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Image Credit: The Guardian
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: More details have come to light about a secret compound used by Chicago police for incommunicado interrogations and detentions. The Guardianfirst reported on the Homan Square facility earlier this year. Some have described it as the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site overseas.
Now The Guardian has obtained exclusive video from inside the site. The footage shows a Chicago man named Angel Perez being taken inside a, quote, "prisoner entrance." In 2012, Chicago police sought to compel the 33-year-old Perez to cooperate with a drug sting. After agreeing to meet with police officers, Perez was handcuffed and taken to Homan Square. What happened next may be disturbing to many in our audience.
Angel Perez says police handcuffed his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room. Two officers stood behind him and reportedly threatened to send him to the infamously violent Cook County Jail if he didn’t cooperate. Then, Perez says, one of the officers proceeded to sexually assault him with a metal object, believed to be a handgun barrel.
ANGEL PEREZ: He’s saying that, you know, when you’re in jail and you get penetrated by an African American, that it feels just like a gun going up your rear end. While he’s doing all this, he ends up pulling down my pants, and he gets near my rear end, I guess you can say, and that’s when I just felt something cold and hard just, I guess, penetrate me. And that’s when I just jerked, and I freaked out, and I just went into full panic attack. I couldn’t even talk.
AMY GOODMAN: Angel Perez went on to describe what happened.
ANGEL PEREZ: They shackled my my legs, and they handcuffed me to the bar and the bench that was there. When this happened, I was already pretty shaken up. My eyes were watering. He kind of pushed me over the metal pile and pushed his hands into my eyes while he was sitting on me. And he was like, "You know, you better learn to [bleep] cooperate." They were playing tug of war with me, too. And they were kind of throwing fake punches at me so I would hit myself, like, you know, when I flinched, I would hit the back of my head.
AMY GOODMAN: Angel Perez says the officers also threatened to also "go after" his family members, including his father who’s battling cancer. Angel Perez is now the 13th person to describe his detainment at the secret police site in Chicago to The Guardian. Like many prisoners, he apparently was never formally arrested, so he was neither booked, nor permitted access to an attorney, nor charged. Now Angel Perez and four others have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department seeking justice from the city.
For more on Homan Square, we’re joined now by Spencer Ackerman, national security editor at The Guardian, where he has published a new article on police abuse in Chicago called "Homan Square Detainee: I was Sexually Abused by Police at Chicago 'Black Site'" We’ll link to that at democracynow.org.
Spencer Ackerman, welcome to Democracy Now! So tell us more about Angel Perez.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, this all happened, allegedly—and let’s say "allegedly" upfront; these are allegations from Angel Perez—so we’re not, you know, consistently using that word throughout and interrupting what the story is.
On October 21st, 2012, police, who had already contacted Perez the day before, sought to have him help them buy drugs in a controlled operation for a dealer that they believed Perez knew, who they had been monitoring. He went under his own free will to an agreed-upon meeting place, thinking that they would just basically have a quick conversation. They had asked him to get there to make sure, in their words, according to Perez, that his car wasn’t impounded. When he goes there, as surveillance camera footage from outside that lot that we’ve obtained and published shows, he extends his hand to the officers. He tries to go for a handshake. They turn him around on the car, they handcuff him, and they take him to Homan Square.
The video footage that we’ve published is, if not the first, extremely rare, footage from inside the facility that appear to show a more routinized detention operations apparatus than the Chicago police have said publicly in response to our reporting.
From there, when Perez demonstrates his reluctance to cooperate—he’s afraid, he doesn’t really want to be wrapped up in all of this, he’s worried about retaliation—the police start escalating things. According to Perez, they’re talking a lot about retaliation not just against him, but against his family, ways that they’ll plant evidence, not just on him, but on his family. They start getting, according to Perez, violent. One officer sits on his chest, starts pressing his palms into Perez’s eyes. He describes himself as experiencing this kind of aggression for the first time in his life. He’s freaked out. He’s panicking. They bend him over what he describes as metal detritus in the room near where he’s handcuffed, and they pull down his pants. They use a metal object. He says he feels the coldness and metallic aspect of it as they start tracing it down his back and saying some really vulgar and very racist things, in his telling, about what’s going to happen to him when African-American inmates in a jail in Cook County get a hold of him. They start saying that—if you’ll excuse the language—that he’s going to feel really like a "sexy bitch." So they’re really using a lot of sexualized and homophobic insults at him as they’re doing this, again, according to Perez, at which point one of the officers allegedly uses this metal object to rectally penetrate him. He says it happens very quickly.
And afterwards, he immediately agreed to do whatever the police wanted him to do—in this case, make a controlled buy of $170 worth of heroin. That is one of the most shocking aspects, I think, of this case, that all of this happened not just for a man who police were not looking at, who never charged—who they never charged, who wasn’t implicated in the crime itself—and that would be no excuse, of course, even if he was, but nevertheless as a peripheral figure here, in order to compel him to make a $170 controlled purchase of heroin.
AMY GOODMAN: And the officer, he said, said to him, as he did that, "I almost blew your brains out."
SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right, leading—leading Angel Perez to think that the object used to penetrate him was the barrel of a service revolver, of a gun.
