Righthaven Files More Lawsuits Amid Questions About Group's Agenda
by Wendy Davis, Sunday, May 16, 2010
source
Copyright enforcement group Righthaven has filed two more lawsuits against Web site operators for allegedly copying and linking to articles that originally appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In the latest lawsuits, against the nonprofit Ecological Internet and the operator of the sports betting site madjacksports.com, as with the prior 11 filed since March, Righthaven says it obtained the copyrights to the newspapers' articles. In all cases, Righthaven apparently went to court without first asking that the articles be removed. While sending takedown notices isn't legally required, it's extremely unusual for content owners to sue over newspaper articles when no one has previously complained to the operators.
Glen Barry, who runs Ecological Internet, says he has kept a database of articles about environmental issues for 15 years without previously facing litigation. "We have already amicably resolved similar situations with other outlets, including The New York Times," he says. He adds that he preserved copies of the articles on his site for research purposes. "We are building a scholarly archive to solve ecological crises," he says.
Barry adds that he checked the site's logs after speaking with Online Media Daily and discovered that the site had just four articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal in its archives. None had ever been clicked on, he said.
In the meantime, at least one Righthaven defendant is questioning whether it was targeted for political reasons. The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, sued last month, was previously named by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as one of the five "worst taxpayer nightmares of the year."
"This nonprofit band of lefties never tires of coming up with ways to spend other people's money in the pursuit of 'social, economic and environmental justice,'" the paper railed in a December editorial.
PLAN now sees a connection between the paper's stance and the lawsuit. "They've got a right to say what they want to say," says communications director Launce Rake. "But at this point, I believe they just want to shut us down."
But it's not yet clear whether Righthaven intends to bring actions against conservative organizations. Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson says that his concern is limited to fighting the "rampant" copyright infringement occurring online. He specifically denies any link between the newspaper's editorial stance and the lawsuits brought to date. "We're non-discriminatory in terms of addressing copyright infringement," he says.
Other defendants include the progressive group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a real estate blogger, sites related to sports gambling, a group that opposes wind energy, an environmental site and the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws. In 2002, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran an editorial urging the decriminalization of marijuana.
Still, some observers have noted that Righthaven so far has not filed suits against any right-wing organizations or Republican groups that the paper currently appears to support. The Las Vegas Journal Review (which covers the media and has no connection to the Review-Journal) and Media Matters for America have both pointed out that Righthaven appears to allow U.S. Senate candidate Danny Tarkanian to reproduce the paper's stories on his campaign site.
Media Matters also said that some legal experts believe that allowing one political group to post copyrighted material but preventing others potentially violates campaign finance law.
Whether the lawsuits are aimed at forcing liberal groups to shut down or not, that could well be the effect, says Santa Clara University professor Eric Goldman. Simply defending a lawsuit could easily cost at least $100,00, he estimates. In addition, statutory damages in copyright infringement lawsuits -- available regardless of any actual economic harm -- range from $750 to $150,000 per infringement.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Oil in the Loop
BP withholds oil spill facts — and government lets it
By Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say that data is crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe.
Moreover, the company isn't monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in gulf.
BP's role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.
Under pressure from senators, BP released four videos Tuesday, but it hasn't agreed to better monitoring.
The company also hasn't publicly released air sampling for oil spill workers although Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of monitoring compliance with worker safety regulations, is relying on the information and has urged it to do so.
"It is not ours to publish," said Dean Wingo, OSHA's assistant regional administrator who oversees Louisiana. "We are working with (BP) and encouraging them to post the data so that it is publicly available."
Much of the worker exposure data is being collected by contractors hired by BP.
Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said the company is sharing the data with "legitimate interested parties," which include government agencies and the private companies assisting in the cleanup. When asked whether the information can be released publicly, he responded, "Why would one do it? Any parties with a legitimate interest can have access to it."
Joseph T. Hughes Jr., the director of the worker education training program for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said he didn't think "anyone has seen much of that data at all."
"The hard part about it is that in a normal response, when the government is doing this, there might be more transparency on the data," Hughes said. "In this case, when you have BP making the decisions and collecting the data it's harder to have that transparency."
Unlike the response to other past national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina where the government was in charge, BP has been designated as the "responsible party" under federal law and is overseeing much of the response to the spill. The government is acting more as an adviser.
So far, the government has been slow to press BP to release its data and permit others to evaluate the extent of the crisis.
"I think that one of the lessons learned here is whether the federal government should have more of a role in the response and not leave that decision-making in the hands of the responsible parties," said Hughes, whose institute was one of the first to raise questions about air quality at the World Trade Center site in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many Sept. 11 rescue workers still suffer from impaired lung function.
The Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, one of BP's consultants, is collecting air quality samples over the coast and the water.
"It's fair to say that a majority of the air monitoring along the shoreline is being done by our organization," said Glenn Millner, a partner with the CTEH and a principal toxicologist.
Gina Solomon, a medical doctor and a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her environmental organization has been pressing the government to release the data, after hearing reports of fishermen concerned about exposure.
"The fact that OSHA is saying that it's safe is important because they have access to data that we don't have," she said. "It's sort of awkward to have to take that on face value given the fact that there are fishermen who feel they are getting sick."
The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing shoreline data on its website, but not information about the air quality workers encounter on the water.
OSHA has access to that data and is monitoring it to determine what type of equipment the workers should be issued and other questions related to worker safety. So far, the air quality does not require workers to receive respirators, Wingo said.
Millner said that data as a matter of practice is shared only with the oil clean up worker and the company overseeing the cleanup.
BP also has exercised considerable control over how much is known about the amount of oil gushing into the gulf.
Early on, the government estimated that 210,000 gallons was being released daily. That estimate was based on satellite observations of the water's surface.
The first look at the oil coming out of the pipe on the sea floor was a video clip that BP released last week in response to demands from reporters and others. It caused a stir because some experts who analyzed it estimated that the amount of oil pouring into the gulf was many times the government's official estimate.
Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., on Monday asked BP on Monday to provide all available video footage.
BP provided clips from several days of the spill on Tuesday.
The clips, however, would still result only in rough estimates because the oil flows at different rates at different times and it's mixed with gas, said BP spokesman Mark Proegler.
The company had no other equipment on the sea floor to monitor the amount of the flow, and no plans to install any.
"We've said from the beginning . . . it's difficult if not impossible to measure from the source of the flow," Proegler said on Tuesday. BP's focus is stopping the flow and keeping the oil away from shore, he said.
Jeff Short, an oil pollution expert and former National Marine Fisheries Service official who now works for the environmental group Oceana, said the estimate based on surface observations was very imprecise, and that looking at the flow rate from the pipe would be better.
"The public has the right to see what harm the environment is exposed to, and knowing the flow rate is fundamental to that," he said.
Judy McDowell, the chair of the biology department and a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who's studied many oil spills, said that in addition to knowing the amount of oil flowing in, scientists also need to figure out how it's dispersing and breaking down in order to know what effect it would have on living organisms in the water.
Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of NOAA, said in testimony to a Senate committee Tuesday said it was important, but difficult to get a better estimate of the amount of oil. She said that the Coast Guard planned to set up a team to get a better estimate.
Some university researchers have been frustrated by the lack of data and the refusal of federal agencies to press BP to collect detailed measurements from the broken well pipe or fully assess what might be happening underwater.
"We have been screaming from day one for data,'' said Peter Ortner, a fisheries biologist at the University of Miami.
Ortner also said that NOAA had been slow to consider sub-surface effects and didn't deploy the sophisticated gear that might help surveying for submerged oil.
Lubchenco said Monday that the agency had been discussing ideas about more sensing gear on the ocean floor but said "the priority at this point is to stop the flow.''
Meanwhile, an analysis of satellite imagery by the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, reported Tuesday that the spill has grown to more than 7,500 square miles, or about the size of New Jersey.
(Curtis Morgan of The Miami Herald contributed to this article.)
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY
Obama talks tough on oil spill, but avoids taking hands-on role
Oil spill: BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer
Fear over Gulf oil spill: What happens if they can't stop it?
Congress wants to know why MMS aborted tougher drilling rules
More McClatchy oil spill coverage
Check out McClatchy's expanded politics coverage at Planet Washington
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/18/94415/bps-secrecy-keep-facts-on-gulf.html#ixzz0oQjGfOyj
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Pentagon’s Private & Secret Spy Ring
International Media Mis-Adventures:
The Pentagon’s Private & Secret Spy Ring
by rory o' connor
source
Author and adventurer Robert Young Pelton is perhaps best known for his best-selling guides to The World’s Most Dangerous Places. A veteran of battles in Afghanistan, sieges in Chechnya and attacks in Liberia, and a survivor of an assassination attempt in Uganda and a kidnapping in Colombia, Pelton has also spent time hunting for Osama with the CIA and hanging out with both Blackwater contractors and the insurgents they were fighting in Iraq.
Two months ago, Pelton says, things started to get really scary in one of the world’s truly most dangerous places – the environs of Washington, D.C.
That’s when the New York Times broke a story headlined “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants,” and ran a picture of Pelton above a caption identifying him as “a contractor.”
The article explained how “under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program,” a Defense Department official named Michael D. Furlong “set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants…” Furlong is a civilian Pentagon official with years of experience in what the military used to call “psyops” or “psychological operations” — now referred to as “information operations.” Unnamed “government officials” (no doubt with DC-area offices in Langley, Virginia) told Times reporter Mark Mazzetti they believed Furlong “might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.” Furlong’s operation, as the Times reported, involves “a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.” His “operators” gathered intelligence on militants and the location of their camps, which was then passed on to military and intelligence officials “for possible lethal action” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Did any of this intrigue involve Robert Young Pelton? Or has he – along with his business partner, the former CNN executive Eason Jordan – become collateral damage in a murky “rogue” intelligence affair?
Pelton and Jordan had been hired by the US military to run a public Web site aimed at helping government officials gain a better understanding of the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. The pair thought up the idea for the government information program sometime in 2008 and approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, who was about to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their previous “Iraq Slogger” Web site had employed Iraqis to report and write news stories. Now they proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — “Iraq Slogger on steroids,” Pelton calls it — to be financed largely by the American military. Dubbed AfPax Insider, their proposed reporting and research network was meant to be an “open-source” news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered by employees. The project would involve not only a subscription-based Web site, but a secure information database only the military could access in addition.
McKiernan endorsed the proposal and told them “to get to work,” but funding was late in coming and less than expected. In the summer of 2009 they were told their services were no longer needed. Instead, the planned budget of $22 million that was supposed to go to their Web site was apparently redirected by Furlong toward “off the books” intelligence gathering used to kill militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead of using Pelton and Jordan, Furlong employed two other companies. The first was International Media Ventures — several of whose senior executives are former members of the military’s covert Special Operations forces — describes itself as a public relations firm and “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.” IMV President Robert Pack says it provides “information and media atmospherics, research and analysis for good governance and development in Afghanistan, civil society demographics and dynamics, key audience and influence group analysis, and media channel utilization.”
“Were they using us as cover?” Pelton wonders. “I don’t know, but I do know we got cut out after the snowball got rolling. Were we exploited? What was exploited was our concept of providing ‘atmospherics.’”
The second firm was American International Security Corporation, run by former Green Beret Mike Taylor, who employed Duane Clarridge, a former top C.I.A. official linked to the Iran-Contra scandal. AISC was also employed by The New York Times in late 2008 until mid-June 2009 to assist in the case of David Rohde, a reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas before finally escaping. Who led the mission for the Times? None other than Duane Clarridge, who then began establishing a network of informants around the globe.
The Times, which withheld information about Rohde’s kidnapping for months, is now also withholding information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in a front page story this week, Mazzetti did reveal that Furlong’s “rogue operation” is still operating, and that its “detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.”
Pelton believes he has become cannon fodder in a turf war between the CIA and the Pentagon, with the Times acting as the CIA’s mouthpiece and media outlet. “The narrative has become Blackwater-like,” he complains. “The unstated assumption is that we are the same sort of ‘contractors’ as Blackwater.” Instead, Pelton says, it was “a constant battle with Furlong,” who was “constantly trying to push us in that direction.” He avers that he and Jordan are “not spies and not contractors, but open-source information providers” who got caught in the middle of what might be “a CIA Frankenstein.”
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell has said that the entire program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department.” Meanwhile, Pentagon officials decided recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of this month.
“We gave them everything we promised,” Pelton told me. “But the worst part of all this is that the military still desperately needs exactly what we could provide them. Instead, our information was being used to kill people!”
The Pentagon’s Private & Secret Spy Ring
by rory o' connor
source
Author and adventurer Robert Young Pelton is perhaps best known for his best-selling guides to The World’s Most Dangerous Places. A veteran of battles in Afghanistan, sieges in Chechnya and attacks in Liberia, and a survivor of an assassination attempt in Uganda and a kidnapping in Colombia, Pelton has also spent time hunting for Osama with the CIA and hanging out with both Blackwater contractors and the insurgents they were fighting in Iraq.
Two months ago, Pelton says, things started to get really scary in one of the world’s truly most dangerous places – the environs of Washington, D.C.
That’s when the New York Times broke a story headlined “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants,” and ran a picture of Pelton above a caption identifying him as “a contractor.”
