Author: admin
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Greens leader begs Libs & ALP for climate action
Tasmanian Greens Deputy Leader Nick McKim says the Federal government has abrogated its responsibility on climate change but the Tasmanian government is just as bad for not seeking mandatory cuts in emissions.
Dropping MRETs is Howard’s failure: "We think that John Howard’s abandonment of the mandated renewable energy targets is a shame and demonstrates his personal failure and the failure of his government to come to grips with what I regard as the most important issue currently facing policy makers in the world," McKim told state parliament on 27/9/2006.
Policy scuttles wind project:The "complete gutting" of Hydro Tasmania’s plans to proceed with the Musselroe wind farm was a byproduct of the Federal government’s stance, he said.
Tasmania fails on target cuts: McKim, speaking after he had released a leaked draft of the Tasmanian Labor government’s climate change strategy, criticised its failure to broach a local emissions reduction scheme.
South Australia has easier road: He noted that the South Australian Labor government had legislated to reduce greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by the year 2050. Given that Tasmania generated most of its electricity by renewable means, it would be easier for South Australia to achieve any given emissions reduction target, he conceded.
Massive failure by Labor: "But for the Lennon government to choose not only not to legislate for any mandatory emissions reduction targets but not to even propose a process by which we can discuss whether or not we ought to legislate is a massive failure and puts them right next to John Howard on this issue.
Policy will cost economy: "Mr Howard and his government and Mr Lennon and his government have manifestly failed to come to grips with the issue of climate change and as a result are costing this state and this country not only environmentally but, very importantly, economically as well."
Climate health is paramount: McKim said the climate change issue was more important than health. "Let me put it like this. If you are going to build a new Royal Hobart Hospital, it is no use putting one where it is going to be under water in 20 years."
Reference: Anatomical Examinations Bill 2006 (No. 39). First Reading. Bill presented by Ms Giddings and read the first time.
Erisk Net, 4/10/2006
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New Indonesia Calamity: A Man-Made Mud Bath
Sigit Pamungkas/ReutersHouses in Sidoarjo, in Indonesia, were inundated by mud late last month, the result of a natural gas drilling project that has gone awry.
Eight villages are completely or partly submerged, with homes and more than 20 factories buried to the rooftops. Some 13,000 people have been evacuated. The four-lane highway west of here has been cut in two, as has the rail line, dealing a serious blow to the economy of this region in East Java, an area vital to the country’s economy. The muck has already inundated an area covering one and a half square miles.
And it shows no signs of stopping.
The mud is rising by the hour, and now spewing forth at the rate of about 170,000 cubic yards a day, or about enough to cover Central Park.
Foreign companies, environmental groups and political observers are now watching closely to see whether the government will hold the company that drilled the well accountable for the costs of the cleanup, which could easily reach $1 billion.
The company is part of a conglomerate controlled by Aburizal Bakrie, a cabinet member and billionaire who was a major contributor to the campaign of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The disaster occurred as the company, Lapindo Brantas, drilled thousands of feet to tap natural gas and used practices that geologists, mining engineers and Indonesian officials described as faulty.
But as the liabilities have escalated, Lapindo was sold — for $2 — last month to an offshore company, owned by the Bakrie Group, and many fear it will declare bankruptcy, allowing its owners to walk away.
Mr. Bakrie declined to be interviewed. A spokeswoman for Lapindo, Yunawati Teryana, said that it was too early to conclude that Lapindo had acted negligently. She noted that some geologists had said this was a natural disaster, a natural mud volcano, perhaps set off by seismic activity in the area.
Government officials and company engineers are not hopeful that they can contain the problem. In what Indonesian officials describe as the best of the worst options, the government plans to pump the mud into the Porong River, which flows into the sea 20 miles north of here.
“It will be the death of the ecosystem around that area,” said Amien Widodo, an environmental geologist who teaches at the November 10 Institute of Technology in Surabaya. There is debate whether the mud is toxic. But the sheer volume alone will smother just about everything in its path, he said.
The area’s commerce has already been devastated.
“We are angry because we were living comfortably in our own home and now we are forced to leave,” Reni Matakupan said as she stood here looking across 200 yards of mud at her family’s factory, DeBrima, which was filling with mud.
The problems began in late May when the company had reached about 9,000 feet, Mr. Widodo said. It continued to drill to this depth even though it had not installed what is known as a casing around the well to the levels required under Indonesian mining regulations, and good mining practices, he said.
The company experienced problems with the drilling that led to a loss of pressure in the well. That is when the mud started seeping in from the sides of the unprotected well bore, at a depth of about 6,000 feet.
The mud was stopped by cement plugs that the company had inserted into the well hole. The mud then sought other avenues of escape, eventually breaking through the earth, and creating mud volcanoes in several places that resemble the geysers of Yellowstone.
If the proper casing had been in place, the mud would not have entered the well, Mr. Widodo said, and would not have discovered these other avenues to the surface, a conclusion supported by mining engineers. Several Western and Indonesian mining engineers spoke about the matter, some offering graphs and mining details that have not been made public, but only on the condition that they not be identified, for fear of running afoul of Mr. Bakrie, the billionaire company owner.
