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Pulling a Gun on a Pool Party? Texas Cop Suspended After Manhandling Bikini-Clad Black Teen
As a grand jury charges former South Carolina police officer Michael Slager with murder for the shooting death of unarmed African-American Walter Scott, hundreds have protested in McKinney, Texas against a white police officer who threw an African-American bikini-clad 14-year-old girl to the ground and pointed his pistol at other black youths at a pool party. We are joined by Cheryl Dorsey, a former sergeant in the Los Angeles Department, the third largest in the country. Dorsey’s autobiography is "The Creation of a Manifesto: Black & Blue."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: We begin with the latest in police abuses, including cases where video could prove the difference between accountability and impunity. On Monday, a grand jury charged former South Carolina police officer Michael Slager with murder for the shooting death of unarmed African-American Walter Scott. Slager had stopped Scott for a broken light when Scott fled on foot. Slager explained the shooting by saying he feared for his life and claiming Scott had taken his Taser weapon. But eyewitness video shows Slager shooting Scott in the back eight times as he runs away. Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson said Slager was charged with the single murder charge allowed under South Carolina law, unlawful killing with malice forethought.
SCARLETT WILSON: In this case and in cases involving murder, what we’re talking about is unlawful killing with malice of forethought. And malice of forethought, yes, is a form of premeditation, but there is no time limit or time requirement in proving malice of forethought. It can be seconds before. As long as malice exists in the heart and mind at the time before and during the killing, the state has proven malice of forethought.
AMY GOODMAN: If convicted, Michael Slager faces anywhere between 30 years to life in prison without parole. Walter Scott’s brother, Rodney Scott, and Scott family attorney, Chris Stewart, welcomed the indictment.
SCARLETT WILSON: In this case, and in cases involving murder, what we’re talking about is unlawful killing with malice of forethought. In this case, and in cases involving murder, what we’re talking about —
RODNEY SCOTT: This morning the grand jury made a decision to indict Mr. Slager for murder and we’re very happy and pleased about that right now.
CHRIS STEWART: Today was just an example that if you just keep the faith, even in the darkest times, you’ll see the light. But this is just step one. We’re going to patiently wait for the criminal trial in this case and the family is going to patiently wait to see if the city and the police department and the chief is going to accept responsibility in the civil suit, because this entire situation never should have occurred with Officer Slager.
AMY GOODMAN: The indictment comes as a new incident caught on tape in Texas has sparked national outrage. A McKinney police officer has been put on leave after video emerged of his aggressive handling of African-American teens. The officer, Eric Casebolt, was responding to a complaint about a pool party the teens were attending. Several witnesses say a dispute only broke out after local white residents voiced anger at the presence of African-Americans and hurled racial epithets. On the video, officer Casebolt is seen wrestling a teenage girl to the ground, pulling her hair, and slamming her face into the ground. He then sits on top of the girl, who is only wearing a bikini, burying his knees into her back as she weeps. Casebolt also pulls a gun on another African-American teen who voices concern. Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey spent over two decades at the Los Angeles police department. Her autobiography is called, The Creation of a Manifesto: Black & Blue. We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you tell us — we’ll start here in the McKinney case. Hundreds of people rallied yesterday in protest of what took place. Can you talk about these — this officer’s actions as he went after this 14-year-old girl?
CHERYL DORSEY: Yes, and thank you for having me on the show. For me, as I watch officer Casebolt, what I see is a bully. I see someone that was totally out of control, that was similarly focused on every African-American youth that he encountered. And then he paid particular attention to this young woman. Why? Because she failed to follow his orders. And what we see is what I like to refer to as contempt of cop. When you don’t do what an officer says, there’s a price to pay. And we’ve seen it over and over. Generally, we’ve seen that that price is death. Thank goodness no young person lost their life in this incident, but he punished her. He sat on top of her with the full weight of his body to make a point. And it was unnecessary. It was over-the-top, outrageous, and he needs to be fired.
AARON MATÉ: We also see him pulling his gun. He rolls on the ground in sort of an action figure type of pose. What do you make of the behavior and what does it indicate to you?
