Talk Nation Radio, for the week of June 16, 2010
Robert Jensen, Media in Age of Calamity, BP Spill update
We look at media coverage of the BP oil spill, of the drilling regulation “debate” and U.S. policy in the Middle east.
Produced by Dori Smith, Storrs, CT
TRT: 29:12
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or at Radio4all.net and Archive.org
US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to break records for cost in dollars and lives and time served by US and other forces. In the meantime, the American people seem to be more at risk than ever of losing all hope of home ownership, or even financial security.
We look at media coverage of these leading cataclysmic stories, How can we improve the media and be more actively engaged in helping?
Journalist Robert Jensen is at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a Ph.D. in media ethics and law from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He worked as a journalist for a decade prior to joining academia, and presently teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics.
Next week, we’ll hear more on the BP spill from scientist Craig McClain, Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. He focuses on the ecological and evolutionary drivers of marine invertebrate biodiversity:
Craig McClain: “Because of a variety of things, ocean warming, ocean acidification, the sort of things that have been gong on for a while now, the depletion of the reef and the fish throughout the Gulf of Mexico, the degradation of the marshes and wetlands along the Gulf Coast especially around Louisiana; those things were already occurring before the oil spill. And now we’ve asked all of those other systems to take another impact which is the oil spill and so the question is, now have we pushed all of these systems past their tipping points? Have we created irreversible damage?”
Talk Nation Radio for June 17, 2010 Talk Nation Radio for June 17, 2010
Amjad Shawa, Palestine, Cecelia Goin, Jerusalem, and Francis A. Boyle, on Gaza, Was a deal struck to lighten the blockade of Gaza in exchange for cooperation with investigation of flotilla killings?
Israel announced it will add more items to the list of goods allowed into Gaza. We contacted Palestinian aid coordinator Amjad Shawa of PNGO, as the story was developing, ICRC, spokesperson Cecelia Goin for comment on their strongest call yet for Israel to lift its blockade, (see below) and Law Professor Francis A. Boyle for analysis of the blockade negotiations and Israel’s investigation of the Gaza flotilla deaths.
‘Four of our 14 specialized ventilators for newborn babies are out of order. It is currently impossible to get spare parts into Gaza so that we can have the ventilators fixed. This is a real problem if we have many newborns in the intensive care unit at the same time’. Majdia Jouda, head of the neo-natal department at Shifa Hospital
INTRO: The entire process of easing the blockade went on over roughly two weeks. Israel first announced it would allow more food items like catchup and mayonnaise into Gaza, insulting Palestinians who said they wanted the blockade lifted, not eased for condiments. UN spokesperson Chris Gunness echoed their call. Then, in surprise global coordination, their voices were joined by top government officials in Turkey, the US, the EU, and at the Arab League: Ireland‘s most senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Sean Brady, said both the economic and military blockade of Gaza should be lifted. And former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on June 16th that he was confident that Israel had agreed to a partial lifting of the blockade, that there would now be a list of non allowed goods, rather than the short list of 80 types of items to be allowed into Gaza by Israel.
ANALYSIS: Also, International Law expert Francis A. Boyle responds to Israel’s appointment of new members to their panel looking into deaths on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. He says the new members do not afford independence, and says he expects a whitewash. He expects neither Turkish or Palestinian officials to accept Israel’s investigation.Professor Francis A. Boyle has written definitive texts on international legal rights under conditions of war and occupation. He is skeptical about Israel’s ability to investigate itself about the Gaza flotilla killings.
Last week Israel announced it would be adding two non Israelis to the investigating panel, Brigadier Gen. Ken Watkin, former attorney to Canada’s military, and Lord David Trimble, former Ulster Unionist party head in Northern Ireland. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Fellow Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Corrigan Mcguire, a 1976 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, questioned Trimble’s ability to be impartial.
(NYT, The Lede) Two weeks ago Lord Trimble attended an event set up by the Israeli government to combat what they called, a quote: “unprecedented delegitimization campaign against Israel, driven by the enemies of the Jewish state and perversely assumed by numerous international authorities.”
The new Friends of Israel Initiative includes former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, and Bush’s staunch supporter in Spain, former Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar. Also, Netanayahu ally, and former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold addressed the event.
