Scientists Ordered Not to Talk about Dophin Deaths in the Gulf of Mexico

Posted: March 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: open thread, Psychopaths in charge, Team Obama, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments

From Huffpo Green, via National Wildlife blog:

BILOXI, Mississippi — The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year’s BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.

Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.

The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an “unusual mortality event (UME),” had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.

A number of scientists said they have been personally rebuked by federal officials for “speaking out of turn” to the media about efforts to determine the cause of some 200 dolphin deaths this year, and about 90 others last year, in the Gulf.

On top of that, scientists are being kept in the dark about results of tests on the specimens they have collected and given to the government. That can’t be a good thing.

This is an open thread.

Monday: Hillary, Gerry, and No Limits

Posted: March 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, morning reads, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 72 Comments

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears during a pre-taping of "Face the Nation" to discuss the latest developments in Libya, Syria and the Middle East, in Washington March 26, 2011. (Reuters)

Hey all. Wonk the Vote here filling in with some Monday Reads for Kat while she rests up. Get well soon, Kat! We’re all thinking of you and sending you healing thoughts.

Alright news junkies, let’s get this morning roundup started.

Hillary on the Sunday Shows

  • Yesterday Hillary did a bunch of joint interviews with Robert Gates on the Sunday morning shows, basically doing all the leg work for Obama’s speech tonight. If you missed the Clinton-Gates interviews and would like to judge for yourself, Stacy at SecyClintonBlog has all the transcripts and videos up here.
  • I’ll let the headlines do the summarizing:

NYT: Clinton and Gates Defend Mission in Libya.

Huffpo/AP: Clinton, Gates: Libya Operation Could Last Months.

David Gregory: Clinton and Gates try to clarify U.S. involvement in Libya.

CBS News: Clinton: No military action in Syria for now.

Jake Tapper’s Political Punch: Clinton Cites Rwanda, Bosnia in Rationale for Libya Intervention. From the link:

In an interview with ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper on “This Week,” Clinton said that the United Nations-backed military intervention in Libya “is a watershed moment in international decision making. We learned a lot in the 1990s. We saw what happened in Rwanda. It took a long time in the Balkans, in Kosovo to deal with a tyrant. But I think in what has happened since March 1st, and we’re not even done with the month, demonstrates really remarkable leadership.”

[…]

In an interview on “This Week” in December, 2007, Clinton told George Stephanopoulos that she urged President Clinton to intervene in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide there.Then-Senator Clinton said, “I believe that our government failed. … I think that for me it was one of the most poignant and difficult experiences when I met with Rwandan refugees in Kampala, Uganda, shortly after the genocide ended and I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off who had seen their husbands and children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies, and then when I was able to go to Rwanda and be part of expressing our deep regrets because we didn’t speak out adequately enough and we certainly didn’t take action,” she told Stephanopoulos.

Hillary, on the passing of Gerry:

  • At the end of the Clinton-Gates appearance on Meet the Press, David Gregory played the “Ms. Ferraro, could you push the nuclear button” clip and asked Hillary to react to it. Here’s what Hill had to say (scroll to the end to find this in the transcript at the link):

SECRETARY CLINTON: It just makes me smile because she was an extraordinary pioneer, she was a path-breaker, she was everything that – now the commentators will say an icon, a legend. But she was down to earth, she was just as personal a friend as you could have, she was one of my fiercest defenders and most staunch supporters, she had a great family that she cherished and stood up for in every way.

And she went before many women to a political height that is very, very difficult still, and she navigated it with great grace and grit, and I think we owe her a lot. And I’ll certainly think about her every day, and thanks for asking me to reflect on it briefly, because she was a wonderful person.

“Gerry Ferraro was one of a kind — tough, brilliant, and never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for what she believed in — a New York icon and a true American original. She was a champion for women and children and for the idea that there should be no limits on what every American can achieve. The daughter of an Italian immigrant family, she rose to become the first woman ever nominated to the national ticket by a major political party. She paved the way for a generation of female leaders and put the first cracks in America’s political glass ceiling. She believed passionately that politics and public service was about making a difference for the people she represented as a congresswoman and Ambassador.

For us, Gerry was above all a friend and companion. From the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns to the important work of international diplomacy, we were honored to have her by our side. She was a tireless voice for human rights and helped lead the American delegation to the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Through it all, she was a loyal friend, trusted confidante, and valued colleague.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Gerry’s husband John, her children and grandchildren, and their entire family.”