The article explained how “under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program,” a Defense Department official named Michael D. Furlong “set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants…” Furlong is a civilian Pentagon official with years of experience in what the military used to call “psyops” or “psychological operations” — now referred to as “information operations.” Unnamed “government officials” (no doubt with DC-area offices in Langley, Virginia) told Times reporter Mark Mazzetti they believed Furlong “might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.” Furlong’s operation, as the Times reported, involves “a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.” His “operators” gathered intelligence on militants and the location of their camps, which was then passed on to military and intelligence officials “for possible lethal action” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Did any of this intrigue involve Robert Young Pelton? Or has he – along with his business partner, the former CNN executive Eason Jordan – become collateral damage in a murky “rogue” intelligence affair?
Pelton and Jordan had been hired by the US military to run a public Web site aimed at helping government officials gain a better understanding of the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. The pair thought up the idea for the government information program sometime in 2008 and approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, who was about to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their previous “Iraq Slogger” Web site had employed Iraqis to report and write news stories. Now they proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — “Iraq Slogger on steroids,” Pelton calls it — to be financed largely by the American military. Dubbed AfPax Insider, their proposed reporting and research network was meant to be an “open-source” news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered by employees. The project would involve not only a subscription-based Web site, but a secure information database only the military could access in addition.
McKiernan endorsed the proposal and told them “to get to work,” but funding was late in coming and less than expected. In the summer of 2009 they were told their services were no longer needed. Instead, the planned budget of $22 million that was supposed to go to their Web site was apparently redirected by Furlong toward “off the books” intelligence gathering used to kill militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead of using Pelton and Jordan, Furlong employed two other companies. The first was International Media Ventures — several of whose senior executives are former members of the military’s covert Special Operations forces — describes itself as a public relations firm and “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.” IMV President Robert Pack says it provides “information and media atmospherics, research and analysis for good governance and development in Afghanistan, civil society demographics and dynamics, key audience and influence group analysis, and media channel utilization.”
“Were they using us as cover?” Pelton wonders. “I don’t know, but I do know we got cut out after the snowball got rolling. Were we exploited? What was exploited was our concept of providing ‘atmospherics.’”
The second firm was American International Security Corporation, run by former Green Beret Mike Taylor, who employed Duane Clarridge, a former top C.I.A. official linked to the Iran-Contra scandal. AISC was also employed by The New York Times in late 2008 until mid-June 2009 to assist in the case of David Rohde, a reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas before finally escaping. Who led the mission for the Times? None other than Duane Clarridge, who then began establishing a network of informants around the globe.
The Times, which withheld information about Rohde’s kidnapping for months, is now also withholding information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in a front page story this week, Mazzetti did reveal that Furlong’s “rogue operation” is still operating, and that its “detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.”
Pelton believes he has become cannon fodder in a turf war between the CIA and the Pentagon, with the Times acting as the CIA’s mouthpiece and media outlet. “The narrative has become Blackwater-like,” he complains. “The unstated assumption is that we are the same sort of ‘contractors’ as Blackwater.” Instead, Pelton says, it was “a constant battle with Furlong,” who was “constantly trying to push us in that direction.” He avers that he and Jordan are “not spies and not contractors, but open-source information providers” who got caught in the middle of what might be “a CIA Frankenstein.”
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell has said that the entire program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department.” Meanwhile, Pentagon officials decided recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of this month.
“We gave them everything we promised,” Pelton told me. “But the worst part of all this is that the military still desperately needs exactly what we could provide them. Instead, our information was being used to kill people!”
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Iceland Volcano Rumbles and Spews Still
Iceland Volcano Rumbles and Spews Still
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303950104575185250359696836.html
Spill? What Spill?
Oil spill? What oil spill?
BP's nonchalance over Gulf leak tars entire offshore drilling industry
By Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal May 16, 2010
Source
When you watch news reports of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, remember one thing: The hurricanes that regularly plague the Gulf often have enough force to churn up the seabed.
A Category 4 or 5 hurricane at the surface spins and whirls with such magnitude that the ocean floor 2,000 or even 3,000 feet below is sometimes turned over.
What has this to do with the Deepwater Horizons disaster? Plenty.
At the moment, being unable to cap the erupting wellhead a mile below, oil company crews, with the approval of government administrators, are injecting the spreading mess on the surface with dispersant -- chemicals designed to break up the enormous, creeping black blot that threatens the Gulf's freshwater deltas and saltwater marshes.
But dispersants are little more than a cosmetic coverup. They may even do more harm than good by masking the extent of the environmental catastrophe and breaking the oil up into smaller parcels that will be harder to clean up.
What's more, the dispersant may increase the formation of tar balls, globs of heavy, gooey black oil that often sink to the sea floor only to be carried to shore on currents and tides --- a few here, a few hundred there.
That's where the hurricanes come in.
If British Petroleum (BP) and its partners, coupled with the U.S. Department of the Interior, inject enough dispersant and create enough tar balls, these tacky ecological time bombs will keep being torn up from the ocean bed and brought to shore for decades and decades.
Just when Americans are certain the legacy of this tragedy has passed, another hurricane will come along and pick up scores of these viscous reminders of the Deepwater disaster and deposit them on some shore birds' nesting grounds or fragile oyster bed or sea life spawning zone.
I certainly do not favour a ban on offshore drilling. There are, at present, too few alternatives to oil and natural gas to power developed and developing economies alike.
It is naive in the extreme to believe we can simply proclaim our desire to find alternative energy sources and it will happen like magic.
Over time, alternatives will come, but what replaces hydrocarbons cannot be directed by government. Nor can they be predicted now.
Perhaps wind, solar or nuclear -- or some combination of the three -- will provide our future energy needs. But it is also possible that some as-yet-unknown source will emerge.
Still, while we wait for the replacement or replacements -- while we are still dependent on crude oil and natural gas -- and while we need to expand offshore exploration, the companies doing the drilling and exploring have to be better prepared for accidents than BP has shown itself to be in this case.
BP's attitude has appalled even a diehard free-marketer such as me.
First, it seemed to say "Oil spill? What oil spill?" Then when the slick could no longer be ignored, its attitude became one of nonchalance: "Don't worry. It's only a small leak."
To this day, neither the company nor the U.S. Department of the Interior seems prepared to admit the true extent of the disaster. Both are insisting that no more than 5,000 barrels a day are gushing from the broken well (after having insisted, disingenuously, for two weeks that it was only 1,000).
Meanwhile, independent engineers viewing the speed of the flow estimate the true rate at 20,000 to 70,000 barrels daily.
(The upper estimate would create an Exxon Valdez every four days.)
Indeed, BP's attitude seems still to be one of unconcern. They still seem to be saying it's no big deal. Even if it is a big deal, it's not our fault. Besides, what are you going to do, sue us? Government regulations limit the extent of our financial liability.
A story in Friday's Miami Herald claims BP employees had described the well as "troublesome" in the weeks leading up to the explosion in late April.
Unscheduled gas penetrations had occurred and three times during the course of the rig's final day there had been "sudden loud noises as bursts of pressure had been released." Pressure tests had shown a "disturbing imbalance." Nonetheless, BP pushed ahead.
Such a cowboy attitude does the cause of offshore drilling more harm than good.
According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, offshore drilling remains less damaging than shipping oil by tanker.
"Since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines."
Even during hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, very little oil spilled into the Gulf.
But there is no excuse for companies being shielded by governments from the full impact of the mistakes they make.
If they want to drill in sensitive areas, oil companies have to be more accountable, especially for the damage they do to others' property and livelihoods: fishermen, homeowners, boaters and entrepreneurs.
lgunter@shaw.ca
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/spill+What+spill/3034244/story.html#ixzz0o7LfYq7G
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Barrick Tries to Block Book on Mining Practices
Barrick Gold moves to block mining book
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
CBC News
source
The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.
Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of "libel chill" by one of Canada's largest mining companies.
The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World's Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers.
Siegler described Imperial Canada as an examination of the political, legal and banking environment that has led 70 per cent of the world's mining companies to register in Canada.
Defamation suit launched in Quebec
The letter gave Talonbooks seven days to hand over the manuscript of the book, which was in the process of being translated from French to English.
"We ignored it initially," Siegler said in an interview Wednesday with CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show.
"As far as we were concerned, they had no right to demand or see copies of manuscripts that were in development prior to their public release. Anyone working on a book has a right to privacy and should not be subject to this kind of supervision."
But after receiving a legal letter, the translators immediately stopped work on the book. Siegler consulted a lawyer, who told him if he proceeded with the book, he could face years in court fighting an opponent with very deep pockets.
"Everyone involved stood to lose millions of dollars," Siegler said. "In the publisher's case, we stood to lose not just the company but all of the titles we have in print, roughly 500 titles dating back to the 1960s, many of which are Canadian classics."
Imperial Canada Inc. was inspired by a French-language book published in Quebec called Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique by the same lead author Alain Deneault .
Barrick Gold and another mining company, Banro, sued the authors and publishers of Noir Canada for $11 million claiming defamation for the book's description of Canadian mining practices in Africa. That case is still before the courts and Canada Noir remains available in print in French only.
Siegler said he considered publishing a straight-up translation of Canada Noir but decided he wanted to examine a wider issue — the infrastructure that supports Canada's mining industry.
"I'm not interested in the sensationalist aspects [of] what Canadian companies do around world. I'm interested the subtext," he said.
He approached Degneault to write the book, suggesting he recruit a team of collaborators.
Libel accusation 'appalling': publisher
John Dixon, a spokesman for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the case underscores the need for a change in Canadian libel laws, so that corporations cannot use the laws to protect themselves from public scrutiny.
"If we step back and consider whether or not it is really important for Canadians to understand the mining industry and the consequences of the conduct of those industries around the world, we can't give corporations the same kind of protection [as we do private citizens]," Dixon said.
"We can't let them have the uninhibited ability to sue if we're going to get to the bottom of stuff like that. "
But Vince Borg, vice-president of corporate communications at Barrick Gold, said the company is just defending its reputation.
"Discourse is a very good thing in democracy, but it has to be based on the facts," Borg told Q.
"If I was about to publish a book about your criminal misdeeds, and you saw it on my website, would you not take action to protect your reputation?"
Siegler called this defence "appalling."
"Here's a man telling you that he's seen on a website a book that he presumes is about to accuse him and the corporation he works for of criminal acts," Siegler said. "There's nothing on our website to indicate that anybody is going to accuse anyone of criminal acts."
Talonbooks is still considering publishing Imperial Canada, possibly among its fall releases, but it first has to convince the translators and everyone else involved with the book to continue working on it, Siegler said.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/05/12/barrick-gold-mining-book.html#ixzz0nsX0Xhmx
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
CBC News
source
The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.
Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of "libel chill" by one of Canada's largest mining companies.
The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World's Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers.
Siegler described Imperial Canada as an examination of the political, legal and banking environment that has led 70 per cent of the world's mining companies to register in Canada.
Defamation suit launched in Quebec
The letter gave Talonbooks seven days to hand over the manuscript of the book, which was in the process of being translated from French to English.
"We ignored it initially," Siegler said in an interview Wednesday with CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show.
"As far as we were concerned, they had no right to demand or see copies of manuscripts that were in development prior to their public release. Anyone working on a book has a right to privacy and should not be subject to this kind of supervision."
But after receiving a legal letter, the translators immediately stopped work on the book. Siegler consulted a lawyer, who told him if he proceeded with the book, he could face years in court fighting an opponent with very deep pockets.
"Everyone involved stood to lose millions of dollars," Siegler said. "In the publisher's case, we stood to lose not just the company but all of the titles we have in print, roughly 500 titles dating back to the 1960s, many of which are Canadian classics."
Imperial Canada Inc. was inspired by a French-language book published in Quebec called Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique by the same lead author Alain Deneault .
Barrick Gold and another mining company, Banro, sued the authors and publishers of Noir Canada for $11 million claiming defamation for the book's description of Canadian mining practices in Africa. That case is still before the courts and Canada Noir remains available in print in French only.
Siegler said he considered publishing a straight-up translation of Canada Noir but decided he wanted to examine a wider issue — the infrastructure that supports Canada's mining industry.
"I'm not interested in the sensationalist aspects [of] what Canadian companies do around world. I'm interested the subtext," he said.
He approached Degneault to write the book, suggesting he recruit a team of collaborators.
Libel accusation 'appalling': publisher
John Dixon, a spokesman for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the case underscores the need for a change in Canadian libel laws, so that corporations cannot use the laws to protect themselves from public scrutiny.
"If we step back and consider whether or not it is really important for Canadians to understand the mining industry and the consequences of the conduct of those industries around the world, we can't give corporations the same kind of protection [as we do private citizens]," Dixon said.
"We can't let them have the uninhibited ability to sue if we're going to get to the bottom of stuff like that. "
But Vince Borg, vice-president of corporate communications at Barrick Gold, said the company is just defending its reputation.
"Discourse is a very good thing in democracy, but it has to be based on the facts," Borg told Q.
"If I was about to publish a book about your criminal misdeeds, and you saw it on my website, would you not take action to protect your reputation?"
Siegler called this defence "appalling."