Spokespersons for Israel at their embassy in Washington declined to comment on air about any changes to the blockade of Gaza. They did not return our press call. Finally, during our second call to them we were able to confirm only that there was a cabinet meeting scheduled for June 17th to discuss Tony Blair’s recommendations. Their spokesperson said he preferred to be unnamed.
It was a rare crack in Israel’s usual tight control over news and information. But what was really going on, and would the easing of the blockade be meaningful? As the story was unfolding we asked Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois school of Law to comment. Professor Boyle has been advising members of the flotilla on international legal rights and has represented the Palestinians in the past.
See latest, Al Jazeera report on this matter here. “The new Israeli decision would allow the entry of some 120 types of goods and products that Israel embargoed after claiming that such goods could be used for military purposes.—Furthermore, Israel is expected to grant the UNRWA a green line to implement some projects and reconstruct schools and public building that were bombarded by the Israeli army during the war”.
BBC News on Details of Gaza blockade revealed in court case Aid group brings lawsuit over Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Why some things not other, why no “fruit juice”? — Gisha’s director, Sari Bashi, says she is no security expert, “but preventing children from receiving toys, preventing manufacturers from getting raw materials – I don’t see how that’s responsive to Israeli security needs.” The Israelis maintain that: “The limitation on the transfer of goods is a central pillar in the means at the disposal of the State of Israel in the armed conflict between it and Hamas.”
See BBC clip Growing international concern over conditions in Gaza. Israel violating International law with blockade of Gaza, “unsustainable” and “unlawful”.
ICRC gravely concerned about humanitarian situation in Gaza, June 13, 2010
ICRC gravely concerned about humanitarian situation in Gaza
Geneva (ICRC) – The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is alarmed about the deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip.
The continuing escalation of violence, with military operations taking place in highly populated areas, has serious consequences for the civilian population.
Over the past two weeks, Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip have led to the deaths of dozens of people and the wounding of many more, among them a large number of civilians. In one single incident on 12 July, nine family members – including children – were killed in their home by an air strike in Gaza City. In some cases, people living near operations have been unable to leave their homes for several days.
The ICRC has urged and continues to urge Israel to respect the rules of international humanitarian law. In particular, in the conduct of hostilities, Israel must take all precautions to spare civilian life and property. It must also ensure that the wounded have access to medical facilities.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is continuing to deteriorate. The strike on Gaza’s only power plant on 28 June reduced the power supply in the Strip by half, with direct and indirect effects on the population. Hospitals and a large part of the water and wastewater systems now depend on generators that consume considerable amounts of fuel, which is also in short supply owing to recurrent closures of the Strip. Furthermore, the strict controls imposed on the passage of basic items into the Strip have exacerbated the difficulties faced by residents, who were already living in precarious conditions. Under international humanitarian law, Israel is responsible for meeting the basic needs of the population, which include food, medical supplies and means of shelter.
As a further consequence of the ongoing situation in the Gaza Strip, hundreds of Palestinians have been stranded on the Egyptian side of the Rafah terminal, two of whom have reportedly died. The material and psychological conditions in which these people live are deteriorating day by day and no solution to their plight has been found by the parties concerned. The ICRC has already offered its services to facilitate their passage into the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, together with the Egyptian Red Crescent, it is providing the affected people with assistance.
The ICRC is seriously concerned about the consequences of the repeated launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip against the civilian population in Israel. These attacks, which have wounded several people, are indiscriminate and thus prohibited by international humanitarian law.
Finally, the ICRC urges those detaining IDF corporal Gilad Shalit to treat him humanely and allow him to contact his family. It has informed all the parties that it stands ready to provide its services.
Talk Nation Radio, for the week of June 16, 2010 A Discussion with Journalist Robert Jensen, Media in an Age of Cataclysm http://talknationradio.com/?p=1384
We look at media coverage of the leading cataclysmic stories, the BP spill, war in the Middle East and recent events in international waters where aid workers were targeted by Israeli commandos, plus the state of government in America. How can we improve the media and be more actively engaged in helping?
Journalist Robert Jensen is at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a Ph.D. in media ethics and law from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He worked as a journalist for a decade prior to joining academia, and presently teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics.
