Thursday, October 23, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, October 23, 2014


Mornin', folks!

 Did you read last night's last newsbite - the three-parter...?

 If not... PLEASE... read it. (Comments - Wednesday's Newsbites Post.)


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12 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* FOUR-PARTER... (Part 1 of 4)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/22/immigration-detainees-released-criminal-records/17714925/

* HERE'S THE USA TODAY HEADLINE:

U.S. misinformed Congress, public on immigrant release

* NO! THAT'S A LIE! WHAT THE HEADLINE SHOULD READ IS: OBAMA OFFICIALS MISINFORMED CONGRESS, PUBLIC ON IMMIGRANT RELEASE

* FOLKS... THIS IS A DISTINCTION WITH A HUGE DIFFERENCE!

* IN FACT... HERE'S THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THE ACTUAL STORY:

New records contradict the Obama administration's assurances to Congress and the public that the 2,200 people it freed from immigration jails last year to save money had only minor criminal records.

* THINK ABOUT IT, FOLKS... IS IT PARTISANSHIP - OR FEAR - WHICH CREATES SUCH DISCONNECTS? (EITHER WAY... IT AIN'T GOOD!)

* ANYWAY... CONTINUING...

The records, obtained by USA TODAY, show immigration officials released some undocumented immigrants who had faced far more serious criminal charges, including people charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, drug trafficking and homicide.

* NAMES...? (OF THE OFFICIALS AND THE RELEASEES?)

The release sparked a furor in Congress. Republican lawmakers accused the Obama administration of setting dangerous criminals free.

* SHOULDN'T DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS BE JUST AS FURIOUS? (THE FACT THAT THEY'RE APPARENTLY NOT TELLS YOU ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.)

In response, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it had released "low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal records," a claim the administration repeated to the public and to members of Congress.

* AGAIN... NAMES... N*A*M*E*S...!!! WE NEED THE NAMES OF THESE OBAMA OFFICIALS!

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 10:46 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 4)

The new records, including spreadsheets and hundreds of pages of e-mails, offer the most detailed information yet about the people ICE freed as it prepared for steep, across-the-government spending cuts in February 2013. They show that although two-thirds of the people who were freed had no criminal records, several had been arrested or convicted on charges more severe than the administration had disclosed.

* "SEVERAL...???" IF ONLY TWO-THIRDS HAD NO CRIMINAL RECORDS... WHAT OF THE REMAINING 33.3%...???

* BTW... DOES ANYONE BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF "SEVERAL" WASN'T DELIBERATE... WASN'T A DELIBERATE "SOFT PEDDLE" OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS?

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen acknowledged the discrepancy.

* "ACKNOWLEDGED..."

* "DISCREPANCY..."

* UH-HUH...

She said "discretionary releases made by ICE were of low-level offenders. However, the releases involving individuals with more significant criminal histories were, by and large, dictated by special circumstances outside of the agency's control."

Lawmakers expressed concern. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said it is "deeply troubling that ICE would knowingly release thousands of undocumented immigrant detainees – many with prior criminal records – into our streets, while publicly downplaying the danger they posed."

* "DEEPLY TROUBLING..." (PLEASE... JOHN S. MCCAIN... SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE HEAD AND PUT THE REST OF US OUT OF OUR MISERY!)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 10:47 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 3 of 4)

Immigration authorities detain an average of about 34,000 people a day. Although the agency regularly releases immigrants who have been charged with serious crimes...

* OF COURSE THEY DO...!

(*BANGING MY HEAD AGAINST THE DESK*)

...it typically does so because their legal status has changed or because they cannot be deported — not as a way to save money.

In hearings last year, Republican lawmakers pressed then-ICE Director John Morton for specifics on the criminal records of the people the agency had freed.

* AGAIN... SHOULDN'T DEMOCRATS BE JUST AS CONCERNED...??? SHOULDN'T THEY...?!?!

At one, Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-Va., asked Morton directly, "No one on that list has been charged or convicted with murder, rape or sexual abuse of a minor, were they?"