"Here's a man telling you that he's seen on a website a book that he presumes is about to accuse him and the corporation he works for of criminal acts," Siegler said. "There's nothing on our website to indicate that anybody is going to accuse anyone of criminal acts."
Talonbooks is still considering publishing Imperial Canada, possibly among its fall releases, but it first has to convince the translators and everyone else involved with the book to continue working on it, Siegler said.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/05/12/barrick-gold-mining-book.html#ixzz0nsX0Xhmx
Venezuelan Natural Gas Platform Sinks in Caribbean
Venezuelan natural gas platform sinks in Caribbean
source
A gas platform has sunk in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela, but the energy minister says it poses no risk to the environment.
President Hugo Chavez announced the incident via his account on the social networking site Twitter.
He said all 95 workers were evacuated from the Aban Pearl platform before it sank in the early hours of Thursday.
The rig was at the centre of Venezuela's efforts to develop its huge offshore gas deposits.
Venezuela's energy and oil minister, Rafael Ramirez, said there had been a problem with the flotation system of the semi-submergible platform, causing it to keel over and sink.
But he said a tube connecting the rig to the gas field had been disconnected and safety valves activated, so there no risk of any gas leak.
The Aban Pearl platform was drilling in the Mariscal Sucre offshore natural gas project, off the coast of Venezuela's Sucre state.
It belongs to an Indian company, Aban Offshore Ltd, but was being operated by Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, which is developing the field.
Massive reserves
Last week Mr Ramirez stood atop the rig on live television as its gas flare was lit to inaugurate the project.
Venezuela has massive offshore gas reserves, but it has struggled to attract foreign investment, and industry experts say progress has been slow.
President Chavez used Twitter to send out the news of the sinking at just after 0300 local time (0730 GMT).
"I'm afraid to inform you that gas platform Aban Pearl sank a few moments ago. The good news is that 95 workers are safe," he tweeted.
"They were evacuated and at the moment two Navy patrols are moving to the area."
The captain and two other crew stayed on board until it was clear the rig was going down, officials said.
The incident comes less than a month after an explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Work is still under way to stop a massive oil leak that is threatening the Gulf coast of the United States.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Eyeing the Black Mountain Climb
I share their despair, but I'm not quite
ready to climb the Dark Mountain
by George Monbiot
source
To sit back and wait for the collapse of industrial civilisation is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens value
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world's richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.
But we needn't rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians' thesis as self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10 times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees.
The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich world's demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber and animal feed.
The Guardian's carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is that official figures don't count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment.
So the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that "capitalism has absorbed the greens". Instead of seeking to protect the natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists now work on "sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world's rich people – us – feel is their right".
Today's greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more of the world's wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They've forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save industrial civilisation.
That task, Paul Kingsnorth – a co-founder of Dark Mountain – believes, is futile: "The civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it." Nor can we bargain with it, as "the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon … growth in order to function". Instead of trying to reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should "start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse … Our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place".
Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I champion, I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement's first book, to be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.
While I'm prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK's land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point. Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don't believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn't reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain people believe will be civilisation's imminent collapse, without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies. There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet's every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don't give a stuff about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than the alternatives.
For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is why I'll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month. There are no easy answers to the fix we're in. But there are no easy non-answers either.
ready to climb the Dark Mountain
by George Monbiot
source
To sit back and wait for the collapse of industrial civilisation is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens value
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world's richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.
But we needn't rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians' thesis as self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10 times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees.
The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich world's demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber and animal feed.
The Guardian's carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is that official figures don't count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment.
So the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that "capitalism has absorbed the greens". Instead of seeking to protect the natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists now work on "sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world's rich people – us – feel is their right".
Today's greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more of the world's wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They've forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save industrial civilisation.
That task, Paul Kingsnorth – a co-founder of Dark Mountain – believes, is futile: "The civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it." Nor can we bargain with it, as "the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon … growth in order to function". Instead of trying to reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should "start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse … Our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place".
Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I champion, I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement's first book, to be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.
While I'm prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK's land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point. Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don't believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn't reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain people believe will be civilisation's imminent collapse, without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies. There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet's every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don't give a stuff about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than the alternatives.
For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is why I'll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month. There are no easy answers to the fix we're in. But there are no easy non-answers either.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Prosecuting a Tortured Child
Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy
by Andy Worthington,
May 3, 2010
Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized military commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama’s zeal for repudiating the Bush administration’s “war on terror” detention policies has ground to a halt.
The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked the “state secrets doctrine” last February, to combat a lawsuit brought by several men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and was sealed last May, when Obama delivered a major national security speech in which he announced that the military commissions were back on the table, and also announced his intention to continue holding some prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial.
In November, Attorney General Eric Holder set the seal on the administration’s two-tier justice system for terror suspects at Guantánamo by announcing that five men would face federal court trials for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but that five others would face trial by military commission, in a revamped version of the “terror courts,” approved by Congress over the summer.
This year, Obama disappointed critics in the United States, and those scrutinizing his activities around the world, by failing to close Guantánamo within a year as promised, and by failing to set a new deadline for the prison’s closure, but last week his administration pressed ahead with what may well be viewed as the single most disappointing failure to repudiate the cruel, chaotic and unjust policies of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”: the trial, by military commission, of Omar Khadr.
A Canadian citizen, Khadr was just 15 years old when he was seized by U.S. forces after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, in which he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer, and was taken first to the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, and then to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. I have been covering his case since June 2007, when his first pre-trial hearing took place in the commissions’ first reincarnation, after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2006 that the original version, the brainchild of Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, was illegal.
For nearly three years, therefore, I have watched as a disturbingly shambolic and misconceived excuse for a judicial system has attempted, without success, to prosecute Omar Khadr, and the many failures of this endeavor have not been resolved through Congress’ tweaking the system last summer.
The shame and disgrace of prosecuting a child
Firstly, and most important, Khadr was a child when seized. This meant nothing to the Bush administration, and it is clear that it also means nothing to the Obama administration either. Back in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo (and research indicates that at least 22 juveniles were held in total), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld impatiently told a press conference, “This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children,” and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that they “may be juveniles, but they’re not on the Little League team anywhere. They’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team, and they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason — for our safety, for your safety.”
This rhetoric played well with those who hold that everyone is accountable for their actions, whatever their age, but in a more enlightened world, of which the United States is technically a part, juveniles — defined as those under the age of 18 when the crime they are accused of committing took place — “require special protection” according to the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which the United States is a signatory. The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”
It would be difficult to find a more appropriate case of a child who was “particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities” than Omar Khadr, who spent much of his childhood in Afghanistan, taken there by his father, an alleged fundraiser for Osama bin Laden, and yet, as I demonstrated in the first of my weekly columns for The Future of Freedom Foundation, back in October 2008, Khadr has never received “physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration,” because a detailed plan submitted by four doctors to the Defense Department in January 2003, entitled, “Recommended Course of Action for Reception and Detention of Individuals Under 18 Years of Age,” was completely ignored.
The problem of invented war crimes charges
Beyond this most glaringly obvious problem with Omar Khadr’s trial (and his nearly eight years in detention), another fundamental problem with Obama’s decision to proceed with prosecuting a former juvenile prisoner in the first U.S. war crimes trial since Nuremberg concerns the basis of the charges against Khadr. On an intuitive level, critics of Khadr’s trial have, from the beginning, recognized that there is something horribly skewed about redefining the internationally accepted laws of war so that one side in an armed conflict — the United States — can kill whoever it wants with impunity, whereas its opponents are viewed as terrorists, or, when brought to trial, as those who have committed “murder in violation of the law of war.”
Lt. Col. David Frakt, who knows more about the laws of war than Congress or officials in either the Bush or Obama administrations, has long pointed out that the military commissions are fundamentally flawed because they contain ”law of war offenses” invented by Congress, including “providing material support to terrorism” and “murder in violation of the law of war.” As he explained last week, as Khadr’s trial got underway, the latter was introduced by the DoD in 2003, when it was defining the crimes eligible for trial by military commission, as “murder by an unprivileged belligerent.” He added:
This status-based definition conflated two different concepts — unprivileged belligerents and war criminals. Under Article 4 of the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention it is clear that while a member of an organized resistance movement or militia may be an unprivileged belligerent (because of not wearing a uniform or failing to carry arms openly, for example) he may still comply with the laws and customs of war, so not all hostile acts committed by unprivileged belligerents are war crimes. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which comply with the law of war (in that they attack lawful military targets with lawful weapons) may only be tried in domestic courts. In Iraq, for example, insurgents who try to kill Americans by implanting roadside bombs are properly arrested and tried before the Central Criminal Court of Iraq as common criminals. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which violate the law of war, such as attacks on civilians or soldiers attempting to surrender, or using prohibited weapons like poison gas, can be tried in a war crimes tribunal.
When Congress revived the commissions in 2006 (after Congress ruled them illegal), “murder by an unprivileged belligerent” became “murder in violation of the law of war.” However, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, the distinction appeared to be cosmetic, and, crucially, judges in the only two full trials that ever took place (those of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul), as well as the judge in the case of Mohamed Jawad (released in August 2009), rejected the supposed crime, “each ruling that the mere status of unprivileged belligerency was insufficient to prove a violation of the law of war.”
Despite Lt. Col. Frakt’s alerting Congress to these problems last summer, lawmakers left the definition of “murder in violation of the law of war” unchanged in the new version of the commissions, but, astonishingly, DoD officials added an “official comment,” explaining that “an accused may be convicted in a military commission … if the commission finds that the accused engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war." In other words, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.”
The first flawed week of Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearings
This new twist in the absurdly ill-conceived commissions did not permeate the first week of pre-trial proceedings in Omar Khadr’s case, although it will undoubtedly surface should the trial actually go ahead in July, and his defense team has not yet flagged up Khadr’s age on capture as a campaigning issue. Even so, there was more than enough incompetence and manipulation at work to indicate that President Obama’s decision to revive the commissions will, in all probability, lead not only to protracted legal challenges, but also to international indignation at the failure of both the administration and Congress to deliver justice to the prisoners at Guantánamo.
As dozens of journalists geared up for the pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo last Tuesday, having experienced the logistical nightmare that makes trials at the naval base such a poor idea on the basis of expense and practicability alone, they received their first notification of the chaos that, without fail, marks the proceedings as little more than a dark farce. The first day’s hearing was delayed so that everyone could review the commission manual, which was not signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates until the evening of April 27, and now had to be downloaded and printed out in a part of the world where technology is often stranded in, at best, the late 20th century.
Although Khadr turned up for the delayed start of the first day’s hearings, which commenced on Wednesday afternoon, he essentially boycotted the rest of the week’s proceedings, when, whether deliberately or not, he highlighted the kind of excessive security measures that pass for normal at Guantánamo. On day two, after complaining of eye pain, apparently brought on by conjunctivitis, he refused to don blackout goggles for his trip from his cell to the courtroom in a windowless vehicle, telling his escort, Marine Capt. Laura Bruzzese, “You're trying to humiliate me.” Although he was persuaded to attend later that day, he again refused to attend on day three, complaining that a waistband search for contraband “comes too close to his genitalia in the way it's being done,” as Barry Coburn, one of his military defense lawyers, explained. On Saturday, he refused again, telling Capt. Bruzzese, “I’m not going, nothing is starting at 0730.”
In the courtroom, meanwhile, discussions focused on the reliability of the evidence gathered by the government during Khadr’s interrogations. Khadr’s defense team has long maintained that Khadr, who was badly wounded at the time of his capture, having been shot twice in the back, was subjected to brutal treatment in the U.S. prison at Bagram, and later at Guantánamo, which rule out any self-incriminating statements he may have made as the “fruits of torture.” As I explained in a major review of Khadr’s case in November 2007:
According to his own account, reported by Amnesty International, he “asked for pain medication for his wounds but was refused,” said that “during interrogations a bag was placed over his head and U.S. personnel brought military dogs into the room to frighten him,” and added that he was “not allowed to use the bathroom and was forced to urinate on himself.” Like many other prisoners, he was also hung from his wrists, and explained that “his hands were tied above a door frame and he was forced to stand in this position for hours.” An article in Rolling Stone, in August 2006, added further details, noting that he was “brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in great pain,” and was “ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet.”
Most of the above seems to have taken place in Bagram, where brutality was so commonplace at the time of Khadr’s stay there that at least two prisoners died of wounds inflicted by their guards just months after his departure. However, the abuse continued in Guantánamo, where, it should be noted, he arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation, and abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques used in a military program designed to train U.S. personnel to resist interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of “actionable intelligence” from the prison. As I explained in 2007:
He told his lawyers that he was “short-shackled by his hands and feet to a bolt in the floor and left for five to six hours,” and that “occasionally a U.S. officer would enter the room to laugh at him.” He also said that he was “kept in extremely cold rooms,” “lifted up by the neck while shackled, and then dropped to the floor,” and “beaten by guards.” In one particularly notorious incident, the guards left him short-shackled until he urinated on himself, and then “poured a pine-scented cleaning fluid over him and used him as a ‘human mop’ to clean up the mess.” As if further humiliation was required, he added that he was “not provided with clean clothes for several days after this degradation.”