(Note the use of Hillary’s trademark “No Limits” in the statement. There’s no higher compliment from Hill than that.)

Remembering Gerry from Queens

  • If you haven’t read Stacy’s tribute to Geraldine Ferraro yet, it’s by far my favorite. I was barely three years old when Mondale picked Ferraro. Stacy’s post gave me a sense of “meeting” Ferraro in the way that she was introduced to many of you in 1984.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department

Europe

Gulf of Mexico

Louisiana officials were confounded last weekend when a thin oil slick washed up on around 30 miles of Gulf shoreline. Initial tests sought to determine whether it might have been residual oil left over from last April’s massive Deepwater Horizon spill, but it turns out that yet another offshore drilling accident may have occurred. Tests matched the oil with crude that Houston-based Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners had reported spilling from one of its wells. The latest accident comes at a bad time for federal regulators, who have just approved four new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf — not to mention Gulf fishermen and residents.

MENA region

First, from NY Mag’s roundup… Five Men [allegedly] Arrested in Connection to Libyan Rape Allegations.

LA Times… Libyan woman who alleged rape remains missing:

The whereabouts of a woman who was taken away by security officials while making allegations of rape to Western journalists are unknown. A government official says she is a prostitute and that an inquiry is underway.

Nicholas Kristof, via twitter:

The heroic Libyan woman #EmanalObeidi turns out to be a law graduate, age 29, seized at checkpoint http://bit.ly/fNp4Nf

  • Speaking of Nick Kristof, he has an important piece out about the battle for human rights in Egypt…what Kristof calls Freedom’s Painful Price. He calls attention to the torture, humiliation, and degradation that the women protesters of Egypt are facing…the horrifying circumstance of virginity tests and calling women prostitutes to scare them into silence and submission. Kristof concludes:

The lesson may be that revolution is not a moment but a process, a gritty contest of wills that unfolds painstakingly long after the celebrations have died and the television lights have dimmed.

Previewing Obama’s Week-Late, Leadership-Short Speech Tonight

The speech from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., will be his first major attempt to explain his thinking.

He offered a preview in his weekly address on Saturday, saying that the U.S. should not and cannot intervene every time there is a crisis somewhere in the world.

But Obama said, “When someone like Gadhafi threatens a bloodbath that could destabilize an entire region, and when the international community is prepared to come together to save many thousands of lives — then it’s in our national interest to act.”

President Obama plans a Monday evening address with an increasingly common goal, to sell the American public on an increasingly unpopular war. But while those previous speeches were about the decade-long Afghan War, the Monday speech will be about the new war in Libya.

[…]

President Obama’s effort to sell the American public on support for a third major war will be complicated by admissions from top officials that the new war isn’t even a vital American interest in their eyes.

So what’s on your blogging list today?

Japan, Libya Crises Contribute to Crushing Election Defeat for Angela Merkel

Posted: March 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Germany, Libya, U.S. Military | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Angela Merkel

From NPR: Merkel Suffers Historic Defeat In German State

German chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives have suffered a historic defeat in a state ballot after almost six decades in power there, partial results showed Sunday, in an election that amounted to a referendum on the party’s stance on nuclear power.

The opposition anti-nuclear Greens doubled their voter share in Baden-Wuerttemberg state and seemed poised to win their first-ever state governorship, according to calculations based on partial results published by public broadcaster ARD….

The Greens secured 24 percent of the vote, with the center-left Social Democrats down 2 percentage points at 23.2 percent, giving them enough form a coalition government in the state, the results showed.

Representatives of all parties said the elections were overshadowed by Japan’s nuclear crisis, turning them into a popular vote on the country’s future use of nuclear power, which a majority of Germans oppose as they view it as inherently dangerous.

The UK Telegraph explains:

Although overseeing a surging economy and falling unemployment, Mrs Merkel attracted withering criticism after she decided to reverse an unpopular decision taken last autumn to extend the lifespans of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors.

Critics condemned the abrupt u-turn, and the decision to shut down seven of the oldest reactors pending a safety review, as blatant electioneering, claiming that Mrs Merkel hoped to capitalise from rising opposition to nuclear energy in Germany following the disaster engulfing the Fukushima reactors in Japan.

