Month: May 2009

COAL, MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL AND YOU

May 31, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

In mid-May, Obama’s EPA cleared 42 of 48 new mountaintop removal mining permits.

The practice of mountaintop removal is attractive to the coal industry because it doesn’t require as much labor as traditional mining does, so they don’t have to pay as many workers. They simply blow the mountain up to get to the seams of coal inside.
But these corporate profits translate into public misery. One million acres of the central and southern Appalachian Mountains have been destroyed, including about one thousand miles of streams.

In the process, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Mining companies are clear cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests. They’re filling local rivers and streams with blasted debris, polluting drinking water with toxic waste and sacrificing the safety and sanctity of countless communities.”

Here is a satellite collage of Boone and Logan Counties, West Virginia, in the Reagan years compared with the same area as the tanks rolled into Baghdad two decades later:

The intrepid Morgan Spurlock, by the way, spends 30 Days as a coal miner, and you can watch a clip addressing mountain top removal here.

And if you want to find your own electric connection to mountain top removal, here is a useful tool.

(I typed in my own downtown L.A. zip code and found that yes, indeed, I am complicit in the mountaintop removal process as a customer of the Los Angeles DWP, which is the the biggest customer of Intermountain Power Agency, which purchases coal from companies engaged in mountaintop removal mining.)

CONTINUITIES 3

May 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Obama cheers at his daughter’s soccer game while children of lesser consequence recover from the deadly U.S. air strikes by unmanned drones in the Farah province of Afghanistan.

Honestly, it is hard to keep up with all of the ways the Obama administration represents continuity with the Bush Administration. Here are some more things to add to the list….

Under the Obama administration, as under the Bush administration,attack on Afghan villages by U.S. drones are still a common occurrence– and it looks like these attacks will only increase.

Here is a report about another instance of a drone strike in North Waziristan, where 29 people were killed in the village of Mirali on May 16.

These deadly robots are remote controlled by brave soldiers sitting in air conditioned trailers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.(USA today posted a softball piece about the training program here.)

Prisoners at Guantanamo are still being stripped of their rights and tortured by brutal extrajudicial “Immediate Reaction Force” thugs.  See here and especially here.

Obama is resorting to a modified version of Bush style military commissions to try Guantanamo detainees, instead of in civilian courts which suffer from an inadmissibility of evidence beaten out of those who would be presumed innocent. See also here.

Obama is continuing the cover-up Bush crimes. I have already posted about how Obama’s DOJ has been been trying to evoke the “state secrets privilege” to block evidence of the U.S. torture regime under Bush.

Now he is refusing to release another batch of “prisoner abuse” photos. See also here. (John Dean thinks that Obama was forced to block release of the photos by “National Security” bereaucrats.)

The Obama administration has also threatened the British government to keep torture evidence concealed.

ANOTHER U.S. MASSACRE OF AFGHAN CIVILIANS

May 7, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

From Rebel Reports:

As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a US bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead andwounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The US airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with US-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans — perhaps as many as 2,000 — poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting “Death to America.” The protesters demanded a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

A statement from the Red Cross is here. The Guardian covers it here. Al-Jazeera covers the incident here:

CONTINUITIES 2

May 2, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

After 100 days in office it is clear that the candidate who ran on “change” is continuing, and even amplifying, many of the worst policies of the Bush years: continued war and occupation of Iraq, escalation of war in Afghanistan, expansion of war into Pakistan, increased military funding, using “state secrets” to block torture victims from having their day in court, continuing the practice of rendition, expanding the American gulag at Bagram, and arguing against prosecution for war criminals.

Regarding this last point, Obama has rendered himself as incoherent as his predecessor ever was.  Upon the release of the torture memos, he issued a statement that included the following two contradictory claims:

  1. “The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals.”
  2. “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

You can’t coherently maintain that the U.S. is a nation of laws AND that U.S. government officials who break the law should not be subject to prosecution.  (Even if they were torturing people “in good faith”.)

And it is mind numbingly hypocritical to say that your administration “will always act in accordance with those laws” and in the very same speech assert your intention to break them. Here are the relevant quotes from Article 2 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, signed by Reagan in ’88 and ratified by Congress in ’94:

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or athreat of war, internal political in stability or any other publicemergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

“An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”


In his remarks to the C.I.A., Obama has (again) exposed himself as a liar, a hypocrite and, now, a criminal.