Sunday, September 07, 2014 9:01:33 PM
Crime Scene – New Orleans
"Losing Ground"
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
By Greg Palast for Reader Supported News
[Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans] Nine years ago this week, New Orleans drowned. Don’t you dare blame Mother Nature. Miss
Katrina killed no one in this town. But it was a homicide, with nearly 2,000 dead victims. If not Katrina, who done it? Read on.
---
The Palast Investigative Fund is making our half-hour investigative report available as a free download .. http://www.gregpalast.com/bigeasydownload/ – Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans, produced for Democracy Now. In the course of the filming, Palast was charged with violation of anti-terror laws on a complaint from Exxon Corporation. Charges were dropped, and our digging continued.
It wasn’t an Act of God. It was an Act of Chevron. An Act of Exxon. An Act of Big Oil.
Take a look at these numbers dug out of Louisiana state records:
Conoco 3.3 million acres
Exxon Mobil 2.1 million acres
Chevron 2.7 million acres
Shell 1.3 million acres
These are the total acres of wetlands removed by just four oil companies over the past couple decades. If you’re not a farmer, I’ll translate this into urban-speak: that’s 14,688 square miles drowned into the Gulf of Mexico.
Here’s what happened. New Orleans used be to a long, swampy way from the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes and storm surges had to cross a protective mangrove forest nearly a hundred miles thick.
But then, a century ago, Standard Oil, Exxon’s prior alias, began dragging drilling rigs, channeling pipelines, barge paths and tanker routes through what was once soft delta prairie grass. Most of those beautiful bayous you see on postcards are just scars, the cuts and wounds of drilling the prairie, once America’s cattle-raising center. The bayous, filling with ‘gators and shrimp, widened out and sank the coastline. Each year, oil operations drag the Gulf four miles closer to New Orleans.
Just one channel dug for Exxon’s pleasure, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet ("MR-GO") was dubbed the Hurricane Highway by experts—long before Katrina—that invited the storm right up to—and over—the city’s gates, the levees.
Without Big Oil's tree and prairie holocaust, "Katrina would have been a storm of no note," Professor Ivor van Heerden told me. Van Heerden, once Deputy Director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, is one of the planet’s the leading experts on storm dynamics.
If they’d only left just 10% of the protective collar. They didn’t.
Van Heerden was giving me a tour of the battle zone in the oil war. It was New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, which once held the largest concentration of African-American owned homes in America. Now it holds the largest contrition of African-American owned rubble.
We stood in front of a house, now years after Katrina, with an "X" spray-painted on the outside and "1 DEAD DOG," "1 CAT," the number 2 and "9/6" partly covered by a foreclosure notice.
The professor translated: "9/6" meant rescuers couldn’t get to the house for eight days, so the "2"—the couple that lived there––must have paddled around with their pets until the rising waters pushed them against the ceiling and they suffocated, their gas-bloated corpses floating for a week.
In July 2005, Van Heerden told Channel 4 television of Britain that, "In a month, this city could be underwater." In one month, it was. Van Heerden had sounded the alarm for at least two years, even speaking to George Bush’s White House about an emergency condition: with the Gulf closing in, the levees were 18 inches short. But the Army Corps of Engineers was busy with other rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates.
[Oh! Is that mention new to anyone else, too? Has anyone seen that twist in any articles on the New Orleans disaster before? See article below.]
So, when those levees began to fail, the White House, hoping to avoid Federal responsibility, did not tell Louisiana's Governor Kathleen Blanco that the levees were breaking up. That Monday night, August 29, with the storm by-passing New Orleans, the Governor had stopped the city’s evacuation. Van Heerden was with the governor at the State Emergency Center. He said, "By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew."
So, the drownings began in earnest.
Van Heerden was supposed to keep that secret. He didn't. He told me, on camera––knowing the floodwater of official slime would break over him. He was told to stay silent, to bury the truth. But he told me more. A lot more.
"I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."
Well, they did shut him down. After he went public about the unending life-and-death threat of continued oil drilling and channelling, LSU closed down its entire Hurricane Center (can you imagine?) and fired Professor van Heerden and fellow experts. This was just after the University received a $300,000 check from Chevron. The check was passed by a front group called "America’s Wetlands"—which lobbies for more drilling in the wetlands.