Libya was also an issue for voters:

the government’s refusal to support military intervention in Libya added to Mrs Merkel’s woes.

In comments echoing conservative disquiet with the decision Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister, said Germany had lost “credibility” on the world stage and had blown its chances of getting a seat at the UN Security Council.

It’s interesting that many Germans apparently wanted to help the Libyan rebels, while so many “progressives” in the U.S. opposed the UN/NATO intervention because Libya is not of much strategic importance to the U.S. and because of the cost.

Germans saw Merkel’s unwillingness to support the intervention in Libya as an embarrassment that could prevent Germany from getting a seat on the UN Security Council.

Here in the U.S., progressives (IMO) missed the importance of the U.S. President making a decision that concurred with the wishes of most of the Arab world–might that not be a better use of our military resources than endlessly pouring them into Afghanistan and Iraq. Just my 2 cents…

Just a couple of quick updates–

Libyan rebels are marching toward Tripoli

The last time the rebels made it as far west as Bin Jawad, it ended in disaster: their fighters ran into a murderous ambush, lost 70 men, and were forced into a terrifying retreat that nearly ended their campaign.

But yesterday, after a stunning sweep across the territory for which they have fought so hard and for so long, they were back.

This time, with Western air power destroying almost all that is left of the regime’s armour and artillery, the mood was very different. The rebels’ eyes were cast towards Sirte, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s birthplace and the centre of loyalist resistance.

[….]

The shift in momentum is palpable. Rebels are now back in possession of the two key oil complexes of Ras Lanuf and Brega which handle a sizeable proportion of the 1.5 million barrels a day the country used to export before the uprising. The opposition’s provisional administration in Benghazi stated that Qatar, which had joined the Western coalition in sending warplanes to Libya, would be marketing the oil. However, restarting production will be extremely difficult until the return of the foreigners who ran the plants, but left after the uprising.

In Japan, a 6.5 magnitude aftershock triggered a new tsunami warning, and workers have again left the Fukushima nuclear plant because of dangerously high radiation levels. From the Independent:

It [earthquake and tsunami alert] came after emergency workers fled from one of Fukushima’s stricken nuclear reactors yesterday, after contaminated water in the cooling system was apparently found to be 10 million times more radioactive than normal, only for officials to later say that the reading might have been inaccurate.

The latest confusion in the battle to bring Japan’s nuclear crisis under control came as villagers near the plant complained that they were being kept in the dark over radiation risks.

The technician who took the reading at reactor No 2 yesterday was so alarmed by the numbers that the team fled the building before taking a second measurement. And later, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the Fukushima plant, said: “There is a suspicion that the reading … is too high, so we are redoing our tests… We are very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Highly radioactive pools of water have formed inside all four of the damaged reactors, officials said. After previously downplaying fears of a serious breach in any of the reactors, Yukio Edano, the cabinet secretary and the face of the government throughout the crisis, said it “almost certainly” had happened.

The world is changing very rapidly, despite our government’s attempts to maintain the status quo. I wonder what dramatic news awaits us tomorrow?

Late Night: Obama = Bush on Steroids

Posted: March 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Psychopaths in charge, SCOTUS, Surreality, Team Obama, torture, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Prepare yourself for the next stage in the enactment of Total Information Awareness. The Obama administration is in the process of enacting a “mass surveillance state.” Raw Story reports that the FBI is working on “an advanced biometrics facility” that will also be used by the Pentagon.

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, attorney Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C., warned that this move in particular was indicative of a fast approaching mass surveillance state that poses a “grave danger” to American values.

The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.

To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.

Even more frightening is allowing the government and law enforcement to use facial mapping to keep tabs on all of us.

“Facial recognition is one of the most invasive biometrics because it allows surreptitious tracking at a distance,” Calabrese continued. “They can secretly track you from camera to camera, location to location. That has enormous implications, not just for security but also for American society. I mean, we are now at a point where we can automatically track people. Computers could do that. That’s what, we think, is a grave danger to our privacy.”

And that’s not all. You’ve probably heard that the Obama Justice Department has decided to ignore the Supreme Court Decision that requires Miranda warnings for crime suspects.

[On March 24,] the Obama DOJ unveiled the latest — and one of the most significant — examples of its eagerness to assault the very legal values Obama vowed to protect. The Wall Street Journal reports that “new rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.” The only previous exception to the 45-year-old Miranda requirement that someone in custody be apprised of their rights occurred in 1984, when the Rehnquist-led right-wing faction of the Supreme Court allowed delay “only in cases of an imminent safety threat,” but these new rules promulgated by the Obama DOJ “give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.”

