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“The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.”

-- John Calvin

News and Opinion

The CIA officially reveals who designed its post-9/11 torture program

For the first time since the CIA launched its post-9/11 “war on terror” torture program, the agency has officially unmasked the two Air Force psychologists credited as the program’s architects.

Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell were identified by name in an April 27, 2005 CIA Inspector General report that probed the circumstances surrounding the death of 34-year-old Afghan militant Gul Rahman, according to documents obtained exclusively by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Rahman was rendered from Pakistan in October 2002 and detained at a secret black site prison in Afghanistan code-named COBALT and also known as the Salt Pit.

There, he froze to death after undergoing a brutal torture regimen. ...

The agency did not respond to requests for comment about why it decided to reveal Mitchell and Jessen’s identities and declassify additional details about Rahman’s death. The ACLU is suing both psychologists in federal court, alleging human experimentation and torture; Rahman’s family members are among the plaintiffs. It’s likely the two men’s names were disclosed as a result of that court case, which is expected to go to trial next year. ...

A redacted copy of the 68-page Inspector General report, which was entitled “Death of a Detainee,” was released to VICE News in June — but Jessen and Mitchell’s names were blacked out. Last week, the CIA turned over another version of the report, unmasking the two contractors and unredacting a slew of other details, kept secret for more than a decade, about its torture program, Rahman’s death and how CIA personnel at the black site and officials in Langley tried to cover it up.

The new details reveal far more brutality than had been previously disclosed.

[See article for extensive reportage of the documents. - js]

How World War III Could Start

If humanity ever suffers a Third World War, chances are good it will start in some locale distant from the United States like the Baltic or South China Seas, the Persian Gulf, or Syria, where Washington and its rivals play daily games of “chicken” with lethal air and naval forces.

Far from enhancing U.S. security, the aggressive deployment of U.S. armed forces in these and other hot spots around the world may be putting our very survival at risk by continuously testing and prodding other military powers. What our military gains from forward deployment, training exercises, and better intelligence may be more than offset by the unnecessary provocation of hostile responses that could escalate into uncontrollable conflicts.

The most obvious example is Russia, which top Pentagon officials like to remind us “poses an existential threat to the United States” by virtue of its huge nuclear arsenal. So it was discomforting to learn a few days ago that U.S. and Russian warplanes are experiencing near misses in Syrian airspace “once every 10 days-ish,” in the words of Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeff Harrigian.

Potentially deadly incidents aren’t confined to Syria. In September, a Russian fighter jet flew within 10 feet of a U.S. Navy spy plane over the Black Sea. Six months ago, reacting to an increase in NATO war games and maneuvers, Russian aircraft buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer conducting exercises with Poland in the Baltic Sea. ... A couple of days later, a Russian jet intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane in the same region. ...

Americans raised on a pervasive ideology of “exceptionalism” all too easily assume that our far-flung military presence is simply the natural order of things, and that any challenge to it must be countered. A little reflection, however, should suggest why countries — like Russia, China and Iran — grow hostile and even paranoid as they are tested almost daily by the air and naval forces of a superpower. Even if we do not appreciate their point of view, we should seriously ask whether our military really serves U.S. security interests by provoking new opportunities for deadly confrontations almost daily.

U.S. military acknowledges anti-Taliban airstrikes killed Afghan civilians

U.S. military officials here acknowledged Saturday that U.S. airstrikes in embattled Kunduz province on Thursday had “likely resulted in civilian casualties” when Afghan and U.S. forces, searching for a reported meeting of Taliban leaders in a village, faced “significant enemy fire” and called for air support. 

The U.S. officials did not provide numbers or details of the casualties, but Afghan officials and witnesses have said that 30 civilians, including many women and children, were killed and about 25 others wounded when their homes in Bozi Kandahari village were bombed as the families slept. Two U.S. service members and three Afghan Special Operations forces were also killed in fighting there.

The civilian deaths have drawn sharp criticism from rights groups and some Afghan leaders, including former president Hamid Karzai, who has long complained that Western bombings and raids cause needless deaths and undermine the war against Taliban insurgents.  ...

