crimes Act, and made it retroactive to 1997, "to delineate the specific violations of [the Geneva Conventions'] Common Article 3 that would be punishable. Among those violations is 'performing biological experiments.'
"The amended language prohibits: The act of a person who subjects, or conspires or attempts to subject, one or more persons within his custody or physical control to biological experiments without a legitimate medical or dental purpose and in so doing endangers the body or health of such person or persons."
According to the PHR report, "the new language of the WCA added two qualifications that appear to have lowered the bar on biological experimentation on prisoners" by creating a loophole regarding a "legitimate" purpose that does not necessarily match up with the interests of the subject. The word "endangers" also would open the door to some forms of human experimentation, the report said.
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Calls for Accountability
PHR and other human rights groups plan to file a complaint Wednesday with the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) demanding the agency launch a probe into the CIA's Office of Medical Services. Additionally, the group wants the Justice Department's ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), to launch a separate investigation.
The OPR recently concluded a four-year long investigation into the legal work former OLC attorneys John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Jay Bybee, a federal appeals court judge on the Ninth Circuit, did when drafting the August 2002 torture memos and concluded both men violated professional standards when they issued their legal opinions that allowed CIA officers to use brutal methods when interrogating suspected terrorists, and recommended both men be referred to their state bar associations to face possible disbarment.
The judgment was softened by career prosecutor David Margolis, who was put in charge of the final recommendations, and who said he was "unpersuaded" by OPR's "misconduct" conclusion, which faulted Yoo and Bybee for their approval of brutal interrogation techniques that were used against terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks.
The CIA denied the PHR's allegations of wrongdoing. Spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency, "as part of its past detention program, [did not] conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees."
Despite the latest revelations regarding the torture program and other war crimes, President Obama still refuses to allow war-crimes investigations into the actions of President George W. Bush and his subordinates, saying it is better to "look forward, and not backwards."
However, Obama appears to have different standards for other countries. During an interview with a reporter for an Indonesian television station, Obama was asked whether he was satisfied with the way Indonesia dealt with its past human rights abuses.
"We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed," said Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a child and whose step-father was Indonesian. "We can't go forward without looking backwards."
Stephen Soldz, a psychoanalyst and one of the author's of the PHR report, said "it is important to realize that the logic used by the Obama administration to refuse an investigation of torture claims - that the torture memos allowed the torturers to believe their actions were legally sanctioned - does not apply to potential research on detainees."
"As far as is publicly known, there exist no 'torture research' memos authorizing ignoring laws and regulations prohibiting research on torture techniques," Soldz said.
Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, said PHR's findings "recalls some of humanity's darkest days - charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away."
"A Guinea Pig"
The PHR report's conclusions regarding sleep deprivation also buttresses previous information that the Bush administration practiced its torture techniques on the first "high-value detainee," Abu Zubaydah, after he was captured in March 2002 and confirm several recent investigative reports published by Truthout.
A former National Security official knowledgeable about the Bush administration's torture program previously told Truthout that Zubaydah was "an experiment ... a guinea pig" used so CIA contractors could obtain data regarding different techniques.
The data was then shared with officials at the CIA and the Justice Department, who used the information to draft the August 2002 torture memos regarding the preferred interrogation methods and their frequency of use, setting parameters that supposedly prevented the interrogators from crossing the line into torture.
In an interview with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Zubaydah said the torture he was subjected to after his capture "felt like [his torturers] were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people."
Moreover, in her book "The Dark Side," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote that Zubaydah's interrogation sessions became more aggressive and experimental in April 2002, after the CIA sent in Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the agency, to take over the interrogations.
Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who had first interrogated Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques, that Zubaydah needed to be treated "like a dog in a cage."
Mitchell said Zubaydah was "like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while he's so diminished, he can't resist."
Soufan and the other FBI agent argued that Zubaydah was "not a dog, he was a human being" to which Mitchell responded: "Science is science."
The PHR report does not identify Zubaydah by name.
In March, Truthout reported, based on interviews with more than two dozen intelligence and national security officials, that one of the main reasons Zubaydah's torture sessions were videotaped was to gain insight into his "physical reaction" to the techniques used against him.
For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to "severely break down." So, the torture memo signed by Bybee concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.
Those videotapes were destroyed and the issue is now the subject of a criminal investigation lead by John Durham, a US attorney from Connecticut.
PHR's report said, "information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish sleep deprivation policy" and "guide further application of the technique."
The report determined that the human experimentation side of the program helped create a framework to protect the torturers from war crimes and other charges.