In place of Van Heerden and independent experts, LSU’s new "Wetlands Center" has professors picked by a board of petroleum industry hacks.
In 2003, Americans protested, "No Blood for Oil" in Iraq. It’s about time we said, "No Blood for Oil"—in Louisiana.
* * * * * *
For more revelations from Professor van Heerden...
http://www.gregpalast.com/crime-scene-new-orleans/
===
Volume 8, Number 1 • Winter 2006
Water and Security in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin: Yet Another Crisis?
By: Frederick Michael Lorenz, JD, LLM
Birachik Lake in southeast Turkey.
Since ancient times, the Tigris-Euphrates Basin has been the scene of intense conflict. Today the modern countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran share the Basin’s dwindling fresh water resources. Dams and development along the rivers, increasing population, and decreasing water quantity and quality will cause the water issue to reach crisis proportions in the next ten to fifteen years. Understanding the problem involves the study of complex political, economic, environmental and security factors in the Basin. While there is no easy solution, there may be some important contributions to be made by engineers and water professionals that will help the parties move towards regional cooperation.
In Turkey, the Southeast Anatolia Development Project (GAP in Turkish) is moving ahead and will eventually transform an area about the size of the State of Tennessee. The GAP includes 13 major irrigation and hydropower schemes that involve the construction of 21 dams and 19 power plants on the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Virtually all of the hydropower units are now completed but construction of the irrigation infrastructure is behind schedule and may take another 20 years to complete. As more land is brought into production in Turkey, the amount of water available to the country’s neighbors to the south will decrease. And the return flow from agriculture will surely reduce the quality of water flowing into Syria and Iraq. A careful review of regional development and water availability data indicates that demand will certainly exceed supply in the coming years. Even more important is the question of water quality, though little data is available on this point. Each country takes the view that water information is a state secret, and rarely makes it available to outsiders. This complicates or makes impossible any serious cooperation between the parties.
Writers have been predicting “water wars” for years, but the reality is much more complex. A water crisis in this region may not look like a classic shooting war; we are more likely to see tensions, exacerbated relations, human suffering and irreconcilable national interests. With additional demands being made on the rivers by uncooperative parties, water quantity and quality will be a central cause of regional instability, leading to a decline in economic and public health conditions. When weak or authoritarian governments fail to provide enough water for their people they are more susceptible to challenge by radical groups. All this does not bode well for regional security, or United States interest in the Middle East. Cooperation over water resources is not a high priority for the international community right now, with so many other pressing and troublesome issues involving Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Despite the current turmoil in Iraq, there is an opportunity now to promote an effective transboundary water initiative for Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The new Ministry of Water Resources in Iraq has received support from the U.S. and is moving ahead despite tremendous obstacles, not the least of which is security. There are a number of working models that can provide insight, such as the Nile Basin Initiative in Africa and the Mekong River Commission coordinating water management efforts in Southeast Asia. Water Management professionals and engineers can help inform the regional parties and build shared capacity on experience and techniques to complement eventual governmental discussions.
A Syrian well.
What can be done to assist? There should be an increased emphasis on modern information technology to monitor and assess water data in the region. There is an increasing understanding in the international scientific community of the interplay between water quality and quantity. The U.S. engineering community could take the lead with a coordinated project including other worldwide engineering communities to gather data on water flow, topography, irrigation, hydrology and consumption rates now and projected at least ten years into the future. The technology and assets are available; they need to be directed to this strategically important region. This includes a reservoir simulation model and a master plan for the entire basin. Such a project is underway for Iraq at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC)] in Davis, California.
In the short term, the assistance of international water professionals can lead to an exchange of data between the parties that could be a first step towards greater cooperation in the Basin. Now is the time for action, and this subject must take a higher priority on the international policy agenda. The benefits will go far beyond the mere availability of water; efforts now will help support long term peace and stability in the region.
Frederick Michael Lorenz is a retired U.S. Marine colonel who currently teaches “Water and Security in the Middle East” at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington in Seattle. With his co-author Edward J. Erickson he is working on a book “Hydropolitics and Security in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin” and can be
reached at rsrchassc@aol.com or lorenz@u.washington.edu.
http://email.asce.org/ewri/TigrisEuphrates.html
~~~
War over Water (Jordan river)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about geopolitical struggle between Israel vs.
Jordan and Syria. For other water conflicts, see War over Water
.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(disambiguation).
