Drying Away in America's Fading West

Never Again Enough: Field Notes from a Drying West

by William deBuys  - TomDispatch

Several miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 -- Down here, at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the Colorado River growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group of 24 is one week into a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. We settle in for the night. Above us, the canyon walls part like a pair of maloccluded jaws, and moonlight streams between them, bright enough to read by.

One remarkable feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster that carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.

These days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m talking about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air conditioners in America’s least sustainable city merely hum, Glen Canyon Dam, immediately upstream from the canyon, will run about 6,500 cubic feet of water through its turbines every second.

Tomorrow, as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon will crank the dam’s maw wider until it sucks down 11,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That boost in flow will enable its hydroelectric generators to deliver “peaking power” to several million air conditioners and cooling plants in Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun. And the flow of the river will therefore nearly double.

Tomgram: William deBuys, Goodbye to All That (Water)

Martha and the Vandellas would have loved it. Metaphorically speaking, the New York Times practically swooned over it. (“An unforgiving heat wave held much of the West in a sweltering embrace over the weekend, tying or breaking temperature records in several cities, grounding flights, sparking forest fires, and contributing to deaths.”) It was a “deadly” heat wave, a “record” one that, in headlines everywhere, left the West and later the rest of the country “sweltering,” and that was, again in multiple headlines, “scary.” The fire season that accompanied the “blasting,” “blazing” heat had its own set of “record” headlines -- and all of this was increasingly seen, in another set of headlines, as the “new normal” in the West. Given that 2012 had already set a heat record for the continental U.S., that the 10 hottest years on record in this country have all occurred since 1997, and that the East had its own sweltering version of heat that wouldn’t leave town, this should have been beyond arresting.

In response, the nightly primetime news came up with its own convenient set of new terms to describe all this: “extreme” or “severe” heat. Like “extreme" or "severe" weather, these captured the eyeball-gluing sensationalism of our weather moment without having to mention climate change or global warming. Weather, after all, shouldn’t be “politicized.” But if you’re out in the middle of the parching West like TomDispatch regular William deBuys, who recently headed down the Colorado River, certain grim realities about the planet we’re planning to hand over to our children and grandchildren can’t help but come to mind -- along with a feeling, increasingly shared by those in the sweltering cities, that our particular way of life is in the long run unsustainable. Tom

Never Again Enough: Field Notes from a Drying West

by William deBuys

It takes time for these dam-controlled tidal pulses to travel downstream. Where we are now, just above Zoroaster Rapid, the river is roughly in phase with the dam: low at night, high in the daytime. Head a few days down the river and it will be the reverse.

By mid-summer, temperatures in Phoenix will routinely soar above 110°F, and power demands will rise to monstrous heights, day and night. The dam will respond: 10,000 cfs will gush through the generators by the light of the moon, 18,000 while an implacable sun rules the sky.

Such are the cycles -- driven by heat, comfort, and human necessity -- of the river at the bottom of the continent’s grandest canyon.

The crucial question for Phoenix, for the Colorado, and for the greater part of the American West is this: How long will the water hold out?

Major Powell’s Main Point

Every trip down the river -- and there are more than 1,000 like ours yearly -- partly reenacts the legendary descent of the Colorado by the one-armed explorer and Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell. The Major, as he preferred to be known, plunged into the Great Unknown with 10 companions in 1869. They started out in four boats from Green River, Wyoming, but one of the men walked out early after nearly drowning in the stretch of whitewater that Powell named Disaster Falls, and three died in the desert after the expedition fractured in its final miles. That left Powell and six others to reach the Mormon settlements on the Virgin River in the vicinity of present-day Las Vegas, Nevada.

Powell’s exploits on the Colorado brought him fame and celebrity, which he parlayed into a career that turned out to be controversial and illustrious in equal measure. As geologist, geographer, and ethnologist, Powell became one of the nation’s most influential scientists. He also excelled as an institution-builder, bureaucrat, political in-fighter, and national scold.

Most famously, and in bold opposition to the boomers and boosters then cheerleading America’s westward migration, he warned that the defining characteristic of western lands was their aridity. Settlement of the West, he wrote, would have to respect the limits aridity imposed.

He was half right.

The subsequent story of the West can indeed be read as an unending duel between society’s thirst and the dryness of the land, but in downtown Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles you’d hardly know it.

By the middle years of the twentieth century, western Americans had created a kind of miracle in the desert, successfully conjuring abundance from Powell’s aridity. Thanks to reservoirs large and small, and scores of dams including colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, as well as more than 1,000 miles of aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels, and diversions, the West has by now been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It has been given the plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine, and in the process, its liquid resources have been stretched far beyond anything the Major might have imagined.

Today the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West’s great waterways, provides water to some 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland. It also touches 22 Indian reservations, seven National Wildlife Reservations, and at least 15 units of the National Park System, including the Grand Canyon.

These achievements come at a cost. The Colorado River no longer flows to the sea, and down here in the bowels of the canyon, its diminishment is everywhere in evidence. In many places, the riverbanks wear a tutu of tamarisk trees along their edge. They have been able to dress up, now that the river, constrained from major flooding, no longer rips their clothes off.

The daily hydroelectric tides gradually wash away the sandbars and beaches that natural floods used to build with the river’s silt and bed load (the sands and gravels that roll along its bottom). Nowadays, nearly all that cargo is trapped in Lake Powell, the enormous reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam. The water the dam releases is clear and cold (drawn from the depths of the lake), which is just the thing for nonnative trout, but bad news for homegrown chubs and suckers, which evolved, quite literally, in the murk of ages past. Some of the canyon’s native fish species have been extirpated from the canyon; others cling to life by a thread, helped by the protection of the Endangered Species Act. In the last few days, we’ve seen more fisheries biologists along the river and its side-streams than we have tourists.

The Shrinking Cornucopia

In the arid lands of the American West, abundance has a troublesome way of leading back again to scarcity. If you have a lot of something, you find a way to use it up -- at least, that’s the history of the “development” of the Colorado Basin.

Until now, the ever-more-complex water delivery systems of that basin have managed to meet the escalating needs of their users. This is true in part because the states of the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) were slower to develop than their downstream cousins. Under the Colorado River Compact of 1922, the Upper and Lower Basins divided the river with the Upper Basin assuring the Lower of an average of 7.5 million acre-feet (maf) of water per year delivered to Lees Ferry Arizona, the dividing point between the two. The Upper Basin would use the rest. Until recently, however, it left a large share of its water in the river, which California, and secondarily Arizona and Nevada, happily put to use.

Those days are gone. The Lower Basin states now get only their annual entitlement and no more. Unfortunately for them, it’s not enough, and never will be.

Currently, the Lower Basin lives beyond its means -- to the tune of about 1.3 maf per year, essentially consuming 117% of its allocation.

That 1.3 maf overage consists of evaporation, system losses, and the Lower Basin’s share of the annual U.S. obligation to Mexico of 1.5 maf. As it happens, the region budgets for none of these “costs” of doing business, and if pressed, some of its leaders will argue that the Mexican treaty is actually a federal responsibility, toward which the Lower Basin need not contribute water.

The Lower Basin funds its deficit by drawing on the accumulated water surplus held in the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, which backs up behind Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, with the Lower Basin using more water than it receives, the surplus there can’t last forever, and maybe not for long. In November 2010, the water level of the lake fell to its lowest elevation ever -- 1,082 feet above sea level, a foot lower than its previous nadir during the fierce drought of the 1950s.

Had the dry weather held -- and increasing doses of such weather are predicted for the region in the future -- the reservoir would have soon fallen another seven feet and triggered the threshold for mandatory (but inadequate) cutbacks in water delivery to the Lower Basin states. Instead, heavy snowfall in the northern Rockies bailed out the system by producing a mighty runoff, lifting the reservoir a whopping 52 feet.

Since then, however, weather throughout the Colorado Basin has been relentlessly dry, and the lake has resumed its precipitous fall. It now stands at 1,106 feet, which translates to roughly 47% of capacity. Lake Powell, Mead’s alter ego, is in about the same condition.

Another dry year or two, and the Colorado system will be back where it was in 2010, staring down a crisis. There is, however, a consolation -- of sorts. The Colorado is nowhere near as badly off as New Mexico and the Rio Grande.