Morton answered, "They were not."

* LET ME GUESS... (*SIGH*)... HE WAS LYING?

He told lawmakers that, to his knowledge, none had faced child pornography charges.

(White House spokesman Jay Carney similarly described them as "low-risk, non-criminal detainees.")

A spreadsheet ICE officials prepared listing the detainees includes one person in Texas charged with aggravated kidnapping and sexually assaulting a child, as well as others charged with armed assaults or assaulting police officers. Another immigrant released from Miami had been charged with conspiracy to commit homicide. Two detainees from Boston had been charged with aggravated assault using a weapon. One in Denver had a sexual assault charge. The agency released the spreadsheet to USA TODAY under the Freedom of Information Act.

ICE's records do not indicate whether the detainees were convicted of those crimes or merely charged with them. The agency said it would not release information identifying any of the detainees because doing so would invade their privacy, so it was impossible to examine the details of their cases.

* ILLEGAL ALIENS SHOULD HAVE NO PRIVACY!

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 10:48 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)

Morton, who resigned last year, told Congress that the more than 2,200 immigrants ICE released included 629 people with criminal records, all of them people who had been charged with misdemeanors "or other criminals whose prior conviction did not pose a violent threat to public safety."

* BUT...

That accounting did not include 144 other detainees whose release ICE records attribute to "special issues."

(*SMIRK*)

Most often, that meant the detainees were let go because the agency had little chance of deporting them in the near future. The Supreme Court has said the government generally cannot hold immigrants for more than six months if it has no prospect of deporting them. To save money, ICE freed some detainees before the six-month clock ran out.

Homeland Security officials have acknowledged that ICE handled the detainee release badly.

* AFTER GETTING CAUGHT...

(*SIGH*)

The department's inspector general concluded in August that the cost-cutting efforts were so rushed and mismanaged that top officials never informed the White House or then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

* CREDIBLE DENIABILITY? (I THINK NOT!) BUREAUCRACY'S FOUNDATION IS CYA. IF NAPOLITANO DIDN'T KNOW... IT'S BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T WANNA KNOW... IT'S BECAUSE A DELIBERATE FIREWALL WAS CREATED BETWEEN HER AND THE INFO BY THOSE WHO WORKED DIRECTLY FOR HER AND UNDERSTOOD WHAT SHE WOULD AND WOULDN'T WANT TO HAPPEN... AND WHAT SHE WOULD AND WOULDN'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT.

Nonetheless, its audit concluded that officials acted "appropriately" in selecting which undocumented immigrants should be released.

(*SNORT*)

* AGAIN... RAISE YOU HAND IF THIS SOUNDS "KOSHER" TO YOU. (AND IF USA TODAY BOUGHT SUCH KNOWLEDGE... WHY THE STORY?)

The former head of ICE's detention operation, Gary Mead, said that if officials provided incorrect information to the public, they did not do so deliberately.

* GEEZUS FRIGGIN' CHRIST... WHAT ELSE IS HE GONNA SAY...?!?!

Rather, he said, the release happened so quickly that ICE managers in Washington did not know precisely who had been released until after the episode had been reported by the news media.

* SO IN OTHER WORDS "THE MEDIA KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON BEFORE THE FOLKS SUPPOSEDLY RUNNING THE AGENCY DID." UH-HUH. (AND NO MASS FIRINGS...???)

"We had been asking for some time whether we would have enough money to sustain the level of detention we had, and we didn't get an answer," Mead said. "When we did get an answer, it was that we had to start releasing people today."

* I CAN GUARANTEE THAT SHERIFF ARPAIO COULD HAVE HANDLED THE ACTION... COULD HAVE DRASTICALLY CUT COSTS AND KEPT EVERY SINGLE ILLEGAL LOCKED UP INDEFINITELY!

October 23, 2014 at 10:49 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Fremont-Tech-Company-Paid-Workers-121-An-Hour-US-Dept-of-Labor-280148082.html

* HAT TIP MICHELLE ZORNES!