In contrast to Khadr’s claims, the government has proposed that he was treated humanely, and that he offered up self-incriminating information voluntarily. Robert Fuller, an FBI agent who interviewed Khadr at Bagram in October 2002, testified on Wednesday that his interrogations of Khadr were “conversational” and “non-confrontational,” adding, “We never put our hands on Mr. Khadr,” and stating that Khadr spoke “openly, confidently and comfortably about al-Qaeda” and admitted to throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer. Fuller’s testimony continued on Thursday, and on Friday, a young female Navy Reservist (identified only as “Agent Number 11”) also spoke about non-coercive interrogations, this time at Guantánamo.
As Michelle Shephard explained in the Toronto Star, the former interrogator told the court that, “over the course of 12 interviews, which began in the prison hospital when Khadr arrived [at Guantánamo] on Oct. 28, 2002, he agreed to talk while they shared M&Ms and fig newtons.” Claiming that she was chosen to interrogate Khadr in the hope that he would relate to her as a “mother figure,” she also stated that their rapport was so good that Khadr told her, “I’d rather be in the booth with you than bored in my cell.”
Whether this is true or not, “Agent Number 11” inadvertently revealed the general futility of cooperating with the interrogators in Guantánamo, when she explained that “He knew if he was cooperative it would expedite his repatriation back to Canada” — a claim that was clearly groundless. She also said that he confessed to throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer “like it was done in the movies,” adding that he said “he checked his watch just before throwing the grenade to note the time.” Military defense lawyer Lt. Col. Jon Jackson challenged this as “odd,” according to Shephard, “especially since … Khadr was bleeding from his head and blinded in one eye by shrapnel by that time” — or, in another possible scenario, was unconscious and face-down beneath a pile of rubble.
Did Omar Khadr throw the grenade?
The question of whether or not Khadr even threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer is crucial to his case, of course, and on day three of the hearings (on Saturday), these claims and counter-claims were addressed. Back in March 2008, it was revealed that there were two versions of a report describing the firefight, both written by the commander of the Special Forces unit responsible for capturing Khadr, who is identified only as “Lt. Col. W.”
In the first version, “Lt.-Col. W” stated that the person who had thrown the grenade had been killed, This, of course, would rule out Khadr as the suspect, but in the revised version, “Lt. Col. W” changed a single line to note that the person who threw the grenade was “engaged,” thereby implicating Khadr, who was the only non-U.S. survivor of the firefight. On Saturday, “Lt. Col. W.” testified by video link from the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, claiming that he had changed his report for “history’s sake,” but only because he had initially believed that Khadr had died. He said that he changed it, several years after the event, after being visited by military investigators.
This sounds plausible, but, as Michelle Shephard noted, his revised report “appears to conflict with a March 2004 statement written by a commando identified only as OC-1, which states that after the grenade was thrown he shot two fighters — one fatally,” demonstrating that two men were alive at the time the grenade was thrown (Khadr and another insurgent), and that, as a result, either of them could have thrown the grenade.
How this will all pan out is unknown at present, as the defense team has not yet had the opportunity to present its evidence, including the alarming claim, mentioned above and made last October when Khadr’s defense team released previously classified photos, that Khadr could not have thrown the grenade because, at the time, he was buried face-down under a pile of rubble.
Will a plea deal save Omar Khadr (and Obama) from the perils of a trial?
Pre-trial hearings are continuing this week at Guantánamo, and, to be honest, anything could happen. According to some of the first reports last week, prosecutors offered Khadr a plea bargain before the hearings even began — proposing that he would serve five years in a U.S. prison in exchange for pleading guilty to the war crimes charges against him — but the defense team turned down the offer. However, on Saturday the Washington Post claimed that the Obama administration was actively seeking a plea agreement. A senior official, speaking of the proposed trial in July, which would be the first trial under Obama to go ahead, told the Post, “This is not what you would choose to open with. Khadr has become a cause, and this is not a case that will demonstrate the strength and validity of military commissions.”
This seems rather disingenuous, as the administration clearly knew what it was doing when Khadr’s name was put forward last November, but maybe Obama has finally found his conscience, and is getting cold feet. After all, as Lt. Col. David Frakt declared authoritatively last week:
The Administration's decision to press forward with the first war crimes trial of a child soldier in modern history is unfathomable. That the Administration would then try to ensure a conviction by attempting to rewrite the law to create a new war crime is reprehensible.
If an administration that promised “hope and change” is not definitely to become one tarred as an advocate of the “unfathomable and reprehensible,” Obama needs to move fast. Changing the plea bargain to one that frees Khadr after a much shorter period of time than five years would be a good start; and scrapping the commissions immediately afterwards would be a sensible way to follow up.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Fish Farms Good Enough to Eat
Farmed salmon you can eat with peace of mind
April 21, 2010
Photo: Farmed salmon you can eat with peace of mind
SeaChoice partners with Overwaitea Food Group in 2009 (Credit: Lana Gunnlaugson)
By Bill Wareham, Senior Marine Conservation Specialist
source
You may have heard your fill about farmed salmon, but I want to tell you an exciting story about one of Canada's leading retailers, which is asking you to fill up on a new farmed salmon product.
After listening to years of debate in British Columbia, this company recognized the problems with open net pen farmed salmon and began looking for an alternative. SeaChoice and many other sustainable seafood programs in North America recommend against buying farmed salmon from open net pens due to negative effects this practice has on the health of our oceans, particularly the proliferation of sea lice and their devastating effect on juvenile wild salmon.
Believing that aquaculture is going to be part of our food security solution, the challenge for the company and SeaChoice was to find producers that farmed fish in a sustainable manner. This is where things get interesting.
In searching for alternative seafood options to meet their commitment to marketing sustainable seafood, the Overwaitea Food Group secured a supply of sustainably farmed salmon branded as "Sweet Spring" from a company in Washington State. These folks produce Coho salmon in an innovative land based closed containment system that uses a freshwater recirculation system, significantly reducing the environmental damage associated with traditional salmon farming. SeaChoice assessed this product and ranked it as a sustainable "Best Choice".
Beginning this Earth Day, Overwaitea Food Group will begin selling this sustainable Coho salmon in their Save-On Foods, PriceSmart, Overwaitea Foods, Urban Fare and Cooper's Foods stores throughout BC and Alberta. I think this is great news, demonstrating that there are creative alternatives for consumers looking for sustainable seafood.
If you're a fish eater, I recommend that you seek out and purchase this sustainably produced Coho salmon and help create a demand that enables closed system salmon producers to grow and profit from a great idea.
Filling Canada's Prisons: Harper Seeks to Follow Mandatory Minimum Sentencing for Marijuana
Bill C-15 could fill Canadian prisons with drug offenders
By Carlito Pablo
Will Bill C-15 kill the twin scourge of illegal drugs and gang violence?
source
Libby Davis
NDP MP,Vancouver East
“There’s a lot of information, both in the United States and in Canada, that shows that mandatory minimum sentencing regimes for drug offences are ineffective. This is all about window-dressing for the Conservatives’ crime agenda. They want to impress people with their tough-on-crime approach. One thing that will happen is that it could very much overcrowd our prisons. We find the bill to be misdirected and based on a very faulty premise. It’s based on the U.S.’s war on drugs, which has been a complete failure.”
Ed Fast
Conservative MP, Abbotsford
“What Bill C-15 does is it’s connecting the sale of drugs to aggravating factors. If there’s a sale or production or growing of drugs that occurs and violence is present, we will put those guys behind bars. But we also want to make sure that low-level dealers that are dealing in drugs simply because they’re addicted can actually get the help that they deserve. We believe it’s a balanced approach. We’re not going after the marijuana users. We’re going after the guys who really present an ongoing danger to our community.”
Ujjal Dosanjh
Liberal MP, Vancouver South
“Bill[s] C-14 and [C-]15? We have said that we’ll support both of them. We agree with tougher penalties for serious and violent and chronic offenders. But that alone isn’t going to do the job. That’s why we believe this government is failing significantly in their drive to deal with the issue of crime. They’re failing Canadians because they’re not emphasizing crime-preventing, they’re not providing resources for youth programs, they’re not providing actual police officers on the ground, [and] they’re not providing prosecutors.”
Adrianne Carr
Deputy leader, Green Party of Canada
“The Green party doesn’t support mandatory sentencing because it has proven to not work. It’s coming from this tough-on-crime perspective. What we’ve seen is that our court system wastes extraordinarily high resources in prosecuting the petty criminals involved in drug cases, particularly marijuana. We should be legalizing marijuana, which has been suggested by the Senate of Canada and the Fraser Institute, and these are hardly radical institutions. What we have to do is delink the profit motive from drugs.”
On March 2, the Pew Center on the States, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, released a report on the staggering growth of the American correctional system.
Entitled One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, the report noted that “sentencing and release laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s put so many more people behind bars that last year the incarcerated population reached 2.3 million and, for the first time, one in 100 adults was in prison or jail.”
It also cited the tremendous increase in the number of people on probation or parole, such that “combined with those in prison and jail, a stunning 1 in every 31 adults, or 3.2 percent, is under some form of correctional control.”
Why is this relevant to Canada?
“We only need to go south of the border and see a nation that enacted mandatory minimums related to drug offences from the mid-1980s on,” criminologist Susan Boyd told the Georgia Straight. “It didn’t reduce violence and drug use. So here we are saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”
Boyd—an associate professor at UVic and research fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C.—was referring to the reintroduction in Parliament by the Conservative government of a bill that proposes mandatory minimum jail sentences for drug offenders.
If passed into law, Bill C-15 would, among its other provisions, throw people caught with one marijuana plant into the slammer for a minimum of six months. If growing a single plant is done on a property that belongs to another person or in an area where it may present a hazard to children, minimum jail time is nine months.
Worse, the bill seeks to increase the maximum penalty for this particular offence to 14 years.
Vancouver’s so-called Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, who is fighting extradition on charges of selling marijuana seeds to American growers, is a potential U.S. prison statistic.
Emery was handing out leaflets condemning drug prohibition, along with his wife, Jodie, on the south side of the city when the Straight asked him about Bill C-15. “Anything that puts more people in jail for drugs is going to fill prisons,” he said. “It’s a very expensive and failed policy that will only bring us more misery.”
The Pew Center on the States report pointed out that many states in the U.S. “appear to have reached a ‘tipping point’ where additional incarceration will have little if any effect on crime”.
In Washington state, which shares a border with B.C., the report stated, “from 1980 to 2001, the benefit-to-cost ratio for drug offenders plummeted from $9.22 to $0.37.
“That is, for every one dollar invested in new prison beds for drug offenders, state taxpayers get only 37 cents in averted crime,” it noted. “An updated analysis from 2006 found that incarceration of offenders convicted of violent offenses remained a positive net benefit, while property and drug offenders offered negative returns.”
Conservative Abbotsford MP Ed Fast deflected criticism that mandatory jail times haven’t worked in the U.S.
“First of all, on the issue of deterrence there’s contradicting evidence,” Fast told the Straight. “I don’t base my support for the legislation on the deterrent effect. I base it on the prophylactic effect of the legislation. Prophylactic means taking repeat, violent offenders out of our communities for longer periods of time.”
Bill C-15 is a reincarnation of Bill C-26, which the Conservatives introduced in November 2007.
In February 2008, a few months after Bill C-26 was tabled in Parliament, Boyd started sending Prime Minister Stephen Harper a weekly letter in an attempt to educate the Conservative leader about harm reduction and drug regulation.
Boyd did this for a year, and she sent her 52nd and final letter in early February this year. Bill C-15 was introduced on February 27, a day after the Conservatives filed Bill C-14, which toughens penalties for gang-associated violent activities.
As an educator, Boyd has this to say about mentoring Harper: “The prime minister gets a failing grade on drug policy.”
The economics of prisons in Canada
> Total correctional-services expenditures in 2005-06: almost $3 billion
> Share spent on custodial services or prisons: 71 percent
> Associated policing and court costs in 2005-06: more than $10 billion
> Number of correctional facilities in Canada in 2005-06: 192
> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal female prisoner in
2004-05: $150,000 to $250,000
> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal male prisoner in 2004-05: $87,665
> Daily cost of incarcerating a provincial prisoner in 2004-05: $141.78
> Daily cost of alternatives such as probation, bail supervision,
and community supervision: $5 to $25
Source: prisonjustice.ca
By Carlito Pablo
Will Bill C-15 kill the twin scourge of illegal drugs and gang violence?
source
Libby Davis
NDP MP,Vancouver East
“There’s a lot of information, both in the United States and in Canada, that shows that mandatory minimum sentencing regimes for drug offences are ineffective. This is all about window-dressing for the Conservatives’ crime agenda. They want to impress people with their tough-on-crime approach. One thing that will happen is that it could very much overcrowd our prisons. We find the bill to be misdirected and based on a very faulty premise. It’s based on the U.S.’s war on drugs, which has been a complete failure.”
Ed Fast
Conservative MP, Abbotsford
“What Bill C-15 does is it’s connecting the sale of drugs to aggravating factors. If there’s a sale or production or growing of drugs that occurs and violence is present, we will put those guys behind bars. But we also want to make sure that low-level dealers that are dealing in drugs simply because they’re addicted can actually get the help that they deserve. We believe it’s a balanced approach. We’re not going after the marijuana users. We’re going after the guys who really present an ongoing danger to our community.”
