Psyche, Science, and Society

Obama administration distoring science to protect BP

Remember when the Bush administration was distorting science to support their policy preferences? Well, the Obama administration, in this area as in so many others, is mimicking the Bush administration’s worst habits. They are issuing rosy “analyses” of the oil in the gulf, supposedly “reviewed” by scientists within and outside the Federal government. Strange thing, all of the named “reviewers” deny ever reviewing the report. Meanwhile the reports conclusions re being disputed by independent scientists. Dan Froomkin reports:

In responding to the growing furor over the public release of a scientifically dubious and overly rosyfederal report about the fate of the oil that BP spilled in the Gulf of Mexico, NOAA director Jane Lubchenco has repeatedly fallen back on one particular line of defense — that independent scientists had given it their stamp of approval.

Back at the report’s unveiling on August 4, Lubchenco spoke of a “peer review of the calculations that went into this by both other federal and non-federal scientists.” On Thursday afternoon, she told reporters on a conference call: “The report and the calculations that went into it were reviewed by independent scientists.” The scientists, she said, were listed at the end of the report.

“What we were trying to do was give the Incident Command something that they could at least start with,” said Ed Overton, an emeritus professor of environmental science at Louisiana State University. “But these are estimates. There’s a difference between data and estimates.”

Overton said NOAA asked him: “How much did I think would evaporate?” He responded with some ideas, but noted: “There’s a jillion parameters which are not very amenable to modeling.”

He said he didn’t know what NOAA did with his input. “I pretty much did my estimates and let that go,” he said.

And Overton bridled at the way the report was presented — with very precise percentages attributed to different categories. For instance, the report declared that 24 percent of the oil had been dispersed.

“I didn’t like the way they say 24 percent. We don’t know that,” Overton said. “They could have said a little bit more than a quarter, a little bit less than a quarter. But not 24 percent; that’s impossible.”

Michel Boufadel is on the list, but told HuffPost he did not review the report or its calculations. And the Temple University environmental engineer also said its specificity was inappropriate.

“When you look at that dispersed amount, and it says 8 percent chemically dispersed and 16 percent naturally dispersed, there’s a high degree of uncertainty here,” he said. “Naturally dispersed could be 6 or it could be 26.”

Ron Goodman, a 30-year veteran of Exxon’s Canadian affiliate who now runs his own consulting company, was incorrectly listed on the report with an academic affiliation: “U. of Calgary.” He is only an adjunct there. He said he responded to a series of questions from NOAA — “and that was it.”

And once the report came out, he said, “I was concerned that the amount dispersed was very low. I think it was higher by maybe a factor of two or three.”

But all the scientists on that list contacted by the Huffington Post for comment this week said the exact same thing: That although they provided some input to NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), they in no way reviewed the report, and could not vouch for it.

The skimpy, four-page report dominated an entire news cycle earlier this month, with contented administration officials claiming it meant that three fourths of the oil released from BP’s well was essentially gone — evaporated, dispersed, burned, etc. But independent scientists are increasingly challenging the report’s findings and its interpretation — and they are expressing outrage that the administration released no actual data or algorithms to support its claims.

HuffPost reached seven of the 11 scientists listed on the report. One declined to comment at all, six others had things to say.

In addition to disputing Lubchenco’s characterization of their role, several of them actually took issue with the report itself.

In particular, they refuted the notion, as put forth by Lubchenco and other Obama administration officials, that the report was either scientifically precise or an authoritative account of where the oil went.

The Obama officials officials copied the Bush officials in respect, the loaded their “independent reviewers” with individuals with close links to the oil industry:

Also worth noting: Four of the “independent scientists” listed on the report work for the oil industry, have until recently, and/or work for consulting companies that do business with the oil industry.

Strange, isn’t it, that the Obama administration wants to run the fall campaign against the Bush administration?