A San Francisco California Bay Area tech company has been slapped with a fine and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in back wages after a United States Department of Labor investigation revealed the company paid workers $1.21 an hour.

The Labor Department said about eight employees of Fremont-based Electronics For Imaging were flown in from India...

* OK... I SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING...

...and worked 120-hour weeks to help with the installation of computers at the company's headquarters. The employees were paid their regular hourly wage in Indian rupees, which translated to $1.21.

* FUCKING SCUMBAGS...

EFI, which posted third-quarter revenue of nearly $200 million, released the following statement on Thursday: "During this process we unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local U.S. standards."

* F*U*C*K*I*N*G S*C*U*M*B*A*G*S...

Last year, another company, Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale, faced similar charges and was fined for underpaying employees from Mexico an hourly wage of $2.66.

* THIS IS WHY WE MUST BRING BACK CORPORAL PUNISHMENT! BRING BACK THE PUBLIC STOCKS! PUBLIC WHIPPINGS!

* AND, YES... Y*E*S... I'M ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS!

Federal officials said both cases are particularly egregious, given the booming labor market and the wealth in Silicon Valley. "It is certainly outrageous and unacceptable for employers here in Silicon Valley to bring workers and pay less than the minimum wage," said Alberto Raymond, an assistant district director for the United States Department of Labor.

* ABSOLUTELY!

October 23, 2014 at 11:18 AM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/22/us-jury-convicts-blackwater-security-guards-iraq

* SICKENING.

* JUST SICKENING.

Three security guards working for the private U.S. contractor Blackwater have been found guilty of the manslaughter of a group of unarmed civilians at a crowded Baghdad traffic junction in one of the darkest incidents of the Iraq war.

* AND YET NO ONE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT FACES SANCTION FOR HIRING BLACKWATER... FOR USING MERCENARIES.

* AND, FOLKS... THIS SHIT GOES BACK TO BUSH. (THOUGH ACCELERATED UNDER OBAMA AND CLINTON...)

A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was found guilty of one charge of first-degree murder.

All face the likelihood of lengthy prison sentences after unanimous verdicts on separate weapons charges related to the incident. Lawyers for the guards say they plan to appeal.

* WHY NOT EXECUTE THEM?

The Nisour Square massacre in 2007 left 17 people dead and 20 seriously injured after the guards working for the U.S. State Department fired heavy machine guns and grenade launchers from their armoured convoy in the mistaken belief they were under attack by insurgents.

* AGAIN... OUR GOVERNMENT IS ULTIMATELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MASSACRE! OUR STATE DEPARTMENT HIRED THESE PEOPLE!

The case had attracted widespread attention in Iraq as a symbol of apparent American immunity. [But] now, after a 10-week trial and 28 days of deliberation, a jury in Washington has found three of the men – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – guilty of a total of 13 charges of voluntary manslaughter and a total of 17 charges of attempted manslaughter.

The fourth defendant, Slatten, who was alleged to have been first to open fire, was found guilty of a separate charge of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors had claimed Slatten, the convoy’s sniper, viewed killing Iraqis as “payback for 9/11” and often “deliberately fired his weapon to draw out return fire and instigate gun battles” or tried to smash windscreens of passing cars as his convoy rolled through Baghdad.

Jeremy Ridgeway, another member of the convoy known as Raven 23, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 2008 and agreed to testify against his colleagues in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

* SOUNDS LIKE OUR CORRUPT GOVERNMENT - MAKING DEALS WITH THE DEVIL.

Although jurors failed to reach a verdict on three of the manslaughter and attempted manslaughter charges relating to Dustin Heard, he was found guilty of the remaining 17, and the near clean-sweep will be seen as overwhelming endorsement of the government’s case that the massacre was unlawful.

* OK. ALLOW ME TO CLARIFY. IF THE WORST IS TRUE... I WANT THESE PEOPLE EXECUTED. IF ANY OF THEM ARE BEING RAILROADED... THEN OF COURSE THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING.