How Dry I Am This Side of the Pecos

In May, New Mexico marked the close of the driest two-year period in the 120 years since records began to be kept. Its largest reservoir, Elephant Butte, which stores water from the Rio Grande, is effectively dry.

Meanwhile, parched Texas has filed suit against New Mexico in multiple jurisdictions, including the Supreme Court, to force the state to send more water downstream -- water it doesn’t have. Texas has already appropriated $5 million to litigate the matter. If it wins, the hit taken by agriculture in south-central New Mexico could be disastrous.

In eastern New Mexico, the woes of the Pecos River mirror those of the Rio Grande and pit the Pecos basin’s two largest cities, Carlsbad and Roswell, directly against each other. These days, the only thing moving in the irrigation canals of the Carlsbad Irrigation District is dust. The canals are bone dry because upstream groundwater pumping in the Roswell area has deprived the Pecos River of its flow. By pumping heavily from wells that tap the aquifer under the Pecos River, Roswell’s farmers have drawn off water that might otherwise find its way to the surface and flow downstream.

Carlsbad’s water rights are senior to (that is, older than) Roswell’s, so in theory -- under the doctrine of Prior Appropriation -- Carlsbad is entitled to the water Roswell is using. The dispute pits Carlsbad’s substantial agricultural economy against Roswell’s, which is twice as big. The bottom line, as with Texas’s lawsuit over the Rio Grande, is that there simply isn’t enough water to go around.

If you want to put your money on one surefire bet in the Southwest, it’s this: one way or another, however these or any other onrushing disputes turn out, large numbers of farmers are going to go out of business.

Put on Your Rain-Dancing Shoes

New Mexico’s present struggles, difficult as they may be, will look small-scale indeed when compared to what will eventually befall the Colorado. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation expects the river’s 40 million water-users to grow to between 49.3 and 76.5 million by 2060. This translates into a thirst for Colorado River water of 18.1 to 20.4 maf -- oceans more than its historical yield of 16.4 maf.

And that’s not even the bad news, which is that, compared to the long-term paleo-record, the historical average, compiled since the late nineteenth century, is aberrantly high. Moreover, climate change will undoubtedly take its toll, and perhaps has already begun to do so. One recent study forecasts that the yield of the Colorado will decline 10% by about 2030, and it will keep falling after that.

None of the available remedies inspires much confidence. “Augmentation” -- diverting water from another basin into the Colorado system -- is politically, if not economically, infeasible. Desalination, which can be effective in specific, local situations, is too expensive and energy-consuming to slake much of the Southwest’s thirst. Weather modification, aka rain-making, isn’t much more effective today than it was in 1956 when Burt Lancaster starred as a water-witching con man in The Rainmaker, and vegetation management (so that trees and brush will consume less water) is a non-starter when climate change and epidemic fires are already reworking the landscape.

Undoubtedly, there will be small successes squeezing water from unlikely sources here and there, but the surest prospect for the West? That a bumper harvest of lawsuits is approaching. Water lawyers in the region can look forward to full employment for decades to come. Their clients will include irrigation farmers, thirsty cities, and power companies that need water to cool their thermal generators and to drive their hydroelectric generators.

Count on it: the recreation industry, which demands water for boating and other sports, will be filing its briefs, too, as will environmental groups struggling to prevent endangered species and whole ecosystems from blinking out. The people of the West will not only watch them; they -- or rather, we -- will all in one way or another be among them as they gather before various courts in the legal equivalent of circular firing squads.

Hey, Mister, What’s that Sound?

Here at the bottom of Grand Canyon, with the river rushing by, we listen for the boom of the downstream rapids toward which we are headed. Sometimes they sound like a far-off naval bombardment, sometimes more like the roar of an oncoming freight train, which is entirely appropriate. After all, the river, like a railroad, is a delivery system with a valuable cargo. Think of it as a stream of liquid property, every pint within it already spoken for, every drop owned by someone and obligated somewhere, according to a labyrinth of potentially conflicting contracts.

The owners of those contracts know now that the river can’t supply enough gallons, pints, and drops to satisfy everybody, and so they are bound to live the truth of the old western saying: “Whiskey’s for drinkin’, and water’s for fightin’.”

In the end, Powell was right about at least one thing: aridity bats last.

William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, irrigates a small farm in northern New Mexico and is the author of seven books including, most recently, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.

Copyright 2013 William deBuys

Watershed Forest Alliance Delivering a Letter to Island Timberlands

Rally on Friday, August 2 at 1:00 pm at Cathedral Grove

by Watershed Forest Alliance 

Watershed Forest Alliance will be handing out information pamphlets in hopes of increasing public awareness of Island Timberlands intent to log high conservation valued Douglas fir old growth habitats.

Our main concern is the old growth forest on the steep slopes of McLaughlin Ridge above China Creek, Port Alberni's drinking water, that Island Timberlands is preparing to log.

Any support would be most appreciated for handing out pamphlets and showing Island Timberlands that there are people who really care about what is happening to the forests around us.

Hope to see you there,

Jane Morden
coordinator, Watershed Forest Alliance
(250)723-9551

Letter to Island Timberlands Endorsed by 23 Organizations and Scientists

Watershed-Forest Alliance
3668 Craig Road
Port Alberni, BC V9Y 5Z1
watershedforestalliance@gmail.com

July 17, 2013

Mr. Darshan Sihota
Island Timberlands LP
65 Front Street, 4th Floor
Nanaimo, BC V9R 5H9

Dear Mr. Sihota,

In 2005, when Island Timberlands was established, 74,000 hectares of its holdings came from Tree Farm Licence 44, an area in mid-Vancouver Island that includes and surrounds the Alberni Valley. At the time of transfer, parts of this area had already been designated by BC government scientists to have the highest conservation value and were categorized as Wildlife Habitat Areas and Ungulate Winter Range. These areas are old growth (over 250 years), primarily Douglas-fir forest habitats. Island Timberlands, when acquiring this land, was fully aware that the intent was to protect these sensitive areas from logging indefinitely, as is done on publicly owned lands. To date, under Island Timberlands’ management, approximately 60% of these designated areas have been logged.

We are asking for a cessation of logging of all the remaining high conservation areas, which may only amount to as little as 1.25% (930 hectares) of the 74,000 hectares.

Roughly half of the area that should be off-limits to logging is on the south side of McLaughlin Ridge in the China Creek watershed, which is the source of drinking water for the City of Port Alberni. Although already compromised by recent logging, the core area that remains is only about 400 hectares. Notably it is located on steep terrain and very thin soil. The area is also essential habitat for the endangered Queen Charlotte Goshawk and other wildlife species. Preserving the wildlife habitat will also protect the quality of drinking water for the citizens of Port Alberni.

Another area of high conservation and recreation value is known as the Cameron Firebreak, which stretches from the Cameron River to a ridge of Mt. Arrowsmith. This easily accessible forest includes an increasingly rare valley bottom old-growth habitat which provides a valuable winter refuge for Roosevelt Elk. A significant portion of the Cameron Firebreak has already been logged. Any future logging will jeopardize its value as wildlife habitat and its high potential for ecotourism.

The remaining portions are in smaller scattered areas, each with their own unique ecological and recreational values, including the south side of Mt. Horne above Cathedral Grove.

As logging continues, these irreplaceable old-growth forests previously identified by government biologists have become more important than ever. It is essential that they be removed from all harvesting plans so that the ecological and social values they embody can be preserved for future generations.

