May 2010 archive

There were six of them, gunned down by the armed force of the state.

I could be talking about the four students murdered at Kent State just seven days before plus the two who would would die later in the week at Jackson State.

But I’m not. I’m talking about six young Black men killed in Augusta, Georgia, 40 years ago tonight. Each was shot in the back by police shotguns, and their deaths were woven into the fabric of struggle and repression that was growing day by day in May, 1970.

The Gulf of Mexico Foundation‘s website says it was “founded in 1990 by citizens concerned with the health and productivity of the Gulf of Mexico.” Its site shows it has sponsored conservation and educational programs and partnered with the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The site also says the group represents a “wide range of interests,” including “agriculture, business, fisheries, industry, tourism, and the environment.”

But as it turns out, industry appears to be the most represented of those interests.

At least half of the 19 members of the group’s board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry. One of them is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig.

The Gulf of Mexico Foundation’s slogan is:

America’s Sea … Keep It Shining

    Based on the science of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), renowned Christian theologian and mathematician, the Pascal Wager can be used to prove the risks of denying the existence of God and climate change at the same time.

   First, watch this video that covers the concept of Pascal’s wager, a system used to prove what might happen to someone based on their belief in God and the chance that God exists or not.

More, and the wonky climate science stuff, below the fold

Ken Salazar’s first pledge as secretary of the interior was to reform the scandal plagued Mineral Management Service (MMS), which had been found by the U.S. inspector general to have traded sex, drugs, and financial favors with oil-company executives. In a January 29, 2009 press release on the scandal, Salazar stated:

“President Obama’s and my goal is to restore the public’s trust, to enact meaningful reform…to uphold the law, and to ensure that all of us — career public servants and political appointees — do our jobs with the highest level of integrity.”

Yet just three months later, Secretary Salazar allowed the MMS to approve – with no environmental review – the BP drilling operation that exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster will soon be, if it is not already, the worst oil spill in American history.

BP submitted its drilling plan to the MMS on March 10, 2009. Rather than subject the plan to a detailed environmental review before approving it as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency declared the plan to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis because it posed virtually no chance of harming the environment.

As BP itself pointed out in its April 9, 2010, letter to the Council on Environmental Quality, categorical exclusions are only to be used when a project will have “minimal or nonexistent” environmental impacts.

But how could Obama have known that Ken Salazar is a gung-ho booster of offshore drilling, instead of a responsible guardian of the public interest?

Let’s blame it all on Salazar, and BP, and Halliburton, and… anybody but Obama!

But…

In 2006, while Salazar was in the Colorado Senate, he fought to get increased oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region, by sponsoring the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.

Now some people are calling the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe “Obama’s Katrina,” but that characterization is completely unfair… to George W. Bush.

Because nobody claims that Bush could have prevented Hurricane Katrina, like Obama could have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by enforcing existing environmental law.

One shouldn’t be surprised if the President were fed up with the problems of taking war prisoners, aka enemy combatants, because they cause a lot of administrative headaches.  The vast majority of prisoners at GITMO were innocent, but there were no acceptable ways of providing due process without the administration looking like tyrants or liars, so prisoners simply languished in prison year after year based on the administration’s word that these were the worst of the worst.  Then there were the unsightly torture photos from Abu Ghraib, and reports of homicides and abuse at Bagram and GITMO, and an entire global archipelago of black sites used to squeeze information and compliance from god-knows-who.  

According to Seymour Hersch, Team Obama is not going to make the same mistakes as Team Bush and just round-up people arbitarily:

And I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed on the battlefield.  It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. Things don’t change.

[…]

What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.

Imagine that:  Killing them because you CAN’T identify them as an enemy.  It helps cut down on paperwork and political overhead.  Stay classy, Barack.

http://www.gijc2010.ch/en/home…

h/t Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Ugh.

Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, helped protect the Saudi royal family from lawsuits that sought to hold al Qaeda financiers responsible in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The suits were filed by thousands family members and others affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. In court papers, they provided evidence that members of the Saudi royal family had channeled millions to al Qaeda prior to the bombings, often in contravention of direct guidance from the United States.

But Kagan, acting as President Obama’s Solicitor General, argued that the case should not be heard even if evidence proved that the Saudis helped underwrite al Qaeda, because it would interfere with US foreign policy with the oil-rich nation. She posited “that the princes are immune from petitioners’ claims” because of “the potentially significant foreign relations consequences of subjecting another sovereign state to suit.”

Remember when you were either with us or against us?  Kagan has no scruples about acting at the behest of hypocrites and terrorists, as long as it advances her career.

Kagan also argued in a separate case that lawyers attempting to bring terrorist organizations under the rule of law by writing a legal brief, or even representing them to standards of reason in an op-ed article could be charged as terrorist sympathizers.

So, on one hand, actual terrorist outlaws should not be prosecuted, because they are powerful “allies,” whereas small-time lawyers who encourage or aid lawful behavior by less-preferred or less politically connected terrorists get no such protections, and should be prosecuted.  Rule or spirit of law: 0; Powerful elite: 2

It’s the typical hypocrisy and lack of intellectual honesty by the ruling elite, and Kagan has no scruples defending it, as long as it advances her career.

Some will say that it was her job to represent the administration.  However, if my job required me to tell people to take stress hormone supplements and eat high-fat diets, I’d resign, because it’s professionally irresponsible and flat-out wrong.   Letting your integrity hit rock bottom in order to advance your career is pretty stanky, and not a selling point for a lifetime seat on SCOTUS.  This does not pass the smell test.