Ujjal Dosanjh
Liberal MP, Vancouver South
“Bill[s] C-14 and [C-]15? We have said that we’ll support both of them. We agree with tougher penalties for serious and violent and chronic offenders. But that alone isn’t going to do the job. That’s why we believe this government is failing significantly in their drive to deal with the issue of crime. They’re failing Canadians because they’re not emphasizing crime-preventing, they’re not providing resources for youth programs, they’re not providing actual police officers on the ground, [and] they’re not providing prosecutors.”
Adrianne Carr
Deputy leader, Green Party of Canada
“The Green party doesn’t support mandatory sentencing because it has proven to not work. It’s coming from this tough-on-crime perspective. What we’ve seen is that our court system wastes extraordinarily high resources in prosecuting the petty criminals involved in drug cases, particularly marijuana. We should be legalizing marijuana, which has been suggested by the Senate of Canada and the Fraser Institute, and these are hardly radical institutions. What we have to do is delink the profit motive from drugs.”
On March 2, the Pew Center on the States, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, released a report on the staggering growth of the American correctional system.
Entitled One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, the report noted that “sentencing and release laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s put so many more people behind bars that last year the incarcerated population reached 2.3 million and, for the first time, one in 100 adults was in prison or jail.”
It also cited the tremendous increase in the number of people on probation or parole, such that “combined with those in prison and jail, a stunning 1 in every 31 adults, or 3.2 percent, is under some form of correctional control.”
Why is this relevant to Canada?
“We only need to go south of the border and see a nation that enacted mandatory minimums related to drug offences from the mid-1980s on,” criminologist Susan Boyd told the Georgia Straight. “It didn’t reduce violence and drug use. So here we are saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”
Boyd—an associate professor at UVic and research fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C.—was referring to the reintroduction in Parliament by the Conservative government of a bill that proposes mandatory minimum jail sentences for drug offenders.
If passed into law, Bill C-15 would, among its other provisions, throw people caught with one marijuana plant into the slammer for a minimum of six months. If growing a single plant is done on a property that belongs to another person or in an area where it may present a hazard to children, minimum jail time is nine months.
Worse, the bill seeks to increase the maximum penalty for this particular offence to 14 years.
Vancouver’s so-called Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, who is fighting extradition on charges of selling marijuana seeds to American growers, is a potential U.S. prison statistic.
Emery was handing out leaflets condemning drug prohibition, along with his wife, Jodie, on the south side of the city when the Straight asked him about Bill C-15. “Anything that puts more people in jail for drugs is going to fill prisons,” he said. “It’s a very expensive and failed policy that will only bring us more misery.”
The Pew Center on the States report pointed out that many states in the U.S. “appear to have reached a ‘tipping point’ where additional incarceration will have little if any effect on crime”.
In Washington state, which shares a border with B.C., the report stated, “from 1980 to 2001, the benefit-to-cost ratio for drug offenders plummeted from $9.22 to $0.37.
“That is, for every one dollar invested in new prison beds for drug offenders, state taxpayers get only 37 cents in averted crime,” it noted. “An updated analysis from 2006 found that incarceration of offenders convicted of violent offenses remained a positive net benefit, while property and drug offenders offered negative returns.”
Conservative Abbotsford MP Ed Fast deflected criticism that mandatory jail times haven’t worked in the U.S.
“First of all, on the issue of deterrence there’s contradicting evidence,” Fast told the Straight. “I don’t base my support for the legislation on the deterrent effect. I base it on the prophylactic effect of the legislation. Prophylactic means taking repeat, violent offenders out of our communities for longer periods of time.”
Bill C-15 is a reincarnation of Bill C-26, which the Conservatives introduced in November 2007.
In February 2008, a few months after Bill C-26 was tabled in Parliament, Boyd started sending Prime Minister Stephen Harper a weekly letter in an attempt to educate the Conservative leader about harm reduction and drug regulation.
Boyd did this for a year, and she sent her 52nd and final letter in early February this year. Bill C-15 was introduced on February 27, a day after the Conservatives filed Bill C-14, which toughens penalties for gang-associated violent activities.
As an educator, Boyd has this to say about mentoring Harper: “The prime minister gets a failing grade on drug policy.”
The economics of prisons in Canada
> Total correctional-services expenditures in 2005-06: almost $3 billion
> Share spent on custodial services or prisons: 71 percent
> Associated policing and court costs in 2005-06: more than $10 billion
> Number of correctional facilities in Canada in 2005-06: 192
> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal female prisoner in
2004-05: $150,000 to $250,000
> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal male prisoner in 2004-05: $87,665
> Daily cost of incarcerating a provincial prisoner in 2004-05: $141.78
> Daily cost of alternatives such as probation, bail supervision,
and community supervision: $5 to $25
Source: prisonjustice.ca
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Sweeping New Powers
Sweeping New Powers Would Threaten Privacy: Watchdog
BC Government wants to amend law to allow much more collection and sharing of personal data.
By Andrew MacLeod,
25 Mar 2010, TheTyee.ca
source
Public bodies would collect, share your personal information without consent.
The British Columbia government wants sweeping new powers to collect and share citizens' private information and store it outside of Canada. Officials argue the powers would help them better serve the public, but a privacy advocate says British Columbians should be worried about the government's plans.
Representatives of the B.C. government presented their 88-page submission to a March 24 meeting of a special committee struck to review the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Such a review happens every six years. The transcript is here.
The government proposes public bodies be able to collect and share people's personal information without their consent. Non-public bodies such as the police, social service providers and non-governmental organizations would be able to do the same.
It would also change the act to allow information to be stored outside of Canada, overturning a provision put in place to protect British Columbians from the long arm of the United States' Patriot Act.
"It's the scope of the thing," said Vincent Gogolek, the policy director for the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association watchdog group. "They really are looking to change the basis of the act to remove people's control over their own information."
'Shared across the universe'
Millennium Water - Home of the Olympic and Paralympic village.
The government's submission says it wants the act amended "to allow for indirect collection by, and disclosure to and between all relevant public bodies, without consent, for purposes of integrated program or activity."
Even non-public bodies including "government and police agencies in other jurisdictions" could indirectly collect and disclose personal information without consent, under the proposal.
This would be done where it's "of benefit to the citizen and necessary to the delivery of the service or program," or for public health and safety.
"They want it shared across the universe," said Gogolek. "NGOs, the RCMP, all over the place. . . They don't want any supervison of that. . . and that's a problem."
The information at stake includes some of the most personal things about people, he said. Information about medical history, mental health, addictions, housing and criminal records would be included, he said. "This is stuff you don't want bouncing around all over the place."
People have a right to keep control of their information and how it is used, Gogolek said, adding it's not good enough for the government to just say, "trust us."
"This will be used monitoring and checking up on people," he said. The government argues that it has become more horizontal and the law needs to change to match its new structure, he said. "I've got a bit of a problem with that and I suspect the committee might have a bit of a problem with that."
The government is making the pitch as it embarks on a $180-million integrated case management system that will be used by both the children and families and housing and social development ministries.
The government has entered a six-year deal with Deloitte Inc. to develop the system, despite warnings the system will create new privacy risks.
Patriot Act worries
Perhaps even more contentious is the provincial government's desire to store more information outside the country.
Here's how the submission to the committee puts the request: "Amend the provisions in the FOIPP Act prohibiting the storage of information outside of Canada to take into account IT developments and advancements that make jurisdictional boundaries artificial."
The change would include, "social networking and other internet tools and mechanisms that can promote stronger citizen engagement and [would] take advantage of commercial and economic opportunities for storage and management of information including 'cloud computing.'"
The provision requiring information stay in Canada dates back to soon after the B.C. Liberals took office in 2001. They were contracting out the management of health records, just as the United States government responded to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center by bringing in the Patriot Act, parts of which allowed for the collection of large amounts of information.
The province's chief information officer, Dave Nikolejsin, presented the government's submission to the committee. He described why they want the restrictions on foreign data storage changed: "How we are able to do some of our alternative service delivery projects is dictated, because a lot of the organizations that bid on opportunities like that and attempt to do business with us are not Canadian businesses. We have to go through machinations that other jurisdictions don't in order to make sure that the data stays in Canada."
"Alternative service delivery" is the wording the government uses to describe contracting out public services. He named Alberta and Ontario as provinces B.C. competes with that don't have similar restrictions on data storage.
"This was hugely controversial and the government was forced to bring it in because of the Patriot Act," said Gogolek. "The Patriot Act is still there." The president of the United States may have changed, but the law has not, he said.
Expanding definitions
Gogolek also takes issue with a couple of changes suggested by the attorney general and the solicitor general.
One would extend the definition of "law enforcement," allowing public bodies to refuse access to a greater number of records. Originally the idea was to prevent information that would compromise a particular investigation from being released. As Gogolek puts it, you legitimately don't want the U.N. Gang able to request records about how the police are investigating the U.N. Gang.
"They want to expand it from investigations to crime prevention," said Gogolek. That would make lots of records that are now releasable secret, he said. "It's got to be realistic. You can't just raise hypotheticals."
The government also asked the committee to rewrite the law so it can refuse access to security video from jail cells. That would be in direct contradiction to a two-year-old ruling by former information and privacy commissioner David Loukidelis, said Gogolek.
"They seem grumpy about that," he said. Knowing that video from jail cells may find its way into public is incentive for the people who work in jails to follow the law, he said. That incentive would be removed if people knew the footage could never be released, he said. "I don't think it's a good way to go."
The acting information and privacy commissioner, Paul Fraser, is scheduled to present to the committee next week.
Gogolek said his group, which presented to the committee last month, will also be looking for a way to respond to the government's submission. [Tyee]
Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee's Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. You can reach him here.
BC Government wants to amend law to allow much more collection and sharing of personal data.
By Andrew MacLeod,
25 Mar 2010, TheTyee.ca
source
Public bodies would collect, share your personal information without consent.
The British Columbia government wants sweeping new powers to collect and share citizens' private information and store it outside of Canada. Officials argue the powers would help them better serve the public, but a privacy advocate says British Columbians should be worried about the government's plans.
Representatives of the B.C. government presented their 88-page submission to a March 24 meeting of a special committee struck to review the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Such a review happens every six years. The transcript is here.
The government proposes public bodies be able to collect and share people's personal information without their consent. Non-public bodies such as the police, social service providers and non-governmental organizations would be able to do the same.
It would also change the act to allow information to be stored outside of Canada, overturning a provision put in place to protect British Columbians from the long arm of the United States' Patriot Act.
"It's the scope of the thing," said Vincent Gogolek, the policy director for the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association watchdog group. "They really are looking to change the basis of the act to remove people's control over their own information."
'Shared across the universe'
Millennium Water - Home of the Olympic and Paralympic village.
The government's submission says it wants the act amended "to allow for indirect collection by, and disclosure to and between all relevant public bodies, without consent, for purposes of integrated program or activity."
Even non-public bodies including "government and police agencies in other jurisdictions" could indirectly collect and disclose personal information without consent, under the proposal.
This would be done where it's "of benefit to the citizen and necessary to the delivery of the service or program," or for public health and safety.
"They want it shared across the universe," said Gogolek. "NGOs, the RCMP, all over the place. . . They don't want any supervison of that. . . and that's a problem."
The information at stake includes some of the most personal things about people, he said. Information about medical history, mental health, addictions, housing and criminal records would be included, he said. "This is stuff you don't want bouncing around all over the place."
People have a right to keep control of their information and how it is used, Gogolek said, adding it's not good enough for the government to just say, "trust us."
"This will be used monitoring and checking up on people," he said. The government argues that it has become more horizontal and the law needs to change to match its new structure, he said. "I've got a bit of a problem with that and I suspect the committee might have a bit of a problem with that."
The government is making the pitch as it embarks on a $180-million integrated case management system that will be used by both the children and families and housing and social development ministries.
The government has entered a six-year deal with Deloitte Inc. to develop the system, despite warnings the system will create new privacy risks.
Patriot Act worries
Perhaps even more contentious is the provincial government's desire to store more information outside the country.
Here's how the submission to the committee puts the request: "Amend the provisions in the FOIPP Act prohibiting the storage of information outside of Canada to take into account IT developments and advancements that make jurisdictional boundaries artificial."
The change would include, "social networking and other internet tools and mechanisms that can promote stronger citizen engagement and [would] take advantage of commercial and economic opportunities for storage and management of information including 'cloud computing.'"
The provision requiring information stay in Canada dates back to soon after the B.C. Liberals took office in 2001. They were contracting out the management of health records, just as the United States government responded to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center by bringing in the Patriot Act, parts of which allowed for the collection of large amounts of information.
The province's chief information officer, Dave Nikolejsin, presented the government's submission to the committee. He described why they want the restrictions on foreign data storage changed: "How we are able to do some of our alternative service delivery projects is dictated, because a lot of the organizations that bid on opportunities like that and attempt to do business with us are not Canadian businesses. We have to go through machinations that other jurisdictions don't in order to make sure that the data stays in Canada."
"Alternative service delivery" is the wording the government uses to describe contracting out public services. He named Alberta and Ontario as provinces B.C. competes with that don't have similar restrictions on data storage.
