What Your Government Won't Tell You About the BP Oil Gusher in the Gulf; the BP/Government Police State; U.S. Coast Guard Involved in Corexit Spraying

The Weather Channel Premieres 'The Spill: Crisis in the Gulf,' Hosted by Brian Williams

July 15, 2010

The Weather Channel - TWC presents "The Spill: Crisis in the Gulf," a one-hour special hosted by Brian Williams of "NBC Nightly News," which premiered June 25 at 9 p.m. ET. Produced exclusively for TWC by Peacock Productions, the special explores the Gulf Coast oil spill that resulted from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20. It examines what is now a race to save the Gulf Coast and its delicate ecosystem as well as the potential impact of a threatening hurricane season. It also delves into the many failed attempts to plug the leak so far.

Williams was the first network news anchor on the ground in the region after the story broke and this special features more on-location reporting from him. Featured are several interviews with Gulf Coast residents including a shrimping family whose livelihood has been lost. Williams also gives viewers a glimpse of Cat Island, a refuge and home to pelicans, now surrounded by plastic containment boom.

"I urge people to watch, to remind themselves where we've been in this disaster -- how little we knew early on, and what a painful, titanic struggle it has been to stop this horrible ongoing disaster," said Williams.

Marking the 5-year anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita this August, The Gulf Coast has already seen its fair share of heartache and turmoil and this manmade oil spill is no exception. "The Spill: Crisis in the Gulf," takes a closer look at how the oil spill has affected the Gulf's coastline, wildlife, fisheries, tourism and way of life. With a string of recent severe weather and the current record-setting heat hindering cleanup efforts, every day is a battle to preserve the threatened environment that will be affected for decades to come.

The special includes stories told by victims and the people living this nightmare. In addition, interviews with environmentalist Philippe Cousteau Jr., scientist Bill Nye and environmental scientist Ed Overton are included as well as a rare look inside BP headquarters in Houston, TX.

"The Spill: Crisis in the Gulf" encores Saturday, July 17, at 5 p.m. ET and Sunday, July 18, at 5 p.m. ET on the Weather Channel.

To learn more about TWC programming, visit www.weather.com/tv.

The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) is made up of The Weather Channel television network, The Weather Channel digital properties, and Weather Services International (WSI). The Weather Channel® is based in Atlanta and is seen in more than 100 million U.S. households. TWC also operates Weatherscan, a 24-hour all-local weather network; The Weather Channel Radio Network; and The Weather Channel HD. The digital properties of TWC, which include the weather.com® site, The Weather Channel Desktop and The Weather Channel Mobile, reach more than 45 million unique users online each month and is the most popular source of online weather, news and information according to Nielsen//NetRatings. WSI, headquartered in Andover, MA, primarily provides business-to-business weather services, particularly for the media, aviation, marine and energy sectors. TWCC is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. For more information, visit www.weather.com/press.

BANNED Australian “60 Minutes” Documentary About the BP Oil Spill

July 1, 2010

internettoday - Presented in two parts that were leaked onto YouTube and still being deleted by BP, here is an Australian ‘60 Minutes’ documentary about the BP oil spill…if the video goes missing please contact me so I can re-upload, as BP is sending around “cease-and-desist” letters to anyone sharing the video. Prepare yourself for the shocking truth.





The videos are also available on the Cryptome.org YouTube account.

AU 60 Minutes Oil Spill Video Axed by BP Part 1

AU 60 Minutes Oil Spill Video Axed by BP Part 2

What Your Government Won't Tell You About the BP Oil Gusher in the Gulf

July 9, 2010

connectingdots1 - The Australian "60 Minutes" episode should have been broadcast in the USA, not on the other side of the world where folks won’t necessarily feel a direct impact of the spill…yet!

It’s just further proof that all TV networks in the USA are owned by only 5 corporations…’cause there’s NO doubt that this show should have played here in the Northern hemisphere where the oil is actually leaking…ground Zero!

Australian CBS Report on BP Oil Spill (Censored at BP's Request)

Australia's mini documentary on the BP Oil Spill had a 24-hour shelf life on the official "60 Minutes" website before it was removed.

June 13, 2010

Sott.net - A mini-documentary on the BP oil spill aired June 13 on Australia's CBS' 60 Minutes. The damning report includes an interview with Kindra Arnesen and eyewitness video footage of the Deepwater explosion. It also revealed that miles of BP's boom has broken free and washed inland along Louisiana's marshes. BP apparently went all out to demand the report be taken down from CBS's website.