Sincerely,
Jane Morden, Coordinator,
Watershed-Forest Alliance

Cc: Morgan Kennah, RPF, Manager, Sustainable Timberlands and Community Affairs, Island Timberlands
Hon. Steve Thomson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations
The Hon. Christy Clark, Premier
Chief Steve Tatoosh, Hupacasath First Nation
Chief Hugh Braker, Tseshaht First Nation
Mayor & Council, City of Port Alberni
Board of Directors, Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District

Endorsed by:

Alberni Valley Transition Town
Alberni Environmental Coalition
Alberni Fish and Game Club
Ancient Forest Alliance
Arrowsmith Parks and Land-Use Council
B.C. Wildlife Federation, Vancouver Island Region Association
Kim Brunt, MSc, RPBio
Phil Carson, Independent Video Producer
Citizens’ Stewardship Coalition (Alberni Valley)
Council of Canadians, Port Alberni Chapter
Scott Fraser, MLA (Alberni-Pacific Rim)
Friends of the Stillwater Bluffs (Powell River)
Valerius Geist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science
Herb Hammond, Forest Ecologist & Professional Forester, Silva Forest Foundation
Island Stance: peaceful direct action / Cortes Island
Doug Janz, Wildlife Biologist, RPBIO (ret), RPF (ret), Chair of the Forestry Committee,
B.C. Wildlife Federation, Vancouver Island Region Association
Craig Orr, Ph.D., Watershed Watch Salmon Society
Dr. Briony Penn, Environmental Journalist
Port Alberni & District Labour Council
Save the Day (Roberts Creek)
Save Our Valley Alliance Public Education Committee (Alberni Valley)
Vancouver Island Water Watch Coalition

http://www.watershedforestalliance.ca/

Alex Gibney (Character) Assassination of Julian Assange

The Assassination of Julian Assange

by Jonathan Cook

I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it.

The film’s contention is that Assange is a natural-born egotist and, however noble his initial project, Wikileaks ended up not only feeding his vanity but also accentuating in him the very qualities — secretiveness, manipulativeness, dishonesty and a hunger for power — he so despises in the global forces he has taken on.

This could have made for an intriguing, and possibly plausible, thesis had Gibney approached the subject-matter more honestly and fairly. But two major flaws discredit the whole enterprise.

The first is that he grievously misrepresents the facts in the Swedish case against Assange of rape and sexual molestation to the point that his motives in making the film are brought into question.

To shore up his central argument about Assange’s moral failings, he needs to make a persuasive case that these defects are not only discernible in Assange’s public work but in his private life too.

We thus get an extremely partial account of what occurred in Sweden, mostly through the eyes of A, one of his two accusers. She is interviewed in heavy disguise.

Gibney avoids referring to significant aspects of the case that would have cast doubt in the audience’s mind about A and her testimony. He does not, for example, mention that A refused on Assange’s behalf offers made by her friends at a dinner party to put up the Wikileaks leader in their home — a short time after she says the sexual assault took place.

The film also ignores the prior close relationship between A and the police interviewer and its possible bearing on the fact that the other complainant, S, refused to sign her police statement, suggesting that she did not believe it represented her view of what had happened.

But the most damning evidence against Gibney is his focus on a torn condom submitted by A to the police, unquestioningly accepting its significance as proof of the assault. The film repeatedly shows a black and white image of the damaged prophylactic.

Gibney even allows a theory establishing a central personality flaw in Assange to be built around the condom. According to this view, Assange tore it because, imprisoned in his digital world, he wanted to spawn flesh-and-blood babies to give his life more concrete and permanent meaning.

The problem is that investigators have admitted that no DNA from Assange was found on the condom. In fact, A’s DNA was not found on it either. The condom, far from making A a more credible witness, suggests that she may have planted evidence to bolster a case so weak that the original prosecutors dropped it.

There is no way Gibney could not have known these well-publicised concerns about the condom. So the question is why would he choose to mislead the audience?

Without A, the film’s case against Assange relates solely to his struggle through Wikileaks to release secrets from the inner sanctums of the US security state. And this is where the film’s second major flaw reveals itself.

Gibney is careful to bring up most of the major issues concerning Assange and Wikileaks, making it harder to accuse him of distorting the record. Outside the rape allegations, however, his dishonesty relates not to an avoidance of facts and evidence but to his choice of emphasis.

The job of a good documentarist is to weigh the available material and then present as honest a record of what it reveals as is possible. Anything less is at best polemic, if it sides with those who are silenced and weak, and at worst propaganda, if it sides with those who wield power.

Gibney’s film treats Assange as if he and the US corporate-military behemoth were engaged in a simple game of cat and mouse, two players trying to outsmart each other. He offers little sense of the vast forces ranged against Assange and Wikileaks.

The Swedish allegations are viewed only in so far as they question Assange’s moral character. No serious effort is made to highlight the enormous resources the US security state has been marshalling to shape public opinion, most notably through the media. The hate campaign against Assange, and the Swedish affair’s role in stoking it, are ignored.

None of this is too surprising. Were Gibney to have highlighted Washington’s efforts to demonise Assange it might have hinted to us, his audience, Gibney’s own place in supporting this matrix of misinformation.

This is a shame because there is probably a good case to make that anyone who takes on the might of the modern surveillance and security empire the US has become must to some degree mirror its moral failings.

How is it possible to remain transparent, open, honest — even sane — when every electronic device you possess is probably bugged, when your every move is recorded, when your loved ones are under threat, when the best legal minds are plotting your downfall, when your words are distorted and spun by the media to turn you into an official enemy?

Assange is not alone in this plight. Bradley Manning, the source of Wikileaks’ most important disclosures, necessarily lied to his superiors in the military and used subterfuge to get hold of the secret documents that revealed to us the horrors being unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan in our names.

Since he was caught, he has faced torture in jail and is currently in the midst of a show trial.

Another of the great whistleblowers of the age, Edward Snowden, was no more honest with his employers, contractors for the US surveillance state, as he accumulated more and more incriminating evidence of the illegal spying operations undertaken by the National Security Agency and others.

Now he is holed up in a Russian airport trying to find an escape from permanent incarceration or death. Should he succeed, as he did earlier in fleeing Hong Kong, it will probably be because of secrecy and deceit.

This documentary could have been a fascinating study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the surveillance super-state. Instead Gibney chose the easy course and made a film that sides with the problem rather than the solution.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. - http://www.jonathan-cook.net

Balkanizing the Arab Lands

Arabs, Beware the "Small States" Option

by Sharmine Narwani - Sandbox

At the heart of all politics lies cold, hard opportunism. New circumstances, changed alliances and unexpected events will always conspire to alter one’s calculations to benefit a core agenda.

In the Middle East today, those calculations are being adjusted with a frequency unseen for decades.

In Egypt and Syria, for instance, popular sentiment is genuinely divided on where alliances and interests lie. Half of Egyptians seem convinced that deposed President Mohammed Mursi is the resident US-Israeli stooge, while the other half believe it is Egypt's military that is carrying out those foreign agendas.

In Syria the same can be said for Syrians conflicted on whether President Bashar al-Assad or the external-based Syrian National Council (SNC) most benefits Israeli and American hegemonic interests in the region.

But Egyptians and Syrians, who point alternating fingers at Islamists or the state as being tools of imperialism, have this wrong: Empire is opportunistic. It has ways to benefit from both.

There is another vastly more destructive scenario being missed while Arabs busy themselves with conspiracies and speculative minutiae: A third option far more damaging to all.

Balkanization of Key Mideast States

At a June 19 event at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger touched upon an alarming new refrain in western discourse on Mideast outcomes; a third strategy, if all else fails, of redrawn borders along sectarian, ethnic, tribal or national lines that will shrink the political/military reach of key Arab states and enable the west to reassert its rapidly-diminishing control over the region. Says Kissinger about two such nations:

“There are three possible outcomes (in Syria). An Assad victory. A Sunni victory. Or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to co-exist together but in more or less autonomous regions, so that they can’t oppress each other. That’s the outcome I would prefer to see. But that’s not the popular view…First of all, Syria is not a historic state. It was created in its present shape in 1920, and it was given that shape in order to facilitate the control of the country by France, which happened to be after UN mandate…The neighboring country Iraq was also given an odd shape, that was to facilitate control by England. And the shape of both of the countries was designed to make it hard for either of them to dominate the region.”

While Kissinger frankly acknowledges his preferred option of “autonomous regions,” most western government statements actually pretend their interest lies in preventing territorial splits. Don’t be fooled. This is narrative-building and scene-setting all the same. Repeat something enough – i.e., the idea that these countries could be carved up – and audiences will not remember whether you like it or not. They will retain the message that these states can be divided.

It is the same with sectarian discourse. Western governments are always warning against the escalation of a Sunni-Shia divide. Yet they are knee-deep in deliberately fueling Shia-Sunni conflicts throughout the region, particularly in states where Iran enjoys significant influence (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq) or may begin to gain some (Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen).

“Seeding” Sectarianism to Break Up States

If ever a conspiracy had legs, this one is it. Stirring Iranian-Arab and Sunni-Shiite strife to its advantage has been a major US policy objective since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Wikileaks helped shed light on some of Washington’s machinations just as Arab uprisings started to hit our TV screens.

