Drilling On Hold, But Torture May Proceed

Just because President Obama put a five-year kibosh on oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic doesn't mean that the ocean is now safe for whales and other marine life. Far from it.

Oil companies will still be free to blast away with underwater sonic cannons, prospecting for every last barrel of goo hiding beneath the ocean floor. They will be free to damage and destroy marine life in the process. They'll be free to hasten the extinctions already underway due to man-made climate change. 

Call it pre-emptive plunder. The thinking behind the White House giving approval to exploration without immediate extraction is that once the current global oil glut depletes itself,  and higher prices make it worth the market god's while, the multinationals will have their mother lodes all mapped out for them. They're simply being proactive. 

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is currently considering eight separate applications for seismic blast testing for oil and gas in the Atlantic. To visualize what this "mapping" will do to wildlife, try to imagine undergoing a diagnostic ultrasound in the middle of a war zone. Imagine that submitting yourself to such a test would not only render you permanently deaf,  it would also very likely drive you insane. Imagine that the sound would be so loud that you would lose all sense of direction and not even be able to find your way home from the clinic. Imagine if you had your children with you, and the sonic blast had the effect of making you forget that you even had children.

That is what oil company sonic blasting will do to whales, sea turtles and other sentient beings. The sound can travel underwater for more than 2,000 miles to do its damage. According to marine conservation scientist Douglas Nowacek, the sound blasts can reach 260 decibels and continue for weeks or months on end.

 “Each survey would discharge its airguns approximately every 10 or 12 seconds, and would operate 24 hours per day," he told Congress last year.  "If these permits are granted, ocean animals located in that wide area of the Atlantic Ocean would be exposed to noise levels that are likely to cause impacts and to disrupt essential behavior patterns.”  

To suggest that the Obama administration's approval for this testing is tantamount to approving torture is actually quite an understatement.

As Oceana's Ingrid Biedron points out, “Since the Atlantic has been removed from drilling for the next five years, there’s no immediate need for companies to prospect for oil and gas in this way. We’d encourage them, and the government, to wait until there is safer technology available before going ahead with this.”

Asking predatory capitalists to wait for anything is asking way too much, of course. That their quest for more oil and more profits has already done irreparable damage to all the species inhabiting our precious planet is simply what neoliberal economists label an "externality," and what the masters of war label collateral damage.

And Obama's reasons for placing a five-year moratorium on Atlantic drilling actually have little to do with protecting the environment. His administration simultaneously approved ten new leasing sites in the Gulf of Mexico and another three off the Arctic coast. The decisions to halt drilling in the Arctic were made by the oil companies themselves -- the cost-benefit analyses simply did not work out in their favor.

And wasn't only environmentalists and tourism concerns that put pressure on the president to halt Atlantic drilling. It was the United States military brass. Underwater drilling by oil companies would damage the Pentagon's ability to play their war games on the Atlantic high seas and also interfere with the training exercises and other testing that they conduct on the Eastern coastline.

So when Big Oil is up against Big Forever War, the bigger, faster death obviously wins. But Big Oil dare not complain too much, seeing as how the Pentagon uses more of its polluting product than all other government agencies combined. As a matter of fact, the American military contributes more to global warming than any other institution on the planet. And miracle of miracles: the Pentagon enjoys blanket exemption from all international climate change agreements. So, as long as the wars continue, so will the current oil glut diminish, so will the oil companies' profits ooze back up in a giant blob of cash.

As Herbert Melville observed in his own anti-capitalist whale of a tale (Moby Dick): "The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” 

The Shy Assassins

The killers who maintain and act upon the White House Kill List are afraid that they might be killed if their identities ever become known. Therefore, lawyers for the Obama administration have requested that the individuals associated with drone strikes against Muslims be outfitted with the legal equivalent of a KKK hood for their own protection.

Of course, they don't flaunt their depraved cowardice in quite that way. They've magnanimously dropped their previous claim of "attorney-client privilege," for instance. I suppose that granting Obama and other government officials "client" status was a bit much, even for them. At the very least, it implied a little bit of guilty knowledge. And in this new age of populist outrage, the last word they want applied to themselves is privilege.

But far from checking their privilege, they're doubling down on it and calling it National Security.

The administration had been fighting a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which demanded that it release to the public details about its secretive Predator and Reaper drone attacks. But seeing the writing on the wall -- a federal judge was about to issue a decision directing the White House to comply -- Obama's lawyers are now offering a redacted version of his drone playbook.