“Just show me one example of a bombing that has taken us one step closer to peace,” Karzai said Friday, adding that he had called families in Boz Kandahari to express his concern. Fifteen years after U.S. and NATO forces began fighting in Afghanistan, he asked, “Do we have more Taliban or less, more radicalization or less, more terror or less? Is this really a war on terror, or is it something else in which the lives of Afghans don’t matter?”

US-Backed Kurds Announce Start of Invasion of ISIS Capital of Raqqa

Following statements from US officials that they wanted a military offensive launched against the ISIS capital city of Raqqa during the ongoing Iraqi invasion of ISIS’ largest city of Mosul, the Kurdish YPG today announced that they have begun such an invasion to “liberate” the city.

It is unclear what, if anything, is actually being done on the ground to that end yet, as the announcement simply came at a press conference, and all of the comments that followed were about things that would happen in the future, with the YPG emphasizing the offensive would happen with heavy US air support.

Some 30,000 members of the YPG-dominated group which styles itself as the Syrian Democratic Forces are to surround the city, with Defense Secretary Ash Carter saying the goal is to “isolate” the ISIS capital, and then start trying to enter the city itself.

Kurdish fighters battle 'IS' in Bashiqa

Iraq: ISIS Defenses Slowing Mosul Offensive

While some Iraqi troops managed to reach the outskirts of Mosul last week, the overwhelming majority of the military operations continue to be on the outskirts, where Iraqi officials concede that elaborate defenses set up by ISIS are severely hampering their efforts.

While officials were previously bragging that their offensive was well ahead of schedule, the special forces leading the charge have been quickly spread thin, some given significant room to advance while others were slowed.

Mosul is being destroyed by, as well as ‘liberated’ from, Isis

There is no doubt that the great majority of people in Mosul will be glad to get rid of Isis with its cruelty, violence, subjugation of women and religious bigotry. But it is not at all clear what comes next. Isis is likely to lose Mosul, but it will not go wholly out of business in Iraq or anywhere else. It is already resorting to guerrilla raids such as one today when a group of Isis fighters took over a mosque and part of the town of Shirqat, 60 miles south of Mosul, and were resisting counter-attack. They did the same in Kirkuk last month when 100 Isis fighters mysteriously invaded the centre of the oil city.

But the effect of the recapture of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, on the morale and war-making capacity of Isis should be great. Isis will no longer have the human and financial resources of the self-declared Caliphate, at its peak a powerful administrative machine, to support its campaign of slaughter at home and abroad. The very fact of defeat is likely to be damaging for a movement that claimed its victories were divinely inspired. ...

Not far from Bartella, there is the empty Syrian Catholic town of Qaraqosh which once had a population of 44,000 who fled in 2014. Yohanna Towara, a local community leader, explains that when they come back they will find that their homes have been destroyed. He says that “my brother’s house was destroyed by an airstrike [by the US-led coalition] and my house was damaged. Daesh [Isis] burned the other houses before they left and they have all been looted a long time ago.” Even where houses are still standing, there is no water or electricity or likelihood of it being restored any time soon. Many of the former residents have already migrated to Australia, France and other parts of the world.

The chances of restoring any form of security to the Nineveh Plain depends on first of all capturing Mosul from which Isis has destabilised the whole of northern Iraq. It will take time to discover if Mosul is going to be destroyed as well as “liberated”, as has already happened to the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani in Syria and the Sunni Arab city of Ramadi in Iraq. ... It was difficult not to wonder today how soon the Sunni Arabs, who were fleeing Mosul because of a mortar barrage, would be able to go back. It may be that the conflict in Iraq is not going to end with any form of power-sharing, as so often recommended by foreign powers, but because the war has finally produced winners and losers – and the people of Mosul will be among the latter.

Diver may have found 'lost nuke' missing since cold war off Canada coast

Diver Sean Smyrichinsky was wrapping up a day of diving near Haida Gwaii, an archipelago 80km west of the coast of British Columbia, when he stumbled across what may be the remains of the world’s first known “broken arrow” – the code name for accidents involving American nuclear weapons. ...

The object was huge, he said, measuring around 12 feet long. “It resembled a bagel cut in half, and then around the circle of the bagel these bolts all molded into it, like half spheres. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.” ...