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The Deeper Evil Behind US Detainee Bill
It was a dark hour indeed last Thursday when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone – American citizens included – whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough – a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush – powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality – there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed – and used – openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide – arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal – is an "enemy combatant."
That’s right; from the earliest days of the Terror War – September 17, 2001, to be exact – Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you’re an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he’ll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it’s simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents – and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.
And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush’s royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill – with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.
"’There won’t be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,’ Olson said in the interview. ‘There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.’"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism – and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record – a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There’s nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know – if they choose to know it.
II.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton’s White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president’s right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" – that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw – as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation’s collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy’s adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency’s wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner’s son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to … enter countries surreptitiously."
What’s more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations – in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television – Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA’s term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere – including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush’s hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush’s "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush’s death squad, but even celebrated it. I’ll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush’s state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide – "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let’s put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects – and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects – had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds – or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators … applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man’s bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law – our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill – but only when they knew the it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush’s presidential tyranny were already clear – or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America’s liberties over the past five years – these fine words might have had some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should’st be living at this hour; America has need of thee.
Chris Floyd is an American journalist. He is the author of the book, Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime
. Visit his website www.chris-floyd.com
Source: Information Clearing House
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Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Sept. 28 — It was his infant son’s cries, gasping and insistent, that first woke Salif Oudrawogol one night last month. The smell hit him moments later, wafting into the family’s hut, a noxious mélange reminiscent of rotten eggs, garlic and petroleum.
Candace Feit for The New York TimesA worker helping to clean up toxic sludge last week in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The sludge, dumped from a tanker, has been blamed for eight deaths.
Candace Feit for The New York TimesSix-month-old Salam Oudrawogol of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, has been covered with sores since he was exposed to toxic waste in August. More Photos »
Mr. Oudrawogol went outside to investigate. Beside the family’s compound, near his manioc and corn fields, he saw a stinking slick of black sludge.
“The smell was so bad we were afraid,” Mr. Oudrawogol said. “It burned our noses and eyes.”
Over the next few days, the skin of his 6-month-old son, Salam, bloomed with blisters, which burst into weeping sores all over his body. The whole family suffered headaches, nosebleeds and stomach aches.
How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization. It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.
So far eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized and 85,000 have sought medical attention, paralyzing the fragile health care system in a country divided and impoverished by civil war, and the crisis has forced a government shakeup.
“In 30 years of doing this kind of work I have never seen anything like this,” said Jean-Loup Quéru, an engineer with a French cleanup company brought in by the Ivorian government to remove the waste. “This kind of industrial waste, dumped in this urban setting, in the middle of the city, never.”
The tale of the sludge can be traced to July 2, when a rust-streaked tanker, the Probo Koala, arrived in Amsterdam after a lengthy stay in the Mediterranean. Leased by Trafigura, a global oil and metals trading company, it was pausing on its way to Estonia to unload what the company said was 250 tons of “marslops” or “regular slops.” That is the wash water from cleaning a ship’s holds, which would normally be laced with oil, gasoline, caustic soda or other chemicals.
Amsterdam Port Services, a waste processing company, took the job, for about $15,000. But as workers unloaded the waste, they found problems, the company said. For one, the volume was much higher, more like 400 tons. For another, the seeping fumes of the waste sickened some of the Dutch workers.
“It was pitch black and had a heavy stench,” said Luut Planting, a spokesman for Amsterdam Port Services. “No one had ever seen similar waste.”
The company stopped unloading the sludge, ordered analyses and then informed the Amsterdam city authorities of the presence of hazardous waste, Mr. Planting said. The material and test results are currently under seal in the office of the Dutch public prosecutor, which has opened a criminal investigation.
A statement posted on Trafigura’s Web site says that tests performed on material discharged by the Probo Koala in Abidjan by a laboratory in Rotterdam showed that the material was not toxic. “Contrary to speculation in the media and the activist communities about residue washings in a recent shipment to Côte d’Ivoire, tests conducted by the company and others show the washings themselves to have little or no toxicity,” the statement says.
As to the deaths and illness, the statement says, “It is still unclear exactly what caused the tragedy.”
But the Rotterdam laboratory, Saybolt, has told Dutch news media that it was asked only for a limited analysis and that the samples were not sealed, not properly marked and not wholly reliable.
Lucas Reijnders, a chemist and professor of environmental science at the University of Amsterdam, said he had seen the results of an analysis done in Ivory Coast by a lab there, Ciapol, on samples taken from the Probo Koala before the dumping.
The analysis showed extremely high levels of caustic soda; mercaptans, a kind of sulfur compound; and hydrogen sulfide, he said. The last, he said, is a volatile compound that “smells of rotten eggs, but at high concentrations you can no longer smell it because it paralyzes your nervous system.”
“It’s very lethal and acts very rapidly,” he added. The mix, he said, was suggestive of oil refining.
Exactly where the waste originated remains unclear. A spokesman for Trafigura, Jan Maat, said the Probo Koala had served in the Mediterranean “as a floating storage tank” and had taken on loads from several different ships, but he declined to give details.
Reports in the Dutch press said the Probo Koala had been secretly used as a floating refinery during the summer, when selling gasoline had become unusually profitable.
Mr. Maat denied that. “This is absolutely untrue,” he said.
Source: The New York Times
