Snowden, Wall Street & DAPL, and Military Carbon BootPrint

A campaign to persuade President Obama that he should issue a presidential pardon to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was launched to coincide with the opening of Oscar-winning film director Oliver Stone’s newest biopic movie, “Snowden.” The Pardon Snowden campaign, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch among other groups, is working to convince Obama that “Snowden’s act of whistleblowing benefited the United States and enriched democratic debate worldwide.” The campaign is urging citizens to write the president and sign an online petition in support of the effort.

Among the many public figures supporting a Snowden pardon are: U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden, Vietnam War era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, professors Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Lawrence Lessig, current and former government officials including Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, actor Susan Sarandon and director Terry Gilliam.

Those pressing for a pardon before President Obama leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017 say that Snowden’s selfless act revealing unconstitutional warrantless, dragnet surveillance of all Americans communications, led to some necessary reforms and moves toward more government accountability. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, whose board Edward Snowden chairs from exile in Russia. Here, Timm talks about why he believes Snowden deserves a pardon and the need to protect whistle-blowers and the journalists who tell their stories.

Learn more about the Foundation and the Pardon Snowden campaign at http://pardonsnowden.org/

Report Details Wall Street Banks Financing Controversial Dakota Access Pipeline
Interview with Hugh MacMillan, senior researcher with Food & Water Watch, conducted by Scott Harris

In recent developments in the ongoing opposition campaign to stop construction of the Dakota Access oil Pipeline in North Dakota, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 16 ordered a temporary halt to construction of the 1,100-mile pipeline near the Missouri River, upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The stop work order is in effect until the court can rule on a preliminary injunction sought by the Standing Rock tribe that was initially denied in federal court on Sept. 9. The tribe and their allies oppose the pipeline because of sacred burial sites in the area and the threat to its drinking water supply posed by a potential oil spill. Climate activists are working to block fossil fuel pipelines that contribute to global warming.

Earlier on Labor Day weekend, security guards hired by the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, pepper-sprayed and physically assaulted protesters and used attack dogs, which reportedly bit at least six people. Video of the violent confrontation was captured by journalist Amy Goodman and her Democracy Now! film crew, which later went viral across the news media and Internet. However, five days later, the state of North Dakota issued an arrest warrant for Goodman, charging her with criminal trespassing, in clear violation of the First Amendment.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Hugh MacMillan, senior researcher with Food & Water Watch, who talks about his recent report titled, “Who’s Banking on the Dakota Access Pipeline?” Here, he details the Wall Street banks behind the project and their conflict of interest with indigenous communities and other people living along the pipeline route.

See the report “Who’s Banking on the Dakota Access Pipeline?” at http://www.nodaplsolidarity.org/

U.S. Military Industrial Complex a Major Contributor to Climate Change Crisis

Interview with Patricia Hynes, director of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Former presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called climate change the most urgent threat to national security, but most government officials – and most peace activists – don’t necessarily make the connection between the havoc that the climate crisis is already creating and will create in the future on the issues of peace and security. One glaring example is the drought in Syria, which pushed tens of thousands of Syrians off their land and into the cities, exacerbating conflicts which precipitated the civil war that has raged for the past five-and-a-half years, killing up to 500,000 Syrians and displacing millions more.

One group that does make that connection is the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The center’s Director Pat Hynes spoke earlier this month to a meeting in Connecticut that was co-sponsored by Promoting Enduring Peace and the Connecticut chapter of 350.org]], which brought peace and climate activists together. Hynes is a retired professor of Urban Environmental Health, and has worked for decades as an educator, researcher, writer and activist on issues of environmental justice, feminism and the health effects of war. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Hynes, about how resources dedicated to the military in the U.S. and in other nations around the world, contributes to the urgent crisis of climate change. For more information on the work of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, visit the group's website at traprock.org/.
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PATRICIA HYNES: The U.S. military is the largest institutional user of oil in the world, and the largest institutional contributor to climate change. The key book, which came out a few years ago, The Green Zone by Barry Sanders, is probably the only book so far written by an author who has tried to ferret out documentation in terms of the amount of oil used by the Pentagon. His conclusion is that the Pentagon contributes five percent of emissions to climate change, but there are some caveats there – and no other institution contributes five percent of the global emissions to climate change. He said that with jet fuel – the Air Force uses one-quarter of the jet fuel that’s used throughout the world – that jet fuel has the capacity to contribute up to three times the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent in its emissions, and it’s because of the particular types of emissions from jet fuel and the impact they have on climate change, so actually he considers five percent an underestimate.