Smyrichinsky started asking around, curious if anyone else had ever come across the mysterious object. “Nobody had ever seen it before or heard of it. Nobody ever dives there,” he told the Vancouver Sun. “Then some old-timer said: ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.’” It was a reference to the Mark IV, a 10-foot, blimp-shaped nuclear bomb weighing some five tonnes and which went missing over the Pacific during a US air force B-36 training flight on 13 February 1950.

According to the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, the intercontinental bomber had left an air base in Alaska for a mission that included a simulated drop on San Francisco when three of the plane’s six engines caught fire.

The crew was forced to abandon the bomber but US air force reports said they first jettisoned the bomb over the Pacific. The US military said the lost bomb was a dummy capsule – packed with lead rather than the plutonium core needed for an atomic explosion.

The Canadian Armed Forces said on Friday that a Canadian navy ship would be deployed in the coming weeks to investigate the object.

Three New Scandals Show How Pervasive and Dangerous Mass Surveillance Is in the West, Vindicating Snowden

Earlier this month, a special British court that rules on secret spying activities issued an emphatic denunciation of the nation’s domestic mass surveillance programs. The court found that “British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade.” Those agencies, the court found, “operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.”

On Thursday, an even more scathing condemnation of mass surveillance was issued by the Federal Court of Canada. The ruling “faulted Canada’s domestic spy agency for unlawfully retaining data and for not being truthful with judges who authorize its intelligence programs.” Most remarkable was that these domestic, mass surveillance activities were not only illegal, but completely unknown to virtually the entire population in Canadian democracy. ...

The third scandal also comes from Canada — a critical partner in the Five Eyes spying alliance along with the U.S. and U.K. — where law enforcement officials in Montreal are now defending “a highly controversial decision to spy on a La Presse columnist [Patrick Lagacé] by tracking his cellphone calls and texts and monitoring his whereabouts as part of a necessary internal police investigation.” The targeted journalist, Lagacé, had enraged police officials by investigating their abusive conduct, and they then used surveillance technology to track his calls and movements to unearth the identity of his sources. Just as that scandal was exploding, it went, in the words of the Montreal Gazette, “from bad to worse” as the ensuing scrutiny revealed that police had actually “tracked the calls and movements of six journalists that year after news reports based on leaks revealed Michel Arsenault, then president of Quebec’s largest labour federation, had his phone tapped.” ...

When Snowden first spoke publicly, these were exactly the abuses and crimes he insisted were being committed by the mass surveillance regime these nations had secretly erected and installed, claims that were vehemently denied by the officials in charge of those systems.

Private Intellligence Firm Proposes “Google” for Tracking Terrorists’ Faces

A top facial recognition company is partnering with a private intelligence firm that tracks terrorists to create an Internet-based tool to scan and identify terrorists’ faces for law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies.

According to a late October email obtained by The Intercept — sent by Ben Venzke, the CEO of IntelCenter, the new tool would combine his company’s pre-existing terrorist data with facial recognition algorithms developed by Morpho, which specializes in biometric technology. ...

Morpho, which does not disclose its proprietary algorithms to identify faces, has also partnered with the FBI in the past to develop its facial recognition programs. This new tool would combine not only the facial recognition technology but also the database of faces — or the “terrorist data” as Venzke describes it.

The new tool, four years in the making, is designed so that “searching for the face of a terrorist [is] as easy as running a Google search,” Venzke wrote. Anyone from a local beat cop with a shoestring budget to the more sophisticated state or FBI investigator would have access to the inexpensive, “quick and easy” tool, he continued. ...

Privacy advocates are now raising questions about the involvement of private companies in developing the algorithms and compiling the database of faces. If IntelCenter itself is providing the data to state and local law enforcement agencies, and it includes Americans, “that seems like a due process issue, if they are enrolling somebody on a terrorist watch list,” said Clare Garvie, Law Fellow at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, in an interview with The Intercept. “As a private company, they’ll be exempt from records laws, information about who’s in the database, how they got there.”

Garvie expressed concern that the tool might exacerbate racial profiling if it’s used by every cop on the street. “Would state and local officers be more inclined to stop someone who looks like a Middle Eastern male if they have an app on their phones that compares it to a list of terrorists?” she said. “That would raise some huge red flags for me.”