A 2006 State Department cable that bemoans Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strengthened position in Syria outlines actionable plans to sow discord within the state, with the goal of disrupting Syrian ties with Iran. The theme? “Exploiting” all “vulnerabilities”:

“PLAY ON SUNNI FEARS OF IRANIAN INFLUENCE: There are fears in Syria that the Iranians are active in both Shia proselytizing and conversion of, mostly poor, Sunnis. Though often exaggerated, such fears reflect an element of the Sunni community in Syria that is increasingly upset by and focused on the spread of Iranian influence in their country through activities ranging from mosque construction to business. Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here, (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders), are giving increasing attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue.”

Makes one question whether similar accusations about the “spread of Shiism” in Egypt held any truth whatsoever, other than to sow anti-Shia and anti-Iran sentiment in a country until this month led by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

A 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia continues this theme. Mohammad
 Naji al-Shaif, a tribal leader with close personal ties to then-Yemeni President Ali Abdallah 
Saleh and his inner circle says that key figures "are privately very skeptical of Saleh's
 claims regarding Iranian assistance for the Houthi rebels":

Shaif told
 EconOff on December 14 that (Saudi Government's Special Office for
 Yemen Affairs) committee members privately shared his view that Saleh was providing false or exaggerated
 information on Iranian assistance to the Houthis in order to
 enlist direct Saudi involvement and regionalize the conflict. Shaif said that one committee member told him that "we know
 Saleh is lying about Iran, but there's nothing we can do 
about it now."

That didn't stop Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lying through her teeth to a Senate Committee a few short years later: "We know that they - the Iranians are very much involved in the opposition movements in Yemen."

US embassy cables from Manama, Bahrain in 2008 continue in the same vein:

“Bahraini government officials sometimes privately tell U.S. official visitors that some Shi’a oppositionists are backed by Iran. Each time this claim is raised, we ask the GOB to share its evidence. To date, we have seen no convincing evidence of Iranian weapons or government money here since at least the mid-1990s… In post’s assessment, if the GOB had convincing evidence of more recent Iranian subversion, it would quickly share it with us.”

Yet as Bahraini rulers continue to violently repress peaceful protest in the Shia-majority state two years into that country’s popular uprising, their convenient public bogeyman mirrors that of Washington: Iranian interference.

Washington was extremely quick to activate anti-Shia and anti-Iran narratives as the Arab uprisings kicked off. Barely three months into 2011, the US military ran a secret exercise to fine-tune a “storyline” that perpetuates differences between Arabs and Iranian, Sunni and Shia.

Here are some of the premises and questions included in CENTCOM’s Arabs versus Iranians exercise. (Note: The exercise refers to Iranians as “Persians.”)

Premise: “The Arab-Persian dynamic is a divide. History, religion, language and culture simply pose too many obstacles to overcome.”

Premise: “A general Arab inferiority complex relative to Persians means that many Arabs are fearful of Persian expansion and hegemony throughout the Middle East. In their minds, the Persian Empire has never gone away and it is more self-sufficient than most Arab states.”

Premise: “Barring a “clash of civilizations” – i.e., a modern crusades, Islam vs Judeo-Christians, warfare between the West/Israel vs Arabs/Persians – there does not appear to be a scenario where Arabs and Persians will join forces against the US/West.”

Question: “Is it appropriate to frame the discussion as Arab-Persian or is Sunni-Shia a more appropriate framework?”

Question: “Assuming a schism, what could unite Arabs and Persians, even temporarily?”

These narratives assume two things: that the division between Iranians and Arabs is a fact and that the greater unity of the two groups in the wake of the Arab uprisings is a potential threat to U.S. interests. Hence the worried question: What could unite them, even temporarily?

“Small States” Weaken Arabs

As manufactured conflict increases in the region, options too diminish. Because of the strategic importance of the Middle East and its vital oil and gas reserves…because of the desire to maintain stability in key states that safeguard US interests like Israel, Jordan, NATO-member Turkey, Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf…open-ended conflict in multiple states is, simply put, undesirable.

Over the course of the Syrian conflict – and certainly in the past year when Assad’s departure looked less likely – the West, through media and “pundit” intermediaries, has often floated the idea of dividing the state into several smaller parts along sectarian and ethnic lines. While framed as a means to “prevent further conflict,” this idea actually follows the American experiment of Iraqi federalism that effectively sought to carve Iraq into three distinct Sunni, Shia and Kurdish zones.

Forget that you cannot find five non-Kurdish Syrians or Iraqis of credible national renown who would back the idea of fragmenting their nation. This is distinctly a Washington vision. Or rather, a western one, with Israeli fingerprints all over it.

Israel’s vision of “Small States”

In 1982, as Israel warmed up its operation to invade multi-sect Lebanon, Israeli foreign ministry strategician Oded Yinon inked a master plan to redraw the Mideast into small warring cantons that would never again be able to threaten the Jewish state’s regional primacy:

“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan.”

“Egypt is divided and torn apart into many foci of authority. If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt. The vision of a Christian Coptic State in Upper Egypt alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government as to date, is the key to a historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement but which seems inevitable in the long run.”

“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.”

“There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel's policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority.”

Beware the Artificial Break-up of States

As opposed to western narratives about Arab “revolutions” heralding the arrival of “freedom and democracy,” the Russians took a more cautious view of events.

As early as February 2011, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that revolutions across the Arab world could see fanatics coming to power, leading to “fires for years and the spread of extremism in the future." The breaking up of states in the aftermath of these events, he says, is a distinct possibility:

“The situation is tough. We could be talking about the disintegration of large, densely-populated states, talking about them breaking up into little pieces.”

The Russians were right. The Americans - dangerously wrong.

The Mideast will one day need to make region-wide border corrections, but to be successful, it must do so entirely within an indigenously determined process. The battles heating up in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere are a manifestation of a larger fight between two “blocs” that seek entirely different regional outcomes – one of these being the borders of a new Middle East.

The first group, a US-led bloc aggressive in its pursuit of maintaining regional hegemony any which way, is using fiction and carefully-spun divisive narratives to sway populations into accepting “cause” for new western-backed borders. These borders will divide nations along sectarian, ethnic and tribal lines to ensure ongoing conflict between the newly minted states, and "redirecting" them from the vastly bigger imperial threat. A unified Mideast, after all, would naturally turn against the universally reviled Empire, with Israel’s borders being the first on the chopping board. And in this climate, western-fomented border revisions will be dramatically more chaotic than Sykes-Picot ever was.

The second bloc (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China and a smattering of independent groups/states) which opposes western-Israeli hegemony does not have the means or ability to impose border solutions except in their own direct geographical base, which looks increasingly like a line drawn from Lebanon to Iraq (and not accidentally, where most of the chaos is currently channeled). Theirs is a defensive strategy, based largely on unwinding divisive plots, minimizing strife and warding off foreign-backed insurgencies, through military means if necessary.

In this bloc's view, Sykes Picot will be undone, but within an organic process of border corrections based on regional consensus and rational considerations. In truth, this bloc is focused less on redrawn borders than it is on dousing the fires that seek to create the harmful divides.

Arabs and Muslims need to start becoming keenly aware of this “small state” third option, else they will fall into the dangerous trap of being distracted by detail while larger games carve up their nations and plunge them into perpetual conflict.

Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.

A Missive to CN Re: Rail Pipeline Through BC

CN Headquarters
935 de La Gauchetière Street West
Montreal, Quebec H3B 2M9
claude.mongeau@cn.ca
Tel : 514-399-2963

Attention: Claude Mongeau, CN President and CEO

January 29, 2013
Dear Monsieur Claude Mongeau,

We last wrote a couple of years ago expressing our concerns about CN’s Pipeline-on-Rails proposal. It now appears as though CN has started shipping oil - although no tar sands oil as of yet - in British Columbia. Given the potential magnitude of the project and its impacts, we are asking that you undertake consultation with impacted First Nations and community members should CN decide to move forward with its proposal to ship tar sands oil through BC.

Both your company and the Port of Prince Rupert acknowledge that at this time CN is not moving crude oil to Canada’s west coast ports, where there are no terminals in place to unload crude oil from rail cars to  ocean vessels for export. However, given the current momentum behind transporting oil by rail and the unlikely construction of new pipelines, we’re once again writing to express our opposition for such a proposal through British Columbia.
 