The "War over Water" (Hebrew: ?????? ?? ????, HaMilhama al HaMaim), also the Battle over Water (Hebrew: ???? ?? ????, HaKrav al HaMaim), refers to a series of confrontations between Israel and its Arab neighbors from November 1964 to May 1967 over control of available water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin. .. with links .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_%28Jordan_river%29
See also:
Helen was born, August 4th 1920 .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas .. then there was ..
The Jaffa riots were riots and killings that took place in the British controlled Palestine between 1 and 7 May 1921. Together with the previous year's Nebi Musa riots, they are commonly considered as the first violent confrontation in what would become the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian conflict - though Israel as a state would only be formed decades later.
[...]
Arab–Israeli conflict
Jerusalem riots (1920) – Jaffa riots (1921) – Palestine riots (1929) – Arab revolt (1936–1939) – Civil War (1947–1948) – Arab-Israeli War (1948–1949) – Retribution operations (1951-1966) – Suez Crisis (1956) – War over Water (1964–1967) [e added here] – Six-Day War (1967) – War of Attrition (1967–1970) – Wrath of God (1972–1979) – Yom Kippur War (1973) – South Lebanon conflict (1978) – Lebanon War (1982) – South Lebanon conflict (1982–2000) – First Intifada (1987–1993) – Second Intifada (2000–2005) – Shebaa Farms conflict (2000-2006) – Lebanon War (2006) – Gaza War (2008–2009) ... http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51009162
This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destruction [...]
To be fair, Bush doesn't rest his entire bid for rehabilitation on animal faeces. His new book, Decision Points, deploys several methods. There is contrition, limited and always qualified; blame-shifting and finger-pointing, most notably over his government's inertia in the face of Hurricane Katrina, standing idle as New Orleans drowned [my e]; and pleas for mitigation, typified by his suggestion that Guantánamo wasn't that bad – after all, prisoners had personal copies of the Qur'an and access to a library that included "an Arabic translation of Harry Potter". Above all is the Blair-style insistence that, while some of the practicalities might have gone awry, his principles were sound and just.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=56533375
Decision expected on plug for BP's broken oil well
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53305110
Judge ends Katrina flooding lawsuits against feds
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95375187
"Losing Ground"
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
By Greg Palast for Reader Supported News
[Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans] Nine years ago this week, New Orleans drowned. Don’t you dare blame Mother Nature. Miss
Katrina killed no one in this town. But it was a homicide, with nearly 2,000 dead victims. If not Katrina, who done it? Read on.
---
The Palast Investigative Fund is making our half-hour investigative report available as a free download .. http://www.gregpalast.com/bigeasydownload/ – Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans, produced for Democracy Now. In the course of the filming, Palast was charged with violation of anti-terror laws on a complaint from Exxon Corporation. Charges were dropped, and our digging continued.
It wasn’t an Act of God. It was an Act of Chevron. An Act of Exxon. An Act of Big Oil.
Take a look at these numbers dug out of Louisiana state records:
Conoco 3.3 million acres
Exxon Mobil 2.1 million acres
Chevron 2.7 million acres
Shell 1.3 million acres
These are the total acres of wetlands removed by just four oil companies over the past couple decades. If you’re not a farmer, I’ll translate this into urban-speak: that’s 14,688 square miles drowned into the Gulf of Mexico.
Here’s what happened. New Orleans used be to a long, swampy way from the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes and storm surges had to cross a protective mangrove forest nearly a hundred miles thick.
But then, a century ago, Standard Oil, Exxon’s prior alias, began dragging drilling rigs, channeling pipelines, barge paths and tanker routes through what was once soft delta prairie grass. Most of those beautiful bayous you see on postcards are just scars, the cuts and wounds of drilling the prairie, once America’s cattle-raising center. The bayous, filling with ‘gators and shrimp, widened out and sank the coastline. Each year, oil operations drag the Gulf four miles closer to New Orleans.
Just one channel dug for Exxon’s pleasure, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet ("MR-GO") was dubbed the Hurricane Highway by experts—long before Katrina—that invited the storm right up to—and over—the city’s gates, the levees.
Without Big Oil's tree and prairie holocaust, "Katrina would have been a storm of no note," Professor Ivor van Heerden told me. Van Heerden, once Deputy Director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, is one of the planet’s the leading experts on storm dynamics.