August 20th, 2010

Cleared in 2004, yet still imprisoned at Guantanamo

Despite the Obama administration’s claim that they wanted to close Guantanamo, they are still fighting tooth and nail to retain people who should never have been in US custody in the first place. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports on one prisoner who the Pentagon wanted released six years ago in 2004.Despite this, and despite his sever psychological symptoms, the Obama administration still refuses to release him:

U.S. still holds detainee Pentagon wanted freed in 2004

By Carol Rosenberg

An emotionally ill detainee still being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was first recommended for release by the Pentagon in 2004, according to a federal judge whose ruling ordering that the man be freed was made public this week.

Despite the Pentagon’s recommendation, it wasn’t until 2007 that the Bush administration adopted the military assessment and put Adnan Abdul Latif, now about 34, on an approved transfer list. By then, however, the issue of transferring prisoners to Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, was mired in a diplomatic standoff over whether the Arabian Peninsula nation could provide security assurances and rehabilitate suspected radicalized Guantanamo detainees.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy disclosed the timeline in a heavily censored 28-page ruling made public on Monday night that ordered Latif set free. Latif is the 38th Guantanamo captive to be found by a federal judge to be illegally detained at the remote U.S. Navy base.

Kennedy first ordered the Obama administration to arrange for Latif’s release “forthwith” on July 21. But a Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said government lawyers were still deciding Tuesday night whether to appeal to a higher court.

“Why they continue to defend holding him is unfathomable,” said David Remes, Latif’s free-of-charge attorney. “Adnan’s case reflects the Obama administration’s complete failure to bring the Guantanamo litigation under control.”

Latif, held at Guantanamo since Jan. 18, 2002, has said for years that he had suffered a head injury in his teens and was in Pakistan and Afghanistan seeking Islamic charity medical care before his capture.

The U.S. Justice Department countered that Latif was seen at an al Qaida guest house and trained with the terror movement.

But in the portion of the judge’s ruling made public Kennedy noted that the Pentagon’s own military intelligence analysis found no eyewitness to back up the claim, only war-on-terror captives who had seen him in U.S. prison camps.

Kennedy quoted from a 2004 Defense Department report that recommended he be sent home and said Latif “is not known to have participated in combatant/terrorist training.”

The government had “not proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Latif was in Afghanistan to train and fight with” either the Taliban or Al Qaida, Kennedy wrote.

Latif’s lawyer said the Yemeni has spent long periods of his captivity in the Guantanamo psychiatric ward after repeated suicide attempts and reacted with despair to the judge’s ruling.

“He sees death as his only way out,” Remes said.

Latif has covered himself in excrement, thrown blood at the lawyer, swallowed shards of metal and tried to eat glass in dozens of self-harm episodes, Remes said.

Latif was brought to meet his lawyer last week in a padded green garment held together by Velcro called a “suicide smock,” according to Remes, who said he had been stripped of his underwear. Prison camp guards have put the smocks on display for reporters during camp tours and said in the past they also had acquired suicide-proof underwear.

Pentagon records show Latif was measured at 5-feet-4-inches and weighed 114 pounds on his arrival at the prison camps on Jan. 18, 2002. Remes said by last week he had been weighed at 93.

More than half of the 176 captives currently at Guantanamo are Yemeni citizens, a portion of whom an Obama Task Force has approved for transfer home.

But the White House has frozen most Yemeni transfers following the aborted Christmas Day bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man who said he was trained in Yemen.

August 20th, 2010

Steven Reisner & Patricia Davis discuss psychologists and torture on GRITtv

Steven Reisner and playwright Patricia Davis discuss psychologists and US torture on GRITtv with Guest host Esther Arma:

August 20th, 2010

Cockburn and Fisk: The empire’s defeat

As US “combat troops” leave Iraq, leaving only 50,000 troops there for combat, both Robert Fisk and Alexander Cockburn point out that the US suffered a massive defeat in this major test of its ability to “shock and awe” the world into submission.

Fisk:

Instead, the millions of American soldiers who have passed through Iraq have brought the Iraqis a plague. From Afghanistan – in which they showed as much interest after 2001 as they will show when they start “leaving” that country next year – they brought the infection of al-Qa’ida. They brought the disease of civil war. They injected Iraq with corruption on a grand scale. They stamped the seal of torture on Abu Ghraib – a worthy successor to the same prison under Saddam’s vile rule – after stamping the seal of torture on Bagram and the black prisons of Afghanistan. They sectarianised a country that, for all its Saddamite brutality and corruption, had hitherto held its Sunnis and Shias together.