Cyber deadlock? WikiLeaks servers under targeted DoS attack since latest DNC leaks

Julian Assange to be questioned by Ecuador over rape allegation

Julian Assange will be questioned next week in the Ecuadorian embassy in London over an allegation of rape, Sweden’s public prosecutor’s office has confirmed.

The WikiLeaks founder, who has been holed up in the embassy since 2012, welcomed the news through his lawyer, saying he was looking forward to the “chance to clear his name”.

The Swedish authorities said one of the prosecutors on the case, Ingrid Isgren, as well as a Swedish police inspector, would also attend the questioning on 14 November and report the findings to Sweden.

“A DNA sample will also be taken, provided that Julian Assange agrees to it,” the prosecutor’s office said.

“We have requested this interview repeatedly since 2010,” his lawyer, Per Samuelsson, said. “Julian Assange has always wanted to tell his version to the Swedish police. He wants a chance to clear his name. We hope the investigation will be closed then.”

The lawyer said the “shape of the questioning” was under discussion.

Secret World of US Election: Julian Assange talks to John Pilger

Transcript here.

French women urged to walk out of work over pay disparity

French women are being urged to walk out of work at 16:34 on Monday to protest against being paid less than their male colleagues.

Women’s rights campaigners at the feminist newsletter Les Glorieuses suggested that downing tools until the end of the year – in effect taking 38.2 days off – would highlight the global wage disparity that experts say will not disappear until 2186.

“From 7 November at 16.34 (and seven seconds) women will be working ‘voluntarily’. If women were paid as much as men, they could stop working on November 7 at 16.34,” Les Glorieuses wrote.

The education minister, Najat Belkacem, formerly minister for women’s rights, backed the strike. “The fight for pay equality involves the whole of society. We cannot wait until 2186,” she tweeted.

Laurence Rossignol, the current women’s rights minister, welcomed the initiative and said she had no problem with women in her office stopping work to take part in the protest. “When women protest, they make visible what is invisible … I support them,” she told Le Parisien.

Janet Reno, first female US attorney general, dies aged 78

Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as US attorney general, has died aged 78.

Reno died early on Monday from complications associated with Parkinson’s disease, her goddaughter, Gabrielle D’Alemberte, said. D’Alemberte said Reno spent her final days at home in Miami surrounded by family and friends.

A former Miami prosecutor who famously told reporters “I don’t do spin,” Reno served nearly eight years as attorney general under President Bill Clinton, the longest stint in a century.

Reno, one of the administration’s most recognisable and polarising figures, faced criticism early in her tenure for the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, where sect leader David Koresh and scores of his followers died. ...

After Waco, Reno became embroiled in some of the controversies and scandals that marked the Clinton administration, including Whitewater, Filegate, bungling at the FBI laboratory, Monica Lewinsky, alleged Chinese nuclear spying and questionable campaign financing in the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election. ...

In 1993, Clinton tapped her to become the first woman to lead the justice department after his first two choices – also women – were withdrawn because both had hired illegal immigrants as nannies. Reno was 54.

The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say

Donald J Trump is possibly the least qualified presidential candidate ever to be chosen by one of our big parties. He is a reality TV star who has never held a political office and has only a vague understanding of how the US government works – a real-estate tycoon who travels on a private jet and lives in a penthouse apartment that is decorated, say reports, in the style of Louis XIV. And yet he has somehow made himself into the voice of the downwardly mobile millions. ...

But what makes Trump the ace is that he has successfully captured the anger of average people who see themselves on the receiving end of a “rigged” system, to use the cliche of the year. He has turned the tables of class grievance on the Democratic party, the traditional organisation of the American left. How did this happen? ...

The financial crisis of 2008 and the lingering recession shattered the whole thing. By 2016, as blue-collar wages continued to stagnate and inequality to worsen, the base of the Republican party had lost its appetite for pointless culture crusades: they demanded something real. And of the 17 Republican candidates for president this year, Donald Trump offered exactly that.

He railed against a rotten political establishment that did nothing for working people; he promised to defend social security and to renegotiate the trade deals that are widely blamed for the deindustrialisation of the midwest. He also scapegoated Muslims and illegal immigrants, blaming them falsely for all manner of offences. And he did it all in the bluntest terms, with a self-absorbed way of speaking that somehow captured the imagination of this unhappy era. Even his grotesque, bombastic style seemed to confirm his appeal; at the Republican convention in July, I heard him described as a “blue-collar billionaire”.