Prosecutors told the jury that Slatten triggered the incident by shooting the occupants of a civilian car during a traffic jam at a busy roundabout in Baghdad. As the car rolled forward, other members of the convoy of three armoured vehicles opened fire indiscriminately with heavy weapons claiming they thought they were under attack from an attempted car bombing.

The case hinged on whether or not the defendants’ belief that their convoy was under attack could be justified by limited evidence apparent to them at the time.

Their lawyers focused on the allegedly erratic behavior of one of the vehicles at the junction and evidence of AK-47 bullet casings found nearby, which some witnesses claimed they heard being fired toward the convoy.

Nevertheless, during the trial’s emotional closing arguments, jurors were told of the “shocking amount of death, injury and destruction” that saw “innocent men, women and children mowed down” as they went about their business in downtown Baghdad.

(*TEARS*)

October 23, 2014 at 2:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Federal prosecutor Anthony Asuncion said: “These men took something that did not belong to them: the lives of 14 human beings. They were turned into bloody bullet-riddled corpses at the hands of these men.”

“It must have seemed like the apocalypse was here,” said Asuncion in his closing argument, as he described how many were shot in the back, at long range, or blown up by powerful grenades used by the U.S. contractors.

* AS AUTHORIZED BY... THAT'S RIGHT... OUR GOVERNMENT.

“There was not a single dead insurgent on the scene,” claimed the prosecutor. “None of these people were armed.”

(*PURSED LIPS*)

After he described at length the harrowing fate of individual Iraqi civilians attacked by the Blackwater convoy, Asuncion’s voice was shaking, and he was asked to repeat a key line for the court stenographer to hear. “[The witness] opened the door and his son’s brains fell out at his feet,” Asuncion shouted the second time. “As [the witness] put it, ‘the world went dark for me’.”

Dozens of witnesses and relatives from Iraq were flown over for the trial, some showing jurors the scars on their bodies and giving evidence that caused one juror to be recused after she said she could no longer sleep at night.

Prosecutors also recapped evidence from Blackwater colleagues who testified against the accused, claiming they acted with contempt for Iraqi civilians and boasted of turning “a guy’s head into a canoe” and “popping his grape”.

Earlier in the trial, these witnesses had spoken of telling the accused to “cease-fucking-fire” after the attack, which one described as “the most horrible botched thing I have ever seen in my life”.

But defense attorneys argue the men were acting in legitimate self-defense after suspecting a car that was rolling toward them at a busy traffic intersection could contain a bomb.

Blackwater – renamed first Xe Services and then Academi after the incident saw it thrown out of Iraq and dubbed a mercenary force by a United Nations report – reached a civilian settlement on behalf of six of the victims in 2012 and paid an undisclosed sum in compensation.

FBI investigators who visited the scene in the following days described it as the “My Lai massacre of Iraq” – a reference to the infamous slaughter of civilian villagers by U.S. troops during the Vietnam war – in which only one soldier convicted.

Nevertheless, the first attempt to bring the case to trial was thrown out by a judge after it emerged that State Department investigators had promised the defendants that statements made after the attack and leaked to the media would not be used against them in court.

* OK...

In an unusual political intervention, vice-president Joe Biden promised the U.S. would pursue a fresh prosecution during a trip to Iraq and an appeal court later ruled these errors in witness interviews did not sufficiently taint the evidence to prevent a trial.

* FOLKS... AGAIN... THE RULE OF LAW MEANS NOTHING TO THESE PEOPLE. I WANT JUSTICE. HELL... CHANCES ARE THAT IF I READ THE TRANSCRIPTS AND EXAMINED THE EVIDENCE FOR MYSELF I'D BE BEATING THE DRUM FOR THE DEATH PENALTY. BUT... BUT... BUT... WHAT I JUST READ IS THAT JOE BIDEN'S ORDERS BASICALLY TRUMPTED BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS (re: FRUIT OF THE POISONED TREE).