Cataclysm One: There is a discussion raging about how to save the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s oil. The oceans provide us with air, and stabilize the atmosphere. What will thousands of barrels of oil per day going into the gulf do to the production of oxygen in the world’s most effective lung system?
Scientists at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Minerals Management Service that granted BP deep water drilling rights, are frantically searching for ways to repair the problem. The head of America’s joint task force on the containment operation, Admiral Thad Allen, is becoming more flustered as he tries to answer questions from a few of the more astute reporters. They have begun to press the Admiral and BP for answers about the scale of the disaster. Reading between the lines, when field reporters tell major TV news anchors that the oceanographers they interviewed are “terrified” we know there is something dark and terrible shaking the core of America’s belief system that we are too big to fail.
How did we reach this level of cataclysm, and what role has the media played?
Airing on WHUS Radio, Wed. June 16th at 5:00 PM EST www.whus.org before upload to other fine radio stations in the Pacifica community and any LPFM, Net-radio, podcasting stations that wish to air us weekly.
Talk Nation Radio for June 10, 2010
BP Tries to Disperse Concern amid Calls for Prosecutions and Reform, Dr. Ira Leifer, Flow Rate Tech Group, Scott West, Retired EPA Special Agent
Transcript below:
Breaking News Update: The White House has announced that they have received a new flow rate assessment about the BP spill. The company is now promising an ability to contain as much as 60,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil per day from their leaking pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. Here is a paragraph from the statement that arrived via the White House list serve to Talk Nation Radio: “The Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) cap that is currently in place can capture up to 18,000 barrels of oil per day. At the direction of the federal government, BP is deploying today a second containment option, called the Q4000, which could expand total leak containment capacity to 20,000-28,000 barrels per day. Overall, the leak containment strategy that BP was required to develop projects containment capacity expanding to 40,000-53,000 barrels per day by the end of June and 60,000-80,000 barrels per day by mid-July”.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu said: “This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well.”
They are now claiming that they have planned for contingencies to deal with a worst case scenario, which is exactly what our guest last week, Dr. Ira Leifer of the Government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, indicated was the best approach. We transcribed our interviews for last week’s show and you can read them below.
Dori Smith, talknationradio@gmail.com
Dr. Ira Leifer speaking about BP’s shear and cap effort to stop the flow of oil coming from their blown pipe in the Gulf of New Mexico: ‘What I would argue from looking at the videos is however much oil is coming out its large enough relative to 15,000 that it did not make an appreciable dent in it. That means it’s certainly more than double that and the amount is something that we should be able to figure out within a day with the results of the new data’. (more below)
Produced by Dori Smith
TRT: 29:00
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here and at Radio4all.net and Archive.org Dr. Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Flow Rate Technical Group, Scott West, former Special Agent in Charge, EPA
BP gives out low numbers on flow from broken pipe. We hear better analysis. If the DOJ and Bush administration had backed EPA official’s call for criminal prosecution, safety might have improved. Plus Nalco, manufacturer of chemical dispersant. See: BP Tries to Disperse Concern amid Calls for Prosecutions and Reform.
Transcript: Talk Nation Radio, June 9, 2010
Producer/host: Dori Smith
‘I’m quite confidence that in the long term, that basically the truth will out’.
Dr. Ira Leifer joins us to talk about his assessment as part of the government’s flow rate technical group analyzing the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP/Transocean spill.
‘And BP, which is able to afford a great number of attorneys can just simply overwhelm the federal government with its legal representation’.
Then, former EPA investigator Scott West joins us to go over BP’s history of criminal negligence and catastrophe. We look at the problem of getting good information from BP or the government, as a pattern has been forming. BP tries to disperse public concern by offering low numbers and the Obama administration reinforces them.
In May, NPR’s Richard Harris asked Dr. Steven Wereley, at Purdue University, to study the videotape of the oil flowing out of the pipe and use his technique for calculating low rate from speed of particle movement. ‘We’re talking more than a factor of 10 difference between what I calculate and the number that’s being thrown around’.
BP had said 5,000 barrels of oil were flowing from the pipe per day. Wereley told NPR that the flow rate was more like 70,000 barrels a day. Other researchers also got the much higher numbers.