From one perspective, Trump’s rise has merely marked the evolution of Republican populism. It has always been a form of entertainment, and Trump is a captivating entertainer. Traditional Republican leaders, however, regard Trump as a pariah, thanks to his market-offending stands on trade, social security and bank regulation. These leaders have abandoned him in droves, while he has promised to remake the Republicans into a “workers’ party.”

But what has also made Trumpism possible is the simultaneous evolution of the Democrats, the traditional workers’ party. ... We are invited to select between a populist demagogue and a liberal royalist, a woman whose every step on the campaign trail has been planned and debated and smoothed and arranged by powerful manipulators. The Wall Street money is with the Democrats this time, and so is Silicon Valley, and so is the media, and so is Washington.

If there is any hope left in the American system, it lies with a generation of young voters who are gigantically frustrated with the choices offered by two-party politics. ... These young people know all about our predatory modern capitalism, know that they are fated to toil at some gig job in their crumbling deindustrialised city, slowly paying off the 30 or 40 grand they borrowed to study science technology, engineering and maths at the state U. And they are to be forgiven if they can’t see the promise in the Clinton restoration, or some modern-day Louis XIV, or even in the American way of life.

US election seen from France: America's 'angry white men'

Latest WikiLeaks Emails Suggest CNN Really Is the Clinton-News-Network

Yesterday, at 4:33 p.m., we checked at the digital front page of CNN to see how it was delivering the news that FBI Director James Comey had sent yet another letter to Congress (on a Sunday, no less). ...

The statement that came from Comey yesterday, however, did not mention the ongoing, year-long criminal investigation into pay-to-play allegations against the Clinton Foundation where favors may have been given by Hillary Clinton’s State Department in exchange for large donations to the charity founded by Bill Clinton on which he continues to serve as a Director and where their daughter, Chelsea, serves as Vice Chair of the Board. That ongoing investigation has been reported by the Wall Street Journal and by CNN’s Senior Law Enforcement Analyst, Tom Fuentes. Despite this, CNN ran a big, bold headline yesterday — “All Clear” – to erroneously send voters in tomorrow’s presidential election the signal that it’s clear-sailing for Clinton at the FBI. ...

CNN had already been shamed into firing DNC Interim Chair, Donna Brazile, after two separate WikiLeaks email releases indicated she had fed CNN debate questions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign team in advance of two CNN primary debates. ...

Last night’s WikiLeaks’ email releases show a further untoward coziness between CNN and the DNC. On April 28, 2016, DNC researcher Lauren Dillon wrote to her colleagues that CNN was looking for questions to ask Ted Cruz during an on-air appearance. The email notes:

“CNN is looking for questions. Please send some topical/interesting ones. Maybe a couple on Fiorina. Someone please take point and send them all together by 3pm. Thank you!”

A few days earlier, Dillon had written to her colleagues in an email that bore a subject heading “Re: Trump Questions for CNN.” The colleagues had submitted a long list of questions for CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to pose to Donald Trump in an interview ahead of his foreign policy speech. The interview was cancelled but Dillon wrote the following to the staff at the DNC that had provided the questions:

“CNN said the interview was cancelled as of now but will keep the questions for the next one.”

Clinton's charity confirms Qatar's $1 million gift while she was at State Dept

The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new or significantly increased support from foreign governments.

Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark the 65th birthday of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, and sought to meet the former U.S. president in person the following year to present him the check, according to an email from a foundation official to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta. The email, among thousands hacked from Podesta's account, was published last month by WikiLeaks.

Clinton signed an ethics agreement governing her family's globe-straddling foundation in order to become secretary of state in 2009. The agreement was designed to increase transparency to avoid appearances that U.S. foreign policy could be swayed by wealthy donors. ...

The State Department has said it has no record of the foundation submitting the Qatar gift for review, and that it was incumbent on the foundation to notify the department about donations that needed attention. A department spokeswoman did not respond to additional questions about the donation.