"OLC lawyers argued that efforts to refine and improve the application of techniques would provide a potential 'good faith' defense for interrogators against charges of torture," the report said. "They argued that such a medical monitoring regime would remove the element of intent to cause harm from the act, which is a necessary requirement for a successful prosecution of a torture charge under US law, and that a 'good faith belief need not be a reasonable belief; it need only be an honest belief.' Thus, research on the detainees became a key part of the OLC legal strategy to demonstrate the lack of intent to commit torture."
Nathaniel Raymond, director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture, said, "Justice Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture."
Brent Mickum, Zubaydah's attorney, said PHR's report is evidence that there was an "experimental element to the torture program and it was approved at the highest levels of government."
"I have said literally for years that I believe my client was tortured before any of these enhanced interrogation techniques were approved by the Justice Department," Mickum told Truthout. "And now we know that not only was my client subjected to torture but he was part of an experiment. This is so ugly, so shameful, so unlawful. If this revelation doesn't kick in an obligation on the part of the Department of Justice to investigate war crimes than I don't know what does. The Obama administration has essentially refused to do that. At some point, this president and his appointees have to take seriously what their obligations are under the law."
Mickum said he is preparing to file a series of motions in federal court, calling on the government to preserve evidence related to the CIA's research and experimentation.
"Research" Continues
Meanwhile, Obama's presence in the White House has not resulted in an abandonment of the research side of the interrogation program.
Last March, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recently resigned, disclosed that the Obama administration's High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), planned on conducting "scientific research" to determine "if there are better ways to get information from people that are consistent with our values."
"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair said during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. He did not provide additional details as to what the "scientific research" entailed.
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19) 'A Very Deep Hole'
By BOB HERBERT
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08herbert.html?hp
I know the president has a lot on his mind, but the No. 1 problem facing the U.S. continues to fester, and that problem is unemployment.
The jobs report for May, released on Friday by the Labor Department, was grim. President Obama tried to put the best face on it, but it was undeniably bad news, which is why the stock markets tanked. The private sector created just 41,000 jobs in May, a dismal performance. The government hired 411,000 workers to help with the census, but those jobs are temporary and will vanish in a few months.
Unemployment is crushing families and stifling the prospects of young people. Given that reality, President Obama's take on the May numbers seemed oddly out of touch. "This report," he said, "is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day."
The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed. Even the meager job growth in the private sector last month was composed mostly of temporary work. Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, had the right take when he said, "These new data do not present a picture of a healthy private sector and offer nothing even closely resembling the job growth we need to dig us out of a very deep hole."
More than 15 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half have been jobless for six months or longer. New college graduates are having a terrible time finding work, and many are taking jobs that require only a high school education. Teachers are facing the worst employment market since the Depression.
Entire communities are going under. A remarkable article in The Times last week detailed what has happened in Memphis, where a majority of the residents are black. It said the city epitomizes "how rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress."
The median income of black homeowners in Memphis has dropped to a level below that of 1990.
It's impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. With so many people out of work and so much of the rest of the population deeply in debt, where is the spending going to come from to power a true economic recovery? The deficit hawks are forecasting Armageddon, but how is anyone going to get a handle on the federal deficits if we don't get millions of people back to work and paying taxes?
Some inner-city neighborhoods, where joblessness is off the charts, are becoming islands of despair. Rural communities and rust belt cities and towns are experiencing their own economic nightmares.
There is no plan that I can see to get us out of this fix. Drastic cuts in government spending would only compound the crisis. State and local governments, for example, are shedding workers as we speak.
Policy makers have acted as if they are unaware of the magnitude of this crisis. They have behaved as though somehow, through some economic magic perhaps, or the power of prayer, this ocean of joblessness will just disappear. That's a pipe dream.
Even if we somehow experienced a sudden, extraordinary surge in job growth (which no one is expecting), it would take a very long time just to get back to the level of employment that we had when the recession started in late-2007.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, addressed this. "In the boom of the late-1990s," she said, "the fastest year of employment growth was 2.6 percent, in 1998. If, in the event we have that extremely strong level of growth from here on out, we would still not get down to pre-recession unemployment rates until January 2015."
For all the money that has been spent so far, the Obama administration and Congress have not made the kinds of investments that would put large numbers of Americans back to work and lead to robust economic growth. What is needed are the same things that have been needed all along: a vast program of infrastructure repair and renewal; an enormous national investment in clean energy aimed at transforming the way we develop and use energy in this country; and a transformation of the public schools to guarantee every child a first-rate education in a first-rate facility.
This would be a staggeringly expensive and difficult undertaking and would entail a great deal of shared sacrifice. (It would also require an end to our insane waste of resources on mindless and endless warfare.) The benefits over the long term would be enormous.
Bold and effective leadership would have put us on this road to a sustainable future. Instead, we're approaching a dead end.