CHERYL DORSEY: What it indicates to me is that this is how this officer comports himself. I would venture to guess if we were to look into his history, we’ll see that there are probably other incidents where people have complained about excessive force, overzealousness on his part, and I would bet that that department does what a lot of police departments do, is minimize and mitigate that bad behavior. They circle the wagons. They shield the officers, and then that officer lives to offend again. And that’s what happened here. This is not the first time that this officer has pulled his weapon out and used it as a bullying tool, as an intimidation tool to compel these children to come here, to sit down, to don’t move, to shut up. A weapon is drawn in the immediate defense of your life or the life of another. And none of that was going on when he pulled his weapon out of its holster.
AMY GOODMAN: You said that he should be fired. Should he also be charged? I mean, you think about it. A man with a gun is pushing a young woman to the ground, jumping on top of her as she screams, telling her to put her face in the ground. I mean, isn’t this outright assault?
CHERYL DORSEY: It seems very criminal to me. Certainly if a citizen was acting in the same manner, they would be charged with a litany of criminal violations. Assault, assault with a deadly weapon, which is a felony, brandishing a firearm. I mean, there’s a plethora of things he could be charged with criminally and then let’s not forget that there were other police officers there who also, I think, hold some culpability in the actions of this officer. Although he’s senior, certainly, if you see your partner officer doing something that is out of policy, outrageous, and could be deadly, you have an obligation to stop that officer, to pull him back, to rein him in. And that didn’t happen.
AARON MATÉ: Let’s turn to an eyewitness, Aryana Rhodes, describing what happened in McKinney.
ARYANA RHODES: It was one — police came, the brutal one, the one that attacked my friend, the 14-year-old, he attacked her. He just came and he was out of control. He came to these group of young men and just out of nowhere, put them in handcuffs for no reason. And then we were just standing, me and my friends, were standing on the side and he told us to back away, and that is what we did. And my friend, the one that got attacked, said, she said, as I quote, "By my momma, this isn’t right." And I guess he didn’t like it and took it as this disrespect. And he took her by the wrist and took her from the group we were in and dragged her and pushed her into the ground and put his knee in her back so she wouldn’t move.
AARON MATÉ: Video of the incident has been viewed more than 7 million times on YouTube. On Monday, protesters rallied in McKinney to call for Officer Casebolt’s firing. This is Reverend Ronald Rice of Justice Seekers Texas.
REV. RONALD RICE: We’re here today because of the unethical misconduct and racial misconduct of a police officer here in the city of McKinney. It is our hope and prayer that the chief of police, the mayor of the city, handle this situation by not only firing this officer, but taking his [TCOLEs] license, because this was simply based on race.
AARON MATÉ: Cheryl Dorsey, the issue of how this whole incident started, the teens were at a pool party. Apparently, some — there was a dispute between some white residents and some of the black teens with the white residents hurling epithets at the black teens and that was the so-called disturbance that spurred this officer’s response.
CHERYL DORSEY: Right. And so, with that as a backdrop, when he comes in, what he should have done is he should have contacted the reporting party, interview that person to find out what was going on, and then attempt to locate and identify the person that was hosting the party to further conduct an investigation. And none of that happen. It seems as though he merely took the word of the white residents, that the black teens were not there legally, permissibly and then just went about corralling them and harassing them and talking to them in a way that was profane and offensive. And, you know, since he’s a training officer, I am concerned because we also see him on video barking orders to the junior officers, go get that mf-er. And they just followed him blindly. So I’m wondering if this isn’t a problem that is maybe systemic throughout the department. If this is your police officers are training younger officers, is this condoned? Is this behavior appropriate? I think not.
AMY GOODMAN: In a video posted to YouTube on Sunday, an African-American teenager named Tatiana said her family was hosting a cookout for friends when a racist woman began insulting them. This is Tatiana describing the incident.
TATIANA: This lady was saying racial slurs to some friends that came to the cookout.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of slurs was she saying?
TATIANA: She was saying things such as black effer, and that’s why you live in section eight homes. There was also a male that was saying rude things. And this 14-year-old girl named Grace, which is my brothers friend, stood up for us saying that’s not right, you shouldn’t do that, that’s racist, and things like that. So then they started verbally abusing her, saying that she needs to do better for herself, be better for herself, cursing at her. And I’m saying, no, that’s wrong. She’s 14, you should not say things like that to a 14 year old. They’re like, um, well you need to go back from where you’re from.