Another FBI bombshell: Comey says the FBI has NOT changed its conclusions about Clinton emails. Here's the letter pic.twitter.com/WuZHkdtd6d

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 6, 2016

James Comey's troubles just beginning after latest twist in Clinton email tale

Hillary Clinton’s immediate FBI woes ended on Sunday with a letter whose five sentences signaled that James Comey’s troubles have only begun. ...

Whether or not Comey endangered his position at the head of the FBI, the episode has cost him his chief asset: his reputation, cultivated assiduously in the media, for probity and judgment. Beyond the director himself, the coda to the Clinton email inquiry has exposed the FBI as a politicized agency, a development with serious repercussions over the next several years.

Donald Trump spent much of the summer and fall attacking the FBI as “corrupt” for failing to recommend indictment, only to reverse himself entirely after Comey’s October letter. Now that Comey has ended the issue ahead of the election, the director has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable ally to Trump, who has loudly insisted on complete loyalty around him. Should Trump win the election, Comey is likely to find himself either marginalized or unemployed.

If Clinton wins, Comey’s position is unlikely to be much better. ...

Comey may very soon himself be under investigation. Al Franken, a Minnesota senator on the judiciary committee with direct oversight of the FBI, said early Sunday he was “certain” of forthcoming hearings into Comey’s actions. After the latest letter, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another judiciary committee Democrat and a consistent ally of the security agencies, said she found Comey’s intervention “even more troubling”. Feinstein also called for a justice department review.

The Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes John Podesta

Leading Senate Proponents of Spying and War Get Election Boost From “Libertarian” Koch Brothers

Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are some of the loudest proponents on Capitol Hill of dragnet surveillance and torture, as well as expanding the military budget and the military’s involvement in conflicts overseas. All three are in heated re-election campaigns and throughout the campaign, especially in recent weeks, Koch money has flooded in to shore them up. ...

The Koch brothers’ campaign cash, including $950,000 in the final week of the campaign to support Johnson, undercuts the undeserved image the industrialists have nurtured as principled supporters of personal freedom.

The Koch brothers are widely depicted by the press as high-minded civil libertarians who are simply interested in reducing the size and scope of government. Numerous hagiographic books, articles, and media outlets attest to the Kochs’ libertarian bona fides, and the brothers maintain a sophisticated public relations apparatus to perpetuate their libertarian brand.

Oklahoma shaken by strong earthquake causing 'significant' damage

A magnitude 5.0 earthquake has shaken central Oklahoma, leading to reports of “significant damage” to buildings and a gas leak.

The US Geological Survey reported the earthquake struck at 7:44pm CST, with an epicenter located one mile west of Cushing, about 50 miles northeast of Oklahoma City. It initially measured the quake at a magnitude of 5.3.

Cushing, which has a population of about 7,900, bills itself as the Pipeline Crossroads of the World. It is home to the Cushing Tank Farm, a massive oil storage facility that’s touted as the world’s largest. ...

Scientists have linked Oklahoma’s sharp increase in earthquakes to the underground disposal of wastewater from oil and gas production.

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission has shut down some disposal wells and ordered a reduction in the amount of wastewater disposed of in others.

Dakota Access Pipeline Builder Ignored Obama Admin Request to Halt Construction

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has confirmed to DeSmog that Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the proposed Dakota Access pipeline, has ignored the Obama administration's September 9 request to voluntarily halt construction in a disputed area, 20 miles east and west of Lake Oahe and the Missouri River. 

The confirmation came in the aftermath of a video published by drone pilot Shiyé Bidziil on the news website Indian Country Today titled, “Drone Footage of Dakota Access Pipeline Approaching Missouri River.” Published November 2, this video offers an airborne view of pipeline construction — coupled with heavily guarded concrete fortresses around key construction locales — in close proximity to the Missouri River. 

“The Army will not authorize constructing the Dakota Access pipeline on Corps land bordering or under Lake Oahe until it can determine whether it will need to reconsider any of its previous decisions regarding the Lake Oahe site under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or other federal laws,” reads the initial September 9 statement disseminated by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Interior, and Army Corps.

“Therefore, construction of the pipeline on Army Corps land bordering or under Lake Oahe will not go forward at this time. In the interim, we request that the pipeline company voluntarily pause all construction activity within 20 miles east or west of Lake Oahe.”