At a press conference June 9th, the National Incident Commander on the spill, Admiral Thad Allen, said between 19 and 25,000 gallons were coming out of the pipe per day at this point:
Admiral Thad Allen: ‘We have a bunch of technical experts got together and they came up with two ranges; of 12,000 to 19,000 and 12,000 to 25,000. Until we get better data that becomes the rebuttable uh assumption on flow and everything else’.
That after the pipe was sheared to accommodate a containment cap. The company had trapped 15,000 barrels during the previous twenty-four hour period and hoped to double that in the coming weeks. But again, NPR wanted more clear information. Where the numbers came from, BP or the government? ‘My knowledge was it was the task group but I will check back and if I misunderstood it I will make a clarification on it. They are going to be looking at that again they have high-resolution video that was taken after the riser pipe was cut, that’s been brought back on hard disk and that’s exactly what the group is analyzing right now’.
When we spoke with one of those technical experts working for the government’s team, Dr. Ira Leifer, he confirmed his assessment based on BP’s own data, that the flow could be more like their worst-case scenario of 100,000 barrels per day. We asked him to confirm the reports in McClatchy and then Reuters, citing the 100,000 figure:
Dr. Ira Leifer: Let me just say what I had intended to say which is that in the absence of good quality data which was our situation until very recently, the flow clearly had increased significantly. The question is how much. And there are two ways two ways to do go about that. One is you get data and you analyze it, that’s called science. The other way was to just take BP’s own estimate of a worst case scenario of freely flowing pipes and just put that out there: This is what BP thinks would happen when a pipe freely flows from that reservoir, now by pipe I mean the pipe that is the problem with this well, into the ocean. And BP’s number was 100,000 barrels per day. It does not mean that I think 100,000 barrels per day is flowing out, it could be less it could be more. The whole point of science and being a scientist and agencies working on this and the people is to actually come up with a number. And again, previously BP was very reticent about providing data, not letting us do our work. Now they have become much more helpful and forward looking at providing the data. I assumed they kind of realized that they don’t like their own number very much and they would actually finally like for us to be able to come up with a good number.
Dori Smith: Well Dr. Leifer we heard this morning from Admiral Thad Allen that BP captured 15,000 barrels overnight in 24 hours. That still leaves 85,000 according to your estimation.
Dr. Ira Leifer: I would just point out again its BP’s worst case scenario. The question is, is the flow from that well worst case? Is it even worse than that? Or is it not as bad. So what I would argue from looking at the videos is however much oil is coming out its large enough relative to 15,000 that it did not make an appreciable dent in it. That means it’s certainly more than double that and the amount is something that we should be able to figure out within a day with the results of the new data.
So the amount of oil that still remains to be captured could be conceivably within another mere expansion to 30,000 total but it also could be larger. And this is where we need to know by analyzing data and I think what has come out of including BP’s own worst case scenario is that they are much more cooperative and forward looking now and helpful so that we can actually do out job so that the efforts that go on are done safely.
Dori Smith: And of course NOAA is testing deeper samples of water to try to discover oil there, but why is it so difficult to assess this and does it have to do with the Corexit, the Nalco product that was used to disperse the oil. And if so would that affect the tests that are now being sent to laboratories like ALPHA here in New England.
Dr. Ira Leifer: the challenge is, it’s hard enough to figure out where the oil is going to go at the sea surface where you actually can look at it from an airplane or boat and track it. In the three dimensions of the ocean it is far more difficult challenge to find where hit has gone. Because the other thing is that the ocean is vast. If the oil is dispersed throughout the water column, that’s the idea behind dispersants, then the concentrates go down to very small amounts. That should not have anything to say with whether or not those very small amounts are problematic to the ecosystem. Very small amounts of petroleum hydrocarbon in the water column are known to cause all sorts of problems with fish and so on. But because the amounts are so small, they are hard to find. It’s not easy to find when something gets so diluted. And there was a lot of word done on this particular aspect after the Exxon Valdez because scientists were in fact able to take a look at the effects on fish and other life forms in the ocean from the petroleum hydrocarbon dose, even years later from he sediment into the water column.
Dori Smith: Well we were concerned when one of NOAA’s tests turned out to establish that there was a similarity between oil they found at more than 3,000 ft down and the oil spewing from the spill but then on later follow tests they couldn’t establish that. Then we read that there may be a conflict of interest with the labs or that even BP is doing some of these tests themselves.