Nevertheless, prosecutors were still forced to drop manslaughter charges against Slatten because they had mistakenly exceeded the statute of limitations during the wrangling, and had to pursue tougher charges against him instead because there was no time limit for murder.

* HAT TIP MICHELLE ZORNES

October 23, 2014 at 2:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

* WARNING: LONG, BORING, POORLY WRITTEN... BUT YOU SHOULD READ IT; IT AGAIN NOTES HOW THESE PEOPLE WORK... THE PATTERN OF THEIR CRIMES.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/10/obama-asserts-fast-furious-executive-privilege-claim-holders-wife-2/

Judicial Watch announced today that it received from the Obama Department of Justice a “Vaughn index” detailing records about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.

The index was forced out of the Obama administration thanks to JW’s June 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent September 2012 FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice (No. 1:12-cv-01510)).

A federal court had ordered the production over the objections of the Obama Justice Department.

The document details the Attorney General Holder’s personal involvement in managing the Justice Department’s strategy on media and Congressional investigations into the Fast and Furious scandal.

Notably, the document discloses that emails between Attorney General Holder and his wife Sharon Malone – as well as his mother – are being withheld under an extraordinary claim of executive privilege as well as a dubious claim of deliberative process privilege under the Freedom of Information Act.

* THIS... IS... INSANE...!!!

The “First Lady of the Justice Department” is a physician and not a government employee.

* EXACTLY...!!!

This is the first time that the Obama administration has provided a detailed listing of all [15,662] records being withheld from Congress and the American people about the deadly Fast and Furious gun running scandal.

Typically, a Vaughn index must: (1) identify each record withheld; (2) state the statutory exemption claimed; and (3) explain how disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption. The Vaughn index arguably fails to provide all of this required information but does provide plenty of interesting information for a public kept in the dark for years about the Fast and Furious scandal.

Based on a preliminary review of the massive document, Judicial Watch can disclose that the Vaughn index reveals:

Numerous emails that detail Attorney General Holder’s direct involvement in crafting talking points, the timing of public disclosures, and handling Congressional inquiries in the Fast and Furious matter.

President Obama has asserted executive privilege over nearly 20 email communications between Holder and his spouse Sharon Malone. The administration also claims that the records are also subject to withholding under the “deliberative process” exemption. This exemption ordinarily exempts from public disclosure records that could chill internal government deliberations.

Numerous entries detail DOJ’s communications (including those of Eric Holder) concerning the White House about Fast and Furious.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 7:13 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

The scandal required the attention of virtually every top official of the DOJ and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Communications to and from the United States Ambassador to Mexico about the Fast and Furious matter are also described.

* WHAT DID I ALWAYS SAY, FOLKS! THE STATE DEPARTMENT SIMPLY HAD TO BE INVOLVED! HILLARY - AND THUS OBAMA - HAD TO BE INVOLVED!

Many of the records are already publicly available such as letters from Congress, press clips, and typical agency communications. Ordinarily, these records would, in whole or part, be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Few of the records seem to even implicate presidential decision-making and advice that might be subject to President Obama’s broad and unprecedented executive privilege claim.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton criticized President Obama and his disgraced Attorney General in a statement today:

This document provides key information about the cover-up of Fast and Furious by Attorney General Eric Holder and other high-level officials of the Obama administration. Obama’s executive privilege claims over these records are a fraud and an abuse of his office. There is no precedent for President Obama’s Nixonian assertion of executive privilege over these ordinary government agency records. Americans will be astonished that Obama asserted executive privilege over Eric Holder’s emails to his wife about Fast and Furious.

Once again, Judicial Watch has proven itself more effective than Congress and the establishment media in providing basic oversight of this out-of-control Administration. This Fast and Furious document provides dozens of leads for further congressional, media, and even criminal investigations.

On June 28, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives over his refusal to turn over records explaining why the Obama administration may have lied to Congress and refused for months to disclose the truth about the gun running operation. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a sitting Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress.