"This was hugely controversial and the government was forced to bring it in because of the Patriot Act," said Gogolek. "The Patriot Act is still there." The president of the United States may have changed, but the law has not, he said.
Expanding definitions
Gogolek also takes issue with a couple of changes suggested by the attorney general and the solicitor general.
One would extend the definition of "law enforcement," allowing public bodies to refuse access to a greater number of records. Originally the idea was to prevent information that would compromise a particular investigation from being released. As Gogolek puts it, you legitimately don't want the U.N. Gang able to request records about how the police are investigating the U.N. Gang.
"They want to expand it from investigations to crime prevention," said Gogolek. That would make lots of records that are now releasable secret, he said. "It's got to be realistic. You can't just raise hypotheticals."
The government also asked the committee to rewrite the law so it can refuse access to security video from jail cells. That would be in direct contradiction to a two-year-old ruling by former information and privacy commissioner David Loukidelis, said Gogolek.
"They seem grumpy about that," he said. Knowing that video from jail cells may find its way into public is incentive for the people who work in jails to follow the law, he said. That incentive would be removed if people knew the footage could never be released, he said. "I don't think it's a good way to go."
The acting information and privacy commissioner, Paul Fraser, is scheduled to present to the committee next week.
Gogolek said his group, which presented to the committee last month, will also be looking for a way to respond to the government's submission. [Tyee]
Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee's Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. You can reach him here.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Killing Peace: Israeli Defense Force Targets Non-Violent Demonstrators
What Threat Did I Pose The Israeli Soldiers?
By Eva Bartlett
source
25 April, 2010
In Gaza
The latest in a growing number of non-violent protesters shot by well-armed Israeli soldiers, three unarmed demonstrators –two Palestinians and one international–were
injured this afternoon by Israeli soldiers’ firing with live ammunition at a protest east of El Meghazi, central Gaza Strip. One week prior, Mahmoud Shawa, 19, was shot just below his knee by an Israeli soldier while demonstrating near the Nahal Oz crossing, eastern Gaza. March 30, four Palestinians were shot by armed Israeli soldiers while participating in non-violent demonstrations against the Israeli-imposed "buffer zone". Three of the four were injured by bullets or bullet shrapnel to their legs, while the fourth was shot in the head.
Bianca Zammit, 28, from Malta was one of three injured by the Israeli soldiers’ shooting today. Zammit, an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) colleague was standing roughly 3 metres to my left, both of us roughly 50 metres from the Green Line border fence separating Gaza and Israel. At the time that Zammit was shot, she was filming the Israeli soldiers’ assault with live ammunition on the unarmed Palestinian protesters, mainly youths, in front of us, who had run up to post flags on the border fence and re-claim the land Palestinians have been run off of by the unilateral Israeli declaration of a no-go zone.
In theory, this "buffer zone" is 300 metres, running from south to north on the Palestinian side of Gaza’s border. In reality, the off-limits area annexes far more than the 300 metre band of land the Israeli authorities state are off-limits: Palestinian civilians have been killed and injured by Israeli shooting and shelling up to 2 km from the border. As well, workers gathering stones and steel for re-sale for construction purposes are routinely abducted by Israeli soldiers and taken into Israeli detention. These people have been driven by siege-induced poverty and desperation to this low-paying work in the border regions.
Shortly before Zammit was shot, a young Palestinian woman –Hind al Akra, 22– participating in the protest was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli-fired bullet which struck nearby her. The shrapnel lodged in her stomach. At the time of treatment in Deir al Balah’s Al Aqsa hospital, it was deemed that Akra would likely need surgery to remove the shrapnel from her abdomen.
The first to be shot today was 18 year old Nidal al Naql, a teen among those nearest the fence. He was targeted in his right thigh. Thankfully, the bullet missed any artery–the terrain of the area is rolling, rough ground, making the evacuations of the injured more time-consuming and difficult.
*[photo: Rada Daniell]: a remote-controlled machine gun tower, one of many along the border fence used to shoot at Palestinians, including farmers, workers and civilians on their land.
Like those youths shot and injured on Land Day, and the youth of last week, Zammit says when she is healed and able to walk, she will return to the demos, as will the Palestinians, every week, raising their voices against the annexation of their land and targeting of civilians.
"What threat did I pose the Israeli soldiers? What threat did any of us pose them?"
Canada: Follow the Bouncing Harper
“Legal obligations”
by Andrew Coyne
Saturday, May 1, 2010
source
Day three after the Ruling that Saved Our System of Government, and the Tories have achieved their initial objective: total strategic confusion. Is Stephen Harper now prepared to accept opposition demands that a parliamentary committee be given access to the documents in the Afghan detainees affair? Or is he digging in his heels, as unwilling to compromise as ever?
I don’t know. But a clue to the Prime Minister’s state of mind can be found in his repeated invocation of the government’s “legal obligations.” Responding to questions in the House Wednesday, Harper said, variously:
Mr. Speaker, as I have said, we look forward to both complying with your ruling and with the legal obligations that have been established by statutes passed by this Parliament.
and
The government has certain obligations that are established under statutes passed by this Parliament. We obviously want to proceed in a way that will respect both of those things, and of course we will be open to any reasonable suggestions to achieve those two objectives.
and
You have delivered a decision. Obviously, the government seeks to respect that decision. At the same time, it seeks to respect its obligations established by statute and passed by this Parliament.
and
The government seeks at all times to respect all of its obligations. To the extent that some of those obligations may be in conflict, there are reasonable ways to accommodate that and we are open to reasonable suggestions in that regard.
and
The government cannot break the law, it cannot order public servants to break the law, nor can it do anything that would unnecessarily jeopardize the safety of Canadian troops.
You can appreciate the Prime Minister’s dilemma. He is obliged to balance two competing claims: on the one hand, to comply with the Speaker’s ruling enjoining him to respect the House’s demand that he produce the documents; and on the other, to comply with his “legal obligations” not to produce them. Don’t you see? The Speaker is asking him to break the law.
What’s a Prime Minister to do? Parliament has passed legislation, notably the Canada Evidence Act, forbidding the government or its employees from disclosing certain documents. And yet here is one of the Houses of that same Parliament, the Commons, backed by its Speaker, demanding that he should disclose those same documents. What could be more reasonable than to seek some way to balance those competing demands?
Except the whole argument’s bogus. No one is asking the Prime Minister to break the law. The conflict of which he complains exists only in his head. This was a key point in the Speaker’s ruling: a law may impose a general prohibition on the release of certain documents, but unless it expressly states that the ban applies to Parliament, it doesn’t. The presumption, that is, is in favour of parliamentary privilege.
I quote from page 20 of the Speaker’s ruling, where he cites House of Commons Procedure and Practice, pp. 978-9:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of the power rooted in the House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers and records.
The same point is made in the letter from the Commons Law Clerk, Rob Walsh, to the Commons special committee on Afghanistan last December. The committee, he wrote
is at all times to be seen as carrying out its constitutional function of holding the Government to account. This is fundamental to responsible government and more particularly to the relationship between the Government and the House and its committees… The law of parliamentary privilege provides that this relationship operates unencumbered by legal constraints that might otherwise seem applicable…
This is not an exception to the law; it is the law. It does not mean the House of Commons is above the law, or that members may break the law with impunity. It means statute law does not trump the law of parliamentary privilege, which is of constitutional weight.
Moreover, Walsh argues, even if parliamentary privilege did not apply, Crown privilege — the “long-standing legal presumption that a statute does not apply against the Crown unless this is provided expressly in the statute” — does. The Canada Evidence Act, in particular, may forbid others from releasing certain types of information, but it does not prevent the government from doing so. Quite the contrary: two provisions of the Act expressly permit government this discretion.
In other words, the whole “legal obligations” thing is a canard. It’s the same dodge the government was using from the start, when it claimed to be releasing all “legally available” information. The government is under no legal constraint not to disclose information to the committee. On the other hand, it is legally constrained to comply with the comittee’s demands for documents, as enforced by a vote of the House on December 10.
In case there was any doubt, the issue was raised in Parliament, Walsh notes, at the time the Canada Evidence Act was drafted. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice responded:
It would not be the intention of the bill to alter the current status of Parliament’s subpoena powers and privileges…
Having stated this for our parliamentary record so that the intention of the House is clear, an amendment was made to the bill … yesterday for the same purpose of clarifying our intention that Parliament’s privilege to send [for] persons, papers and records not be affected by this legislation.
Indeed, the Justice department concedes as much in its reply to the Law Clerk’s letter. “Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act has no application to parliamentary committee proceedings,” it acknowledges, appealing instead to “the values that inform legislation passed by Parliament,” and to “the parliamentary convention that injurious information should not be disclosed in a parliamentary setting.”
So if the prime minister is still invoking his “legal obligations,” it can only mean his position hasn’t changed a whit. When he speaks of the need to balance one obligation against another, it really means he intends to defy the Speaker and stonewall Parliament.
I’m with colleague Wells, then: the negotiations into which the government has lately entered are in all likelihood a diversion. The aim is to stall, and probe for divisions within and between the parties, notably the Liberals’ palpable fear of an election. The differences between government and opposition will be made to appear as if they were over questions of detail, rather than fundamental principles. So that when, inevitably, the negotiations break down, the government will sigh and claim that it went the extra mile, as it strove to balance its conflicting obligations, but was thwarted by an intransigent and unreasonable opposition.
ADDENDUM: The Speaker is not, as Norman Spector says, the Pope. He is, however, likely to be the last word on this subject, at least until the Commons itself speaks. (The Speaker can only rule on whether there is a prima facie case for a breach of privilege. It is for the House to decide whether the government is in contempt, together with whatever remedies it sees fit.)
It’s always open to the government to refer the whole matter to the Supreme Court, as Norm says, but the Court is not obliged to answer every question put to it, still less to answer as the government would wish. And there is simply no way on God’s green Earth that the Court is going to tread upon parliamentary privilege.
This is one of the holiest precepts in English constitutional law. It’s the reason they fought the Civil War. It’s one of the central demands upheld in the Bill of Rights of 1689: The courts may not intrude upon the inner workings of Parliament — any more than the King can.
by Andrew Coyne
Saturday, May 1, 2010
source
Day three after the Ruling that Saved Our System of Government, and the Tories have achieved their initial objective: total strategic confusion. Is Stephen Harper now prepared to accept opposition demands that a parliamentary committee be given access to the documents in the Afghan detainees affair? Or is he digging in his heels, as unwilling to compromise as ever?
I don’t know. But a clue to the Prime Minister’s state of mind can be found in his repeated invocation of the government’s “legal obligations.” Responding to questions in the House Wednesday, Harper said, variously:
Mr. Speaker, as I have said, we look forward to both complying with your ruling and with the legal obligations that have been established by statutes passed by this Parliament.
and
The government has certain obligations that are established under statutes passed by this Parliament. We obviously want to proceed in a way that will respect both of those things, and of course we will be open to any reasonable suggestions to achieve those two objectives.
and
You have delivered a decision. Obviously, the government seeks to respect that decision. At the same time, it seeks to respect its obligations established by statute and passed by this Parliament.
and
The government seeks at all times to respect all of its obligations. To the extent that some of those obligations may be in conflict, there are reasonable ways to accommodate that and we are open to reasonable suggestions in that regard.
and
The government cannot break the law, it cannot order public servants to break the law, nor can it do anything that would unnecessarily jeopardize the safety of Canadian troops.
You can appreciate the Prime Minister’s dilemma. He is obliged to balance two competing claims: on the one hand, to comply with the Speaker’s ruling enjoining him to respect the House’s demand that he produce the documents; and on the other, to comply with his “legal obligations” not to produce them. Don’t you see? The Speaker is asking him to break the law.
What’s a Prime Minister to do? Parliament has passed legislation, notably the Canada Evidence Act, forbidding the government or its employees from disclosing certain documents. And yet here is one of the Houses of that same Parliament, the Commons, backed by its Speaker, demanding that he should disclose those same documents. What could be more reasonable than to seek some way to balance those competing demands?
Except the whole argument’s bogus. No one is asking the Prime Minister to break the law. The conflict of which he complains exists only in his head. This was a key point in the Speaker’s ruling: a law may impose a general prohibition on the release of certain documents, but unless it expressly states that the ban applies to Parliament, it doesn’t. The presumption, that is, is in favour of parliamentary privilege.
I quote from page 20 of the Speaker’s ruling, where he cites House of Commons Procedure and Practice, pp. 978-9:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of the power rooted in the House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers and records.
The same point is made in the letter from the Commons Law Clerk, Rob Walsh, to the Commons special committee on Afghanistan last December. The committee, he wrote
is at all times to be seen as carrying out its constitutional function of holding the Government to account. This is fundamental to responsible government and more particularly to the relationship between the Government and the House and its committees… The law of parliamentary privilege provides that this relationship operates unencumbered by legal constraints that might otherwise seem applicable…
This is not an exception to the law; it is the law. It does not mean the House of Commons is above the law, or that members may break the law with impunity. It means statute law does not trump the law of parliamentary privilege, which is of constitutional weight.
Moreover, Walsh argues, even if parliamentary privilege did not apply, Crown privilege — the “long-standing legal presumption that a statute does not apply against the Crown unless this is provided expressly in the statute” — does. The Canada Evidence Act, in particular, may forbid others from releasing certain types of information, but it does not prevent the government from doing so. Quite the contrary: two provisions of the Act expressly permit government this discretion.
