Gulf Coast Fishermen Challenge US Government over Dispersants

Dahr Jamail


Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010, t r u t h o u t

Commercial Fishing communities in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida have united to demand that local, state, and federal agencies force BP to discontinue the use of toxic dispersants and conduct better testing before reopening fishing waters.

“We need to get our government to get a handle on this situation and shut down our fishing waters until they test for dispersants, and get the use of dispersants stopped unless they can prove to us they are not harmful,” Kathy Birren, a spokesperson for commercial fishermen in Florida, told Truthout, “We are seeing fish kills. They [US Government and BP] are covering this all up.”

Since the BP oil disaster began in late April, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) was granted emergency powers to open and close fishing areas. The department recently announced the opening of three shrimp management zones for August 16. These areas include zones that have been severely affected by the oil disaster. Dates were also set to open fishing for sea trout and harvesting oysters.

These moves are being questioned by commercial fishermen, who are skeptical of the motives of the state and federal governments’ decision to begin reopening fishing areas that had been closed by the oil disaster.

Clint Guidry is a Louisiana fisherman and on the Board of Directors of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, as well as being the Shrimp Harvester Representative on the Louisiana Shrimp Task Force created by Executive Order of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

“The government, both state and federal, is pushing to open all these fishing areas back up and say it is OK, but this is a load of shit,” Guidry, who is from Lafitte, Louisiana, told Truthout, “It’s not OK. They claim 75 percent of the oil is gone or accounted for, but there’s still oil coming in. There is more oil in many of our bays, right now, than there has ever been.”

Guidry and Birren believe it is far too early for the state or federal governments to allow fishing to resume without more testing for oil and dispersant contamination.


Iran and the Dogs of War

Anthony Migchels

Kombizz (flickr): This is a poster of many posters about Dr Ahmadinejad. It says:

"It seems I entered into "a FORBIDDEN ZONE of POWERS". Few people (top dogs) (politicians), their members of families and their agents control the major parts of the (economy) of the country. I feel with my presence (in politics), they loose parts of their powers."

♣ ♣ ♣

The last few weeks worries about an impending assault on Iran have been mounting. Webster Tarpley, Fidel Castro and an obscure but influential group of ‘intelligence’ people come to mind.

Attacking Iran, like the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan would be an atrocious crime against humanity. Naked aggression of the worst kind that should get all the ones responsible to the gallows. This is not going to happen, of course, the killers in Tel Aviv, Washington and London get away with this kind of thing.

But a war on Iran is likely to be far more catastrophic than those two conflicts in the neighboring states. The complacency of most in the face of crimes, or intended crimes like these makes me sick. I don’t think it will change much, but I will just recapitulate the most obvious reasons for resisting any armed action against Iran.

This is not about Nuclear Weapons

Israel is currently the number three or four Nuclear Power in the world. It owns between 600 and 1000 Nuclear Warheads. It can take down anybody even just threatening them, let alone attacking them and they have often threatened to do so. The nukes in Israels possession are one of the worst threats to world peace. Even if Iran would get the bomb it would never use it against Israel because of the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) situation. We won’t even mention the US of A which is the number one killer of innocents and Nuclear Power in the world.

The chances are real that Iran is developing a bomb or even that they have already acquired a few to be on the safe side. They have seen what the Zionists and their NATO henchmen have done to the Afghans and Iraqi’s. They would be totally crazy if they hadn’t prepared for an assault on them.


America's Gulf: A Toxic Crime Scene

Stephen Lendman

On August 4, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a Department of Commerce agency, reported that:

"The vast majority of the oil from the BP oil spill has either evaporated or been burned, skimmed, recovered from the wellhead or dispersed, much of which is in the process of being degraded....this is the direct result of the robust federal response efforts."

The same day at an AFL/CIO convention, Obama hailed the news, saying "the long battle to stop the leak and contain the oil is finally close to coming to an end."

False. From the start, the Obama administration conspired with BP, imposing censorship and cover-up, barring the public and news media from coming within 65 feet of clean-up of "booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law" without Coast Guard-authorized permission.

The agency is a virtual BP arm, now retired Admiral Thad Allen its de facto representative as National Incident Commander, doing its bidding, suppressing the disaster's severity, including enforcing the FAA's mid-June announced no-fly zone, not needed if there was nothing to hide. There's plenty, why journalists and other violators faced up to five years in prison and a $40,000 fine for telling the truth, now mostly hidden, not gone.


The Myth of the US Military Aid to Lebanon

Yusuf Fernandez


Lebanese soldiers rode atop an aging American M113 armored personnel
carrier. The aid to Lebanon is the first major American military assistance
to the country since the 1980s. (Bryan Denton for The New York Times)

On August 4, US State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley said that the firing by Lebanese armed forces on Israeli troops near the Israel-Lebanon border the previous day, which killed two Lebanese soldiers and one Lebanese journalist as well as one Israeli officer and seriously wounded another, was “totally unjustified and unwarranted.” Shortly before, Israeli Ambassador in Washington, Michel Oren, held talks with US senior officials to demand them a harsh US response.

Some US congressmen warned Lebanon that the US could reassess its aid to the Lebanese Army. “To start shooting as they did -one person killed, one seriously injured– is a very serious move by the Lebanese army,” Florida Representative Ron Klein, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Jerusalem Post.“It certainly is going to come up in our conversations in the Congress about the continued support of the Lebanese Army,” he said. Klein ignored the three Lebanese victims and the Israeli actions that provoked the incident.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main organization of the Zionist lobby, reportedly circulated a memorandum claiming that the Lebanese Army was cooperating with Hezbollah, and stating that unless this stops, “Washington must reevaluate its relationship with the Beirut government and the Lebanese Armed Forces - the recipient of significant American military aid.” A State Department representative declined to respond to a Jerusalem Post question about whether the incident could affect American aid to Lebanon.


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