Dr. Ira Leifer: In that regard I’m quite confident that in the long term, that basically the truth will out. It is not possible for anyone to have a complete control of all of these oil samples from the ocean and I think the laboratories know that if they did not do a very high quality analysis that other entities with own boats collecting water samples would very rapidly be releasing information that would be in contradiction to their laboratory. The one thing that these laboratories value above everything else is their reputation and I would imagine that in order to protect their reputation they would, realizing that other people would also be collecting and analyzing water samples, would be very honest in that regard. I certainly can’t promise that but I imagine that they would want to do that because this is such a large spill, there are so many people who are going to be trying to understand what happened, and so on, that you can’t hide things for very long when so many people are looking.
Dori Smith: Dr. Ira Leifer is a well-known scholar at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California. We turn now to Scott West, an EPA agent in the criminal division, he took calls from workers complaining that BP’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay Alaska, was vulnerable.
Scott West: What I did with the EPA, I was a criminal investigator with the criminal investigation division and in Seattle I was special agent in charge up until I retired in October of 2008. The State of Alaska fell under my area of responsibility. And in 2005 I received information from some employees working on the North Slope up at Prudhoe Bay that a particular transit line was full of sludge and they had grave concerns about erosion causing the pipeline to rupture. They had brought these concerns to their officials, supervisors and other officials at BP and they were ignored and even chastised. So they came to me and there wasn’t much we could do until March of 2006 when that pipeline did indeed rupture and cause the second largest oil spill in Alaska.
We started a criminal investigation immediately and carried it forward for the next year and a half. It was a robust investigation enjoying a great deal of support by the EPA and the Department of Justice. Then unexpectedly in August of 2007 I was informed that the Justice Department had decided to grant BP’s wishes to settle this case along with the cases involving an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, and a propane trading violation in Chicago.
They wanted to wrap these all up together and so the Justice Department shut down my investigation, worked out the misdemeanor plea with the company for the Alaska case and that was that. And so when the rig exploded in the Gulf, and once I found out it was BP’s rig, I felt that nothing had changed within the criminal corporate culture that we had found and indeed that this was no accident, it was the result of criminal decisions.
Dori Smith: And of course, the U.S. Justice Department, once again investigating British Petroleum, we’re reading about a lot of money…
Scott West: …They’re not investigating British Petroleum.
Dori Smith: OK, correct me.
Scott West: Yeah, the Attorney General Last Tuesday came out publicly and under I believe pressure that’s been coming on from the public about why isn’t there a criminal investigation? And he made the statement that indeed there is an investigation and he cited the statutes that one would expect: The Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors of the Refuse Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Now short of calling the Attorney General a liar I’m going to say he practiced the art of deception. There is an investigation underway by the Department of the Interior, Office of Inspector General, having to do with some improprieties at Mines and Minerals Service. By all logic the EPA Criminal Investigation Division has indeed gone into the computer system and officially opened a file for an investigation into BP. But in terms of their being an actual investigation under way, there is none.
Dori Smith: Let’s talk about first the Prudhoe Bay spill and then Texas because I know by the time the Texas spill [refinery explosion] happened you were already aware of safety violations. Walk us through the series of events.
Scott West: Well that’s correct and because the corporation was charged the only things you can do to a corporation is take money away from it and put it under scrutiny. Corporations though do not make the decisions that led to these events. Individuals within them do.
What had been my aim using the criminal tool had been to carry the investigation to the point where we could determine if we could charge individuals for those decisions. And that’s what we wanted to do was to hold individuals accountable and hopefully that that would change the corporate culture. A $20 million dollar fine, which is ultimately what BP had to pay, it was $12 million in fines and then $8 million in restitution, but essentially it was a $20 million dollar deal, is a rounding error when you look at the amount of money that they pulled off the slopes and certainly worldwide. It wasn’t enough to get their attention and they were at that time had already been convicted of felony hazardous waste violations up on the North Slope. Then with the Texas City, also the Clean Air Act, they became serial environmental criminals.
Dori Smith: What were some of the aspects of the Prudhoe Bay Alaska spill that BP did wrong, that contributed to the disaster happening in the first place.