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20) Plumes of Oil Deep in Gulf Are Spreading Far, Tests Find
By JUSTIN GILLIS, CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN BRODER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09spill.html?hp
The government confirmed Tuesday that plumes of dispersed oil were spreading far below the ocean surface from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, raising fresh concerns about the potential impact of the spill on sea life.
Tests conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida found that the concentrations of oil-related chemicals in the water were generally low. Still, the tests confirmed that some toxic compounds that would normally be expected to evaporate from the surface in a shallow-water oil spill were instead spreading through the ocean in the Deepwater Horizon leak.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which helped to fund the research, said it was still working to get a better handle on the potential impact of the spill on fish, corals and other wildlife. Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, said the agency was doing its best to determine "where the oil is going, and where it is at the surface, and where it might be below the surface, and what the consequences of that oil will be to coastal communities as well as to the health of the gulf."
The University of South Florida tests confirmed that detectable levels of petroleum compounds had traveled as far as 42 miles northeast of the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico.
The announcement of test results appeared to confirm information first presented three weeks ago by another group of researchers, who found evidence of large plumes of dispersed oil droplets in the deep ocean, with the largest plume stretching west and southwest of the well. Their findings suggested that a significant amount of oil could be spreading through the deep ocean in plumes or layers of highly dispersed oil, rather than rising to the surface.
Those scientists have not yet completed their analysis of the water samples they collected, but one of them, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, held a news conference Tuesday where she presented detailed instrument readings. Those readings confirm that a large plume, probably consisting of hydrocarbons from the leak, stretches through the deep ocean for at least 15 miles west of the gushing oil well, Dr. Joye said.
Bacteria appear to be consuming the oil-related compounds at a furious pace, Dr. Joye said. That is depleting the water of oxygen, she said, though not yet to a level that would kill sea creatures.
The announcement of test results on the plumes came in a morning news conference in which the national commander of the response to the spill, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, said that BP's new containment cap had captured 14,482 barrels of oil in the most recent 24-hour period, though several of the vents on the cap remain open. The captured oil is being brought to the surface for processing, though a great deal of oil is still leaking out at the ocean floor.
The new figures bring the total collected over four days to about 42,500 barrels of oil, while 30.6-million cubic feet of natural gas has been flared off.
Responding to a reporter's question about why more progress has not been made, Admiral Allen responded: "I have never said this is going well. We're throwing everything at it that we've got. I've said time and time again that nothing good happens when oil is on the water."
Earlier Tuesday, President Obama said he would have fired BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, over the handling of the oil spill if Mr. Hayward worked for him. Mr. Obama's remarks, part of an interview on NBC's "Today" show, came as the president was defending his own response to what is being called the nation's worst environmental disaster.
Critics have said that Mr. Obama has not displayed enough outrage over the spill, which resulted from an explosion on a drilling rig on April 20 that killed 11 workers.
"I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar," Mr. Obama told the show's host, Matt Lauer, in an interview conducted Monday in Kalamazoo, Mich. "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer, so I know whose ass to kick."
The Interior Department was preparing on Tuesday to release new safety and environmental rules that would allow shallow-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to resume. The step would answer concerns from the energy industry and local officials that the freeze on all drilling in the gulf is putting hundreds of people out of work and denying the industry millions of dollars in revenue.
The Obama administration declared a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the aftermath of the BP spill, but said that it would allow exploration and production wells to continue operating in water less than 500 feet deep. Even so, it essentially halted shallow-water drilling operations while the new guidelines were being written. Those new rules are expected as soon as Tuesday afternoon from the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department unit responsible for policing offshore operations.
Well operators complained that the wait for the new guidelines was causing hardship across the gulf. The president of the National Ocean Industries Association wrote in a letter on Monday, "Although as this accident shows, one accident is one too many, a lengthy shutdown of drilling will only multiply the economic and emotional stress and loss of jobs that has already devastated the region." The trade group official, Randall Luthi, a former director of MMS, said that offshore drilling is responsible for 200,000 jobs along the gulf coast and 30 percent of the nation's domestic oil production.
An Interior Department official said that the new rules would clarify how shallow-water drillers could meet safety and environmental regulations and resume operations. "Pulling back exploration plans and development plans and requiring them to be updated with new information is consistent with this cautious approach and will ensure that new safety standards and risk considerations are incorporated into those planning documents," the agency said in a statement.
Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.
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21) With Strikes, China's Workers Seem to Gain Power
By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09labor.html?hp
SHANGHAI - Just days after resolving a strike by agreeing to give substantial raises to 1,900 workers at its transmission factory, Honda Motor said Tuesday that employees at another of its parts plants in southern China had staged a walkout.