A week before the contempt finding, to protect Holder from criminal prosecution and stave off the contempt vote, President Obama asserted executive privilege over the Fast and Furious records the House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed eight months earlier. Judicial Watch filed its FOIA request two days later. Holder’s Justice Department wouldn’t budge (or follow the law), so JW filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 12, 2012.

But then the Justice Department convinced U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates to stay our lawsuit, in part to allow ongoing settlement discussions between the Holder’s government lawyers and the House Committee to continue. Unsurprisingly, the “negotiations” between politicians running the House and the Justice Department went nowhere.

Fed up with the interminable delay caused Holder’s gamesmanship and stonewalling, JW renewed its request to the Court to allow our transparency lawsuit to continue.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 7:15 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

Thankfully, this past July, Judge John D. Bates ended the 16-month delay and ordered the Obama administration to produce a Vaughn index of the alleged “executive privilege” records by October 1. Judge Bates noted that no court has ever “expressly recognized” President Obama’s unprecedented executive privilege claims in the Fast and Furious matter.

Unhappy with having to produce the records prior to the elections, Justice lawyers asked the judge to give them one extra month, until November 3 (the day before Election Day!) to produce the info. Judge Bates rejected this gambit, suggested that the Holder’s agency did not take court order seriously. Rather than a month, Judge Bates gave Justice until yesterday to cough up the Vaughn index. Judge Bates issued his smack down on September 23. Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation two days later.

Many share our opinion it was “no coincidence” that Holder’s resignation came “on the heels of another court ruling that the Justice Department must finally cough up information about how Holder’s Justice Department lied to Congress and the American people about the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, for which Eric Holder was held in contempt by the House of Representatives.”

Fast and Furious was a DOJ/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gun running” operation in which the Obama administration reportedly allowed guns to go to Mexican drug cartels hoping they would end up at crime scenes, advancing gun-control policies. Fast and Furious weapons have been implicated in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of other innocents in Mexico. Guns from the Fast and Furious scandal are expected to be used in criminal activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years to come.

Guns from the Fast and Furious scandal continue to be used in crimes. Just last week, Judicial Watch disclosed that a Fast and Furious gun was used in gang-style assault on a Phoenix apartment building that left two people wounded. We figured this out from information we uncovered through another public records lawsuit against the City of Phoenix.

Congress officially confirmed the AK-47 was used in the assault that terrorized residents in Phoenix. In an October 16 letter sent from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) to Deputy Attorney General James Cole discloses that “we have learned of another crime gun connected to Fast and Furious. The [Justice] Department did not provide any notice to the Congress or the public about this gun….

This lack of transparency about the consequences of Fast and Furious undermines public confidence in law enforcement and gives the impression that the Department is seeking to suppress information and limit its exposure to public scrutiny.”

October 23, 2014 at 7:15 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1b1f1d6-5536-11e4-89e8-00144feab7de.html?segid=0100320#axzz3Gtdw4065

With his military fatigues and the holstered gun at his hip, Lieutenant John Nores Jr is a slightly unnerving sight as he slips through the woody foothills overlooking the southern edge of California’s Silicon Valley. But what the 45-year-old game warden has come to look at is more alarming.

Here in the late summer heat, not far from the sleek headquarters of technology giants Apple and Google, he leads the way to a carefully hidden patch of terraced ground pockmarked with hundreds of shallow holes that until very recently contained towering marijuana plants.

“There were about 2,000 plants here,” says Lt Nores as he explains how he and his colleagues from California’s fish and wildlife department recently launched an early morning raid on the plantation, ripping out a crop worth about $6m to the Mexican drug cartel that grew it.

California pioneered laws allowing marijuana use for medical reasons. But it has yet to follow states such as Colorado that permit recreational use and, in any case, this crop was on public land, making it illegal and dangerous to eliminate – Lt Nores has witnessed several shoot-outs over the past decade.