Scott West: It was the cost cutting, and ignoring the concerns raised by its own engineers that was the problem.
Dori Smith: And how could this leak have gone on for a number of days undetected by this company?
Scott West: (chuckles) Well they operate a quite elaborate system of leak detection equipment and they are quite known for having false reports all the time so the alarm goes off and its summarily ignored. That’s what happened here. The alarms were going off, and because they had gone off so often they weren’t paying much attention. It wasn’t until one of the workers was driving down one of the roads along the pipeline and he actually smelled crude, and so he got out and looked around and that’s how the leak was discovered.
Dori Smith: Can you explain where the criminal negligence was in that case.
Scott West: The criminal negligence was in the fact that the company was not following industry standard practices in terms of maintaining that pipeline. They had internal knowledge from their own employees and experts that they had a serious problem. They chose to ignore that problem saying that they didn’t have the money to address it and it was low on their priority list. They had other concerns. This sort of thing: That’s how you get from an unfortunate series of events turns into criminality when people who have the responsibility to keep up with these things fail to do so.
Dori Smith: And then let’s go to Texas where BP again their plant blue up, I believe it was 15 workers killed and 170 injured. That of course also linked to safety violations at their facility Again, they got placed on probation, pretty much walked away and went on to Deep Ocean drilling.
Scott West: That’s correct. I wasn’t involved in the investigation into Texas City but I was talking to my counterparts who were and we found an awful lot of similarities between BP operating in Alaska and then BP operating at that refinery in Texas, City. It was a whole host of cutting corners, saving money, trying to stretch every penny which is very difficult to understand when you look at the size of the profits that this company was making worldwide and continues to make worldwide as to why they would risk these catastrophic events for nickels and dime. But yet they do, and they did, and now we are seeing that the same sort of behavior most likely led to what happened out in the Gulf.
Dori Smith: The Deep Water Horizon explosion in April, there was someone killed on board that rig and he had been very concerned, his name is Jason Anderson. He was a rig manager and prior to dying had spoken t about his concerns, was shut down by the industry, they were in a hurry, why don’t you take it from there.
Scott West: Well I certainly wasn’t on the rig and I did not speak to Mr. Anderson at any time prior to his death, but what you just told me is certainly consistent with what I had learned about BP when I was investigating them criminally up in Alaska and what my counterparts found in Texas City is that time is money, they are always in a hurry, and workers concerns are often ignored and more so than ignored many workers fear retaliation for speaking out.
They certainly watched a number of their friends get fired or blacklisted from the industry for raising concerns. Then it was also something that we saw that BP would often blame the dead guy. I don’t mean to be crude here but that was what some employees shared with us and that’s how he put it is that when something went terribly wrong and there were deaths it was often the company’s way to say that those individuals that were killed had done something at fault.
Dori Smith: What about BP’s response to accusations of criminal negligence? I assume given the way they lobby in Congress that they came up with a very bold plan to counter such charges.
Scott Well they did but the fact remains that they pled guilty in Alaska to negligence, which led to the rupture of that pipe and the discharge of oil onto the tundra. They pled guilty to felony Clean Air Act in Texas City which led to the explosion and then the deaths of those workers. They pled guilty in Alaska earlier to illegally handling hazardous waste. There’s only so much they can claim when indeed they come into a courtroom and please guilty to these crimes.
The other thing to look at here, and I don’t totally blame BP: They are from my experience the worst of the oil companies operating in the United States, but I blame the Department of Justice for being so lenient with BP in the past that they’ve allowed them to believe that they can continue to operate this way without sanctions.
Dori Smith: Scott West, you are making these charges as a retired Special Agent in Charge at the EPA Environmental Protection Agency. You work in the Department of Intelligence and Investigations, what is that?
Scott West: That’s for Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, it’s a non-government entity but we enforce international law on the high seas, Marine Conservation Law, where other nations fail to do so. So bringing in a criminal investigative element was a move on the part of Captain Paul Watson to strengthen what we do in terms of dealing with crimes on the seas.
Dori Smith: Financial concerns were really on the minds of many of the politicians who for years argued in favor of drilling in the ANWR, drilling in the ocean, and also on the North Slope. People up there needing jobs, needing money, were divided over whether or not this was a good idea. But talk about the environmental risks first of all from these big oil pipeline systems and then from deep water drilling and what that means to us as citizens of this planet.