As with certain pipeline proposals, we are concerned about the upstream impacts associated with tar sands production, including rising greenhouse gas emissions. Confirmation that carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from tar sands production are polluting Alberta’s lakes is grave concern to both the surrounding ecosystems and local communities.

We are particularly concerned about our wild salmon watersheds and the potential impacts an oil spill could have on them. A train derailment and spill into the Skeena or Fraser watersheds could have tragic consequences to salmon, wildlife, tourism and drinking water supplies. CN’s rail line runs parallel to the Skeena River for several hundred kilometres, and crosses the upper tributaries of both the Fraser and Skeena watersheds numerous times. Even a small oil spill could be devastating to fish stocks depending on
the time of year.

It is our understanding that CN has already begun a “geographic response planning” pilot program along the Skeena River to identify river access points and important features, including cultural sites and environmentally-sensitive areas. Unfortunately, as a recent study by the think-tank the Manhattan Institute indicates, there are far greater fatality, injury and environmental risks when transporting crude oil by rail than by pipeline. The industry itself acknowledges that trains have nearly three times the number of spills as pipelines (which provides little comfort given Enbridge’s oil spill record).
 
CN lacks a positive environmental record. Lakes and rivers have been polluted and fish and wildlife have been killed by CN spills of toxic products. Over 72,000 fish were killed in Illinois when CN spilled 60,000 gallons of ethanol into a tributary of the Rock and Kishwaukee rivers; fish and wildlife were killed when CN spilled 1.3 million litres of heavy bunker fuel oil and 700,000 litres of pole treating oil into Wabamun Lake, Alberta; and 500,000 fish were killed near Squamish, British Columbia when CN spilled 40,000 litres of caustic soda into the Cheakamus River. In January 2011, a CN train bound for Prince Rupert derailed close to Tete-Jaune Cache, spilling coal into the Fraser River. Unfortunately, these are just a small sample of CN spills.

As Emile Therrien, past president of the Canada Safety Council who formerly sat on the railways safety committee, recently told the Globe and Mail: “If you look at our two major railroads in Canada, they’re very unsafe.” He pointed to both lack of upgrades to track infrastructure and insufficient safety audits by the government.

Transporting tar sands to the port of either Kitimat or Prince Rupert is unprecedented and would result in the introduction of oil tanker traffic to Canada’s North Pacific coast. The risks to coastal fisheries and tourism
jobs, as well as to cultures and communities who reside there, are too great. In response to our last letter, you indicated CN has no comment or responsibility on the marine-side of shipping tar sands via the west coast.


While CN has no required legal liability, it would be unacceptable to British Columbians to assume the majority of the liability for CN’s project. On top of facilitating tar sands expansion, putting our wild salmon
rivers at risk from train derailments, and introducing oil tankers to our North Coast, extra rail traffic would also have significant impacts on moose kills, noise and air quality, and additional waits at road/rail crossings. Impacts will be felt directly by residents along the rail line.

In an article in the Financial Post in 2009, Diane Francis wrote that: “CN estimates it could ship and have the capacity to handle 2.6 million barrels a day of oil products to the West Coast if 20,000 railcars were added to its fleet.” Given the magnitude of potential rail traffic increases, CN should be required to consult with potentially impacted residents prior to approving any proposal for shipping oil by rail through BC.

In addition, opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway or Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain expansion proposal from communities and First Nations across the province is likely to be extended to CN’s Pipeline-On-Rails Friends of Morice-Bulkley proposal. The Union of BC Municipalities passed a resolution last September against any expansion of oil tanker traffic to the West Coast. Several municipalities along the proposed Northern Gateway route and CN’s rail line have passed their own resolutions against oil tanker traffic introduction and expansion. Coastal First Nations have a tanker ban in place that applies to any tar sands supertankers in the North Pacific Coast. The Save the Fraser Declaration, signed by over 130 First Nations, bans the transport of tar sands through the watershed, regardless of whether done by rail or pipeline.

CN’s proposal to the west coast would be in violation of all of these legal instruments. Should CN decide to try to move forward with its proposal, it would face major opposition and risks to the company. We urge you to stop any forward movement with shipping tar sands oil by rail through British Columbia. We look forward to your reply and would be happy to meet with you in the near future if interested.

Sincerely,

Nikki Skuce, ForestEthics Advocacy
Keith Stewart, Greenpeace Canada
Gerald Amos, Friends of Wild Salmon
Shannon McPhail, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition
Maryam Adrangi, Council of Canadians
David Lane, T.Buck Suzuki Foundation
Eric Swanson, Dogwood Initiative
Brenda Belak, West Coast Environmental Law
Caitlyn Vernon, Sierra Club of BC
Karen Wristen, Living Oceans Society
Julia Hill, Skeena Wild Conservation Trust
Ian McAllister, Pacific Wild
Murray Minchin, Douglas Channel Watch
Sven Biggs, Tanker Free BC
Dawn Remington, Friends of Morice-Bulkley
Josh DeLeenheer, Sea-to-Sands Conservation Alliance
Cc: Mr. David Maclean, Chairman of the Board of CN Rail
Don Krussel, President and CEO of Prince Rupert Port Authority
Robin Silvester, President and CEO of Port Metro Vancouver
Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport Canada
Premier Christy Clark, Leader of the BC Liberals
MLA Adrian Dix, Leader of the BC NDP
Please send reply via ForestEthics Advocacy, #350-163 West Hastings St.,
Vancouver, BC V6B 1H5

"We Won't Torture Snowden, Promise" - US "Justice Department"

A Shameful Day to Be a US Citizen

by Dave Lindorff - This Can't Be Happening

I have been deeply ashamed of my country many times. The Nixon Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was one such time, when hospitals, schools and dikes were targeted. The invasion of Iraq was another. Washington’s silence over the fatal Israeli Commando raid on the Gaza Peace Flotilla--in which a 19-year-old unarmed American boy was murdered--was a third. But I have rarely been as ashamed and disgusted as I was Saturday reading that US Attorney General Eric Holder had sent a letter to the Russian minister of justice saying that the US would “not seek the death penalty” in its espionage case against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, promising that even if the US later brought added charges against Snowden after obtaining him, they would not include any death penalty, and vowing that if Snowden were handed over by Russia to the US, he would “not be tortured.”

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control -- a US citizen at that -- and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”

Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?

Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.

Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States -- the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too.

It is incredibly shameful that we US citizens have to admit that we live in a country that tortures its prisoners, that casually executes people who are mentally retarded, who are innocent, who had defense attorneys who slept through their clients’ trials, whose prosecutors slept with the judge, who were denied access to DNA evidence that could have proven their innocence, or who were convicted based upon the lies of prosecutors and prosecution witnesses.

This country’s “justice” system has become so perverted and politically tainted that the rest of the world, including Russia, knows that Snowden is telling the truth when he says he cannot hope to receive a fair trial here. Indeed, Congress has passed laws, and the President has signed laws, giving this government the power to lock someone like Snowden up indefinitely without trial, to torture him, and even to kill him, not through a jury decision on capital punishment, but simply on the basis of a secret “finding” by the President that he has aided or abetted terrorism.

No wonder Russia and several other countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have offered or are considering offering Snowden asylum.

And no wonder that, in its obsession with getting its tyrannical hands on him, this government is willing to promise not to kill him or torture him (for what a promise from the US government is worth, especially since when Holder makes his promise of "no torture" we have to remember that Holder and the US don't define such horrors as waterboarding, stress positions, keeping someone naked in an unheated cell, or employing prolonged sensory deprivation are not "torture").

Shame and anger are the only appropriate responses to that letter from Holder.

If this were a country that honored the rule of law, Attorney General Holder would not need to promise not to torture. He would need only to point to the US Constitution, with its ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” He would not need to promise a fair trial to Snowden, with no capital punishment on any charges. He could point instead to the Constitution’s promise of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial by a jury of the accused’s peers, to make the case against the granting of asylum.

In such a country, someone like Snowden, with the help of a crack legal team, would have a fair shot at proving to a jury his innocence of the government’s frivolous espionage charges. He’d have a fair chance of convincing at least one juror of his absolute innocence of any crime, making his conviction impossible.