Whistleblower, Louisiana local Kindra Arnesan:



Video of Kindra Arnesan on PBS Newshour also available here:
http://video.godlikeproductions.com/video/Kindra_Arnesan_-_Quoted_on_PBS_Newshour_6232010

Here’s a link to the transcript:
http://susiemadrak.com/?p=3577
She says that as far as EPA, OSHA, NOAA, BP, and the federal government, "they, every one of them, is in collaboration with each other."

The BP/Government Police State

July 6, 2010

Salon.com - Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened.

She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who -- after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because "BP didn't want him filming" -- was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official. McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding:

"One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff's office."

Today, an article that is a joint collaboration between PBS' Frontline and ProPublica reported that a BP refinery in Texas "spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies" two weeks before the company's rig in the Gulf collapsed. Accompanying that article was this sidebar report:

A photographer taking pictures for these articles, was detained Friday while shooting pictures in Texas City, Texas.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said that shortly after arriving in town, he was confronted by a BP security officer, local police and a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. He was released after the police reviewed the pictures he had taken on Friday and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information.

The police officer then turned that information over to the BP security guard under what he said was standard procedure, according to Rosenfield.

No charges were filed.

Rosenfield, an experienced freelance photographer, said he was detained shortly after shooting a photograph of a Texas City sign on a public roadway. Rosenfield said he was followed by a BP employee in a truck after taking the picture and blocked by two police cars when he pulled into a gas station.

According to Rosenfield, the officers said they had a right to look at photos taken near secured areas of the refinery, even if they were shot from public property. Rosenfield said he was told he would be "taken in" if he declined to comply.

ProPublica's Paul Steiger said that the reporting team told law enforcement agents that they were working on a deadline for this story about that facility, and that even if DHS agents believed they had a legitimate reason to scrutinize the actions and photographs of this photographer, there was no reason that "should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company."



These are true police state tactics, and it's now clear that it is part of a pattern. It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area. Newsweek reported this in late May:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable.

In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP's other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP's personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer.

BP's destructive conduct, and the government's complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are.



UPDATE I:

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure". . . [S]ince "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be" . . . .

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill. "Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June. . . .

"[T]o create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency," [said Cooper].

The rule has come under severe criticism not only from journalists but from observers and activists involved in the Gulf Coast clean-up. "With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening," writes Mike Adams at NaturalNews. . . .

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches.

We've frequently heard excuses that the Federal Government has little power to do anything to BP, but they certainly seem to have ample power to do a great deal for them. Public indifference about such things is the by-product of those who walk around like drones repeating the mantra that political officials know what's best about what must be kept secret, and that the Threat of Terrorism (which is what is exploited to justify such acts) means we must meekly acquiesce to such powers in the name of Staying Safe.

UPDATE II: From The New York Times, June 9, 2010:

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

This is clearly a deliberate and systematic pattern of preventing access and coverage that has been going on since the beginning of the spill. And, as we find in so many realms, it's impossible to know where government actions end and corporate actions begin because the line basically does not exist.

Marine Biologist Claims US Coast Guard Involved in Corexit Spraying

This video was published to YouTube by Project Gulf Impact on July 4, 2010.

July 6, 2010

Raw Story - A marine biologist working with a group of environmentalists to save sea turtles claims the U.S. Coast Guard is involved in spraying a toxic chemical dispersant over the Gulf of Mexico; and he says it has already traveled inland.

"Do I think there's dispersants coming in and mixing with our everyday lives?" Dr. Chris Pincetich asked, speaking with a group of activists.

"Absolutely," he pronounced.Pincetich, a marine biologist and toxicologist who works with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, was speaking to a group of activists who call themselves Project Gulf Impact.

Video of the interview quickly made its way to the Internet, where it has sparked renewed concern about the oil dispersant substance Corexit, being sprayed over the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the worst environmental accident in human history. Up until last week that dubious distinction was held by the Ixtoc underwater well disaster in 1979.

BP, the oil company responsible for a broken deep-water well that has been gushing oil and gas unabated since April 22, has been dumping massive amounts of the chemical stock ever since the disaster began as a way of keeping the oil off the water's surface. Thinned by dispersant, the oil mixes with the water column and forms underwater plumes that are less likely to wash ashore or be measured by satellite photography.

After initially approving Corexit, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency retracted its allowance and ordered BP to stop dumping thechemical substance by Sunday, May 23. BP ignored the order, as it had purchased more than a third of the world's supply of Corexit. Nalco Co., formed in-part by a longtime member of BP's board of directors, is in process of mass producing more in Sugarland, Texas.

The EPA followed up on May 26 by ordering BP to reduce the volume of Corexit output by 75 percent. Again, BP did not comply, according to CNN.