In other words, the whole “legal obligations” thing is a canard. It’s the same dodge the government was using from the start, when it claimed to be releasing all “legally available” information. The government is under no legal constraint not to disclose information to the committee. On the other hand, it is legally constrained to comply with the comittee’s demands for documents, as enforced by a vote of the House on December 10.
In case there was any doubt, the issue was raised in Parliament, Walsh notes, at the time the Canada Evidence Act was drafted. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice responded:
It would not be the intention of the bill to alter the current status of Parliament’s subpoena powers and privileges…
Having stated this for our parliamentary record so that the intention of the House is clear, an amendment was made to the bill … yesterday for the same purpose of clarifying our intention that Parliament’s privilege to send [for] persons, papers and records not be affected by this legislation.
Indeed, the Justice department concedes as much in its reply to the Law Clerk’s letter. “Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act has no application to parliamentary committee proceedings,” it acknowledges, appealing instead to “the values that inform legislation passed by Parliament,” and to “the parliamentary convention that injurious information should not be disclosed in a parliamentary setting.”
So if the prime minister is still invoking his “legal obligations,” it can only mean his position hasn’t changed a whit. When he speaks of the need to balance one obligation against another, it really means he intends to defy the Speaker and stonewall Parliament.
I’m with colleague Wells, then: the negotiations into which the government has lately entered are in all likelihood a diversion. The aim is to stall, and probe for divisions within and between the parties, notably the Liberals’ palpable fear of an election. The differences between government and opposition will be made to appear as if they were over questions of detail, rather than fundamental principles. So that when, inevitably, the negotiations break down, the government will sigh and claim that it went the extra mile, as it strove to balance its conflicting obligations, but was thwarted by an intransigent and unreasonable opposition.
ADDENDUM: The Speaker is not, as Norman Spector says, the Pope. He is, however, likely to be the last word on this subject, at least until the Commons itself speaks. (The Speaker can only rule on whether there is a prima facie case for a breach of privilege. It is for the House to decide whether the government is in contempt, together with whatever remedies it sees fit.)
It’s always open to the government to refer the whole matter to the Supreme Court, as Norm says, but the Court is not obliged to answer every question put to it, still less to answer as the government would wish. And there is simply no way on God’s green Earth that the Court is going to tread upon parliamentary privilege.
This is one of the holiest precepts in English constitutional law. It’s the reason they fought the Civil War. It’s one of the central demands upheld in the Bill of Rights of 1689: The courts may not intrude upon the inner workings of Parliament — any more than the King can.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Scared for the Sacred Headwaters
BC’s most endangered waterway remains threatened despite extended moratorium
Groups call for ban on coalbed methane drilling in Sacred Headwaters
For Immediate Release – April 29, 2010
Hazelton, BC – A permanent ban on coalbed methane drilling is required to protect wild salmon habitat in B.C.’s Sacred Headwaters say Northwest B.C. groups. The groups were reacting to government speculation that the current two-year drilling moratorium will remain in place beyond 2012.
“The B.C. government demonstrated leadership by putting the moratorium in place in 2008, but extending the moratorium does not resolve the issue. It’s time to take the final step toward permanent safeguards for the Sacred Headwaters,” said Pat Moss with Friends of Wild Salmon.
In 2008, the BC government imposed a moratorium on Shell’s coalbed methane exploration for a minimum of two years – and not exceeding four years – to allow time for First Nations and other communities to determine the impact of development on water. On a Global TV program on Monday, Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Blair Lekstrom stated that, the moratorium had to continue “until there is consultation and agreement with local communities…it looks as though 2012 would be the expiration of the agreement.”
“I think government is trying to do the right thing,” said Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition executive director Shannon McPhail. “We have seen the disturbance coalbed methane causes on the land – even under the best case scenarios – and it’s simply unacceptable. Rather than conducting further studies and consultation, which will only reaffirm our opposition, let’s use the extension period to create a long-term solution for the Sacred Headwaters.”
Both Friends of Wild Salmon and the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition are calling on the B.C. government to permanently safeguard the Sacred Headwaters instead.
“A permanent ban on drilling would end the conflict, protect B.C.’s most endangered waterway and provide long-term certainty. Coalbed methane would be a huge source of greenhouse gases; foregoing its development would be consistent with the government’s green energy agenda. It would be a win-win for government, residents and our wild salmon,” said McPhail.
Located in northern B.C. east of Iskut, the Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of three of the province’s most important salmon rivers: the Skeena, Nass and Stikine. It is often called the “Serengeti of the North” for its abundant wildlife populations. Earlier this month, the BC Outdoor Recreation Council listed the Sacred Headwaters as B.C.’s most endangered waterway.
For more information, please contact:
Shannon McPhail, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition Executive Director – (250) 842-2494 or Cellular (250) 842-8738
Pat Moss, Friends of Wild Salmon Coordinator – (250) 847-9693 or Cellular (250) 877-9745
Groups call for ban on coalbed methane drilling in Sacred Headwaters
For Immediate Release – April 29, 2010
Hazelton, BC – A permanent ban on coalbed methane drilling is required to protect wild salmon habitat in B.C.’s Sacred Headwaters say Northwest B.C. groups. The groups were reacting to government speculation that the current two-year drilling moratorium will remain in place beyond 2012.
“The B.C. government demonstrated leadership by putting the moratorium in place in 2008, but extending the moratorium does not resolve the issue. It’s time to take the final step toward permanent safeguards for the Sacred Headwaters,” said Pat Moss with Friends of Wild Salmon.
In 2008, the BC government imposed a moratorium on Shell’s coalbed methane exploration for a minimum of two years – and not exceeding four years – to allow time for First Nations and other communities to determine the impact of development on water. On a Global TV program on Monday, Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Blair Lekstrom stated that, the moratorium had to continue “until there is consultation and agreement with local communities…it looks as though 2012 would be the expiration of the agreement.”
“I think government is trying to do the right thing,” said Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition executive director Shannon McPhail. “We have seen the disturbance coalbed methane causes on the land – even under the best case scenarios – and it’s simply unacceptable. Rather than conducting further studies and consultation, which will only reaffirm our opposition, let’s use the extension period to create a long-term solution for the Sacred Headwaters.”
Both Friends of Wild Salmon and the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition are calling on the B.C. government to permanently safeguard the Sacred Headwaters instead.
“A permanent ban on drilling would end the conflict, protect B.C.’s most endangered waterway and provide long-term certainty. Coalbed methane would be a huge source of greenhouse gases; foregoing its development would be consistent with the government’s green energy agenda. It would be a win-win for government, residents and our wild salmon,” said McPhail.
Located in northern B.C. east of Iskut, the Sacred Headwaters is the shared birthplace of three of the province’s most important salmon rivers: the Skeena, Nass and Stikine. It is often called the “Serengeti of the North” for its abundant wildlife populations. Earlier this month, the BC Outdoor Recreation Council listed the Sacred Headwaters as B.C.’s most endangered waterway.
For more information, please contact:
Shannon McPhail, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition Executive Director – (250) 842-2494 or Cellular (250) 842-8738
Pat Moss, Friends of Wild Salmon Coordinator – (250) 847-9693 or Cellular (250) 877-9745
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Mainstream Green Groups Cave On Climate
Published on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate
Dangerously Allow Industry to Set Agenda
by Gary Houser and Cory Morningstar
source
"Governments will not put young people and nature above special financial interests without great public pressure. Such pressure is not possible as long as big environmental organizations provide cover. So the best hope is this -- individuals must demand that the leaders change course or they will lose support." - Dr. James Hansen
With climate scientists warning that we are in a global emergency and tipping points leading to runaway catastrophe will be crossed unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, one would expect groups identified as environmental defenders to be shifting into high gear. Instead, we are witnessing the unspeakably tragic spectacle of a mainstream environmental movement allowing itself to be seduced and co-opted by the very forces it should be vehemently opposing. At the very moment when moral leadership and courage are needed the most, what we see is a colossal failure of both - with potentially irreversible consequences for our civilization. If Congress chooses an inadequate response to the crisis, policies can get "locked in" which virtually guarantee that these tipping points are crossed. These organizations are using their significant financial resources to create a public impression that the "environmental community" has given its "stamp of approval" to this policy and to marginalize the voices of the genuine grassroots activists who represent the heart and soul of the climate movement. With nothing less than the future of the planet at stake, these groups must now be publicly challenged and held accountable for their actions.
The stage has been set for this necessary debate by publication of Johann Hari's excellent commentary entitled "The Wrong Kind of Green". In this piece, Hari provides important insight into some of the relevant history. He describes how in the 1980s and 1990s some of the larger environmental groups began to adopt a policy often called "corporate engagement". The basic idea was that by participating in "partnerships" with corporations - some involving receipt of monetary contributions - there would be opportunity to exert positive influence.
It is not possible to look into the minds of those who promoted this shift. Perhaps there was a sincere hope that corporations would be moved toward more responsible behavior. Whatever the case, the critically important task at this time is not to evaluate possible motives but rather the real life consequences. To do so honestly, all self-interested blinders must be set aside.
The truth is that this policy has created a "slippery slope" leading to severely compromised stances - nowhere more apparent than in regard to the over-arching issue of climate. In 2007, a coalition was formed between corporations and environmental organizations called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or USCAP - whose purpose was to influence U.S. climate legislation. Some of the large groups that joined were Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Nature Conservancy, and National Wildlife Foundation. In January 2009, USCAP presented its proposals and these became the framework of the Waxman-Markey bill.
The physical context is that previously projected worst case scenarios are already being surpassed and humanity is running out of time. Ice is melting far more rapidly than expected, releasing the "albedo effect" where open water absorbs more heat and accelerates further melting. The normally quite cautious National Science Foundation is ringing alarm bells about the methane - a greenhouse gas over 30 times as powerful as CO2 - now venting from the Siberian seabeds. According to the NSF statement: "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming." These are only two examples of "reinforcing feedbacks" that can significantly move the process closer to tipping points.
Within a context so dire that in reality a war-time level of mobilization is needed, what kind of legislation is being offered? First of all, the emission reduction targets themselves - apart from the theoretical strategies for achieving them - categorically ignore the science. The goals do not even aim at stabilization at 350 ppm (let alone the lower figures more likely to be necessary) and the time frame for enacting meaningful reductions is not even remotely close to the speed needed to prevent disaster.
Beyond the issue of targets is that of reduction strategies. USCAP would like to see a trillion dollar carbon market put into place, where traders can claim "pollution rights" to the sky and seek profits from the exchange of such "rights". Such a system - which would determine whether life-supporting ecosystems survive or collapse - would be placed into the same manipulative hands on Wall Street that brought on the financial meltdown. As this commentary goes to press, several traders in the European carbon market (the world's prototype) have been arrested in connection with a massive fraud estimated at $6.75 billion. While some of us lay in the street in nonviolent civil disobedience to block this immoral atrocity (including one of the authors), NRDC and EDF are sending their own people to promote it at carbon trade conferences.
The next immoral concession is to allow the industry to "buy" its way out of actually reducing emissions by supporting so-called "offsets" - such as forest preservation projects in the developing world. Sounding plausible in theory, offsets are actually riddled with verification issues and defects such as loggers simply moving elsewhere. But the bottomline "wrong" here is that any form of offsetting should never be looked at as an alternative to reducing emissions. It should only be seen as an additional action to take.
Then there is the unbelievable capitulation represented by the removal of EPA authority to regulate coal-burning. Now that the EPA has finally been empowered by the Supreme Court to act against a carbon-fueled ecocide, this ability has been effectively stripped from the House bill without a murmur from the USCAP "greens". The result of all these concessions is a pathetically weak bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will not even begin to reduce emissions until 2018. Other studies indicate that if all available offsets are used, reductions could actually be postponed an astonishing 19 years until 2029.
The USCAP "greens" proclaim that their positions are being driven by "political expediency". But there is a stunning "disconnect" which these groups have been reticent to address. How does one negotiate with a melting iceberg? Can the inexorable laws of physics be placed "on hold" while emission reductions are scuttled in a process of political "horse-trading"? What is the meaning of "expediency" when it leads to the collapse of society as we know it? John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseach, stated at the "4 Degrees and Beyond" conference at Oxford that "political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it is completely useless".
The Sierra Club is experiencing what may be a positive change in leadership and to its credit has not adopted the policy of "corporate engagement" described, yet it has failed to truly mobilize its base against the dangerous shortcomings of the USCAP endorsed legislation. In 2008, the Sierra Club bestowed its highest honor - the John Muir Award - to climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. In presenting the award, Sierra Club President Allison Chin said: "He is truly a hero for preserving the environment". How does the Sierra Club reconcile the honoring of this man for warning the world and then essentially ignore his core message that present climate legislation is based on false solutions that will waste precious time?
NRDC and EDF, on the other hand, have gone far beyond mere silence. While their websites claim a dedication to public service ( NRDC's motto is "The Earth's Best Defense"), they have been actively promoting the USCAP accomodation. If they had not lost sight of their original missions, they would have sought out members of Congress willing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and used their resources (in 2008, NRDC had an operational budget of 87 million dollars) to throw weight behind them. Instead of emboldening this kind of voice, they have done the exact opposite by allowing industry to define what is "feasible".