But that is not what this country is, especially today.

In today’s US courts, we know the “Justice” Department would seek to bar testimony about Snowden’s motives in leaking the documents he downloaded from the NSA’s computers. They would ask the judge to limit defense arguments and testimony in the case to the narrow issue of whether or not he downloaded and leaked files, not to whether those files exposed Constitutional violations and needed to be brought to the public’s attention. Our judges, nominated by presidents and confirmed by senators, Democrat and Republican, who want jurists who favor government secrecy and who generally side with the government against the people, can be counted on to grant the government’s motions.

In such circumstances, a defendant like Snowden, facing charges of espionage or theft of government secrets, has no ability to defend himself. The trial would be like in a Lewis Carroll event: “Verdict first, trial later!”

Hopefully President Vladimir Putin will not be pressured by the US into pretending that Snowden has nothing to fear in going back to face “justice” in the US.

It is bad enough that we Americans have to hang our heads in shame as our Attorney General pretends, against all evidence to the contrary, that there is still a fair legal system operating in the US, and that the US respects human rights and the rule of law.

We should not have to also endure yet another kangaroo court trial, this time of Edward Snowden.

Snowden should be granted asylum in Russia, or should be allowed to travel to one of the other countries of his choice that have had the courage to offer him asylum.

If we’re going to have trials on the issue of spying in the US, let them be of Holder himself, and of President Obama.

NOTE: Check out the interview by NBC's Matt Lauer of Snowden's father [1], retired Coast Guard officer Lonnie Snowden, and his attorney, former associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration.

Big Data: How Tech. Firms Gut Privacy

'Big Data' Dynamo: How Giant Tech Firms Help the Government Spy on Us and Gut Privacy

by Tom Burghardt  - Antifascist Calling…

As the secret state continues trawling the electronic communications of hundreds of millions of Americans, lusting after what securocrats euphemistically call "actionable intelligence," a notional tipping point that transforms a "good" citizen into a "criminal" suspect, the role played by telecommunications and technology firms cannot be emphasized enough.

Ever since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking secrets to media outlets about government surveillance programs, one fact stands out:

The zero probability these privacy-killing projects would be practical without close (and very profitable) "arrangements" made with phone companies, internet service providers and other technology giants.

Indeed, a top secret NSA Inspector General's report published by The Guardian, revealed that the agency "maintains relationships with over 100 US companies," adding that the US has the "home field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide telecommunications."

Similarly, the British fiber optic cable tapping program, TEMPORA, referred to telcos and ISPs involved in the spying as "intercept partners." The names of the firms were considered so sensitive that GCHQ "went to great lengths" to keep their identities hidden, fearing exposure "would cause 'high-level political fallout'."

With new privacy threats looming on the horizon, including what CNET described as ongoing efforts by the FBI and NSA "to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users' private Web communications from eavesdropping," along with new government demands that ISPs and cell phone carriers "divulge users' stored passwords," can we trust these firms?

And with Microsoft and other tech giants, collaborating closely with "US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption," can we afford to?

Hiding in Plain Sight

Ever since retired union technician Mark Klein blew the lid off AT&T's secret surveillance pact with the US government in 2006, we know user privacy is not part of that firm's business model.

The technical source for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T and the author of Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine, Klein was the first to publicly expose how NSA was "vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it."

We also know from reporting by USA Today, that the agency "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans" and had amassed "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

Three of those data-slurping programs, UPSTREAM, PRISM and X-KEYSCORE, shunt domestic and global communications collected from fiber optic cables, the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, along with telephone data (including metadata, call content and location) grabbed from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon into NSA-controlled databases.

But however large, a database is only useful to an organization, whether its a corporation or a spy agency, if the oceans of data collected can be searched and extracted in meaningful ways.

To the growing list of spooky acronyms and code-named black programs revealed by Edward Snowden, what other projects, including those in the public domain, are hiding in plain sight?

Add Google's BigTable and Yahoo's Hadoop to that list. Both are massive storage and retrieval systems designed to crunch ultra-large data sets and were developed as a practical means to overcome "big data" conundrums.

According to the Mountain View behemoth, "BigTable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers." Along with web indexing, Google Earth and Google Finance, BigTable performs "bulk processing" for "real-time data serving."

Down the road in Sunnyvale, Yahoo developed Hadoop as "an open source Java framework for processing and querying vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity hardware." According to Yahoo, Hadoop has become "the industry de facto framework for big data processing." Like Google's offering, Hadoop enable applications to work with thousands of computers and petabytes of data simultaneously.

Prominent corporate clients using these applications include Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Twitter, among many others.

'Big Data' Dynamo

Who might also have a compelling interest in cataloging and searching through very large data sets, away from prying eyes, and at granular levels to boot? It should be clear following Snowden's disclosures, what's good for commerce is also a highly-prized commodity among global eavesdroppers.

Despite benefits for medical and scientific researchers sifting through mountains of data, as Ars Technica pointed out BigTable and Hadoop "lacked compartmentalized security" vital to spy shops, so "in 2008, NSA set out to create a better version of BigTable, called Accumulo."

Developed by agency specialists, it was eventually handed off to the "non-profit" Apache Software Foundation. Touted as an open software platform, Accumulo is described in Apache literature as "a robust, scalable, high performance data storage and retrieval system."

"The platform allows for compartmentalization of segments of big data storage through an approach called cell-level security. The security level of each cell within an Accumulo table can be set independently, hiding it from users who don't have a need to know: whole sections of data tables can be hidden from view in such a way that users (and applications) without clearance would never know they weren't there," Ars Technica explained.

The tech site Gigaom noted, Accumulo is the "technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective," enabling agency analysts to "generate near real-time reports from specific patterns in data," Ars averred.

"For instance, the system could look for specific words or addressees in e-mail messages that come from a range of IP addresses; or, it could look for phone numbers that are two degrees of separation from a target's phone number. Then it can spit those chosen e-mails or phone numbers into another database, where NSA workers could peruse it at their leisure."

(Since that Ars piece appeared, we have since learned that NSA is now conducting what is described as "three-hop analysis," that is, three degrees of separation from a target's email or phone number. This data dragnet "could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist," the Associated Press observed).

"In other words," Ars explained, "Accumulo allows the NSA to do what Google does with your e-mails and Web searches--only with everything that flows across the Internet, or with every phone call you make."

Armed with a "dual-use" program like Accumulo, the dirty business of assembling a user's political profile, or shuttling the names of "suspect" Americans into a national security index, is as now easy as downloading a song from iTunes!

And it isn't only Silicon Valley giants cashing-in on the "public-private" spy game.

Just as the CIA-funded Palantir, a firm currently valued at $8 billion and exposed two years ago as a "partner" in a Bank of America-brokered scheme to bring down WikiLeaks, profited from CIA interest in its social mapping Graph application, so too, the NSA spin-off Sqrrl, launched in 2012 with agency blessings, stands to make a killing off software its corporate officers helped develop for NSA.

Co-founded by nine-year agency veteran Adam Fuchs, Sqrrl sells commercial versions of Accumulo and has partnered-up with Amazon, Dell, MapR and Northrop Grumman. According to published reports, like other start-ups with an intelligence angle, Sqrrl is hoping to hook-up with CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel.

Its obvious why the application is of acute interest to American spy shops. Fuchs told Gigaom that Accumulo operates "at thousands-of-nodes scale" within NSA data centers.

"There are multiple instances each storing tens of petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes) of data and it's the backend of the agency's most widely used analytical capabilities."

Accumulo's analytical functions work because of its ability to perform lightning-quick searches called "graph analysis," a method for uncovering unique relationships between people hidden within vast oceans of data.

According to Forbes, "we know that the NSA has successfully tested Accumulo's graph analysis capabilities on some huge data sets--in one case on a 1200 node Accumulo cluster with over a petabyte of data and 70 trillion edges."

Considering, as Wired reported, that "on an average day, Google accounts for about 25 percent of all consumer internet traffic running through North American ISPs," and the Mountain View firm allowed the FBI and NSA to tap directly into their central servers as The Washington Post disclosed, the negative impact on civil rights and political liberties when systems designed for the Pentagon are monetized, should be evident.

Once fully commercialized, how much more intrusive will employers, marketing firms, insurance companies or local and state police with mountains of data only a mouse click away, become?

