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National Security
September 11, 2006 ( politics )
I wasn't intending to write a 9/11 blog, I'm sure there are lots of better entries out there, but I read via boingboing about Greg Palast, and had to pass it on. Five years after 9/11, we've managed to throw a county into outright civil war and give Al Queda a foothold into it, and are much more secure at airports, as long as would-be terrorists promise to limit their nefarious plans to shoe soles and toothpaste. I saw that someone was caught smuggling a knife in a book, and now I'm just waiting to see the pile of burning books next to the pile of discarded "liquids" at each security aisle.
Anyhow. Back to poor Greg:
On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It’s been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up” — except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.Read the rest at GregPalast.comTo give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation’s second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.
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So now Matt and I have a “criminal complaint” lodged against us with the feds.
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After I assured Detective Pananepinto, “I can swear to you that I’m not part of Al Qaeda,” he confirmed that, “Louisiana is still part of the United States,” subject to the first amendment and he was therefore required to divulge my accuser.
Not surprisingly, it was Exxon Corporation, one of a handful of companies not in love with my investigations.
So I rang America’s top petroleum pusher-men and asked their media relations honcho in Houston, Marc Boudreaux, a simple question. “Do you want us to go to jail or not? Is it Exxon’s position that reporters should go to jail?” Because, all my dumb-ass jokes aside, that is what’s at stake. And Exxon knew we were journalists because we showed our press credential to the Exxon guards at the refinery entrance.
The Exxon man was coy: “Well, we’ll see what we can find out… Obviously it’s important to national security that we have supplies from that refinery in the event of an emergency.”
Really? According to the documents our team uncovered from the offices of Exxon’s lawyer, Mr. James Baker, the oil industry is more than happy to see a limit on worldwide crude production. Indeed, the current squeeze has jacked the price of oil from $24 a barrel to $64 and refined products have jumped yet higher — resulting in a record-busting profit for Exxon of nearly $1 billion per week.
Posted by griffjon at September 11, 2006 09:49 PM
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