He estimates that each of the state’s 2,000-odd cartel pot farms contains an average of 5,000 plants, and that each one sucks up between eight and 11 gallons of water a day, depending on the time of year. That means at least 80m gallons of water – enough for more than 120 Olympic-size swimming pools – is probably being stolen daily in a state that in some parts is running dry as a three-year-old drought shrinks reservoirs, leaves fields fallow and dries wells to the point that some 1,300 people have had no tap water in their homes for months.

* FUNNY... THIS IS THE FIRST I'M READING ABOUT THIS - BUT IT MAKES SENSE!

“Marijuana cultivation is the biggest drought-related crime we’re facing right now,” says Lt Nores as he pokes at a heap of plastic piping the growers used to divert water from a dried-up creek near the plantation. However, this is a tiny fraction of the water used legally every day in a state that, like so many other parts of the world, has a swelling population driving rising competition for more heavily regulated supplies that have long been taken for granted and may face added risks as the climate changes.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

October 23, 2014 at 10:58 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

California has always been a dry state. For almost six months of the year many of its citizens get little rain. There have been at least nine statewide droughts since 1900, not counting the latest one.

The state’s history is littered with water wars, among them the conflicts surrounding Los Angeles’s move to siphon off most of the Owens river last century that inspired the classic 1974 film, Chinatown. That dispute was over just one part of a vast system of canals and reservoirs built in the last 100-odd years that are the reason California is sometimes called the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet.

The system channels water from wetter to drier spots, using rivers and streams that in a normal year fill with melted snow from mountain ranges ringing the state, supplying about a third of California’s farms and cities.

The crisis is more severe because a decline in snowfall has compounded problems caused by the lack of rain. The state’s mountain snowpack was just 18% of its average earlier this year, a situation scientists say could be repeated as the climate warms. As a result eight major reservoirs were last week holding less than half their average storage for this time of year.

Reservoir levels sank worryingly when a bad drought hit California in 1976-77, but there were fewer than 22m people in the state then, compared with 38.3m now. There were also fewer laws such as those protecting creatures such as the endangered Delta smelt, a finger-sized fish that can be affected by the management of the canal system, prompting restrictions on pumping the water used by a farming sector that accounts for nearly 80% of the state’s human water use.

“I farm in a very environmentally conscious manner, but these regulations have made it much worse for the farmers,” says Barat Bisabri, a citrus and almond farmer whose property lies in the Central Valley, one of the regions worst hit by the drought. This flat, fertile strip runs south for about 450 miles from the northern reaches of the Sacramento Valley through the heart of the state and grows a lot of what America eats. Nearly half the fruit and nuts grown in the U.S. come from California, including 80% of the world’s almonds.

Much of that produce comes from the Central Valley, where farming is carried out on an industrial scale. Crops and orchards grow up to the edge of people’s houses. Driving down the valley’s long, straight roads, it is striking to see an orchard of dead, brown trees next to another with puddles of water around healthy ones.

From the windows of the roomy farmhouse that overlooks row upon row of the property’s citrus trees, Mr Bisabri points to two of California’s main waterways, the Delta-Mendota Canal and the California Aqueduct. Both run straight through his farm but because of the drought, authorities have sharply limited the amount of water many users can take from them.

“Unfortunately we cannot get water from either of them this year,” says Mr Bisabri, as he explains how, a few weeks earlier, he used bulldozers to rip out 85 acres of healthy mandarin, orange and grapefruit trees that would have used so much water it would have made the rest of the crop far less valuable. “I had to make a decision to kill some so the other ones could survive,” he says, as he drives to the bare patch where the trees once stood. “Had I not made that decision and kept all the citrus that we had, then I would have run out of water in the middle of August.”

It is a dilemma facing farmers across the Central Valley, many of whom have shifted from crops such as tomatoes or peppers to more valuable almonds or other trees that cannot be left unwatered in a dry year.

* FOLKS, THE ARTICLE GOES ON... AND ON AND ON AND ON... BUT YOU GET THE IDEA.

October 23, 2014 at 10:59 PM

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