Also, his analysis does not include the mining, manufacturing of materials, metal materials, the testing and transport of everything that goes into their planes and tanks and ships by the military industrial complex. So what I want to do is be more inclusive in terms of the contribution of militarization not only in this country, but in the effect we have on the world through foreign policy. His analysis does not include, for example, the NATO nations, which our government badgers to build up their contribution of military budget to NATO, so pushing countries to build their military budgets to be equivalent to two percent of their country budgets. And that means they, too, scaling up with respect to all these military planes, ships, tanks, and the manufacture and testing of them in war games, etc. – all of this contributing more in terms of militarization and warming.

And then also, I spoke about this yesterday – the new Cold War tensions which the military historian Michael Klare has written about recently among what he calls the Great Powers – those being China, the U.S. and Russia. So the new Cold War tensions among these great powers – which then causes the buildup of militaries in all these countries, plus war games. And there’s an increase, of course, in war games we are conducting with Asian partners in our pivot to Asia to surround China.

And just to give an example from one war that we have conducted: This is information from Oil Change International, a research group, has collected and put together. First of all, this is just one war, the Iraq War. The full cost of the Iraq War, which has been estimated at $3 trillion – that money would have covered all of the global investments in renewable power generation needed between the time they did the report around 2007 through 2030, to reverse global warming trends. So another point about militarism and war and climate change is the trade-off point. If you are dedicating 52 percent of your discretionary budget, as we are doing in the U.S., to the Pentagon and to all of the activities I’ve talked about, the military industrial complex as well. If we are dedicating that percent of our budget, we are then taking it away from all other aspects of the discretionary budget – health, education, welfare, housing, environmental protection, climate change research, transportation, etc.

Another piece they’ve done as a way of analysis in terms of militarism being an engine of climate change is that rebuilding Iraqi schools, homes, bridges, businesses, roads and hospitals pulverized by the war, as well as new security walls and barriers would require millions of tons of cement; cement is one of the biggest industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Patricia Hynes, there’s been a lot written about how the Pentagon is such a big promoter within the federal government of the need to address climate change, and how it’s taking the lead in that regard.

PATRICIA HYNES: First, the greening of the Pentagon, I would compare to a whitened sepulcher. There is nothing that they can do that would possibly affect the damage that so much of our resources dedicated to militarism and war do. That said, most of the greening of the Pentagon would involve putting solar and wind into bases that they have for electricity, and research on alternative fuels. Forty dollars of military conduct of war for every dollar of greening; that was data from 2010.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You said in your talk that you address groups concerned about peace and groups concerned about climate change, but you rarely address a group that’s concerned about both.

PATRICIA HYNES: I think we’d make more progress and much faster progress if we brought them together. As someone in the audience said as I was speaking, we work politically in silos. And so, I think there’s much more power in grassroots groups working in partnership together, which does not mean that we all do the same thing. It’s that we support each other’s issues; we continue to make the connections between them and build bridges between them, so that we have a larger and larger base of activism against war and on behalf of mitigating climate change and becoming a renewable country.

This week’s summary of under-reported news

Compiled by Bob Nixon
The Philippines’ newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte, who has made a series of statements critical of the United States, has called for US Special Forces to leave the southern island of Mindanao. US Special Forces have operated in the southern Philippines since 2002 targeting the Abu Sayyaf Islamic insurgent group, who have kidnapped and killed dozens of hostages. At its height, there were 1,200 U.S. troops in the southern Philippines, but that number is now down to 107 who are limited to conducting surveillance operations.(“Duterte Says He Wants U.S. Special Forces out of Southern Philippines,” Reuters, Sept. 13, 2016; “Duterte’s Tilt Toward China Upsets U.S. Strategy in Asia,” Bloomberg, Sept. 14, 2016)
Allan Gross, a U.S. government subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development spent five years in a Havana jail after being convicted of providing Cuba’s small Jewish community with Internet communications equipment, including discreet SIM cards used to mask the signals of satellite phones that are generally restricted to military use. (“Ex-Jailed American Subcontractor: Cuba Needs to Join the 21st Century,” In Cuba Today, Sept. 10, 2016)
Far away from the confrontation over the Dakota Access Pipeline between the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, their allies — and the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, an earlier conflict between Texas oil company Western Refining and local opposition near Gallup, New Mexico, over an extension of a pipeline’s right-of way, illuminate’s the duplicitous role played by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.(“How the U.S. Government Is Helping Corporations Plunder Native Land,” In These Times, Sept. 6, 2016)

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