Scott West: We’ve certainly seen the risk from deep water drilling, there’s no question about that. Then, also these major pipelines that carry the oil and of course with the Exxon Valdez, the ships that carry the soil: They are inherently dangerous, inherently pose significant environmental risks. However, there is a great deal of technology out there that if employed properly can reduce those risks considerably. This is what’s causing me the most concern with this particular company is that by my experience investigating them, and then certainly what we are seeing in the Gulf, is that they are not taking advantage of that technology.
Dori Smith: We heard from Attorney Patti Goldman last week, of Earth Justice, that their complaint now in litigation is that BP did not provide the government, MMS, (Minerals Management Service) with an adequate plan to deal with a blow out scenario like the one that happened.
Scott West: Yeah well what your suggesting is that the regulators failed in doing their job and insuring that the operators followed the law. And I think that that’s probably an accurate assessment. I was never involved in the regulatory side of these rigs, and certainly not the Deep Water Horizon spill. We’ll have to see what comes out of that but I would not be at all surprised if we find that there was inadequate oversight, that people either chose to look the other way or simply were not qualified to even understand what was being presented to them in these documents.
Dori Smith: Just summarize the EPA, how it works and what does or does not work about it.
Scott West: That’s the big question. I worked for the EPA for just under 19 years, the entire time as a criminal investigator. It’s a large bureaucracy, it certainly has issues related to that, but I do have to admit I did find it to be quite effective, at least from my perspective in what I was doing, I was proud to work there, and I felt it was a good use of my time and talent towards protecting the environment. I did run into some concerns with the Alaska case when my own management failed to back me up and fell into lock step with the Department of Justice. I did have some concerns back shortly after 9/11 when within the criminal program it seemed to forget all about protecting the environment and wanted to jump on the bandwagon of homeland security. But a lot of those issues I understand have been resolved, or at least are being addressed significantly, so in terms of how the greater part of the agency functions, that was kind of on the other side of the door from where I was as a criminal investigator.
Dori Smith: As it turns out BP was fined [by OSHA] for their Texas operation, 87.45 million, it was the largest find in agency history, for failure to repair potential safety hazards. They also issued notifications, 270 of them, plus another 449 willful violations; there you are talking about worker safety.
Scott West: Correct.
Dori Smith: So what’s the difference essentially in terms of the enforcement capacity of either EPA or OSHA today?
Scott West: A different type of regulations, but we can look at how the EPA, the civil side of the House of Representatives have been able to address the conditions and the actual results of the oil spill in Alaska. They certainly have been trying to bring about fines and BP, which is able to afford a great number of attorneys can just simply overwhelm the federal government with its legal representation and essentially just tie it up in court for years. The EPA is still trying to get some kind of civil resolution to the oil spill of 2006 up on the slope and the BP attorneys just seem to keep overwhelming them and bullying them in meeting after meeting and its not going anywhere. So that’s of concern to me.
Dori Smith: How can an agency that’s had two instances of being put on probation..
Scott West: Three!
Dori Smith: Oh OK three. Well how can they move on to do this deep ocean drilling at this incredible depth, I think its 5,000 feet, and the Bush administration and the MMS, Minerals Management Service, they gave them permission.
Scott West: Well we’d have to ask those officials, those are the ones that grant permission for the drilling and they need to be quizzed as to with this abysmal criminal record, environmental criminal record, and worker safety record, why was not more care taken to make sure that things were being done right before they granted those permits? That’s where you will have to go for that answer.
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UPDATE 6/16: The President was very critical of MMS, Minerals Management Service, and a new leader has been appointed to head the agency. Here we see part of the nature of the problem. There was a sense of emergency to get oil resources for the US, and MMS appears to be doing PR for the general idea of how good an idea this deep water drilling was. Note the paragraph on: “Massive blowout preventers, some 45 feet high and weighing 320 tons, are installed on the ocean floor to protect the environment from the threat of an accidental deep water oil release. Remotely controlled robots operate effectively in the high pressure, cold and dark environment of the ocean bottom to construct, maintain and repair costly drilling equipment. New drill ships capable of carrying the tons of necessary pipe and other drilling equipment have been constructed to support deep water operations. These ships are specially equipped with thrusters controlled by computers and geospatial positioning systems to maintain their position and reduce tension on their riser systems”. — They were 100% bought in, and clearly part of the problem as Attorney Patti Smith said during our interview below.