And because the Shias would invariably rule in this new “democracy”, the American soldiers gave Iran the victory it had sought so vainly in the terrible 1980-88 war against Saddam. Indeed, men who had attacked the US embassy in Kuwait in the bad old days – men who were allies of the suicide bombers who blew up the Marine base in Beirut in 1983 – now help to run Iraq. The Dawa were “terrorists” in those days. Now they are “democrats”. Funny how we’ve forgotten the 241 US servicemen who died in the Lebanon adventure. Corporal David Breeze was probably two or three-years-old then.

But the sickness continued. America’s disaster in Iraq infected Jordan with al-Qa’ida – the hotel bombings in Amman – and then Lebanon again. The arrival of the gunmen from Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp in the north of Lebanon – their 34-day war with the Lebanese army – and the scores of civilian dead were a direct result of the Sunni uprising in Iraq. Al-Qa’ida had arrived in Lebanon. Then Iraq under the Americans re-infected Afghanistan with the suicide bomber, the self-immolator who turned America’s soldiers from men who fight to men who hide.

Anyway, they are busy re-writing the narrative now. Up to a million Iraqis are dead. Blair cares nothing about them – they do not feature, please note, in his royalties generosity. And nor do most of the American soldiers. They came. They saw. They lost. And now they say they’ve won. How the Arabs, surviving on six hours of electricity a day in their bleak country, must be hoping for no more victories like this one.

Cockburn:

No, the Empire Doesn’t Always Win

By Alexander Cockburn

“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all—it’s rebranding the occupation…. What is abundantly clear is that the US…has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.” So declared Seumas Milne of the Guardian on August 4.

Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, Uncle Sam still rules the roost in Iraq. They point to 50,000 US troops in ninety-four military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counterterrorism” missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq, swelling up from the present 100,000. “The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.”

“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East?” Tariq Ali asked in New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously: “[Iraqis] have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.” But the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the US empire, with a “predominantly Shia army—some 250,000 strong…trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance.”

The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali, is oil. Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies.”

Is it really true that, though the US troop presence has dropped by almost 100,000 in eighteen months, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though US troops no longer patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the US Embassy—deployed in its Vatican City–size compound, mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California—cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs. Neither are the private contractors, whose military role should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like.

Is a Shiite-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani, denounced by Ali as America’s creature, who called Bush on his pledge of free elections in 2005, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunnis, who chose to boycott the elections anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance,” by which Ali means the Sunnis, why does the United States constantly invoke the menace of Shiite Iran and decry its influence in Iraq?

If the Sunni “resistance,” honored without qualification by Ali, ever had a strategy beyond a sectarian agenda, it wasn’t advanced by blowing up Shiite pilgrims and setting off bombs in marketplaces. Muqtada al-Sadr, lamented by Ali as sidelined by the United States and Sistani, has been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.

If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States. Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion–barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion–barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.

Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh…. Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’”

So either the all-powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking or the all-powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, the “war for oil” isn’t in very good shape.

Ali and Milne are being credulous in taking at face value declarations by US officials that the United States is not wholly withdrawing and will stay in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those officials don’t want to see their influence go to zilch, so they have to maintain that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by the steady reduction of troops.

The left—or a substantial slice of it—snatches defeat from the jaws of a decisive victory over US plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.” Yes, Iraq is in ruins—always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should hammer home the message that the US onslaught on Iraq, in terms of its proclaimed objectives, was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.

August 20th, 2010

Krugman: The cult of human sacrifice sweeping our elites

Paul Krugman on the cult of human sacrifice sweeping our political elite:

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods

After explaining, he poses this question:

So here’s the question I find myself asking: What will it take to break the hold of this cruel cult on the minds of the policy elite? When, if ever, will we get back to the job of rebuilding the economy?

August 20th, 2010

President takes on Dr. Laura

A reminder of one President who had guts:

If only we had a President like Jed Bartlett. He wouldn’t have to say “Yes we can” because he would actually try.

August 20th, 2010