Global Panopticon

The sheer scope of NSA programs such as UPSTREAM, PRISM or X-KEYSCORE, exposed by the Brazilian daily, O Globo should give pause.

A crude illustration (at the top of this post), shows that all data collected in X-KEYSCORE "sessions" are processed in petabyte scale batches captured from "web-based searches" that can be "retrospectively" queried to locate and profile a "target."

This requires enormous processing power; a problem the agency may have solved with Accumulo or similar applications.

Once collected, data is separated into digestible fragments (phone numbers, email addresses and log ins), then reassembled at lightning speeds for searchable queries in graphic form. Information gathered in the hopper includes not only metadata tables, but the "full log," including what spooks call Digital Network Intelligence, i.e., user content.

And while it may not yet be practical for NSA to collect and store each single packet flowing through the pipes, the agency is already collecting and storing vast reams of data intercepted from our phone records, IP addresses, emails, web searches and visits, and is doing so in much the same way that Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo does.

As the volume of global communications increase each year at near exponential levels, data storage and processing pose distinct problems.

Indeed, Cisco Systems forecast in their 2012 Visual Networking Index that global IP traffic will grow three-fold over the next five years and will carry up to 4 exabytes of data per day, for an annual rate of 1.4 zettabytes by 2017.

This does much to explain why NSA is building a $2 billion Utah Data Center with 22 acres of digital storage space that can hold up to 5 zettabytes of data and expanding already existing centers at Fort Gordon, Lackland Air Force Base, NSA Hawaii and at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters.

Additionally, NSA is feverishly working to bring supercomputers online "that can execute a quadrillion operations a second" at the Multiprogram Research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where enriched uranium for nuclear weapons is manufactured, as James Bamford disclosed last year in Wired.

As the secret state sinks tens of billions of dollars into various big data digital programs, and carries out research on next-gen cyberweapons more destructive than Flame or Stuxnet, as those supercomputers come online the cost of cracking encrypted passwords and communications will continue to fall.

Stanford University computer scientist David Mazières told CNET that mastering encrypted communications would "include an order to extract them from the server or network when the user logs in--which has been done before--or installing a keylogger at the client."

This is precisely what Microsoft has already done with its SkyDrive cloud storage service "which now has 250 million users worldwide" and exabytes of data ready to be pilfered, as The Guardian disclosed.

One document "stated that NSA already had pre-encryption access to Outlook email. 'For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption'."

Call the "wrong" person or click a dodgy link and you might just be the lucky winner of a one-way trip to indefinite military detention under NDAA, or worse.

What should also be clear since revelations about NSA surveillance programs began spilling out last month, is not a single ruling class sector in the United States--including corporations, the media, nor any branch of the US government--has the least interest in defending democratic rights or rolling-back America's emerging police state.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Lucky Lady Lopes from Law: CIA's Own Snowden Melts into Netherworld Ether

Now You See Him, Now You Don’t: Living in a One-Superpower World (or Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady)

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

He came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant. In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady.

Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder. After years in absentia -- poof! -- he reappeared out of nowhere on the border between Panama and Costa Rica, and made the news when Panamanian officials took him into custody on an Interpol warrant. 

 

The CIA's station chief in Milan back in 2003, he had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita version of extraordinary rendition as part of Washington’s Global War on Terror. His colleagues kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Muslim cleric and terror suspect, off the streets of Milan, and rendered him via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to the torture chambers of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. Lady evidently rode shotgun on that transfer.

His Agency associates proved to be the crew that couldn’t spook straight. They left behind such a traceable trail of five-star-hotel and restaurant bills, charges on false credit cards, and unencrypted cell phone calls that the Italian government tracked them down, identified them, and charged 23 of them, Lady included, with kidnapping.

Lady fled Italy, leaving behind a multimillion-dollar villa near Turin meant for his retirement. (It was later confiscated and sold to make restitution payments to Nasr.) Convicted in absentia in 2009, Lady received a nine-year sentence (later reduced to six). He had by then essentially vanished after admitting to an Italian newspaper, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”

Last week, the Panamanians picked him up. It was the real world equivalent of a magician’s trick. He was nowhere, then suddenly in custody and in the news, and then -- poof again! -- he wasn’t. Just 24 hours after the retired CIA official found himself under lock and key, he was flown out of Panama, evidently under the protection of Washington, and in mid-air, heading back to the United States, vanished a second time.

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters on July 19th, “It's my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States." So there he was, possibly in mid-air heading for the homeland and, as far as we know, as far as reporting goes, nothing more. Consider it the CIA version of a miracle. Instead of landing, he just evaporated.

And that was that. Not another news story here in the U.S.; no further information from government spokespeople on what happened to him, or why the administration decided to extricate him from Panama and protect him from Italian justice. Nor, as far as I can tell, were there any further questions from the media. When TomDispatch inquired of the State Department, all it got was this bit of stonewallese: “We understand that a U.S citizen was detained by Panamanian authorities, and that Panamanian immigration officials expelled him from Panama on July 19. Panama's actions are consistent with its rights to determine whether to admit or expel non-citizens from its territory."

In other words, he came and he went.

Edward Snowden: The Opposite of a Magician’s Trick

When Lady was first detained, there was a little flurry of news stories and a little frisson of tension. Would a retired CIA agent convicted of a serious crime involving kidnapping and torture be extradited to Italy to serve his sentence? But that tension had no chance to build because (as anyone might have predicted) luck was a Lady that week.

After all, the country that took him into custody on that Interpol warrant was a genuine rarity in a changing Latin America. It was still an ally of the United States, which had once built a canal across its territory, controlled its politics for years, and in 1989 sent in the U.S. military to forcefully sort out those politics once again. Italy wanted Lady back and evidently requested that Panama hand him over (though the countries had no extradition treaty). But could anyone be surprised by what happened or by the role Washington clearly played in settling Lady’s fate? If you had paid any attention to the global pressure Washington was exerting in an “international manhunt” to get Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower it had already charged under the draconian Espionage Act, back to its shores, you knew which direction Robert Seldon Lady would be heading when he hit the nearest plane out of Panama -- and I don’t mean Italy.

But here was the curious thing: when Panama sent him north, not east, there wasn’t the slightest ripple of U.S. media curiosity about the act or what lay behind it. Lady simply disappeared. While the Italian minister of justice “deeply regretted” Panama’s decision, there was not, as far as I can tell, a single editorial, outraged or otherwise, anywhere in this country questioning the Obama administration's decision not to allow a convicted criminal to be brought to justice in the courts of a democratic ally or even praising Washington’s role in protecting him. And we're not talking about a media with no interest in trials in Italy. Who doesn’t remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the murder trial (and retrial) of American student Amanda Knox there? For the American media, however, Lady clearly lacked Knox's sex appeal (nor would he make millions off a future account of his Italian sojourn).

In this same period, there was, of course, another man who almost magically disappeared. In a transit area of Moscow’s international airport, Edward Snowden discovered that the U.S. government had deprived him of his passport and was determined to bring him back to Washington by just about any means to stand trial. That included forcing the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, returning from Moscow, to make an unscheduled landing in Austria and be searched for Snowden.

The NSA whistleblower was trapped in a kind of no-man’s-land by an Obama administration demanding that the Russians turn him over or face the consequences. After which, for days, he disappeared from sight. In his case, unlike Lady’s, however, Washington never stopped talking about him and the media never stopped speculating on his fate. It hasn’t yet.

He’s only appeared in public once since his “disappearance” -- at a press conference at that airport with human rights activists from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The U.S. government promptly deplored and denounced the event as something Moscow “facilitated” or “orchestrated,” a “propaganda platform,” and a State Department spokesperson even suggested that Snowden, not yet convicted of anything, shouldn’t have the right to express himself in Moscow or anywhere else.

The truth is: when it comes to Snowden, official Washington can’t shut up. Congressional figures have denounced him as a “traitor” or a “defector.” The world has repeatedly been lectured from the bully pulpit in our national capital on how necessary his return and trial is to freedom, justice, and global peace. Snowden, it seems, represents the opposite of a magician’s trick. He can’t disappear even when he wants to. Washington won’t let him, not now, not -- as officials have made clear -- ever. It’s a matter of morality that he faces the law and pays the (already preordained) price for his “crime.” This, in today’s Washington, is what passes for a self-evident truth.