A Honda spokeswoman in Tokyo, Natsuno Asanuma, said workers at an exhaust-system factory in the city of Foshan had gone on strike Monday morning. She declined to say what demands they had made. But the walkout will force Honda to halt work Wednesday at one of its four auto assembly plants in China, the company said.
The four assembly factories had just reopened after closing for almost two weeks because of the earlier strike. It was unclear how long the assembly plant, Guangqi Honda Automobile, would remain closed.
The second Honda strike comes amid growing signs that China's huge migrant work force is gaining bargaining power. New pressure to raise pay and improve labor conditions is likely to raise the cost of doing business and could induce some companies to shift production elsewhere.
Foxconn Technology - a giant contract electronics manufacturer that also raised wages in China this month - said Tuesday it was reconsidering the way it runs its operations there.
The company, which has seen a string of suicides among workers at its sprawling, citylike campuses in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, said it was considering turning the management of some of its worker dormitories over to local governments in China.
"Because Foxconn is a commercial enterprise operating like a society, we're responsible for almost everything for our workers, including their job, food, dorm and even personal relationships," Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman, said Tuesday. "That is too much for a single company. A company like Foxconn shouldn't have so many functions."
Foxconn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, makes devices for companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Hon Hai's shares fell more than 5 percent Tuesday in Taiwan, to their lowest since last August, after the company said it would seek to pass on its higher labor costs to clients.
As the company held annual shareholder meetings in Taipei and Hong Kong, small groups of people demonstrated outside, urging the company to improve conditions for workers.
Turning over management of employee dormitories to the government authorities would be a dramatic change for Foxconn, which - like thousands of other manufacturers in southern China - has lured peasants from rural areas to work at giant, gated factory compounds.
One of the company's Shenzhen campuses employs 300,000 workers and covers about 1 square mile, or more than 2.5 square kilometers. The gated campus boasts high-rise dormitories, a hospital, a fire department, an Internet cafe and even restaurants and bank branches.
Foxconn said Sunday that it planned to double the salaries of many of its 800,000 workers in China to 2,000 renminbi, or nearly $300, a month. The huge raise by one of the country's biggest exporters seems likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit, analysts say.
Chairman Terry Gou told the Taipei shareholders' meeting that the company was looking to shift some unspecified production from China to automated plants in Taiwan, Reuters reported.
After years of focusing on luring foreign investment, Chinese officials are now endorsing efforts to improve conditions for workers and raise salaries. The government hopes the changes will ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor and prevent social unrest over soaring food and housing prices.
On Friday, Beijing's municipal government said it would raise its minimum wage by 20 percent. Ma Jun, a Hong Kong-based economist at Deutsche Bank, said last week that more cities and provinces would soon raise their minimum wages 10 to 20 percent.
"We therefore believe that a faster-than-expected labor cost increase has now become a political imperative," Mr. Ma said in a report, citing comments from Beijing's leadership about improving social justice.
But analysts say wage pressure is also coming from labor shortages in coastal cities as the country's declining birth rate reduces the number of young people entering the work force.
Factories in southern China that used to advertise in search of employees 18 to 24 years old are now recruiting much older workers.
The labor shortages are being exacerbated by an economic boom and improving job prospects in inland provinces.
TPV Technology, a contract manufacturer that produces computer monitors with about 16,000 workers in five cities in China, says it raised salaries by 15 percent in January and plans to raise them again, perhaps as early as July.
"We'll adjust our salary to the market and to our competitors' level," said Shane Tyau, a vice president at TPV, which is based in Hong Kong. "If Foxconn announces another round of pay raises, we'll reconsider our wage level, too."
Economists say that China's labor force is growing increasingly bold and that over the past year, periodic strikes in southern China - some even involving global companies - have been resolved quietly or not reported in the media.
To resolve the strike at its transmission plant, Honda offered workers raises of 24 to 32 percent. The strike had forced Honda to shut down its assembly plants in China.
Now Honda, Japan's second-largest automaker, after Toyota Motor, has been a target again. The exhaust-system factory, which is controlled by a joint venture between a Honda subsidiary and a Chinese company.
Honda owns a network of production facilities in China, including the four car assembly factories and three auto parts manufacturers, as well as two motorbike plants, two plants that make generators, pumps and other power equipment and three research centers.
Those numbers do not include factories opened in China by Honda subsidiaries like Yutaka Giken, which separately runs four auto parts manufacturers in the country.
Honda denied Tuesday that it was vulnerable to more strikes because it had already shown a willingness to increase wages to get employees back to its production lines. "It's not at all clear at this point whether the two strikes are related," said Ms. Asanuma, the Honda spokeswoman.