UPDATE: Under pressure from EPA and Earth Justice as well as others, Nalco released the list of ingredients in their Corexit product being used in the Gulf of Mexico. NYT: Marine Biologist Rick Steiner expresses concern re safety testing on Corexit here.
Patti Goldman, Vice President for Litigation, at Earth Justice Environmental Law. (Blog here).
In this report: Corexit, BP, Oil Spill, Earth Justice, link between pesticides with organophosphates and ADHD, pesticide drift, roadside spraying, government ties between oil companies like BP, and companies that profit from manufacturing pesticides.
Produced by Dori Smith
TRT: 29:00
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or at Radio4all.net and Archive.org.
Music by Fritz Heede
The BP Spill, litigation, and health dangers from Pesticides
Earthjustice attorney Patti Goldman here uses her 4-foot tall son Martin to “measure” a tree in Siskiyou National Forest. The grove harboring this tree was saved by her work with Earthjustice.
Patty Goldman,Vice President of Litigation at Earth Justice Environmental Law, joins us to talk about litigation involving British Petroleum, BP. Earth Justice filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Friday, May 29, 2010, (see FOIA below) seeking the full contents of the Corexit chemical dispersant being poured into the Gulf of Mexico by BP. The manufacturer, Nalco, and BP, have not made all of the ingredients in Corexit public, but has released the information that it may contain cosmetic products and/or stain blocker chemicals in Corexit. (See this page for health risks.)
The chemical is supposed to break up the oil that has been destroyed fishing along Louisiana’s coast. Yet, some scientists worry that it may be more dangerous over the long run than the oil itself. Concerns have also been raised that the dispersant chemical has sent the oil much further into the ocean surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. Presently, the oil is moving toward the Florida coast.
BP is under criminal investigation by the US Justice Dept., and its not the first time. After a spill in Prudhoe bay in 2006 because of pipeline corrosion, and a faulty shut down valve, the company was fined put on probation for three years. A year later 15 workers died and 170 were injured in an explosion linked to safety violations at a BP facility in Texas, again BP was placed on probation. You can read more about the history at Truthout.org in a May story by Jason Leopold.
UPDATE re Jason Anderson, manager killed on Deep Water Horizon. He was worried about safety, felt pressured. “Jason Anderson talked of his concerns about BP putting rising pressure on the crew to bypass safety precautions during the seven-day shore visits he was allowed between three-week stints aboard the Deepwater Horizon, said Billy Anderson, who’s been involved in the oilfield-services equipment industry for 35 years”.
Patty Goldman has also been working on a longer standing crisis created by the massive use of pesticides throughout America. Old data showed them to be dangerous to neurological systems, a new study showed the presence of markers for organophosphates in the urine of children with ADHD.
“The FOIA seeks the identities of all chemical ingredients in the dispersants eligible for use in the Gulf spill. It also seeks all health and safety studies and data and potential adverse effects reports for the chemical ingredients in the dispersants and unredacted correspondence between BP and EPA about dispersants in connection with the Gulf spill”. From Earth Justice, 28 May 2010, 12:26 PM
Terry Winckler, “What’s In Oil Spill’s Toxic Stew? We Demand An Answer
Earthjustice files action to discover what’s in chemical dispersant” at “Unearthed”.
Listeners might also wish to go to the web site for Earthbeat Radio, which has been covering the BP spill extensively. The host, Daphne Wysham is excellent.
Also Related to this program: The University of Connecticut has strong ties to Monstanto. Thus, when we learned that state residents were using the site to decide on which herbicides/pesticides to select for home and business use we contacted them. We were given detailed, lengthy, verbal instructions, on how to click many ‘tabs’ on their web page to locate safety requirements. Clearly, their disclaimer that the school does not endorse use merely because they list all of these products is not working.
Journalist Robert Jensen is at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a Ph.D. in media ethics and law from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He worked as a journalist for a decade prior to joining academia, and presently teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. 