After showing the video to Curry Graham, Director of Public Affairs for the Army Corps, Graham confirmed to DeSmog that Energy Transfer Partners has proceeded with construction inside of the administration's requested zone. Graham also said construction has halted just short of the federal property bordering Lake Oahe.

Turning Point at Standing Rock? Resistance and Renewed Hope Against Dakota Access

According to reports from the Indigenous Environmental Network, Colonel John W. Henderson of the Corps promised the Standing Rock Sioux tribe that no permit would be issued to drill the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River until 30 days after construction stops. After that, there will be a comment period adequate to allow the tribes full consultation. This could delay pipeline construction under the river by 45 days to three months.

Even more good news for pipeline opponents. President Obama earlier this week commented that his administration would be looking at rerouting the pipeline. A new route would require a new environmental assessment, and this time, the tribes, and others, will insist on a full environmental impact statement – not the questionable environmental assessment used by the Army Corps when it issued the first permit.

Either move could scuttle financing for the pipeline, which depends on work being completed on a certain schedule.

There is no confirmation at this time from the Corps of Engineers nor from the Standing Rock Tribe that the 30-day buffer period will in fact go into effect. Still, there is a sense, now, that there is a possible pathway to a resolution of this months-old conflict.

Dakota Access: company under scrutiny over sacred artifacts in oil pipeline's path

North Dakota regulators are filing a complaint against the oil company building the Dakota Access pipeline for failing to disclose the discovery of Native American artifacts in the path of construction.

The allegations mark the state’s first formal action against the corporation and add fuel to the claims of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has long argued that the $3.7bn pipeline threatens sacred lands and indigenous cultural heritage.

Julie Fedorchak, chair of the North Dakota public service commission, told the Guardian that on 17 October, pipeline officials found a group of stone cairns –symbolic rock piles that sometimes mark burial grounds – on a site where construction was planned.

The firm, however, failed to notify the commission, in violation of its permit, and only disclosed the findings 10 days later when government workers inquired about it, she said. ... The commission will file a complaint this week and the company could face a maximum fine of $10,000 per day for the 10 days without a disclosure, according to Fedorchak.

Native American protesters, who call themselves “water protectors”, said a reprimand from regulators was too little too late and lamented that the state had consistently failed to work with the tribe to prevent the destruction of sacred burial grounds and historic artifacts.

'There Is Shame In All This': Naomi Klein Voices Rage as Reef Disappears

"Climate change is already here, and kids are on the frontlines," says author and activist Naomi Klein in a new video spotlighting the decimation of the Great Barrier Reef due to global warming.

In the short film made with the Guardian and posted online Sunday, Klein experiences the diminished reef—which this year underwent a massive coral bleaching event—through the eyes of her son, four-year-old Toma. 

She notes that "most of the time, climate change is hard to pry apart from all the other crises rocking our world: poverty, racism, militarism. They get all mixed up. But here, on the reef, it feels really simple. This world-changing event is mostly just about warming."

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Nine Ways the U.S. Voting System Is Rigged But Not Against Donald Trump

Are Farage and Trump really fascists?

The Resentments Trump Represents

Sweet Jesus on a rubber crutch, what sort of question is this?!? Silly headline, informative article:

Would Wall Street Have a Place in a Clinton Administration?

Thinking Like an Intelligence Officer: Anthony Weiner and Russian Spies

Rogue FBI Twitter Bot dumps months of FOIAs, causing controversy

Clinton WikiLeaks Update: Bernie Sanders May Have Been Pressured, Leaked Emails Suggest

NYT Admits Key Al Qaeda Role in Aleppo

Syria: the US Will Never Separate Its Fighters from Al Qaeda Because It Depends on Them

Agencies of Fear

Why Bernie Sanders is taking on Big Pharma in California

Republican Kelly Ayotte Lost Millions of Dollars by Defying Koch Brothers on Climate Change

A Little Night Music

King Curtis & The Kingpins - Soul Serenade

King Curtis - The Honey Dripper

King Curtis Combo - Jay Walk

King Curtis - Trouble in Mind

King Curtis - Pots & Pans

King Curtis & Champion Jack Dupree - Poor Boy Blues

King Curtis - Instant Groove

King Curtis + Aretha Franklin - Dr. Feelgood

King Curtis - Soul Twist

King Curtis - Whole Lotta Love