If they’d only left just 10% of the protective collar. They didn’t.
Van Heerden was giving me a tour of the battle zone in the oil war. It was New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, which once held the largest concentration of African-American owned homes in America. Now it holds the largest contrition of African-American owned rubble.
We stood in front of a house, now years after Katrina, with an "X" spray-painted on the outside and "1 DEAD DOG," "1 CAT," the number 2 and "9/6" partly covered by a foreclosure notice.
The professor translated: "9/6" meant rescuers couldn’t get to the house for eight days, so the "2"—the couple that lived there––must have paddled around with their pets until the rising waters pushed them against the ceiling and they suffocated, their gas-bloated corpses floating for a week.
In July 2005, Van Heerden told Channel 4 television of Britain that, "In a month, this city could be underwater." In one month, it was. Van Heerden had sounded the alarm for at least two years, even speaking to George Bush’s White House about an emergency condition: with the Gulf closing in, the levees were 18 inches short. But the Army Corps of Engineers was busy with other rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates.
[Oh! Is that mention new to anyone else, too? Has anyone seen that twist in any articles on the New Orleans disaster before? See article below.]
So, when those levees began to fail, the White House, hoping to avoid Federal responsibility, did not tell Louisiana's Governor Kathleen Blanco that the levees were breaking up. That Monday night, August 29, with the storm by-passing New Orleans, the Governor had stopped the city’s evacuation. Van Heerden was with the governor at the State Emergency Center. He said, "By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew."
So, the drownings began in earnest.
Van Heerden was supposed to keep that secret. He didn't. He told me, on camera––knowing the floodwater of official slime would break over him. He was told to stay silent, to bury the truth. But he told me more. A lot more.
"I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."
Well, they did shut him down. After he went public about the unending life-and-death threat of continued oil drilling and channelling, LSU closed down its entire Hurricane Center (can you imagine?) and fired Professor van Heerden and fellow experts. This was just after the University received a $300,000 check from Chevron. The check was passed by a front group called "America’s Wetlands"—which lobbies for more drilling in the wetlands.
In place of Van Heerden and independent experts, LSU’s new "Wetlands Center" has professors picked by a board of petroleum industry hacks.
In 2003, Americans protested, "No Blood for Oil" in Iraq. It’s about time we said, "No Blood for Oil"—in Louisiana.
* * * * * *
For more revelations from Professor van Heerden...
http://www.gregpalast.com/crime-scene-new-orleans/
===
Volume 8, Number 1 • Winter 2006
Water and Security in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin: Yet Another Crisis?
By: Frederick Michael Lorenz, JD, LLM
Birachik Lake in southeast Turkey.
Since ancient times, the Tigris-Euphrates Basin has been the scene of intense conflict. Today the modern countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran share the Basin’s dwindling fresh water resources. Dams and development along the rivers, increasing population, and decreasing water quantity and quality will cause the water issue to reach crisis proportions in the next ten to fifteen years. Understanding the problem involves the study of complex political, economic, environmental and security factors in the Basin. While there is no easy solution, there may be some important contributions to be made by engineers and water professionals that will help the parties move towards regional cooperation.
In Turkey, the Southeast Anatolia Development Project (GAP in Turkish) is moving ahead and will eventually transform an area about the size of the State of Tennessee. The GAP includes 13 major irrigation and hydropower schemes that involve the construction of 21 dams and 19 power plants on the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Virtually all of the hydropower units are now completed but construction of the irrigation infrastructure is behind schedule and may take another 20 years to complete. As more land is brought into production in Turkey, the amount of water available to the country’s neighbors to the south will decrease. And the return flow from agriculture will surely reduce the quality of water flowing into Syria and Iraq. A careful review of regional development and water availability data indicates that demand will certainly exceed supply in the coming years. Even more important is the question of water quality, though little data is available on this point. Each country takes the view that water information is a state secret, and rarely makes it available to outsiders. This complicates or makes impossible any serious cooperation between the parties.