AMY GOODMAN: So what is Angel Perez doing right now? He actually had filed a suit and now has refiled?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, in 2013, Perez filed his lawsuit initially, making the claim of the sexual abuse. What he didn’t know at that point, and would only come out later, was that all of this happened at Homan Square, the warehouse on Chicago’s West Side, home to Chicago narcotics units and some tactical units, that—
AMY GOODMAN: He didn’t know, because he just didn’t know its name?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: He didn’t know, because he was, in his telling, jostled in the car. Where he was going, he couldn’t really see. The cops were doing a kind of—a kind of wild ride. It sounded, in some cases, because he wasn’t shackled in, although it wasn’t a van, somewhat similar to the rough rides we’ve now heard about with Freddie Gray in Baltimore and other places. He wasn’t hurt during that ride nevertheless. He had also been taken to an actual police station nearby Homan Square at Harrison and Kedzie. So, initially, he just assumed he was back there. But they take him to this warehouse. They go through a kind of warren of different rooms, until he’s taken to the second floor at Homan and this happened to him.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, for people who are just hearing about this for the first time—
SPENCER ACKERMAN: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —it has become a big issue since The Guardian started exposing it, even before the re-election of Rahm Emanuel—Homan Square is?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Homan Square is a warehouse complex on Chicago’s West Side. It’s a secretive, but, as the Chicago police will like to point out ad nauseam, not secret, complex, where a lot of plainclothes operations happen. The vice squad is out of there. The narcotics unit is out of there. And it’s a place where we now have accounts from 17 people, 13 of whom I have personally interviewed, who, between 2005 and 2015, have been taken there, held incommunicado, meaning there’s no contemporaneously available to the public record of their whereabouts—no one knows where they are, in other words—hours shackled with no access to legal counsel, often while police try and pressure them in order to either become informants, provide them with drugs and, increasingly, from the stories that we’ve accumulated, provide them with guns.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to two other men who are now suing the city of Chicago after being detained at Homan Square. This is Jose Garcia.
JOSE GARCIA: Took us in the building. And when you hear them say, "Dead man walking," and you hear doors closing, I mean, your hairs just stand up. You know, I mean, what are you going to do? You know, you’re thinking you’re going to get beat up. You know, so we were just scared.
AMY GOODMAN: Another plaintiff, John Vergara, describes the conditions of his confinement at Homan Square.
JOHN VERGARA: It kind of looks like a cage for a dog. It’s just a bench, with a bar on the wall, no toilet, no sink, no nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about this, Spencer Ackerman.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: So, John and [Jose] have described, in their case, being at a sandwich shop in Chicago a couple years ago, when masked police busted in and arrested both customers there, arrested kitchen staff there, took them to Homan Square, tried to, again, shake them down as they’re all shackled, some of them shackled to each other and then shackled to a bar in this sort of cage-like holding area, in order to see about a narcotics arrest.
In the case of John Vergara and Jose Garcia, John Vergara starts saying to the officers that he knows a civil rights attorney, and he’s going to contact that attorney and let people know what’s happening inside Homan Square. The cops made a deal with him. They say, "We will let you out"—this is after several hours of being detained and not being able to access, you know, phone—being denied phone calls, not being able to call their families, not being able to call their lawyers, anyone. And then, ultimately, the cops make a deal with him, and they say, "If you don’t tell this lawyer or anyone else, we’ll let you go right now." And that’s ultimately what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: And as one of them says, "Dead man walking," they say?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: "Dead man walking." A lot of intimidation moves by police to make people feel like they’re entirely under the control of their police captors.
AMY GOODMAN: And lest anyone think we’re talking about decades ago, though that is extremely significant today, can you tell us a story of Calvin Coffey that happened a couple months ago?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: So just in February, basically, less than three weeks before we published our first story from inside Homan Square, according to the lawsuit that he joined, which Angel Perez recently refiled, he was picked up for narcotics or for some sort of—it’s unclear—drugs delivery issue. But he’s just picked up off the street. He’s taken to Homan Square. He’s confined for a long period of time without a bathroom break. He ultimately, while he’s held there for a long period of time, has to answer a call of nature, defecates on the floor of where he’s shackled. Police allegedly make him clean up his own feces with his skull cap.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Victoria Suter, who traveled to Chicago on May 12, 2012, to attend the big anti-NATO protest. On May 16, she and 11 others were taken to Homan Square in Chicago after police raided the apartment where they were staying. Suter spent 18 hours in solitary confinement before being allowed to speak to a lawyer. Earlier this year, she described her experience on Democracy Now!
VICTORIA SUTER: When we arrived there, it was dark. I couldn’t see the outside of the building. But we went in through a garage. There were really large, like military vehicles. They were black, just absolutely massive. There was—one of the other people arrested in that raid with me, they took him in first and left me outside with another officer, and then they took me inside. I was taken to a room, not particularly big, no windows. They put ankle shackles on me at that point and cuffed my right arm to a bar that ran behind the bench, where I stayed for 18 hours prior to being able to see an attorney.