"Before May 26, BP used 25,689 gallons a day of the chemical dispersant Corexit," the network reported on July 2. "Since then, CNN's analysis shows, the daily average of dispersant use has dropped to 23,250 gallons a day, a 9 percent decline."

The EPA's Web site claims the agency and the Coast Guard are tightly monitoring BP's use of Corexit; it does not say that the Coast Guard is actively participating in the deployment thereof.

"The Federal Government reserves the right to discontinue the use of this dispersant method if negative impacts on the environment outweigh the benefits, and the Coast Guard’s Federal On-Scene Coordinator has the authority to make daily decisions regarding any request by BP to adjust the use of dispersant," the agency declared, even after its own orders were so obviously ignored.

"The exact makeup of [Corexit] is kept secret under competitive trade laws, but a worker safety sheet for one product, called Corexit, says it includes 2-butoxyethanol, a compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses,"Pro Publica noted.

However, Fast Company magazine added:

"In a statement to the Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group, toxicology expert Dr. William Sawyer elaborated on the risks associated with Corexit. According to Sawyer, Corexit is also known as deodorized kerosene--a substance with health risks to humans as well as sea turtles, dolphins, breathing reptiles, birds, and any species that need to surface for air exchanges."

Breathing dispersant fumes is what's thought to have sickened and number of spill response workers. Crew members aboard three separate vessels "reported experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains," according to the Coast Guard. Instead of ensuring workers had adequate access to respirators, BP CEO Tony Hayward claimed workers had fallen ill from food poisoning. Fishermen who've since joined the cleanup effort have been discouraged from wearing proper breathing equipment, allegedly because BP wants to stem the tide of "hysteria" over the disaster.

The chairman of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council called Corexit "worse than oil." However, at the end of June the EPA concluded a round of testing on the substance and declared Corexit to be "slightly toxic," but actually not worse than oil.

The New York Times reported:

Lab workers determined what concentration of dispersant was needed to kill half the fish or half the shrimp in the sample, measured in parts per million, and then classified the products in rather broad categories. Corexit, which becomes lethal to half the shrimp or fish at 130 parts per million, was labeled “practically nontoxic,” and dispersants that killed half the shrimp or fish in concentrations between 19 and 55 parts per million were labeled “slightly toxic.” The worst-ranking, Dispersit SPC 1000, killed half the aquatic life at 2.9 parts per million and was classed as “moderately toxic.’’

To the contrary, Yobie Benjamin with the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco of Naperville, Illinois (who, by the way just, hired some expensive lobbyists). Corexit is is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm).

In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled"Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview," Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed.

The substance is thought to become even more toxic when mixed with salty, oily water at high temperatures, such as those found on the Gulf's surface in the middle of summer.

Likewise, Dr. Pincetich argued that his background in toxicology and testing pesticides on marine life gives him a unique perspective on the EPA's measurement process.

"People need to realize that their water, their air, the sand they're walking on, the things they're touching when they wake up in the morning -- are coated with this stuff," he said. "If you see it in a high concentration, it looks like radiator fluid. It is not a pretty sight. The stuff is toxic. The tests say 'no effect.' I can tell you from managing those tests as a professional that you need to know exactly what test gave you what effect that you tested. So, if it was no effect on the survival of seven days of the fish, what happened to that fish at 10 days? That was my doctoral thesis."

"The pesticides that killed no fish at 96 hours, which is the EPA deadline -- 90 percent of them died two weeks later. These were embryonic salmon. There are a lot of chemical effects that are not being measured by the standard EPA tests."

Pincetich specifically cautioned that no matter how carefully Corexit is sprayed, the chemicals will always drift inland, or simply evaporate and return in condensation.

"[Corexit] basically disrupts the natural ability of oil to bond with itself," he said. "Oil bilipid layers next to each other are the very basis of life. Each of us is made out of cells. Those cells are nothing more than an oil layer surrounding ourproteinsand RNA and all the other molecules talking to each other. You put in a chemical that disrupts that basic biological structure and you are putting yourself at risk from umpteen effects."

The Coast Guard has banned reporters from getting near oil spill sites: a move that's been called an assault on the First Amendment. If indeed the guard is actively assisting BP in violating the EPA's order to significantly reduce Corexit output -- and if they've begun taking up night-time spraying missions on the company's behalf, as Dr. Pincetich claims -- then their reasons for shutting out the media become much easier to assume.

Dreadful as it sounds, the scenario would seem to lead reasonable observers in wondering why a foreign corporation is directing a branch of America's military.

Salon writer Glenn Greenwald opined similarly in a recent slight to what he called the "BP/Government police state," saying:

"The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable."