Un recorrido unico por el campo.Al final se llega al Rio Cubuy en donde s epuede acampar y refrescarse.Pra mas informacion comunicate conmigo a mig.p6165@gmail.com.El costo es de $10.00 pp.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Part II: Tom Engelhardt on "The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s"
We discuss the latest in the ongoing US war in Afghanistan—the longest running war in American history—with Tom Engelhardt, creator and editor of the website Tomdispatch and author of "The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s." Engelhardt says the U.S. war in Afghanistan has troubling parallels with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan of the 1980s.
Watch Part I of this interview HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, with our web exclusive with Tom Engelhardt. His book is just coming out now; it’s called The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. Last week, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, said he expected violence and casualties will increase in the coming months.
- GEN. STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: Well, I think that we are pressuring the enemy, and I think they are reacting to that. As we predicted, violence would go up, the more places we were, the more forces that we use to take the momentum away from the enemy. I think it’s likely that our casualties and violence will continue to rise, particularly through the summer months. They could rise well into the fall.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Stanley McChrystal, General McChrystal. Tom Engelhardt, you do TomDispatch.com. You’ve got your new book, The American Way of War. Chapter three is "Air War, Barbarity, and Collateral Damage." Talk about McChrystal’s comments and what’s happening in Afghanistan.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Yes, the reality of modern war, from the early twentieth century on, is that what we call collateral damage has increasingly become the central damage of the war. Collateral damage means damage to civilians. But as war has progressed into our time, you could really say that the soldiers, increasingly, on either side, are the collateral damage, and increasingly, the civilians are the central damage of any war. We can’t count—I mean, we have no idea, despite the counts that you see of actual Afghan deaths, for instance. I mean, who knows what’s happening in small villages we haven’t heard about?
Americans, except on our drone planes, which are kind of sexy, these our new wonder weapons, we pay no attention to air war. But we’ve, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve bombed, you know, countysides. We’ve bombed cities in Iraq. And in the case of TomDispatch, I think I may be the only website in the United States or on the planet—I don’t know—that’s tried to count the number of wedding parties that American—the American Air Force has knocked out in Iraq and Afghanistan. I got up to about seven. I find this shocking. But here, we are incredibly detached from the wars that we fight. And as long as we are thinking in terms of our own safety, we think very little about wedding parties, funerals, baby naming parties. I mean, all of these things can—are because air war is the least—despite what you hear about smart bombs and, you know, precision-guided weaponry, if you’re going to fight from the air—and that is part of the American way of war—you are going to kill civilians, period. And you’re going to probably kill them in greater numbers than any other way. That’s just a fact of war, I would say.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to get back to this question you raise of the garrison state.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Yes.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And obviously, as the United States moved more and more toward a professional, as opposed to a drafted, army, more Americans have become disconnected from the reality of the American military machine around the world. But how extensive is the garrison state? Or, remind some of our viewers and listeners about that.
TOM ENGELHARDT: It’s very striking. I mean, the Pentagon, depending on what year you look at the reports, they 'fess up to 700-odd sites, they call them, bases large and small. And these go from fairly small sites, or places where they may even cache weapons or something without a lot of human beings, to what in essence are enormous American towns. I mean, at one point, Balad Air Base in Iraq, with maybe 20,000 people there—troops, contractors, whatever—had the air traffic of O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I mean, these are enormous places, you know, fifteen, twenty miles around, with bus routes, [inaudible], massage parlors. You know, some of them are quite extraordinary. And those 700-odd bases don’t include, in fact, Balad. They don’t include bases in war zones. We had, at our height, about 300 bases, large to small, in Iraq. And we have been in a building frenzy since the surge in Afghanistan. So we have now, Nick Turse of TomDispatch has estimated, 400 bases—these are from micro to macro—in Afghanistan. And we’re not stopping. To give you a simple example, the Special Forces, Army Special Forces, are supposed to get a $100 million base built for them, you know, seventeen acres in northern Afghanistan, which will be done—since it’s just starting now, it will be done about the time that President Bush—that’s an interesting slip—President Obama claims that we’re going to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. So our basing around the world is—it’s really staggering. I would guess, maybe if you include war zones and also countries that don’t admit—it’s just uncomfortable. Jordan doesn’t want to say there’s an American base there; it’s just awkward. Pakistan, we share bases, so not counted as a base. Maybe 1,200 or more. That would be my guess, including the war zones.
And this is unprecedented historically. I mean, I think Britain had forty bases around the world. The Romans, to go back to, since these are the two things that we were compared to back in 2003, 2004, thirty-seven or thirty-eight. I mean, that was a lot then. There’s nothing like this. I mean, and we, of course, don’t take territory. It’s a very odd kind of imperial structure. We take bases. There are gunboats pushed deep into land. The gunboats that the Europeans used to take much of the world, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth century, these are our land gunboats. That’s really what they are.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Tom Engelhardt. You write about the Bush legacy, what Bush did wrong, and then you move to Obama’s war.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Yeah, I do. Well, I mean, what’s interesting is you’ve got two men who couldn’t, in many ways—I think we can agree, we’re not talking about Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. We’re talking about two people with remarkably different personae, thought processes and whatever. What’s startling is, given all that and given that they’re coming at each of these problems, the war problems, from a different perspective, how often they land at the same place. And I think that tells you that there’s a kind of momentum, like the momentum to build that base in northern Afghanistan. There’s a war momentum, which has the potential to sweep any president along, you know?
I mean, in fact, the Obama administration has followed the policies of, really, the last part of the Bush administration, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and maybe even hiked Afghanistan farther than the Bush people would. I mean, the surge in Afghanistan, we usually hear about 30,000 troops. That’s what’s talked about. But the actual surge in Afghanistan was—it was a surge in troops. It was a surge in CIA operations. It was a surge in special forces operations. It was a large surge in contractors. There was a large surge in base building. There was a significant surge in trying to send in State Department people and, when they couldn’t find them, Pentagon people, etc., etc., etc. So, the level of the surge in this war is bigger than we imagined, and it does seem like a kind of war momentum. And it does seem to me as if we are in both a war state, with Washington as the war capital, and an eternal, permanent state of war at this point. And Americans are largely unaware of that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet—you mentioned the surge in Afghanistan—the progress is almost invisible. There was a startling article in the Washington Post a few days ago about the situation in Marjah, where supposedly the Agency for International Development has funding for 10,000 jobs for the local citizens, but they’re having trouble recruiting people. They tried to organize a women’s group in the town, and no women would show up. They were ready to provide water pumps, hundreds of water pumps for residents, and no one would take them, because they were afraid that the water pumps would be a sign to the Taliban that they were collaborating with the US government. So, in essence, even the pacification efforts of the government are failing in the town that they noted as the example of where they were going to roll back the gains of the Taliban.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Yeah, this was to be the success, and then they were to move on to Kandahar. Now, this area, Marjah, that you’re talking about, it was presented as a city or a town of 80,000 people. It seems clearly now to be a set of connected agricultural villages of maybe 35,000 to 40,000 people. We threw 15,000 troops in, which should, from a counterinsurgency handbook standpoint, be right—you know, about one troop for every two or three people in the area. And, as you say, it’s not worked.
Now, our next offensive, theoretically, recently delayed, is to be in Kandahar. But think of Kandahar as Detroit. I mean, numbers are almost unknown in Afghanistan, but Kandahar has between 500,000 a million people. It’s an enormous city. It’s not a Taliban-controlled city, either, weirdly enough, when we say we’re going to take it. It’s in some in-between state. And I think the truth is that we have a—in Afghanistan, we have a set of tactics, which we call counterinsurgency. They’re procedures, you might say, and they’re out of a kind of a warmed-over Vietnam textbook. But I think basically that this administration and its soldiers, they’re in a kind—you know, they talked about rolling out a government in a box. That was what our war commander said in Marjah. They’re in a kind of a box. I talked to a journalist coming back from Afghanistan recently, who said, you know, they cannot see outside the American box in Afghanistan. And I honestly don’t think they know what they’re doing.
The Bush people, the one thing you can say about them is they were visionaries, in a sense. I mean, they were—you might call them mad visionaries, but they had a vision of the whole planet. It was a geopolitical vision. It involved energy flows, what countries you would take, who you would roll back. It involved the use of American power. It led to various disasters. This administration is, like, managing that war momentum, but I actually don’t think they have a large vision at all of how the world is working. I don’t feel any of that. I feel a deep sense of confusion. And in Washington, there is starting to be some discussion of that now, of the actual strategic confusion of the Bush administration. So I think things look pretty [inaudible]—
JUAN GONZALEZ: Of the Obama administration.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Of the Obama administration. You know, I don’t feel—
JUAN GONZALEZ: You keep slipping.
TOM ENGELHARDT: I don’t feel the two men are similar at all, but their war policies are so similar it’s hard for me not to say that. It’s true. I mean, it’s just startling that their war policies aren’t different.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you know, I’m thinking of Helen Thomas’s last questioning of President Obama, when she asked about why we’re in Afghanistan and talked again about the casualties and who will keep raising these questions. But Obama gave a lesson on, well, we’re attacking the enemy. We’re attacking those that attacked us on September 11th, and we must prevail.
TOM ENGELHARDT: Yeah, it’s that same—it’s the same line about al-Qaeda. I mean, the advantage of al-Qaeda, if you look at it again in the Soviet perspective—the Soviet Union disappeared, and there was no enemy left in the world. A few rogue states, like North Korea, who became the Axis of Evil, sooner or later. But they were very small. They were like—they were like just shrimps in the world. The advantage of al-Qaeda—which really was a ragtag outfit of, you know, a few thousand people scattered around the world, and, you know, some in Afghanistan—after 9/11 was it could be blown up to any size. So it was a very convenient enemy to begin to enter a kind of a war state. And it’s remained that way.
I think, quite honestly, the real question in Afghanistan is not are we doing well or are we doing badly, but why are we doing anything in Afghanistan, when, you know, it is the most—it is the backlands of the world. That money, we desperately need here. And the truth is, we would be a lot safer in a million different ways, if in fact, in 1991, we had not put our money into the military and the military-industrial complex, we had put it into a peace dividend. Imagine where we’d be now, you know? Just as in 1979 with Carter, if anybody had listened to him in that famed "malaise" speech when he had called for alternative energy research, you know, I mean, we’d be in a different world.
But these moments were missed, and we plowed down this military road, and it’s left us in distant wars that, I think at this point, why they’re being managed, nobody really understands. Nobody can imagine getting out, but nobody can—I mean, nobody up there—but nobody can imagine quite why we’re doing it. So they still mention al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is real, but, you know, they’re not really fighting a war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, that’s for sure. They’re fighting something else.
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T-Shirt Bring DN! to Your Community Today’s Show * Headlines * Report: 27,000 Abandoned Wells Pose Threat to Gulf Coast * ProPublica: BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just Before Gulf Blowout * Photographer Harassed by BP Security, Detained by Police While on Assignment at BP Texas Refinery * Outrage in Oakland: Transit Officer Convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter–Not Murder–in Killing of Unarmed Oscar Grant * Gary Rivlin on "Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.–How the Working Poor Became Big Business" RECENT SHOWS Thursday, July 08, 2010 * Headlines * A Debate on Geoengineering: Vandana Shiva vs. Gwynne Dyer * Gwynne Dyer on "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats" * Juan Gonzalez Remembers Puerto Rican Analyst Juan Manuel García Passalacqua * Military Psychologists Face Complaints With Licensing Boards Over Roles at Guantanamo Wednesday, July 07, 2010 * Headlines * After U.S. Praise for Netanyahu’s "Restraint", Israeli Journalist Amira Hass Asks Obama to Imagine Life as A Palestinian Under Occupation * As Dalai Lama Marks 75th Birthday, A Look at His Views on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Tibet * BP Oil Spill Cleanup Workers Getting Sick, Exxon Valdez Survivor Warns of Long Term Health Effects * Media Clampdown in the Gulf Coast: Government and BP Place More Restrictions on Journalists Covering the Oil Spill Tuesday, July 06, 2010 * Headlines * Environmentalist Facing 3-Year Prison Sentence For Unfurling Banners in Senate Office Building * Plaintiff in ACLU Suit Challenging Government No-Fly List Describes Struggle, First Against Deportation, Then To Be Allowed to Board a Plane * "Promised Land"–New Doc Follows Struggles Over Land in South Africa * Puerto Rican Attorney, Historian & Analyst Juan Manuel García-Passalacqua, 73, Dies * Scientist Working With Government Says BP Restricting Access to Study Gushing Oil Well BLOG * If Only Information Flowed as Freely as Oil The U.S. Coast Guard has announced new rules keeping the public, including photographers and reporters covering the BP Oil Spill, from coming within 65 feet of any response vessels or booms on the water or on beaches. Violators could face a fine of up to $40,000 and felony charges. Listen Filed under Weekly Column * Web Exclusive Are Sports Boring? Arun Gupta Debates Dave Zirin Sports-debate As the World Cup draws to a close, we turn to a lively debate on the political and social relevance of sports. Arun Gupta, a founding editor of the Indypendent, debates Nation Magazine sports columnist Dave Zirin. Filed under Web Exclusive * We Can’t Afford War The U.S. will eventually negotiate its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only difference between now and then will be the number of dead, on all sides, and the amount of (borrowed) money that will be spent. Listen Filed under Weekly Column * Web Exclusive Detroit Poet Jessica Care Moore at the U.S. Social Forum Jessica-care-moore Jessica Care Moore is an acclaimed Detroit poet. Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke caught up with Jessica at the U.S. Social Forum. Filed under Web Exclusive * Another World Is Possible, Another Detroit Is Happening “I have a dream.” Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. In fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit, leading a march down Woodward Avenue. Listen Filed under Weekly Column * Amy Goodman to appear on Al-Jazeera English with Kimberly Halkett Democracy Now!’s award-winning host Amy Goodman will talk about the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit on Al Jazeera English with Kimberly Halkett on Tuesday, June 22nd at 9 pm Eastern Time. Watch live at 9pm EST: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/. Filed under D.N. in the News * Web Exclusive Part II: Tom Engelhardt on "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" Engelhardt Engelhardt is the creator and editor of the website Tomdispatch. His latest book is "The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s." Filed under Web Exclusive * Web Exclusive Part II: Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater Owner Erik Prince's Rumored Move to UAE and Obama Admin's Expansion of Special Forces Operations Abroad Pt2scahill Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist, Democracy Now! correspondent, and author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Watch Part I of this interview HERE. Filed under Web Exclusive * Xml More Blog Posts » Podcasting & Torrents * DN! Audio & Video Podcasts * Democracy Now! by BitTorrent Post this story to a social networking site Include this video in your blog or website « Previous Story | Next Story » July 09, 2010 Photographer Harassed by BP Security, Detained by Police While on Assignment at BP Texas RefineryPhotographer Harassed by BP Security, Detained by Police While on Assignment at BP Texas Refinery
We speak with Lance Rosenfield, a freelance photographer who was hired by ProPublica to take pictures of BP’s Texas City refinery that had spewed thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies. While on assignment Rosenfield was followed by BP Security and then detained by local police.JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn to look at a story about the oil giant BP that has received nearly no national attention. Just over three months ago, thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals began spewing into the skies from BP’s massive oil refinery in Texas City. The release began on April 6, two weeks before the explosion on the deepwater horizon oil rig, but it took BP weeks to even realize there was a problem. BP now estimates 538,000 pounds of chemicals and escaped from the refinery over 40-day period.
AMY GOODMAN: The journalist Ryan Knutson of ProPublica and Frontline recently traveled to Texas City to investigate what happened. He joins us here in New York. His reporting on the story appears on the website ProPublica.org. Welcome, Ryan, tell us what you found.
RYAN KNUTSON: Thanks, well we sorta went at this with the question of well, you know, in 2005 BP had a disaster at this Texas City refinery where 15 people were killed. And after that event, you know BP made—said it was a transformational of event, they would make a lot of changes to the organiz-, or to their company. The deep water horizon happens—we wanted to examine, well what was the lead up to that explosion and what has been the outcome of the promises to improve the company. And, it didn’t take long to start finding that there has still been a lot of issues at the Texas City refinery. And most notably, what I thought was interesting was – this was a story that was actually in the Daily News of Galveston County on June 5 that hadn’t received any attention elsewhere, that there had been this 538,000 pound release.
And what happened in that circumstance was there was something called an ultracracker at this refinery, and it takes—it’s an, an important step in the process to produce gasoline. And there’s a hydrogen compressor on this ultracracker and it broke down. And what it does is it, it captures a lot of pollution that’s emitted from this and it, it disposes of it safely. Now when that broke down, BP had a choice: do we shut down the ultracracker and lose an important part of producing gasoline that we’d have to buy elsewhere or maybe reformulate the gasoline, or do we send everything to a flare and burn it off into the atmosphere? Now flares at best case can destroy 98% of the chemicals that are sent to it. So 2% they know is gonna release. At best case there’s also studies that show that as much as 20% of what is sent to a flare doesn’t get destroyed and is, sent off into the atmosphere.
So they decided to send it to a flare and, it took them 40 days to make the repairs. And once they were finished, by the time they had, finished analyzing all the data they had collected during the emissions event, they determined that 538,000 pounds of chemicals released into the atmosphere, most notably, 17,000 pounds of Benzene. Now in the state of Texas, if you emit more than 10 pounds in a 24-hour period, you’re supposed to report that as an emissions event. In this case, 425 pounds of Benzene were being released, every 24 hours for 40 days, ultimately leading up to 17,000 pounds.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this is already a plant that already a plant that has one of the highest Benzene release rates in the country, isn’t it?
RYAN KNUTSON: Right, the Sierra Club did a study, that, from, looking at reportable in emissions events from 1997-2007 and found that the Texas City refinery was the number one releaser of Benzene in the United States. BP says that it has reduced, its Benzene emissions there by I believe 23% over each year, or 50% from last year. So the numbers have gone down significantly, since that 2007 study was completed. But, as you know, environmental advocates make the case, well there’s already a lot of Benzene coming from that refinery, there’s a lot of Benzene because—in the Texas City community because there’s a couple of other refineries there.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how is it possible for this release to go on for so long? You would assume that if they know that they, they were trying to burn some of these gases off with a flare that they would have a likelihood of a potential for extra releases that they’d be monitoring it on a daily basis.
RYAN KNUTSON: Right, and that the thing I had a hard time pinning down from the, the BP people I spoke with. Because I know that, what they said originally is they’ve got a, a method that’s approved by Texas regulators to monitor this along the way. And what they—I know that they have fence line monitors that are about 6 feet high. And so if there—if it reaches any sort of threshold, then it pages officials at the refinery and they make a decision. And so apparently, the fence line monitors—didn’t go off. Now the, the flare is 300 feet tall. So clearly, this is gonna kinda go out and sorta spread around. And so there’s various signs about what the concentration is once it reaches the ground. It depends on the wind and things like that.
AMY GOODMAN: What does Benzene do?
RYAN KNUTSON: Well, Benzene is a known carcinogen. So it doesn’t necessarily have immediate…I don’t know – I imagine if you’re in a room full of it you’d start coughing and wheezing and that sort of thing. But, it’s proven that it’ll increase your cause or your likelihood of getting cancer.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Especially Leukemia, right?
RYAN KNUTSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, fined the company, BP, $87 million for failing to address safety problems from 2005 when they killed 15 people.
RYAN KNUTSON: Yeah, in ‘05, they were, they, they settled with OSHA for $21 million and they agreed to a number of improvements at the plant. And one of the, the main things that they agreed to is they were gonna hire an independent auditor to come in and do an examination of the plant, point out things that need to be improved. OSHA says that, BP should have made all those improvements by the end of 2009. BP says that it was under the impression that they just needed the auditor point these things out by September 2009 and that they could make these improvements as they made maintenance upgrades along the way.
AMY GOODMAN: Well I wanted to go to the issue of the difficulty of reporting this. I want to bring in Lance Rosenfield, the freelance photographer hired by ProPublica to take pictures of BP’s Texas City refinery. While on assignment, he was followed by BP security, then detained by local police. He joins us now from Austin, Texas. Lance Rosenfield, welcome to "DEMOCRACY NOW!" Describe what happened to you.
LANCE ROSENFIELD: Simply put, I was hired by ProPublica to augment the story that’s Ryan Knutson is speaking of, and I was taking photographs. It was a two-day assignment so I had various parts to cover, including, basically giving a portrait of the town itself. So I’d found a decorative ‘Welcome to Texas City’ sign on a public highway south of town near the refinery. And, simply put, I was taking pictures of that sign. I pulled off the shoulder like I would normally do, of the public street, walked over to the median, took the pictures, and then walked back to my car. And I was going to go back to my hotel to file the pictures and I noticed I was being followed by security truck.
So I needed gas anyway. I did not feel like going—letting this guy, you know, follow me to my hotel. So I pulled into the gas station. He continued on, so I thought really nothing of it. Then police pulled in and essentially, you know, blocked me in as if I was gonna to try to go anywhere. And, got out, asked who I was. They had got reports that I was taking photographs. And I said, ‘Yes, I’m a photojournalist.’ And they said, ‘We need to see your pictures.’ I said, well, you know, ‘Without a warrant, I don’t feel like I need to show you the pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, we can, we can – you can show ‘em to us now or we can do this later with Homeland Security.’ It seemed to me like a, some sort of additional threat.
So because I was on deadline, I made the decision to show them the pictures. I just wanted to get this over with, I knew I had nothing, you know, threatening on my photographs. I showed them the pictures and he took my information. At this time the, the security guard that was following me had turned back around, pulled into the parking lot. He was a BP security guard. And the BP security guard asked for my information as well. And I, I declined because he’s a corporate security guard. So he turned to the police officer who had just taken my information, including my Social Security Number, and gave—I’m not sure exactly what of the information that the police officer took—what of that he gave to the BP officer, but he gave him whatever he needed.
And, so I protested. I said I didn’t understand why that was happening. I didn’t – I was never on BP property. And, and so I asked, ‘Under what, what grounds he was able to share my information with a private corporation?’ And basically, I didn’t get a straight answer. I just got, ‘Well, this is Homeland Security procedure. We can call Homeland Security agent Tom Robison down here, you know, if you have a problem with it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m just trying to understand what legal grounds you have to do this, because I was never on BP property.’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll just call Tom Robison.’
So he called Tom Robison, who at time I didn’t know who he was, of course. I’ve found out since that he’s, he’s a local police corporal who is a liaison to the FBI and Homeland Security. So—and he heads the local joint terrorism task force there in Texas City, and I guess, maybe the region. So, but at that time I did not know who he was—they just referred to him as FBI and Homeland Security.
They called Tom Robison. He actually gave me the phone, which I thought was a little unusual, but my natural reaction is to take the phone. Tom Robison got on the phone and asked what my problem was. And I said, ‘I’m just kind understand why this is happening with BP getting my information.’ He said, ‘You’re staying there. Don’t go anywhere until I get there.’ So I gave the phone back to the police officer. He said, you know, ‘You need to stay.’
And at that point, I felt like, you know, the police officer had looked at my photographs on my camera, he had determined that there was no threat. And at this point, why was I being detained? It wasn’t clear to me, other than the fact that Tom Robison wanted to come down. So he showed up and basically approached me in a very antagonistic and aggressive manner. Um, he was shaking, he was worked up, he was loud, he was boisterous, he asked what my problem was. He said his main concern was my attitude. And, you know, all I was trying to do was find out why BP was getting my information. And, you know, it was his antagonistic behavior that I had a problem with. I felt like he was harassing me. The BP security guard stepped in and they both, you know, were trying to relate my activity as a photojournalist to terrorist activity—
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Lance, was there any follow up by ProPublica to find – to understand why this was happening or under what basis? ‘Cause obviously if you had been with one of those automated cameras of Google in car, just driving down the road taking photos, there wouldn’t have been any problem, would there?
LANCE ROSENFIELD: [Laughs] I guess not. You know, I don’t know. There was follow-up. And the statement that we got from BP said that they were following federal law. And there was a, there was another statement that BP followed up with, with once this sort of hit the blogosphere and airwaves. Um, BP sent another, reaction to ProPublica that gave the actual federal code that they were following. So—that was my answer, I mean, there was, in fact, a federal code that says BP is required by federal law to submit a report to NRC. My question then is, and I’m not a lawyer, but my question then is, well if I was never on BP property and there were no infractions—I was not arrested—then still why was BP getting my information? That to me is still unclear.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re gonna leave it there and we’re gonna continue to follow this from Texas City to the Gulf of Mexico where new rules have been laid down for journalists, making it much more difficult for photographers, videographers to get close to clean-up areas. This is an issue we’ll continue to cover. Lance Rosenfield, thanks for joining us, freelance photographer who is working for ProPublica, and Ryan Knutson for your piece, the latest piece called, "BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just
AMY GOODMAN: The journalist Ryan Knutson of ProPublica and Frontline recently traveled to Texas City to investigate what happened. He joins us here in New York. His reporting on the story appears on the website ProPublica.org. Welcome, Ryan, tell us what you found.
RYAN KNUTSON: Thanks, well we sorta went at this with the question of well, you know, in 2005 BP had a disaster at this Texas City refinery where 15 people were killed. And after that event, you know BP made—said it was a transformational of event, they would make a lot of changes to the organiz-, or to their company. The deep water horizon happens—we wanted to examine, well what was the lead up to that explosion and what has been the outcome of the promises to improve the company. And, it didn’t take long to start finding that there has still been a lot of issues at the Texas City refinery. And most notably, what I thought was interesting was – this was a story that was actually in the Daily News of Galveston County on June 5 that hadn’t received any attention elsewhere, that there had been this 538,000 pound release.