AMY GOODMAN: Victoria Suter also said an officer told her, quote, "We’re going to give you a tour of hell on Homan." You can see the whole interview at democracynow.org. Finally, Spencer?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: With Angel Perez, there’s a legacy here of not just police abuse, but sexualized police abuse in Chicago. Darrell Cannon, a man who in 1983 was coerced into falsely confessing for a murder that would have landed him on—that landed him on death row and would have had him be executed, if Illinois’s governor, George Ryan, hadn’t cleared out death row, had a gun, a shotgun barrel shoved in his mouth. It was empty, but police pulled the trigger three times. That got him to falsely confess to a murder. It sounded very reminiscent to me of what Angel Perez went through, again, allegedly, in 2012. So, over—basically, three decades later, this continued.
AMY GOODMAN: And in just a minute, we’re going to have Darrell Cannon join us live from Chicago. Finally, the Chicago police continuing to insist they do not use violence with interrogations, though they have admitted Homan Square exists?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: They’ve admitted Homan Square exists. They continue their nonspecific denials. And now, at this point, they don’t even respond to my questions when I ask them. They don’t even acknowledge receipt of my emails. But in a supposed fact sheet that they put out on March 1st to attempt to refute some of my reporting, they took great umbrage at the suggestion that anyone would be physically abused. They acted as if that has never happened in Chicago, that there’s no history there, there’s no legacy there.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to talk about a multimillion-dollar fund that the mayor and others have set up to deal with police torture in Chicago. Spencer Ackerman, thanks so much for being with us, national security editor at The Guardian, where he’s published a new article on police abuse in Chicago called "Homan Square Detainee: I was Sexually Abused by Police at Chicago 'Black Site'" We’ll link to that at democracynow.org. We’ll be back in Chicago in a moment.
Image Credit: Amnesty International
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the Chicago City Council approved a $5.5 million reparations fund for victims of police torture. More than 200 people, most of them African-American, were tortured under the rein of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge from 1972 to '91. Tactics included electric shocks and suffocation. The reparations package will provide free city college tuition for victims and relatives, counseling services, a memorial to victims, inclusion of Burge's actions in the school curriculum, and a formal apology. Many torture victims were present when the Chicago City Council unanimously approved the reparations package last Thursday. They were recognized by Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno.
ALDERMAN PROCO JOE MORENO: We have some victims of torture here today, and their families, and if they would rise when I call their names: Darrell Cannon; Anthony Holmes; [inaudible]; Mearon Diggins; Mark Clements; Ronnie Kitchen; Marvin Reeves; Stanley Rice; Gregory Banks; Willie Porch; Lindsey Smith: George Powell; Ollie Hammonds; L.C. Riley; Mary Johnson, who’s the mother of torture survivor Michael Johnson; Bertha Escamilla, mother of torture survivor Nick Escamilla; and Carolyn Johnson, the mother of torture survivor Marcus Wiggins. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for continuing to fight, even though you’re out here—you’ve been out. You’re fighting for those that are still in and for those that are still suffering. Thank you so much.
AMY GOODMAN: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel then apologized to the police torture victims and their survivors, and thanked them for their efforts to demand justice.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: This stain cannot be removed from ourhistory of our city, but it can be used as a lesson of what not to do and the responsibility that all of us have.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Chicago, where we’re joined by two guests. Flint Taylor is founding partner of the People’s Law Office. For more than 25 years, he has represented survivors of police torture, including Darrell Cannon, who also joins us. Police tortured Darrell in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than 20 years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. He was released three years later. Since then, he’s focused on the roughly 20 men tortured during the Jon Burge era who remain behind bars.
We welcome both of you back to Democracy Now! Darrell Cannon, can you talk about being in the City Council chamber, the Chicago City Council chamber, as you were recognized and thanked by a city councilmember as they voted on a police torture fund of—what was it? Five-and-a-half million dollars?
DARRELL CANNON: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened to you?
DARRELL CANNON: On November the 2nd, 1983, about 15 all-white detectives invaded my apartment, terrorized me, my common-law wife and my cat. And during that day, through—I was tortured in despicable ways, from them using an electric cattle prod to shock me on my genitals and in my mouth. They tried to hang me by my handcuffs, which was cuffed behind my back. And they tried to play a game of Russian roulette on me with a shotgun, and they ended up chipping my two front teeth and splitting my upper lip.
AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened?
DARRELL CANNON: From there, by the time they finished with me that evening, I was ready to say that my mother committed a crime, if they told me that was the case. The type of things that they did to me, I have never in my life experienced, and I’ll never in my life forget. It was something that you couldn’t even conjure up in a horror movie, because you don’t think that Chicago police officers would stoop this low in trying to obtain a confession. It didn’t matter whether or not I was guilty or innocent. In their minds, any time they pick a black man up, he’s guilty.
AMY GOODMAN: Flint Taylor, you’ve represented Darrell Cannon as well as other people who were the victim of police torture. What—how was this $5.5 million fund arrived at? And what did it take for you to get the City Council of Chicago and the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to talk about this as a police torture fund?
FLINT TAYLOR: Well, there’s a long history, as you mentioned, of fighting against police torture in this city, starting decades ago. And there’s been tremendous movements, generational, intergenerational movements, interracial movements, that have fought, first to get Burge fired many years ago, later to get him indicted in 2008 for perjury and obstruction of justice, and to get him convicted and sent to the penitentiary, federal penitentiary. And now, this particular movement was a wonderful coming together of young people, older people, an organization called the Torture Justice Memorials and other young organizations, Black Lives Matter, We Charge Genocide, and all of that came together politically to deal with aldermen, to deal with demonstrations, to marches. There was a great up—not uprising, but an uplifting experience, that ultimately led, in the middle of what appeared to be a tough election cycle, to the mayor and his people and a majority of aldermen dealing with this issue some decades after the torture took place. And that really is the reason that we were successful in getting this unique and historic reparations package.
To answer your other question, there are about 55 living men—55 or 65, we estimate—who were tortured, who will be eligible for the reparations. We felt that, symbolically and in a real way, that $100,000 per person would be something that would be meaningful, although certainly does not fully compensate anyone for being tortured. But there was no legal recourse for these men: The statute of limitations had run out. So, the entire package, as you mentioned, not only the money, but the services—psychological counseling for family members and the men who have been tortured; the education, not only for the men, but in the public schools, to have it taught; to have a narrative, the narrative we’ve been fighting for, about police torture all these years, that was disbelieved and laughed at and denigrated in the same way Homan Square is denigrated and laughed at by the city and the police, that now the narrative has changed and will be taught in a different way.
AMY GOODMAN: Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge served a short prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice before his release last year. Statistics compiled by your office, Flint, the People’s Law Office, show Chicago has paid at least $64 million in settlements and judgments in civil rights cases related to Burge’s police abuses alone. The Chicago Reader reported some of Burge’s techniques may have been learned in Vietnam, where he served as a military policeman. How long did Jon Burge serve? And, Darrell Cannon, did you meet him at any point when you were being beaten and tortured?
DARRELL CANNON: No, ma’am. I didn’t personally meet him. He was at the station that day, and he assigned his own personal, hand-picked soldiers to come and get me. Peter Dignan, the most vicious detective out of all of them, he’s the one that did all the announcing of Jon Burge any time they did a fundraiser. He took him to his house on holidays and fed him with his family and etc. So, as far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t directly there, but indirectly, oh, yes, ma’am, he was there.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Darrell Cannon, will you benefit from this $5.5 million police torture fund?
DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am.
AMY GOODMAN: And—
DARRELL CANNON: But the thing that I’m most proud of is the fact that the curriculums in schools will be taught now from eighth grade through tenth grade, something that has never been done in the history of America. And because of this, I play a small role in trying to bring positive change to the police department. And I’ll continue to work on behalf of those who are still in prison.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you had been offered money before, is that right? In a settlement?
DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am.
AMY GOODMAN: How much?
DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. And I—well, we can’t disclose exactly how much, but let’s say it was over a million. But I refused to accept it, because, far as I was concerned, this was hush-up money, for me to go away, to be quiet and to speak no more about it. But the picture has always been bigger than Darrell Cannon, you know? What about the other Darrell Cannons who were not as fortunate as I was to have a supporting system on the streets, as well as to have competent lawyers that stood with me through decades in litigation? And we finally achieved the victories that we wanted, on that level. But as I said before, the case is not over with. The glass is only half full.
AMY GOODMAN: And those other Darrells, Darrell Cannon, those that are still in prison—
DARRELL CANNON: Oh, yes, ma’am.
AMY GOODMAN: What is happening with them?
DARRELL CANNON: Oh, yes, ma’am. We are hoping now that the litigation that has been slowly dragging out, due to the judicial system, will now be stepped up. Seeing how the City Council, as well as the mayor, has come to grips with this horrible tragedy, I’m hoping that the judicial system will also take a leading role and speed up all the hearings into the police brutality for those that are still in prison, and in doing so, let the evidence speak for itself. If the evidence shows that these sadistic, vicious individuals posing as cops did in fact torture them, then give all of those men new trials in front of a fair and impartial judge.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Flint Taylor. Do you see that happening? And overall, do you see what’s happened in Chicago as a model for other cities?
FLINT TAYLOR: It’s definitely a model, not only for other cities, but all across the world, I would think, that it happened here in Chicago, that if there are movements to take it to other cities, as we see there are across the country, that they can demand the same kind of things that the movement here demanded. In terms of hearings, we’re very hopeful that people who are still in prison after all these years and decades will get fair hearings. And a judge has ordered that they be appointed lawyers to look into their cases and to bring them back to court. So we are hopeful on both fronts, but the message has to get out, as you are taking it to the country for us, so that others can see the example set here and that "reparations" can be a word that is broad and accepted across this country when it comes to police violence and police brutality.
AMY GOODMAN: Attorney Flint Taylor, I want to thank you for being with us, one of the founding partners of People’s Law Office in Chicago, and Darrell Cannon, tortured by Chicago police, now out fighting for those who remain in prison.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, upstate New York, there’s a struggle going on. We’ll speak with a filmmaker, Josh Fox, who was one of 20 people arrested this week at Seneca Lake. Stay with us.
On Wednesday, Josh Fox, director of "Gasland," the documentary which exposed the harms of the fracking industry, was arrested along with 20 other people after forming a human barricade at a natural gas storage facility in upstate New York. The action was part of a long-standing campaign against plans by Crestwood Midstream to expand gas storage in abandoned salt caverns at Seneca Lake, a drinking water source for 100,000 people. We speak to Fox and air his new documentary short, "We Are Seneca Lake."
Image Credit: WeAreSenacaLake.com
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a new short film by Josh Fox, director of Gasland, the Academy Award-nominated documentary that exposed the harms of the fracking industry. Fox himself will join us next in our studio, but first, in this video, he explains why he arrested Wednesday along with 20 others who formed a human barricade at a natural gas storage facility in upstate New York, the action part of a long-standing campaign against plans by Crestwood Midstream to expand gas storage in abandoned salt caverns at Seneca Lake, a drinking water source for 100,000 people.
JOSH FOX: When Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking in New York state on December 17th, 2014, a lot of fracktivists in New York thought their problems were over. It was a tremendous victory, a precedent for other states, a landmark decision for public health and for the science on fracking.
But not every decision about fracking in New York was being made at the state level. FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, decides about pipelines, storage facilities and other interstate oil and gas infrastructure. Because FERC is in charge of so many projects, they’ve been heavily criticized for having a lack of public input and for simply being a rubber-stamp commission for the oil and gas industry. One of the decisions that FERC has under its control is the fate of Seneca Lake, New York.
Seneca Lake is 600 feet deep, home to nearly a hundred wineries, breweries and distilleries, a tourist destination and drinking water for 100,000 people. Its beauty is breathtaking, its water resource invaluable. But it has one other fairly unique physical feature. Under the lake are salt caverns, where salt has been mined for decades, huge underground hollow expanses. A company called Crestwood is eyeing the salt caverns to stuff natural gas down as a kind of natural storage facility, as a way station, a hub, a port, for fracked gas from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and other places throughout the region.
Sandra Steingraber, one of the founders of New Yorkers Against Fracking and an incredibly influential and outspoken fracking critic, is working with a group called We Are Seneca Lake. Since October, they’ve been blockading the Crestwood facility with protests that are both colorful and imaginative. With over 250 arrests and counting, We Are Seneca Lake is becoming one of the largest environmental civil disobedience protests in New York history.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: We Are Seneca Lake, in doing these themed blockades, have cut their teeth in the anti-fracking movement and have experienced that victory, so hard-won, only to turn around and see that we’re getting fracked through these infrastructure projects that are being decided in places like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in D.C., and local people have no control over that. They see that as, you know, absence of democracy. And so, civil disobedience often is a tool throughout history, that when people have lost their voice and all other legal avenues of redress have been exhausted, that you can turn to this.
JOSH FOX: New York state policy is now no fracking.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: That’s it.
JOSH FOX: Fracked gas is bad. But the fracked gas is coming in this way. That’s got to be one hell of a contradiction.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, it is. And, you know, everything that we learned about fracking, that we still carry that knowledge around. And so, we know what compressor stations can do to public health. We know that they’re inherently leaky, that flare stacks make formaldehyde. And so—and we know how to do research now, right? We can get on Crestwood Midstream’s website and look at what they’re telling their investors, which is that they intend—they have chosen this place, the Finger Lakes, to become the hub for the storage of fracked gases throughout the entire Northeast.
JOSH FOX: Wow.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: That’s not how we see ourselves. So, this—thus, this battle between the past and the future that’s being played out here.
JOSH FOX: So you’re getting everything about the fracking except the drilling, in a way.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: That’s it.
JOSH FOX: So this sounds a little bit like—I mean, OK, so you have this giant lake with all these people’s water that depends upon it, all these wineries all around, a microclimate, a tourist location, and then these kind of rickety salt caverns underneath the ground. It sounds like some kind of, you know, Dr. Evil kind of plan, like, "Oh, I know. I’ll put gas and explosive and toxic things underneath this." It’s kind of—sounds kind of insane to me.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, it sounds insane to us, too, to put so much at risk for—and the risk would all be borne by us, you know? I’m a mom who sends my child to camp every summer at the Hidden Valley 4-H Camp, which is located right near this facility. And so, it’s my job as a mom to make sure my kid isn’t blown up. But more than that—
JOSH FOX: Wait a minute. It’s your job as a mom to make sure your kids don’t get blown up?
SANDRA STEINGRABER: That’s how I see it.
JOSH FOX: I know it sounds a little far-fetched, but actually these gas storage facilities do blow up. It was one of the very first things I ever filmed for Gasland in 2008, a gas storage facility in Pennsylvania that burned for three weeks. The clip didn’t make the film, but I’m taking it out of the vault now to show one of the consequences of underground gas storage gone awry.
I stopped in at a gas station and asked some people if they knew where the fire was. They pointed at the paper.
PENNSYLVANIA LOCAL: You’re trying to film the fire?
JOSH FOX: Yeah, I will.
PENNSYLVANIA LOCAL: They’re not going to let you in.
JOSH FOX: They’re not going to let me in?
You’re going to come talk to me? All right.
Hi. How are you doing?
SECURITY GUARD: Good. What’s your problem?
JOSH FOX: Oh, there’s no problem. I was interested in seeing if I could shoot some of the fire.
SECURITY GUARD: This is a secure area.
JOSH FOX: Right.
SECURITY GUARD: And we’re not to let anybody in.
JOSH FOX: But there’s no way to get even photographs in the site or anything like that?
SECURITY GUARD: No, no, no.
JOSH FOX: All right.
SECURITY GUARD: And I will remind you that the state police are considering activity that doesn’t go through us as a criminal act.
JOSH FOX: You’re writing down my license number?
SECURITY GUARD: Yes, I am.
JOSH FOX: Do you have authority to take my driver’s license number?
SECURITY GUARD: I’m not going to take it. I just asked to see it.
JOSH FOX: Here I am, Minersville, Pennsylvania, northeast. I drove three-and-a-half hours to get here. I thought maybe I could get some pictures.
SECURITY GUARD: You will need to leave the area now. How did you get in, by the way?
JOSH FOX: After the dominion guys told me to get the hell off their mountain, they made sure that I did. They followed me all the way down at 30 miles an hour. For some reason, looking through the rearview mirror, looking through the camera and trying to negotiate my way down this mountain, I realized just how close I was getting to actual power, just how close I was getting to being arrested, just how close I was getting to being threatened, just how close I was getting to something that everybody wanted to hide.
And so I ended up back down at the gas station talking to my newfound friends. Again, none of them wanted to be interviewed for this film, so I ended up taking pictures of a lot of people’s feet. Then finally, they said, "You know what? Down this other mountain, there’s a little pass. There’s a clearing in the forest. From there, you can see the fire." So, I drove up there.
Now I realize why they were trying to do a press lock on the whole situation. Now I realize what they were so scared of, why they said it would take at least three weeks to put this fire out and that they had employed a special contracting company that had expertise in putting out these kinds of fires. You might remember those ones from Kuwait, the ones you could see from space. Something told me you could probably see this from space.
So that about covers the explosive possibility. But what about the actual stability of the salt caverns themselves? Dr. Steingraber says that’s also a potential problem.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: In the very cavern where they want to store more methane, the shale ceiling has actually collapsed and formed a huge pile of rubble on the bottom. So we believe this is an inherently unsafe situation. We don’t know of any other situation where solution salt mining in interbedded caverns is happening on the shore of a lake that is the source of drinking water for 100,000 people and is also this body of water so vast that it actually controls our whole microclimate here, so the only reason we can grow wine grapes here and do all this amazing agriculture, which is the basis of our economy. And also, it’s so beautiful, right? It brings in all these visitors and tourists. So tourism and wine and agriculture, those are the pillars of our economy. It’s all made possible, in this whole region, the whole Finger Lakes region, because of the unique microclimate that Seneca Lake creates.
JOSH FOX: So has a salt cavern that’s been drilled into ever just collapsed and eaten a whole lake? Well, yeah, actually, a particular incident that happened in Louisiana in a place called Lake Peigneur. Again, salt caverns were being eyed for drilling directly underneath a lake, Lake Peigneur. When the drill bore went awry, it actually popped the bottom of the lake, and it drained down like you were pulling the plug on a bathtub. Eleven barges, tanker trucks and huge sections of Jefferson Island were sucked down into the hole as if they were toy boats going down the drain.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: So, when we drink Seneca Lake water, we literally are Seneca Lake. And so, we’re standing up, not just for this beautiful place, but for our actual—you know, the blood that beats through our heart every moment.
JOSH FOX: What we’re seeing is a whole new frontier of environmental activism in America. Civil disobedience protests against critical oil and gas infrastructure, like the Keystone XL pipeline, the Constitution pipeline and now the gas storage facility at Seneca Lake, are gathering more and more popularity, as environmentalists are calling not only for the banning of fracking or tar sands oil, but also for the banning of the infrastructure that transports them, so that they can make their way towards a renewable energy economy.
I made my decision to join the Seneca Lake protests not only because Seneca Lake is beautiful, and not only because these were fellow fracktivists in New York state, but also because, in the same way that I joined the civil disobedience action in front of the White House for Keystone XL, I felt that this is a nationally symbolic moment. We can’t sacrifice any more Seneca Lakes. Time’s up for the fossil fuel industry. We can’t lock ourselves in to decades more of fossil fuel expansion, whether that be pipelines, power plants, storage facilities, fracked gas wells, tar sands fields, deepwater drilling. We have to start to bind these fights together. So I’m very grateful to Dr. Sandra Steingraber and the whole We Are Seneca Lake crew. I really hope you join us.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s We Are Seneca Lake, a new short film by Josh Fox, director of Gasland and Gasland 2. And we welcome Josh Fox back to Democracy Now! Josh, we only have a few minutes. This is astounding to see. Back in 2008, this fire, you believe, could—
JOSH FOX: This was a fire that nobody reported on. This was something that burned for three-and-a -half weeks. And these kinds of things, I think, are routine. When you’re talking about gas storage, you’re stuffing huge amounts of methane into underground formations. These are not steel tanks. These are actual geologic formations. And this is what people in Seneca Lake—one of the reasons people in Seneca Lake are incredibly concerned.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, place it for us, for a global audience.
JOSH FOX: OK, so the Finger Lakes region of New York state has five Finger Lakes. There are hundreds of wineries, distilleries, breweries. It’s an incredibly beautiful area. Seneca Lake itself is in central upstate New York. It’s the source of drinking water for 100,000 people. And famously, as we now know, New York has banned fracking, which is an incredible victory for both the people’s movement against fracking and the science on the subject.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were an essential part of that, with your film, Gasland.
JOSH FOX: Well, I think that Gasland helped educate people quite a bit, but it is—
AMY GOODMAN: Fracking being?
JOSH FOX: Fracking being the injection of high-pressure water and chemicals and sand to break apart rock formations underneath the ground to release oil and gas that’s trapped there. Fracked gas is, you know, a huge environmental issue right now, as well as fracked oil. And New York has banned this practice because it contaminates water supplies and air, and creates a public health crisis. But here in New York state, we still have tons of infrastructure projects—pipelines, compressor stations, power plants.
So, the Seneca Lake gas storage facility fits in with a national crisis right now, when you have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a five-member body, basically usurping state and local authority and saying, "It’s totally OK. Let’s build a huge liquified natural gas storage facility here. Let’s take over this port," like in Cove Point, Maryland, for example. FERC is not accountable, really, to democracy. Nobody really knows who these people are. They’re not famous. They’re not senators. They’re not the president. And yet they are controlling all of these oil and gas infrastructure projects. And you’re seeing people be incredibly frustrated and put themselves in harm’s way, again, in Seneca Lake, now almost 300 arrests over the course of six months.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were one of 20 this week that got arrested?
JOSH FOX: One of 20—one of 20 this week, blockading the front gate. Because when people feel that they don’t have representation in a democracy—this is civil disobedience, obviously, nonviolent civil disobedience, one of the last recourses that you can have to appeal to a higher sense of justice. And people are putting themselves in harm’s way because they sense that the harm is greater if they don’t.
And that’s motivated both by the local issue, I think, of Seneca Lake, and how beautiful and important it is for the microclimate and for drinking water, but also because of climate change. We can ban fracked extraction in New York state, but unless we start to take on the pipelines, the power plants, the basic infrastructure that delivers oil and gas that creates carbon, we’re going to be in deep trouble with climate change and lock ourselves into decades more of fossil fuels.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Josh Fox, for being with us, director of Gasland, the documentary which first exposed the harms of the fracking industry, nominated for an Academy Award, also made Gasland 2, as well as this documentary, We Are Seneca Lake.
That does it for our broadcast. We have a job opening for video production fellowships beginning July 1st. Go to democracynow.org for more information.
Headlines:
Report: Budget, Other Hurdles Stalled Safety Technology on Crashed Train
The death toll from an Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia has risen to eight with all passengers now accounted for, after another body was discovered in the mangled wreckage. The news comes as The New York Times reports the train was already equipped with technology officials say would have prevented the crash, but the system was not yet active, due to budget shortfalls and other hurdles. Congress mandated the installation of positive train control technology in 2008 but failed to grant access to the wireless frequencies needed for it to work. That meant Amtrak was bogged down in negotiations with private corporations to gain use of the necessary airwaves. On Wednesday, just hours after the crash, House Republicans rebuffed attempts to fund the speed-control technology, and voted to cut a fifth of Amtrak’s budget. On Thursday, President Obama called for investment in infrastructure.
President Obama: "Until we know for certain what caused this tragedy, I just want to reiterate what I have already said, that we are a growing country with a growing economy. We need to invest in the infrastructure that keeps us that way, and not just when something bad happens, like a bridge collapse or a train derailment, but all the time. That’s what great nations do."
Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman has said he expects positive train control technology to be in service in the Northeast Corridor by the end of the year. Video shows the train sped up as it approached a curve in the tracks. The engineer Brandon Bostian has agreed to be interviewed by investigators. His attorney has said he does not remember what happened.
Citing Amtrak Crash, Environmentalists Sue over "Bomb Train" Rules
Environmental groups are raising concerns about the proximity of the train derailment to tanker cars which may have been carrying crude oil or other explosive materials. Earthjustice has sued the Obama administration, calling its recently announced rules on so-called oil "bomb trains" inadequate, and citing the tank cars in Philadelphia, shown in photographs just yards from the crash. Officials say the tankers were empty at the time.
Thousands of Migrants from Bangladesh, Burma Stranded at Sea
More than 700 migrants from Bangladesh and Burma have reportedly been rescued from a sinking boat off the coast of Indonesia while thousands remain adrift in the region. Indonesia and Malaysia have turned away vessels laden with starving and dehydrated migrants, many from Burma’s persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority, who are not considered citizens in Burma and are effectively stateless. Between 6,000 and 20,000 people are believed to be at sea in the region, rejected by countries in what advocates call a deadly game of "ping-pong."
Burundi President Returns, Arrests Alleged Coup Leaders
In Burundi, President Pierre Nkurunziza has returned from a trip to Tanzania and says his authorities have arrested three leaders of an attempted coup. An army general had claimed to have ousted the president after more than two weeks of deadly protests over his bid for a third term. But President Nkurunziza now appears to be back in control of the country.
Iraq: ISIL Launches Major Assault on Ramadi
In Iraq, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has launched a major assault on Ramadi in a bid to retake the key city from Iraqi security forces. Ramadi is just 70 miles west of Baghdad.
Obama: U.S. Will Use Military Force to Defend Gulf Allies
President Obama has wrapped up a Camp David summit of Gulf allies designed to allay concerns over a nuclear deal with Iran. Speaking after the summit, Obama vowed to use military force to defend Gulf allies from "external attack."
President Obama: "We discussed the conflict in Syria. We discussed the situation in Yemen. We discussed countering violent extremism, and specifically what additional work we need to do with respect to Daish. And I was very explicit, as will be reflected in the joint statement that we released, that the United States will stand by our GCC partners against external attack and will deepen and extend the cooperation that we have when it comes to the many challenges that exist in the region."
In what’s seen as a snub over displeasure with the Iran negotiations, King Salman of Saudi Arabia did not attend the meeting, nor did Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who opted instead to attend the Royal Windsor Horse Show.
Jeb Bush Walks Back Support for Iraq War; Student Tells Him "Your Brother Created ISIS"
Likely Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has said he would not have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq presided over by his brother, former President George W. Bush, reversing a stance he took just days earlier. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Tempe, Arizona, Bush said he would not have invaded if he had known former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not have "weapons of mass destruction." His comments came three days after the airing of an interview where Bush told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly he would have authorized the war, despite that knowledge.
Megyn Kelly: "On the subject of Iraq, obviously very controversial, knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"
Jeb Bush: "I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."
Jeb Bush spent the rest of the week trying to walk back those remarks, first saying he misunderstood the question, then refusing to respond to hypotheticals, and finally saying he "would not have gone into Iraq," given what is known now. On Wednesday, in Reno, Nevada, Jeb Bush was confronted by Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student, who argued today’s rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State resulted from his brother President George W. Bush’s decision to disband the Iraqi army. "Your brother created ISIS," she said. Last week, Jeb Bush privately told a group of high-powered investors his brother is his top adviser on U.S.-Israel policy.
Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold Seeks to Reclaim Seat
Former Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has announced he is running to retake his Senate seat in 2016. Feingold lost the seat he held for 18 years to millionaire Republican Ron Johnson in 2010 after Johnson spent some $9 million of his own money on his campaign. Feingold, who was seen as one of the Senate’s most progressive members, is best known for working with Senator John McCain to pass the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law to restrict money in politics.
Chile: 2 Students Shot Dead amid Protests for Free Education
In Chile, two students have been shot dead in the port city of Valparaiso amid mass protests demanding a greater voice in education reforms promised by President Michelle Bachelet. Chilean media reports the students were spraying graffiti and putting up posters when they were shot and killed by the property owner’s son. Police say they have arrested the alleged shooter, and Chile’s interior minister has denied police played any role in the killings. The protests are part of a years-long campaign to end the privatized education system imposed under the U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In the capital Santiago, organizers said 150,000 people took to the streets, while police fired water cannon at protesters.
Protesters in Kayaks Oppose Docking of Shell Oil Rig in Seattle
A Shell oil rig bound for drilling in the Arctic has docked in Seattle, Washington. Dozens of activists staged an "unwelcome party," paddling out in kayaks and bearing signs reading "sHell no." Despite opposition by the city, Seattle has become a base for Shell’s supplying of oil rigs bound for remote and pristine Arctic waters. The Obama administration granted Shell conditional approval for Arctic drilling this week in a major blow to environmentalists, who warn the drilling will be catastrophic for the climate. The move comes as NASA has confirmed the first four months of this year were the warmest start to any year in recorded history.
New Jersey: Teacher Fired over Student Letters to Mumia Abu-Jamal
A third-grade teacher in Orange, New Jersey, has been fired a month after she was suspended for letting her students write get-well cards to imprisoned journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Marilyn Zuniga said her students wanted to send letters to Abu-Jamal after she shared one of his quotations with them and later told them he was ill. Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer, but Amnesty International has said he was deprived of a fair trial. Zuniga’s firing comes after she received a wave of support from educators across the country — and from her own students, including eight-year-old Cashmere Jones.
Cashmere Jones: "She has been a great teacher to me and all the other classmates, and they all really want to see her again."
Video Shows Dying Moments of African-American Soldier in Texas Jail
Newly released video has revealed the dying moments of an African-American active-duty soldier who checked himself into the El Paso, Texas, county jail and died while in custody nearly three years ago. Sgt. James Brown reported to jail for a two-day sentence for driving while intoxicated. His family said Brown informed the jail he had a history of post-traumatic stress disorder after two combat tours in Iraq. Local news station KFOX14 said they fought all the way to the Texas attorney general to obtain video of the 2012 incident. The video shows something happened which caused Brown to bleed in his cell. When he refuses to speak with guards, a team in riot gear storms in and swarms on top of him, while he repeatedly says he can’t breathe and appears not to resist. His condition deteriorates, as he is carried to an infirmary, and has a mask placed over his face. Toward the end of the video, after Brown has said he can’t breathe at least 20 times, he is left naked in a cell, not blinking or responding, his breathing shallow. Attorneys say an ambulance was never called. Brown was eventually brought to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Authorities claim he died from natural causes after an autopsy report cited a "sickle cell crisis," but his family says he died as a result of his treatment in jail. Their attorney, B.J. Crow, spoke to KFOX.
B.J. Crow: "When a 26-year-old active military person checks into jail for a court-imposed sentence on a Friday, and he leaves Sunday, you know, in a casket, something went horribly wrong there. ... He was bleeding out the ears, the nose, the mouth. His kidneys shut down. His blood pressure dropped to a very dangerous level. And his liver shut down."
James Brown’s family has filed a lawsuit against El Paso County saying his constitutional rights were violated.
Legendary Blues Singer B.B. King Dies at 89
And the legendary blues singer and guitarist B.B. King has died in Las Vegas, Nevada. The "King of the Blues" was 89 years old.
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