Yes, they actually do call his hit list a "playbook."  Obama must fiddle with his Kill List the same way he fiddles with his March Madness basketball brackets. (Actually, he uses baseball cards for his Terror Tuesday sessions, but let's not quibble: it's almost college hoops season.) He and his wonkish bookies pretend that their drone targets are just like expendable athletes. When human beings can be reduced to numbers and statistics and charts and odds, killing them doesn't feel odd at all. It's all just an intellectual game.

Oops! Better Redact That Name, Mister Prez

As Politico's Josh Gerstein explains:

Last month, Manhattan based U.S. District Court Judge Colleen MacMahon issued an order requiring the Justice Department to produce the PPG document (sometimes called the Playbook), as well as two others, for in-camera review by her.

In a letter to the judge Friday, government lawyers said officials had long been debating making an edited version of the policy public and they have now decided to do so.

"Before receiving the Court’s February 25, 2016 Order, the Government was engaged in extensive discussions regarding the possibility of discretionarily releasing portions of the PPG. Lengthy, high-level,inter-agency coordination was necessary to ensure that the sensitive national security classification equities contained in that document remain protected. Following those deliberations, the Government has determined to waive privilege," Justice Department attorneys wrote.

Translation: They've never had any intention of sharing details of their assassinations with the public, but they must pretend to have been agonizing over the issue for months and years. They are worried about their own security and perpetual billions of dollars in profits for military contractors. For bullshit purposes only, greed and death are always euphemised as "national security."

The government has dropped its claims of attorney-client privilege and deliberative process privilege with respect to the drone-related memo — claims MacMahon signaled in her order that she was inclined to reject. Instead, the administration is claiming protection for portions of the memo under an exemption for classified information and another for intelligence sources and methods.

Translation: the redacted memo will probably resemble the 2010 memo which the government was forced to release when the ACLU brought suit over the Anwar al-Awlaki assassination. The attempted justification for the murder of a U.S. citizen by a politician (Obama) was written  by White House lawyer David Barron before his convenient and swift confirmation as a U.S. District Court judge. Barron is now said to be on Obama's short list to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

In the latest court case, an anonymous White House official too shy to be named told Politico that important lives would be directly at risk if all the details in Obama's Playbook ever came to light. "The Government is committed to protecting properly classified national security information, as well as law enforcement information, where disclosure could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual," he huffed.

Apparently, the lives and physical safety of the stateless human beings residing in "tribal areas" are not to be reasonably protected, let alone given even the slightest passing thought.

The Politico article concludes:

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said Friday he hoped the decision to release the so-called playbook on drones indicated a new willingness to allow more public scrutiny of the program.

"The release of the Presidential Policy Guidance is long overdue, and we are gratified that the administration has agreed with us that much of it should finally be made public" Jaffer said. "We hope that the administration’s decision to release this critical document reflects a broader commitment to make the lethal drone program more transparent. In that spirit, the administration should also release the legal memos that are the foundation for the program, basic information about those killed in past drone strikes, and detailed investigative files relating to strikes that killed bystanders.”

All credit to the ACLU where due, of course. But why prematurely praise the administration for the transparency it has historically lacked? I suggest that we just skip the aspirational accolades for now. Moreover, there is no demand from the ACLU that the "lethal drone program" actually be stopped entirely, given all the blowback from victims' friends and families that Obama's White House now seems to acknowledge.  

As Glenn Greenwald noted in an Intercept piece this week, all the media outrage centered on Donald Trump's vow to keep torturing people, and hunting down and killing the relatives of suspected terrorists is a pretty sick joke:

Here we see the elite class agreeing to pretend that Trump is advocating views that are inherently disqualifying when — thanks to those doing the denouncing — those views are actually quite mainstream, even popular, among both the American political class and its population. Torture was the official American policy for years. It went way beyond waterboarding. One Republican president ordered it and his Democratic successor immunized it from all forms of accountability, ensuring that not a single official would be prosecuted for authorizing even the most extreme techniques, ones that killed people — or even allowed to be sued by their victims.

If Donald Trump becomes president, official opacity will go right out the window. He won't be able to resist boasting about every single person whom he orders killed or tortured. Every drone strike will become the occasion for a chest-thumping press conference.

It's not Trump's agenda than has the Establishment quivering. It's his lack of a filter. When former CIA Chief Michael Hayden promised that the military would never follow an "illegal" order from a President Trump, he was only kidding. What he really meant is that the military would never allow Trump to expose the criminality that has been an operating principle of the deep state ever since its inception more than 200 years ago. 

Trump would be well advised to bring his own private goon squad to the White House to protect him against the Special Ops and the craven cowards who are currently scrambling to get their own names and deeds redacted from the Presidential Playlist.