Writers have been predicting “water wars” for years, but the reality is much more complex. A water crisis in this region may not look like a classic shooting war; we are more likely to see tensions, exacerbated relations, human suffering and irreconcilable national interests. With additional demands being made on the rivers by uncooperative parties, water quantity and quality will be a central cause of regional instability, leading to a decline in economic and public health conditions. When weak or authoritarian governments fail to provide enough water for their people they are more susceptible to challenge by radical groups. All this does not bode well for regional security, or United States interest in the Middle East. Cooperation over water resources is not a high priority for the international community right now, with so many other pressing and troublesome issues involving Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Despite the current turmoil in Iraq, there is an opportunity now to promote an effective transboundary water initiative for Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The new Ministry of Water Resources in Iraq has received support from the U.S. and is moving ahead despite tremendous obstacles, not the least of which is security. There are a number of working models that can provide insight, such as the Nile Basin Initiative in Africa and the Mekong River Commission coordinating water management efforts in Southeast Asia. Water Management professionals and engineers can help inform the regional parties and build shared capacity on experience and techniques to complement eventual governmental discussions.
A Syrian well.
What can be done to assist? There should be an increased emphasis on modern information technology to monitor and assess water data in the region. There is an increasing understanding in the international scientific community of the interplay between water quality and quantity. The U.S. engineering community could take the lead with a coordinated project including other worldwide engineering communities to gather data on water flow, topography, irrigation, hydrology and consumption rates now and projected at least ten years into the future. The technology and assets are available; they need to be directed to this strategically important region. This includes a reservoir simulation model and a master plan for the entire basin. Such a project is underway for Iraq at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC)] in Davis, California.
In the short term, the assistance of international water professionals can lead to an exchange of data between the parties that could be a first step towards greater cooperation in the Basin. Now is the time for action, and this subject must take a higher priority on the international policy agenda. The benefits will go far beyond the mere availability of water; efforts now will help support long term peace and stability in the region.
Frederick Michael Lorenz is a retired U.S. Marine colonel who currently teaches “Water and Security in the Middle East” at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington in Seattle. With his co-author Edward J. Erickson he is working on a book “Hydropolitics and Security in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin” and can be
reached at rsrchassc@aol.com or lorenz@u.washington.edu.
http://email.asce.org/ewri/TigrisEuphrates.html
~~~
War over Water (Jordan river)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about geopolitical struggle between Israel vs.
Jordan and Syria. For other water conflicts, see War over Water
.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(disambiguation).
The "War over Water" (Hebrew: ?????? ?? ????, HaMilhama al HaMaim), also the Battle over Water (Hebrew: ???? ?? ????, HaKrav al HaMaim), refers to a series of confrontations between Israel and its Arab neighbors from November 1964 to May 1967 over control of available water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin. .. with links .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_%28Jordan_river%29
See also:
Helen was born, August 4th 1920 .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas .. then there was ..
The Jaffa riots were riots and killings that took place in the British controlled Palestine between 1 and 7 May 1921. Together with the previous year's Nebi Musa riots, they are commonly considered as the first violent confrontation in what would become the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian conflict - though Israel as a state would only be formed decades later.
[...]
Arab–Israeli conflict
Jerusalem riots (1920) – Jaffa riots (1921) – Palestine riots (1929) – Arab revolt (1936–1939) – Civil War (1947–1948) – Arab-Israeli War (1948–1949) – Retribution operations (1951-1966) – Suez Crisis (1956) – War over Water (1964–1967) [e added here] – Six-Day War (1967) – War of Attrition (1967–1970) – Wrath of God (1972–1979) – Yom Kippur War (1973) – South Lebanon conflict (1978) – Lebanon War (1982) – South Lebanon conflict (1982–2000) – First Intifada (1987–1993) – Second Intifada (2000–2005) – Shebaa Farms conflict (2000-2006) – Lebanon War (2006) – Gaza War (2008–2009) ... http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=51009162
This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destruction [...]
To be fair, Bush doesn't rest his entire bid for rehabilitation on animal faeces. His new book, Decision Points, deploys several methods. There is contrition, limited and always qualified; blame-shifting and finger-pointing, most notably over his government's inertia in the face of Hurricane Katrina, standing idle as New Orleans drowned [my e]; and pleas for mitigation, typified by his suggestion that Guantánamo wasn't that bad – after all, prisoners had personal copies of the Qur'an and access to a library that included "an Arabic translation of Harry Potter". Above all is the Blair-style insistence that, while some of the practicalities might have gone awry, his principles were sound and just.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=56533375
Decision expected on plug for BP's broken oil well
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53305110
Judge ends Katrina flooding lawsuits against feds
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95375187
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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