And what happened in that circumstance was there was something called an ultracracker at this refinery, and it takes—it’s an, an important step in the process to produce gasoline. And there’s a hydrogen compressor on this ultracracker and it broke down. And what it does is it, it captures a lot of pollution that’s emitted from this and it, it disposes of it safely. Now when that broke down, BP had a choice: do we shut down the ultracracker and lose an important part of producing gasoline that we’d have to buy elsewhere or maybe reformulate the gasoline, or do we send everything to a flare and burn it off into the atmosphere? Now flares at best case can destroy 98% of the chemicals that are sent to it. So 2% they know is gonna release. At best case there’s also studies that show that as much as 20% of what is sent to a flare doesn’t get destroyed and is, sent off into the atmosphere.
So they decided to send it to a flare and, it took them 40 days to make the repairs. And once they were finished, by the time they had, finished analyzing all the data they had collected during the emissions event, they determined that 538,000 pounds of chemicals released into the atmosphere, most notably, 17,000 pounds of Benzene. Now in the state of Texas, if you emit more than 10 pounds in a 24-hour period, you’re supposed to report that as an emissions event. In this case, 425 pounds of Benzene were being released, every 24 hours for 40 days, ultimately leading up to 17,000 pounds.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this is already a plant that already a plant that has one of the highest Benzene release rates in the country, isn’t it?
RYAN KNUTSON: Right, the Sierra Club did a study, that, from, looking at reportable in emissions events from 1997-2007 and found that the Texas City refinery was the number one releaser of Benzene in the United States. BP says that it has reduced, its Benzene emissions there by I believe 23% over each year, or 50% from last year. So the numbers have gone down significantly, since that 2007 study was completed. But, as you know, environmental advocates make the case, well there’s already a lot of Benzene coming from that refinery, there’s a lot of Benzene because—in the Texas City community because there’s a couple of other refineries there.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how is it possible for this release to go on for so long? You would assume that if they know that they, they were trying to burn some of these gases off with a flare that they would have a likelihood of a potential for extra releases that they’d be monitoring it on a daily basis.
RYAN KNUTSON: Right, and that the thing I had a hard time pinning down from the, the BP people I spoke with. Because I know that, what they said originally is they’ve got a, a method that’s approved by Texas regulators to monitor this along the way. And what they—I know that they have fence line monitors that are about 6 feet high. And so if there—if it reaches any sort of threshold, then it pages officials at the refinery and they make a decision. And so apparently, the fence line monitors—didn’t go off. Now the, the flare is 300 feet tall. So clearly, this is gonna kinda go out and sorta spread around. And so there’s various signs about what the concentration is once it reaches the ground. It depends on the wind and things like that.
AMY GOODMAN: What does Benzene do?
RYAN KNUTSON: Well, Benzene is a known carcinogen. So it doesn’t necessarily have immediate…I don’t know – I imagine if you’re in a room full of it you’d start coughing and wheezing and that sort of thing. But, it’s proven that it’ll increase your cause or your likelihood of getting cancer.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Especially Leukemia, right?
RYAN KNUTSON: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, fined the company, BP, $87 million for failing to address safety problems from 2005 when they killed 15 people.
RYAN KNUTSON: Yeah, in ‘05, they were, they, they settled with OSHA for $21 million and they agreed to a number of improvements at the plant. And one of the, the main things that they agreed to is they were gonna hire an independent auditor to come in and do an examination of the plant, point out things that need to be improved. OSHA says that, BP should have made all those improvements by the end of 2009. BP says that it was under the impression that they just needed the auditor point these things out by September 2009 and that they could make these improvements as they made maintenance upgrades along the way.
AMY GOODMAN: Well I wanted to go to the issue of the difficulty of reporting this. I want to bring in Lance Rosenfield, the freelance photographer hired by ProPublica to take pictures of BP’s Texas City refinery. While on assignment, he was followed by BP security, then detained by local police. He joins us now from Austin, Texas. Lance Rosenfield, welcome to "DEMOCRACY NOW!" Describe what happened to you.
LANCE ROSENFIELD: Simply put, I was hired by ProPublica to augment the story that’s Ryan Knutson is speaking of, and I was taking photographs. It was a two-day assignment so I had various parts to cover, including, basically giving a portrait of the town itself. So I’d found a decorative ‘Welcome to Texas City’ sign on a public highway south of town near the refinery. And, simply put, I was taking pictures of that sign. I pulled off the shoulder like I would normally do, of the public street, walked over to the median, took the pictures, and then walked back to my car. And I was going to go back to my hotel to file the pictures and I noticed I was being followed by security truck.
So I needed gas anyway. I did not feel like going—letting this guy, you know, follow me to my hotel. So I pulled into the gas station. He continued on, so I thought really nothing of it. Then police pulled in and essentially, you know, blocked me in as if I was gonna to try to go anywhere. And, got out, asked who I was. They had got reports that I was taking photographs. And I said, ‘Yes, I’m a photojournalist.’ And they said, ‘We need to see your pictures.’ I said, well, you know, ‘Without a warrant, I don’t feel like I need to show you the pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, we can, we can – you can show ‘em to us now or we can do this later with Homeland Security.’ It seemed to me like a, some sort of additional threat.
So because I was on deadline, I made the decision to show them the pictures. I just wanted to get this over with, I knew I had nothing, you know, threatening on my photographs. I showed them the pictures and he took my information. At this time the, the security guard that was following me had turned back around, pulled into the parking lot. He was a BP security guard. And the BP security guard asked for my information as well. And I, I declined because he’s a corporate security guard. So he turned to the police officer who had just taken my information, including my Social Security Number, and gave—I’m not sure exactly what of the information that the police officer took—what of that he gave to the BP officer, but he gave him whatever he needed.
And, so I protested. I said I didn’t understand why that was happening. I didn’t – I was never on BP property. And, and so I asked, ‘Under what, what grounds he was able to share my information with a private corporation?’ And basically, I didn’t get a straight answer. I just got, ‘Well, this is Homeland Security procedure. We can call Homeland Security agent Tom Robison down here, you know, if you have a problem with it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m just trying to understand what legal grounds you have to do this, because I was never on BP property.’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll just call Tom Robison.’
So he called Tom Robison, who at time I didn’t know who he was, of course. I’ve found out since that he’s, he’s a local police corporal who is a liaison to the FBI and Homeland Security. So—and he heads the local joint terrorism task force there in Texas City, and I guess, maybe the region. So, but at that time I did not know who he was—they just referred to him as FBI and Homeland Security.
They called Tom Robison. He actually gave me the phone, which I thought was a little unusual, but my natural reaction is to take the phone. Tom Robison got on the phone and asked what my problem was. And I said, ‘I’m just kind understand why this is happening with BP getting my information.’ He said, ‘You’re staying there. Don’t go anywhere until I get there.’ So I gave the phone back to the police officer. He said, you know, ‘You need to stay.’
And at that point, I felt like, you know, the police officer had looked at my photographs on my camera, he had determined that there was no threat. And at this point, why was I being detained? It wasn’t clear to me, other than the fact that Tom Robison wanted to come down. So he showed up and basically approached me in a very antagonistic and aggressive manner. Um, he was shaking, he was worked up, he was loud, he was boisterous, he asked what my problem was. He said his main concern was my attitude. And, you know, all I was trying to do was find out why BP was getting my information. And, you know, it was his antagonistic behavior that I had a problem with. I felt like he was harassing me. The BP security guard stepped in and they both, you know, were trying to relate my activity as a photojournalist to terrorist activity—
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Lance, was there any follow up by ProPublica to find – to understand why this was happening or under what basis? ‘Cause obviously if you had been with one of those automated cameras of Google in car, just driving down the road taking photos, there wouldn’t have been any problem, would there?
LANCE ROSENFIELD: [Laughs] I guess not. You know, I don’t know. There was follow-up. And the statement that we got from BP said that they were following federal law. And there was a, there was another statement that BP followed up with, with once this sort of hit the blogosphere and airwaves. Um, BP sent another, reaction to ProPublica that gave the actual federal code that they were following. So—that was my answer, I mean, there was, in fact, a federal code that says BP is required by federal law to submit a report to NRC. My question then is, and I’m not a lawyer, but my question then is, well if I was never on BP property and there were no infractions—I was not arrested—then still why was BP getting my information? That to me is still unclear.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re gonna leave it there and we’re gonna continue to follow this from Texas City to the Gulf of Mexico where new rules have been laid down for journalists, making it much more difficult for photographers, videographers to get close to clean-up areas. This is an issue we’ll continue to cover. Lance Rosenfield, thanks for joining us, freelance photographer who is working for ProPublica, and Ryan Knutson for your piece, the latest piece called, "BP Texas Refinery Had Huge Toxic Release Just
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