Let’s see now, the President claims the power to identify any American citizen as a terrorist, on his word only. Once you are labeled a terrorist, you can be held without charges, you have no Habeus rights, and no Miranda rights. You can be tortured in a foreign country or right here in the US of A. Not only that, but you can even be assassinated without trial if the President so orders. We even have emergency laws.

The government isn’t going to need martial law to control the population. We’ll be living in an electronic police state, our every move filmed and examined for suspicious behavior.

We might as well be living in Libya or Egypt.

Libyan Woman Disappeared? (UPDATED)

Posted: March 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Libya, Violence against women | Tags: | 33 Comments

Eman al-Obeidy displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet. (Jerome Delay/AP)

Some very disturbing footage and developments out of Tripoli this Saturday.

Warning: This is a very grim story and the footage is raw.

The New York Times reports that a Libyan woman is dragged off by government officials as she tries to tell journalists that she had been tied up, urinated and defecated on, and raped by 15 of Gaddafi’s men:

TRIPOLI, Libya — A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.

[…]

She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”

The NYT Lede has raw footage up here.

Lisa Holland filed this report from Tripoli for Sky News (post continues after youtube):

The bruises and injuries the woman showed to journalists match up with her story of being bound up, beaten, and raped.

From what I can make of the following reporting from Wapo and Forbes, Charles Clover of the Financial Times, one of the journalists attacked as he tried to intervene/report, had his recording device taken away by Gaddafi’s henchmen before he was deported. A CNN camera was also confiscated and the cameraman found himself at gunpoint when he tried to take it back.

Washington Post:

“I was tied up. They defecated on me. They urinated on me. They violated my honor,” she said.

But as she spoke, hotel staff members, security guards and government minders closed in on her and began dragging her away. Journalists who tried to protect her were punched, and one, Charles Clover of the Financial Times, was knocked to the ground and kicked. Shortly afterward, Clover was deported after being informed at 2 a.m. that he would have to leave the country because the government didn’t like his reporting.

Two waitresses grabbed knives and screamed that the woman was a “traitor” to Gaddafi, and one threw a coat over her head in an effort to silence her. Government minders, who are assigned to supervise and supposedly protect journalists, snatched a CNN camera and smashed it, and one of them pulled a pistol when the cameraman tried to take it back.

Eventually the woman, screaming, “They are taking me to jail,” was hauled outside to an unmarked saloon car, which whisked her away at high speed.

Kiri Blakely/Forbes blog:

In the ensuing chaos, reporters were beaten off and threatened as they tried to protect the woman and get her story, and hotel staff suddenly began working in tandem with security staff to get the woman off the premises. A reporter for the Financial Times had his recording device, which had recorded the woman’s testimony, wrested from him.

As Kiri Blakely goes on to report, Gaddafi’s regime is accusing the woman of being drunk and delusional:

The story is tragic and horrible, and I fear for the woman’s life. Adding yet another horrific, and all too common, element to the tale is that the woman’s testimony of sexual and physical abuse, reportedly backed up by physical evidence, was then dismissed as “fantasies” by the Libyan government. The government went on to say that the woman appeared “drunk” and “mentally ill.”

I will try to update this post or do a follow-up as more information becomes available.

UPDATE — Apparently Libyan government officials, now under media scrutiny and facing questions of where al-Obeidy is and how she is being treated, have referred to this as a case of rape — a shift from the ‘drunk and delusional’ narrative being pushed by the government earlier. Via Al Jazeera:

At a hastily arranged press conference following the incident, Moussa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said investigators had told him that the woman was drunk and possibly mentally challenged.

Anita McNaught, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tripoli, said: “The government initially suggested that she was drunk … but when they [officials] came back to the journalists later to reassure them that she was being well cared for … they did describe this as a case of rape.”

Also, more details on what al-Obeidy told reporters about the men from Gaddafi’s militia who attacked her:

Before she was dragged out of the hotel, al-Obeidi was able to tell journalists that she was detained by a number of troops at a Tripoli checkpoint on Wednesday.

She said they were drinking whiskey and handcuffed her and that 15 men later raped her.

Here’s the Al Jazeera report via youtube posted at the link:

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