"It's too early at this point to say whether we are looking at some kind of chain reaction."
Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo. Bao Beibei contributed research.
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22) CONFIRMED: Aerial Video Shows Second Leaking Rig Near The Deepwater Horizon
[There is a video of the Ocean Saratoga rig oil leak in addition to the Deepwater Horizon leak...bw]
By Gus Lubin
Jun. 8, 2010, 9:18 AM
http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
Earlier we published speculation from satellite analytics group SkyTruth that there may be a second leak in the Gulf. A freelance pilot and photographer confirmed these rumors and a possible coverup.
Photographer J Henry Fair says the new photos show an oil plume originating from the Ocean Saratoga rig, which is operated by Diamond Offshore. A work ship in the foreground appeared to be applying dispersants to the oil. A larger rig in the background may be discharging another leak.
This leak was reported last night by Alabama local news. NOAA also mentioned this leak in a April 30 oil slick map [PDF].
Diamond Offshore spokesman Gary Krenek tells us his company was hired by Taylor Energy to "plug and abandon" the existing well. He declined to comment on the reported leak.
The rig was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, according to Times Picayune. However, Diamond Offshore tells us, however, it was not hired to close the well until 2009.
So how long and how much oil has leaked?
A NOAA spokeswoman said "scientists are looking into the leak." Meanwhile, Coast Guard rep Zachary Zubricki tells us "this is not a story."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
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23) Spain Hit by Strike Over Austerity Measures
By RAPHAEL MINDER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/europe/09iht-spain.html?ref=world
MADRID - Spanish public workers went on strike on Tuesday against a cut in their wages in what could be the first of several union-led protests against the government's latest austerity measures.
The strike reduced hospital care, mail distribution and other public services to a minimum, but did not cause a nationwide paralysis. Trade unions said that 75 percent of the country's 2.5 million public workers had gone on strike - a number that was contested by the government, which put the level of participation at about 11.85 percent.
Consuelo Rumi, deputy minister in charge of the civil service, described the protest as a day of "normality" with few incidents. "This strike has had a limited reach," she said.
Reports suggested that some regions were far more affected than others, particularly Catalonia, where the transport network was disrupted and protesters briefly cut off the city's main thoroughfare by burning tires. The public sector strike came on top of a separate protest by truck drivers angered by the cost of diesel fuel, which has notably hit traffic at the border with France.
Spain's public workers were protesting against a 5 percent average reduction in their wages this year, part of a government package of additional spending cuts worth 15 billion euros that was narrowly approved by lawmakers last month.
The cuts are designed to help appease international investors - concerned about Spain and other ailing economies among the 16 members of the euro - by cutting Spain's deficit from 11.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2009 to 3 percent in 2013, the limit under the euro rules.
Tuesday's strike, however, is widely expected to be the prelude to more severe labor unrest later this month, after the government unveils on June 16 plans to overhaul Spain's labor laws. The country's two main unions, which have been at loggerheads with employers over how to improve the labor market, have warned of a general strike should the government present a "hurtful" reform plan.
Spain has some of the highest firing costs for open-ended contracts in Europe, according to the World Bank. That, in turn, has encouraged employers to put a quarter of the country's workforce on temporary contracts. That contributes to rapid fluctuations in Spain's employment levels, with the jobless rate recently soaring to almost 20 percent, double the European Union's average.
As part of his labor reform, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister, is expected to propose next week a sharp cut in redundancy costs for companies, reducing the payment that fired workers on long-term contracts are guaranteed for each year of employment to as little as 20 days from the prevailing 45 days.
A second priority of the reform is to loosen the rigid system of collective bargaining that prevents companies from agreeing to their own terms with employees - and even forces them to follow different rules in different regions.
Still, the government is also expected to take additional steps - focusing this time on increasing state revenues - to help reduce the deficit amid concerns about Spain's growth prospects. BBVA, one of Spain's two biggest banks, forecast Monday that Spain's economy would contract 0.6 percent this year.
Mr. Zapatero recently warned the rich of higher taxes. The government is also considering a fiscal amnesty, according to the center-right newspaper El Mundo, that would seek to repatriate about 50 billion euros held offshore by granting tax evaders a pardon in return for investing in Spanish debt at below market rates.
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24) Police Officers End a Mine Strike in Mexico
By ELISABETH MALKIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?ref=world
MEXICO CITY - For almost three years, the miners at the massive open-pit Cananea copper mine have been on strike, ground troops in a battle to force the recognition of their exiled leader.
The strike ended abruptly Sunday night as busloads of federal police officers poured into the mine, which is 25 miles south of the Arizona border, and took it over.
Mexico's interior ministry said the takeover was peaceful. But witnesses said the police used tear gas to disperse about 50 miners picketing outside the gates and then followed the miners to the union hall where they tried to take refuge.
There were no confirmed reports of injuries.
On Monday, people in Cananea, a tiny desert town, awoke to see the picket line replaced by federal police officers on guard inside the mine's fences. Police trucks rolled through the streets as helicopters clattered overhead.
The mine's owner, Grupo Mexico, which has reported that it has lost more than $1.5 billion from the strike, said that investigators had already entered the mine to assess the damage.
On its surface, the strike by more than 1,000 workers began over health and safety conditions at the mine, but both sides acknowledge that was never the fundamental issue.
The labor dispute at Cananea has been a proxy for a fight that is highly personal - between the miners' leader, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, who has been living in Vancouver, Canada, to escape corruption charges, and German Larrea, the company's secretive chief executive, who is one of Mexico's richest men.
"The reason for all this strike is they wanted to get rid of the orders of apprehension," said Juan Rebolledo, Grupo Mexico's vice president for international affairs. "It was not in our hands to fix the legal problems of Mr. Napoleon Gomez."
Mr. Rebolledo said that the company planned to invest billions of dollars in the mine, but that it could be months before it starts producing again. Before the strike, Cananea produced between 35 percent and 40 percent of Mexico's copper.
After Mr. Gomez Urrutia assumed the leadership of the union in 2001, he altered the traditionally placid labor relations between the country's officially recognized unions and the private sector. After only one strike against Grupo Mexico in the 1990s, the union has called 32 strikes against the company's operations, Grupo Mexico said.
His supporters argue that the Mexican government has allied itself with Grupo Mexico to get rid of Mr. Gomez Urrutia because of his combativeness.
Hours after the police action in Cananea, state police officers in the border state of Coahuila dislodged families of some of the 65 miners who were killed when the Pasta de Conchos coal mine exploded in February 2006. The coal mine is also owned by Grupo Mexico.
Some of the families had been camping outside the mine demanding the recovery of the miners' remains. Mr. Rebolledo said the police were accompanying officials who were shutting down the mine for good. The timing - on the same day as the Cananea action - was a coincidence, he said.
The miners' cause has been adopted by the United Steelworkers in the United States and Canada. Manny Armenta, a steelworkers representative in Arizona was in Cananea when the police arrived on Sunday. He said that he had helped get people out of the union hall when the police threw tear gas. "This is just a blatant violation of union rights and human rights and union autonomy by this government and Grupo Mexico," he said.
Grupo Mexico won a protracted legal battle with the mine workers in February when a court ruled that it could break its contract with the union and dismiss the workers.
Through the strike, the Cananea strikers have remained loyal to Mr. Gomez Urrutia.
"Grupo Mexico and the government wants to snatch the union away," Sergio Tolano, the general secretary of the local section of the union in Cananea, said Monday. "We know that what the government has been saying is slander."
The union's early battles with the company go back to the beginning of the 1990s, when the company offered the union 5 percent in stock as part of a privatization. The union demanded cash, but did not receive it until 2005 when the company put $55 million in a trust.
The union then took control of the trust, leading to the corruption charges against Mr. Gomez Urrutia.
"They are trying to silence our organization," Mr. Tolano said. "Our task is to defend it."
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25)Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP
By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/us/08flow.html?ref=us
Staring day after day at images of oil billowing from an undersea well in the Gulf of Mexico, many Americans are struggling to make sense of the numbers.
On Monday, BP said a cap was capturing 11,000 barrels of oil a day from the well. The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil.
But is it? With no consensus among experts on how much oil is pouring from the wellhead, it is difficult - if not impossible - to assess the containment cap's effectiveness. BP has stopped trying to calculate a flow rate on its own, referring all questions on that subject to the government. The company's liability will ultimately be determined in part by how many barrels of oil are spilled.
The immense undersea gusher of oil and gas, seen on live video feed, looks as big as it did last week, or bigger, before the company sliced through the pipe known as a riser to install its new collection device.
At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.
Dr. Leifer said in an interview on Monday that judging from the video, cutting the pipe might have led to a several-fold increase in the flow rate from the well.
"The well pipe clearly is fluxing way more than it did before," said Dr. Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "By way more, I don't mean 20 percent, I mean multiple factors."
Asked about the flow rate at a news conference at the White House on Monday, Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the federal response to the spill, said that as BP captured more of the oil, the government should be able to offer better estimates of the flow from the wellhead by tracking how much reaches the surface.
"That is the big unknown that we're trying to hone in and get the exact numbers on," Admiral Allen said. "And we'll make those numbers known as we get them. We're not trying to low-ball it or high-ball it. It is what it is."
Speaking at a briefing in Houston on Monday, Kent Wells, a BP executive involved in the containment effort, declined to estimate the total flow and how much it might have increased. He said that video images from the wellhead showed a "curtain of oil" leaking from under the cap.
"How much that is, we'd all love to know," Mr. Wells said. "It's really difficult to tell."
He said that more than 27,000 barrels of oil had been collected, and that engineers were working to optimize the collection rate.
On Sunday, engineers halted their efforts to close all four vents on the capping device, because even with one vent closed, the amount of oil being captured was approaching 15,000 barrels a day, the processing capacity of the collection ship at the surface.
Mr. Wells reiterated that a second collection system, involving hoses at the wellhead, would be implemented "by the middle of June." That oil would be collected by another rig with the ability to handle at least 5,000 barrels a day, he said.
The success of the containment device has cast new doubts on the official estimates of the flow rate, developed by a government-appointed team called the Flow Rate Technical Group. Before the riser pipe was cut, the group made estimates by several methods, including an analysis of video footage, and the overlap of those estimates produced the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day that the team reported on May 27. That was two to four times as high as the government's previous estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, a number that had been widely ridiculed by scientists and advocacy groups.
Yet the scientists who produced that new range emphasized its uncertainty when they presented it. In fact, a subgroup that analyzed the plume emerging at the wellhead could offer no upper bound for its flow estimate, and could come up with only a rough idea of the lower bound, which it pegged at 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.
The Flow Rate Technical Group is scheduled to release a new estimate this week or early next, though it is not clear whether that report will take into account the changed circumstances of recent days.
Some scientists involved in the Flow Rate Technical Group say that they would like to produce a better estimate, but that they are frustrated by what they view as stonewalling on BP's part, including tardiness in producing high-resolution video that could be subjected to computer analysis, as well as the company's reluctance to permit a direct measurement of the flow rate. They said the installation of the new device and the rising flow of oil to the surface had only reinforced their conviction that they did not have enough information.
"It's apparent that BP is playing games with us, presumably under the advice of their legal team," Dr. Leifer said. "It's six weeks that it's been dumping into the gulf, and still no measurements."
President Obama has repeatedly criticized BP's handling of response efforts. He has been criticized for his seeming lack of outrage over the spill, but he took an angrier tone Monday in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday morning on NBC's "Today" show.
"I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar," Mr. Obama told the show's host, Matt Lauer, in an interview in Kalamazoo, Mich. "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick."
On Monday, Mr. Wells, the BP executive, said that engineers had always felt that the oil traveling through the damaged riser created some back pressure that reduced the flow rate. "We always expected to see some increase in flow" when the riser was cut, he said. "It's difficult to do any calculations on that."
The company, which for several weeks had publicly rejected the idea of using subsea equipment to measure the flow rate, now says it is up to the flow-rate group itself to decide whether to undertake such a step.
"We are fully cooperating with the Flow Rate Technical Group," said Anne Kolton, a spokeswoman for BP. "We are working very closely with their experts."
The difficulty adds one more item to the government's long to-do list as it begins planning its response to future oil spills: creating some kind of technology that can produce accurate numbers in a deep-sea blowout.
The lack of a reliable measurement system "opens the door to all this speculation and uncertainty," said Elgie Holstein, oil spill coordinator for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, "and we're all reduced to staring at grainy video footage from the ocean floor."
The success of the cap has prompted commentators on cable networks and the Internet to ask what BP intends to do with the oil, whether the company should be allowed to profit from it or even whether the federal government should confiscate it.
BP officials have said previously that they intend to refine the oil and sell it, although the oil may require special handling. They have also pointed out that any money to be made - at current prices the oil collected by the cap so far would be worth about $1.9 million - would pale in comparison with the costs of the spill, currently $1 billion and counting.
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26) Military Taps Social Networking Skills
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/technology/08homefront.html?ref=us
BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular.
Now a freckle-faced 25, a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan.
Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chatrooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire.
"2 poss children in fov," the team flashed as Marines on the ground lined up an air strike, chat lingo for possible innocents within the drone's field of view. The strike was aborted.
Another message, referring to a Taliban compound, warned: "fire coming from cmpnd." The Marines responded by strafing the fighters, killing nine of them.
Lieutenant Christopher and her crew might be fighting on distant keypads instead of ducking bullets, but they head into battle just the same every day. They and thousands of other young Air Force analysts are showing how the Facebook generation's skills are being exploited - and paying dividends - in America's wars.
The Marines say the analysts, who are mostly in their early to mid-20s, paved the way for them to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan earlier this year with minimal casualties. And as the analysts quickly pass on the latest data from drones and other spy planes, they are creating the fluid connections needed to hunt small groups of fighters and other fleeting targets, military officials say.
But there can be difficulties in operating from so far away.
Late last month, military authorities in Afghanistan released a report chastising a Predator drone crew in an incident involving a helicopter attack that killed 23 civilians in February. Military officials say analysts in Florida who were monitoring the drone's video feed cautioned two or three times in a chatroom that children were in the group, but the drone's pilot failed to relay those warnings to the ground commander.
For the most part, though, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes.
"If you want to act quickly, you've got to flatten things out and engage at the lowest possible levels," said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who runs the Air Force intelligence squadron at this base near Sacramento.
The connections have been made possible by the growing fleet of remote-controlled planes, like the Predators and Reapers, which send a steady flow of battlefield video to intelligence centers across the globe.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the military use drones to wage long-distance war against insurgents, with pilots in the United States pressing the missile-firing buttons. But as commanders in Afghanistan mass drones and U-2 spy planes over the hottest areas, the networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare.
And the mechanics are simple in this age of satellite relays. Besides viewing video feeds, the analysts scan still images and enemy conversations. As they log the information into chatrooms, the analysts carry on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol.
Marine intelligence officers say that during the Marja offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs.
"To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before," said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who was stationed here as a liaison to the analysts.
Sergeant Smothers saw how easily the distance could melt away when an analyst, peering at images from a U-2, suddenly stuck up his hand and yelled, "Check!" - the signal for a supervisor to verify a spotting.
Sergeant Smothers said he and two Air Force officers rushed over and confirmed the existence of a roadside bomb. Nearby on a big screen map in the windowless room, they could see a Marine convoy approaching the site.
The group started sending frantic chat messages to their Marine contacts in the area.
As they watched the video feed from a drone, they could see that their messages had been heard: the convoy came to a sudden stop, 500 feet from the bomb.
"To me, this whole operation was like a template for what we should be doing in the future," Sergeant Smothers said.
Military officials said they are planning to repeat the operation around Kandahar.
The effort is a major turnaround for the Air Force, which had been criticized for taking too long to adjust to different types of threats since 9/11. During the cold war, it focused mostly on fixed targets like Soviet bases. But commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have often complained that it is hard to get help from spy planes before insurgents slipped away.
Marine and Army officers say that that began to change as more planes were sent to Afghanistan in early 2009 and the Air Force got better at blending the various types of intelligence into a fuller picture.
And the new analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have been crucial.
While Air Force analysts were once backroom technicians, the latest generation works in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk. Large screens on the walls display the feeds from drones, and coffee and Red Bull help them get through the 12-hour shifts.
The chatrooms are no-frills boxes on a computer screen with lines of rolling text, and crew leaders keep dozens of them open at once. They may look crude compared to Facebook, but Lieutenant Christopher said they were effective in building rapport.
"When it's not busy, I'll be like, 'Hey, how's your day going?' " she said. "It's not just, 'What do you need?' "
There is also some old-fashioned interaction.
The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts at bases like this and is hiring 2,100 more, has sent liaisons to Afghanistan to help understand the priorities on the ground. And some analysts pick up the phone to build closer bonds with soldiers they have never seen.
Andres Morales, a senior airman, said he often talked to a 24-year-old Army lieutenant, helping his battalion find arms caches and track enemy fighters.
But after four of his fellow soldiers were killed, "he didn't really want to talk about intelligence," Airman Morales, 27, said. "He wanted to talk, more or less, about how life is in California, and how when he comes back, we're going to go surfing together."
Quentin Arnold, 22, another enlisted analyst, said he had been working so closely with the Marines that 15 to 20 had asked to be friends on Facebook. He just collected $1,500 from analysts here to send a care package, including a PlayStation 3 game system and an Xbox 360, to some Marines.
Still, three-quarters of the 350 analysts here have never been to the war zones, so a cultural divide can pop up. Several said they were a bit intimidated when Sergeant Smothers, 36, who has had five tours in Iraq, strode onto the floor here in February.
At the time, the analysts were blending data from the U-2s and the drones to watch the roads into Marja and fields where helicopters might land. But as Sergeant Smothers looked over their shoulders, encouraging them to warn the Marines about even the most tentative threats, the analysts warmed up.
"It was like the shy house cat that wouldn't talk to you at first and now just won't stay out of your lap," he said.
As the operation unfolded, the analysts passed on leads that enabled the Marines to kill at least 15 insurgents planting bombs.
Lieutenant Christopher, who loves to chat on Facebook with her family in Ohio, was so exhausted from overnight shifts during that period that she skipped Facebook and went right to sleep. And sometimes, she said, she ended up dreaming about what she had just seen in the war.
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