The Lady Vanishes

It’s no less a self-evident truth in Washington that Robert Seldon Lady must be protected from the long (Italian) arm of the law, that he is a patriot who did his duty, that it is the job of the U.S. government to keep him safe and never allow him to be prosecuted, just as it is the job of that government to protect, not prosecute, CIA torturers who took part in George W. Bush's Global War on Terror.

So there are two men, both of whom, Washington is convinced, must be brought in: one to face “justice,” one to escape it. And all of this is a given, nothing that needs to be explained or justified to anyone anywhere, not even by a Constitutional law professor president. (Of course, if someone had been accused of kidnapping and rendering an American Christian fundamentalist preacher and terror suspect off the streets of Milan to Moscow or Tehran or Beijing, it would no less self-evidently be a different matter.)

Don’t make the mistake, however, of comparing Washington’s positions on Snowden and Lady and labeling the Obama administration’s words and actions “hypocrisy.” There's no hypocrisy involved. This is simply the living definition of what it means to exist in a one-superpower world for the first time in history. For Washington, the essential rule of thumb goes something like this: we do what we want; we get to say what we want about what we do; and U.N. ambassadorial nominee Samantha Powers then gets to lecture the world on human rights and oppression.

This version of how it all works is so much the norm in Washington that few there are likely to see any contradiction at all between the Obama administration’s approaches to Snowden and Lady, nor evidently does the Washington media. Its particular blind spots, when it comes to Washington’s actions, remain striking -- as when the U.S. effectively downed the Bolivian president and his plane. Although it was an act of seemingly self-evident illegality, there was no serious reporting, no digging when it came to the behind-the-scenes acts of the U.S. government, which clearly pressured four or five European governments (one of which may have been Italy) to collude in the act. Nor, weeks later, has there been any follow-up by the Washington media. In other words, an act unique in recent history, which left European powers disgruntled and left much of Latin America up in arms, has disappeared without explanation, analysis, punditry, or editorial comment here. Undoubtedly, given the lack of substantial coverage, few Americans even know it happened.

The lucky Mr. Lady’s story has followed a similar trajectory. Having vanished in mid-air, he has managed so far not to reappear anywhere in the U.S. press. What followed was no further news, editorial silence, and utter indifference to an act of protection that might otherwise have seemed to define illegality on an international level. There was no talk in the media, in Congress, or anywhere else about the U.S. handing over a convicted criminal to Italy, just about how the Russians must return a man Washington considers a criminal to justice.

This, then, is our world: a single megapower has, since September 2001, been in a financing and construction frenzy to create the first global surveillance state; its torturers run free; its kidnappers serve time at liberty in this country and are rescued if they venture abroad; and its whistleblowers -- those who would let the rest of us know what “our” government is doing in our name -- are pilloried. And so it goes.

All of it adds up to a way of life and the everyday tradecraft of a one-superpower world. Too bad Alfred Hitchcock isn’t around to remake some of his old classics. Imagine what a thriller The Lady Vanishes would be today.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (just published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Emery Hartley, Don Staniford, Janine Bandcroft July 29, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

2013 marks a milestone for Canada's environmental movement. It was the Summer of '93 when thousands of concerned Canadians, and citizens from countries the World over manifested in the forests here, on Vancouver Island, at Clayoquot Sound to engage in the single biggest campaign of civil disobedience the country has ever known.

Dubbed the "War in the Woods" by a largely hostile corporate media, the thousands had come, prepared to lay their bodies and their liberty on the line to protect the forests of the Sound from the odious practice of clear-cut logging.

Stripping forests at an industrial rate has been, and continues to be, the mainstay of British Columbia's "forest management strategy."

Listen. Hear.

This Summer of '13, the Friends of Clayoquot Sound have organized the Clayoquot Wild Weekend to:

"Honour and celebrate the courage of the blockaders FOCS is holding a “Clayoquot Wild Weekend” from August 8th to 11th. The Clayoquot Wild Weekend will also be a time of reflection and planning as we gear up to confront the ongoing threats to the Clayoquot Sound Biosphere Reserve."

Emery Hartley is a natural born and raised Vancouver Islander whose fascination and enthusiasm for nature led him to a University degree in Environmental Science and an ongoing activist career with the Friends of Clayoquot Sound. The Friends first formed in 1979 with a mandate to protect and conserve the priceless ecosystems of the Sound and its surroundings.

Emery Hartley and friends for the Sound in the first half.

And; last week I brought you some news of Don Staniford's legal reversal in BC's Supreme Court of Appeal. Don had won judgement in defence of a suit launched by Mainstream Canada, a subsidiary of transnational fish farm behemoth, Cermaq.

The judgement transcends the case in point, and is a travesty for both British Columbia's environment and the very concept of a free society. Don is out of the country now, (having been asked to leave by Canada's government in dramatic fashion on the court house steps) but has continued his campaign against the destructive practice continued by Cermaq and its subsidiaries in Europe, Chile, and Canada.

Don Staniford censored by BC's "permanent injunction" against global truth-telling in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around our city in the coming week. But first, getting wild with Emery Hartley and friends with Clayoquot's Wild Weekend.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Gilad Atzmon, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, Ramzy Baroud, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Mordecai Briemberg, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Paul Cienfuegos, David Cromwell, Ezili Danto, Jon Elmer, Yves Engler, Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Frances Moore Lappe, Ingmar Lee, Dave Lindorff, Alexandra Morton, Loretta Napoleoni, Andrew Nikiforuk, Ken O'Keefe, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, Paul Craig Roberts, David Rovics, Danny Schechter, David Schindler, Vandana Shiva, Tim Shorrock, Norman Solomon, Jean Saint-Vil, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Andy Worthington, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.

August 8th to 11th - Clayoquot Sound's Wild Weekend Fast Approaching

Clayoquot Wild weekend 8-10 August 

by FOCS

Remember Clayoquot Summer 1993? Were you here? It was a heady time, and it changed the world.

This year is the 20th anniversary, and we’re planning a party!

Twenty years ago thousands rushed to join Friends of Clayoquot Sound to peacefully protest and blockade the bridge that allowed MacMillan Bloedel to devastate clayoquot’s forests.

Their action turned into the largest act of peaceful civil disobedience in Canadian history and continues to influence Canada's environmental movement today.

To honour and celebrate the courage of the blockaders FOCS is holding a “Clayoquot Wild Weekend” from August 8th to 11th. The Clayoquot Wild Weekend will also be a time of reflection and planning as we gear up to confront the ongoing threats to the Clayoquot Sound Biosphere Reserve.

Thursday August 8th Clayoquot Café/Social:

Join a panel of key figures, locals and arrestees from the 1993 logging protests as they discuss the events of the 1993 Clayoquot blockades, weaving a colourful tapestry of history! The event will be held in the Community Theatre, tickets are 10$ and are available in advance from the Mermaid Tales bookshop and from our board members some tickets will also be available at the door, but don’t wait to the last minute!

On the Panel and their roles in 1993:

• Valerie Langer: FOCS Forests Campaigner
• Tzeporah Berman: FOCS Blockade Coordinator
• Elizabeth May: organized Sierra Club Canada’s coast to coast Clayoquot Express rail caravan in 1993
• Chris Hatch: key FOCS volunteer
• Karen Mahon: Greenpeace organizer, key ally
• John Cashore: NDP Minister of Environment and later Aboriginal Affairs
• Terry Brown: arrestee
• Maureen Fraser: Tofino local, FOCS supporter
• Joe Martin: key ally and Tla-o-qui-aht cultural leader

August 9th: Outdoor Concert and Evening Market in Tofino

Join FOCS on the Village Green in Tofino for a fine evening of music, dancing, a night market, and guests speaking about the future of Clayoquot Sound! Our headline artist is Bob Bossin, writer of the song Sulphur Passage! Check out the song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxGjtMk7CNY

August 10th: Day at Kennedy Lake’s Rainbow Beach

Join FOCS out at Kennedy Lake for a photo op on the Kennedy River bridge, for some rainforest walks, frank discussion about the future of the Sound, and bring your instruments for jamming! Self sufficient camping may be available at Rainbow Beach from the 8th to the 11th of August, please contact emery@focs.ca with any questions you may have!