The real climate movement - the one with its backbone intact and composed of grassroots activists and principled groups like Friends of the Earth and Center for Biological Diversity - is already in a "David versus Goliath" situation as it tries to confront the most powerful lobby in the country. But that task has been made infinitely more difficult by these big budget groups using their money to isolate and "box in" the smaller ones.
We close this commentary with the following direct appeal to both the leadership and the members of these groups that have chosen the path of accommodation:
The verdict is in. Your experiment in "corporate engagement" has resulted in a disastrous failure that now threatens the planet. We fully expected the massive campaign from the fossil fuel industry to strip any substance from this legislation. But you have blindsided those of us who are fighting with all our hearts for the future of the earth. Your coffers have grown and now you are using this money to drown us out.
Your stance does not represent those in the grassroots movement, many of whom are young and see the disasters that are looming within their own lifetimes. In your comfortable offices, you do not speak for those willing to put themselves on the line and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against the very forces you seek to accomodate. The rationale for your corporate "partnerships" was the issue of exerting influence. But the question begging to be asked is who influenced whom? Though your treasury is more full, what truly has been gained and what has been lost?
Your intentions may have been honorable, but the agenda of "defending earth" has been hijacked. Along the way, your vision became blurred and you lost sight of this mission. In this "experiment', you are the ones who have been "had". It now appears to have been a terrible Faustian bargain, and we are all paying the price. At the very moment of greatest need for an empowered public advocacy in the face of the most overwhelming threat in human history, your leadership is not to be found.
Your accommodation and your defense of abominably weak Congressional legislation has already had a destructive global impact. It was this legislation that set the bar intolerably low in Copenhagen and instigated a "race to the bottom". The entire world-wide movement for climate sanity has become blocked by the denial, blindness, and paralysis embodied in U.S. climate policy. When you take this stance in the name of "defending the earth", you are actually creating an insidious and dangerous deception.
For the sake of the planet, we appeal to your organizations to reclaim the integrity of your original visions. The position you presently advocate will squander the precious little time we have to implement true reductions before the irreversible tipping points are crossed. The stakes could not be higher. We ask that you join hands with the grassroots activists and groups and support the following eight points:
1) Officially recognize that we are truly in a global emergency and that irreversible tipping points are likely to be crossed if humanity does not act in time;
2) Officially recognize that this emergency is of such a magnitude that a war time level of mobilization is needed in order to effectively deal with it;
3) Stand squarely for the necessity that climate legislation be based on the setting of emission reduction targets and a time frame which are defined by the science;
4) Due to the severe ecosystem damage that will ensue in response to a 2 degree (celsius) rise, an overall goal of no more than one degree (celsius) rise must be sought;
5) Clearly renounce cap and trade and offsets as false solutions that will squander precious time;
6) Stand squarely against any attempt in Congress to strip EPA of its authority to regulate carbon;
7) Support a comprehensive approach to the crisis that combines elements of legislation, regulation, and public investment;
8) Support a legislative component based on a continually rising carbon fee with a 100% distribution of the proceeds to U.S. citizens, with the amount of the fee determined by an emission reduction schedule driven by science.
We also ask the members of these groups to withhold their organizational support until their leadership recognizes the necessity of these changes. On this defining issue of our time, may we strive to remove the barriers that divide us and work together.
Gary Houser is a public interest writer, documentary producer, and activist with Climate SOS seeking to raise awareness within the religious community (here) about the moral issues at stake and working to create a more empowered climate movement.
Cory Morningstar, in addition to being a mom, is an activist with Canadians for Action on Climate Change and has collated latest scientific findings here.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/20-1
Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate
Dangerously Allow Industry to Set Agenda
by Gary Houser and Cory Morningstar
source
"Governments will not put young people and nature above special financial interests without great public pressure. Such pressure is not possible as long as big environmental organizations provide cover. So the best hope is this -- individuals must demand that the leaders change course or they will lose support." - Dr. James Hansen
With climate scientists warning that we are in a global emergency and tipping points leading to runaway catastrophe will be crossed unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, one would expect groups identified as environmental defenders to be shifting into high gear. Instead, we are witnessing the unspeakably tragic spectacle of a mainstream environmental movement allowing itself to be seduced and co-opted by the very forces it should be vehemently opposing. At the very moment when moral leadership and courage are needed the most, what we see is a colossal failure of both - with potentially irreversible consequences for our civilization. If Congress chooses an inadequate response to the crisis, policies can get "locked in" which virtually guarantee that these tipping points are crossed. These organizations are using their significant financial resources to create a public impression that the "environmental community" has given its "stamp of approval" to this policy and to marginalize the voices of the genuine grassroots activists who represent the heart and soul of the climate movement. With nothing less than the future of the planet at stake, these groups must now be publicly challenged and held accountable for their actions.
The stage has been set for this necessary debate by publication of Johann Hari's excellent commentary entitled "The Wrong Kind of Green". In this piece, Hari provides important insight into some of the relevant history. He describes how in the 1980s and 1990s some of the larger environmental groups began to adopt a policy often called "corporate engagement". The basic idea was that by participating in "partnerships" with corporations - some involving receipt of monetary contributions - there would be opportunity to exert positive influence.
It is not possible to look into the minds of those who promoted this shift. Perhaps there was a sincere hope that corporations would be moved toward more responsible behavior. Whatever the case, the critically important task at this time is not to evaluate possible motives but rather the real life consequences. To do so honestly, all self-interested blinders must be set aside.
The truth is that this policy has created a "slippery slope" leading to severely compromised stances - nowhere more apparent than in regard to the over-arching issue of climate. In 2007, a coalition was formed between corporations and environmental organizations called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or USCAP - whose purpose was to influence U.S. climate legislation. Some of the large groups that joined were Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Nature Conservancy, and National Wildlife Foundation. In January 2009, USCAP presented its proposals and these became the framework of the Waxman-Markey bill.
The physical context is that previously projected worst case scenarios are already being surpassed and humanity is running out of time. Ice is melting far more rapidly than expected, releasing the "albedo effect" where open water absorbs more heat and accelerates further melting. The normally quite cautious National Science Foundation is ringing alarm bells about the methane - a greenhouse gas over 30 times as powerful as CO2 - now venting from the Siberian seabeds. According to the NSF statement: "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming." These are only two examples of "reinforcing feedbacks" that can significantly move the process closer to tipping points.
Within a context so dire that in reality a war-time level of mobilization is needed, what kind of legislation is being offered? First of all, the emission reduction targets themselves - apart from the theoretical strategies for achieving them - categorically ignore the science. The goals do not even aim at stabilization at 350 ppm (let alone the lower figures more likely to be necessary) and the time frame for enacting meaningful reductions is not even remotely close to the speed needed to prevent disaster.
Beyond the issue of targets is that of reduction strategies. USCAP would like to see a trillion dollar carbon market put into place, where traders can claim "pollution rights" to the sky and seek profits from the exchange of such "rights". Such a system - which would determine whether life-supporting ecosystems survive or collapse - would be placed into the same manipulative hands on Wall Street that brought on the financial meltdown. As this commentary goes to press, several traders in the European carbon market (the world's prototype) have been arrested in connection with a massive fraud estimated at $6.75 billion. While some of us lay in the street in nonviolent civil disobedience to block this immoral atrocity (including one of the authors), NRDC and EDF are sending their own people to promote it at carbon trade conferences.
The next immoral concession is to allow the industry to "buy" its way out of actually reducing emissions by supporting so-called "offsets" - such as forest preservation projects in the developing world. Sounding plausible in theory, offsets are actually riddled with verification issues and defects such as loggers simply moving elsewhere. But the bottomline "wrong" here is that any form of offsetting should never be looked at as an alternative to reducing emissions. It should only be seen as an additional action to take.
Then there is the unbelievable capitulation represented by the removal of EPA authority to regulate coal-burning. Now that the EPA has finally been empowered by the Supreme Court to act against a carbon-fueled ecocide, this ability has been effectively stripped from the House bill without a murmur from the USCAP "greens". The result of all these concessions is a pathetically weak bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will not even begin to reduce emissions until 2018. Other studies indicate that if all available offsets are used, reductions could actually be postponed an astonishing 19 years until 2029.
The USCAP "greens" proclaim that their positions are being driven by "political expediency". But there is a stunning "disconnect" which these groups have been reticent to address. How does one negotiate with a melting iceberg? Can the inexorable laws of physics be placed "on hold" while emission reductions are scuttled in a process of political "horse-trading"? What is the meaning of "expediency" when it leads to the collapse of society as we know it? John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseach, stated at the "4 Degrees and Beyond" conference at Oxford that "political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it is completely useless".
The Sierra Club is experiencing what may be a positive change in leadership and to its credit has not adopted the policy of "corporate engagement" described, yet it has failed to truly mobilize its base against the dangerous shortcomings of the USCAP endorsed legislation. In 2008, the Sierra Club bestowed its highest honor - the John Muir Award - to climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. In presenting the award, Sierra Club President Allison Chin said: "He is truly a hero for preserving the environment". How does the Sierra Club reconcile the honoring of this man for warning the world and then essentially ignore his core message that present climate legislation is based on false solutions that will waste precious time?
NRDC and EDF, on the other hand, have gone far beyond mere silence. While their websites claim a dedication to public service ( NRDC's motto is "The Earth's Best Defense"), they have been actively promoting the USCAP accomodation. If they had not lost sight of their original missions, they would have sought out members of Congress willing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and used their resources (in 2008, NRDC had an operational budget of 87 million dollars) to throw weight behind them. Instead of emboldening this kind of voice, they have done the exact opposite by allowing industry to define what is "feasible".
The real climate movement - the one with its backbone intact and composed of grassroots activists and principled groups like Friends of the Earth and Center for Biological Diversity - is already in a "David versus Goliath" situation as it tries to confront the most powerful lobby in the country. But that task has been made infinitely more difficult by these big budget groups using their money to isolate and "box in" the smaller ones.
We close this commentary with the following direct appeal to both the leadership and the members of these groups that have chosen the path of accommodation:
The verdict is in. Your experiment in "corporate engagement" has resulted in a disastrous failure that now threatens the planet. We fully expected the massive campaign from the fossil fuel industry to strip any substance from this legislation. But you have blindsided those of us who are fighting with all our hearts for the future of the earth. Your coffers have grown and now you are using this money to drown us out.
Your stance does not represent those in the grassroots movement, many of whom are young and see the disasters that are looming within their own lifetimes. In your comfortable offices, you do not speak for those willing to put themselves on the line and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against the very forces you seek to accomodate. The rationale for your corporate "partnerships" was the issue of exerting influence. But the question begging to be asked is who influenced whom? Though your treasury is more full, what truly has been gained and what has been lost?
Your intentions may have been honorable, but the agenda of "defending earth" has been hijacked. Along the way, your vision became blurred and you lost sight of this mission. In this "experiment', you are the ones who have been "had". It now appears to have been a terrible Faustian bargain, and we are all paying the price. At the very moment of greatest need for an empowered public advocacy in the face of the most overwhelming threat in human history, your leadership is not to be found.
Your accommodation and your defense of abominably weak Congressional legislation has already had a destructive global impact. It was this legislation that set the bar intolerably low in Copenhagen and instigated a "race to the bottom". The entire world-wide movement for climate sanity has become blocked by the denial, blindness, and paralysis embodied in U.S. climate policy. When you take this stance in the name of "defending the earth", you are actually creating an insidious and dangerous deception.
For the sake of the planet, we appeal to your organizations to reclaim the integrity of your original visions. The position you presently advocate will squander the precious little time we have to implement true reductions before the irreversible tipping points are crossed. The stakes could not be higher. We ask that you join hands with the grassroots activists and groups and support the following eight points:
1) Officially recognize that we are truly in a global emergency and that irreversible tipping points are likely to be crossed if humanity does not act in time;
2) Officially recognize that this emergency is of such a magnitude that a war time level of mobilization is needed in order to effectively deal with it;
3) Stand squarely for the necessity that climate legislation be based on the setting of emission reduction targets and a time frame which are defined by the science;
4) Due to the severe ecosystem damage that will ensue in response to a 2 degree (celsius) rise, an overall goal of no more than one degree (celsius) rise must be sought;
5) Clearly renounce cap and trade and offsets as false solutions that will squander precious time;
6) Stand squarely against any attempt in Congress to strip EPA of its authority to regulate carbon;
7) Support a comprehensive approach to the crisis that combines elements of legislation, regulation, and public investment;
8) Support a legislative component based on a continually rising carbon fee with a 100% distribution of the proceeds to U.S. citizens, with the amount of the fee determined by an emission reduction schedule driven by science.
We also ask the members of these groups to withhold their organizational support until their leadership recognizes the necessity of these changes. On this defining issue of our time, may we strive to remove the barriers that divide us and work together.
Gary Houser is a public interest writer, documentary producer, and activist with Climate SOS seeking to raise awareness within the religious community (here) about the moral issues at stake and working to create a more empowered climate movement.
Cory Morningstar, in addition to being a mom, is an activist with Canadians for Action on Climate Change and has collated latest scientific findings here.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/20-1
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