AMY GOODMAN: So that’s Tatiana describing what happened. We also see in this video a large white man wearing a white shirt and blue shorts who keeps standing over the girl, sort of preventing other people from getting to her, not stopping the cop from doing what he did to her. Do you know who this man is?
CHERYL DORSEY: Well, obviously, I don’t know. He looks like a resident from the community. He may very well have been part of the group of white residents who thought those kids had no place there and was doing his part to ensure that the officers did their bidding, which was caused those kids to leave, and then punish those who didn’t. And we’ve also seen video of two white women, two adult women, fighting, I believe it was Tatiana, and we’ve heard nothing in terms of any assault charges against these two women for fighting this young woman. It just seems like it’s totally one-sided and it’s to the benefit of the white residents.
AARON MATÉ: Broadly speaking, what do you think has to change inside police departments, if you could design training policies? What would you advise?
CHERYL DORSEY: What I would advise is that officers should be psychologically evaluated intermittently. Police officers are put through a battery of tests initially when they come on the department. Psychological testing is one of the tests that we’re given, and then that’s it. I think, just based on what officers are exposed to on patrol on a day-to-day basis, it makes sense to me that every so often we should just pull those officers to the side and just make sure that their head is on straight, make sure that they haven’t become jaded. And I think that police departments should not be too quick to promote officers based on time on the job versus common sense and a demonstrated ability to show compassion and empathy for people, because, if a trainer, such as Casebolt, is given the charge of teaching other officers, this is the kind of thing that he will teach. And then it becomes generational. And so you wind up with a police force that has a cultural and a systemic problem, which is what we have right now, where some officers are behaving badly because it’s learned behavior. And then some officers, I think, come to these positions with a bias. And so we need to identify those officers and when they are found to be ill-suited to be a police officer, they should not be given the gift of resignation. They should be fired. They should be terminated so that there’s a record for their bad behavior, unlike officer Timothy Loehmann who was allowed to resign from Independence PD and then move on to Cleveland and ultimately, killed Tamir Rice. Unlike Darren Wilson who was fired from Jennings PD and went on to Ferguson, PD, and ultimately killed Mike Brown. Officers should get one bite at the Apple. And if you mess up, then your banned from that position for life.
AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, you spent over two decades at the Los Angeles Police Department. Your autobiography, called The Creation of a Manifesto: Black & Blue. Did you experience, when you are out on the street with other officers, incidents like this or worse than this? And what role can you play if you see this happening?
CHERYL DORSEY: Well certainly, I did. I spent all 20 years in patrol, and I’m very proud of that. I worked South Bureau CRASH, which is our Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, it’s our our gang detail. And I worked the CRASH unit during the late and middle 1980’s when gangs were very prolific in Los Angeles. And so I understand that a lot of what we see is inherent to police work. Bad guys run from us. People are dishonest because they don’t want to go back to jail. That’s why police officers receive an inordinate amount of training so that when you find yourself in that situation, you just revert back to your training. You do that thing that you learned. And it’s important for officers to have common sense. But unfortunately, that is not something you can teach someone.
When you identify an officer who is either incapable or unwilling to look at someone that they serve and identify with that person as maybe that could be my son, could be my daughter, could be my sister, and treat them accordingly, if you make those kind of observations, if we see red flags of bad behavior, overzealousness, excessive force, that officer needs to be removed from that situation, retrained if possible, and if not, removed from office. It’s just that simple.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there an issue, and did you find this, but right now with the many people, soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, a number of them going into police departments, how is the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder dealt with for those that suffer from it? And also, making that transition from a war zone to being a peace officer? Because that’s what police officers are supposed to be.
CHERYL DORSEY: I don’t think that there’s much emphasis given to officers who struggle on many levels whether it’s aggressiveness because of anger management, whether it’s substance abuse, maybe alcoholism. Because certainly police officers have been known to get in trouble for drinking off-duty, involved in instances where there’s bar fights and drunk driving. We’re not immune. And I think unless and until police department chiefs and commissioners and sheriffs admit that there’s a problem, then there’s nothing to fix. And what we hear and what we see is our police chiefs saying that everything is OK. That this really isn’t what it appears to be. And so if everything is OK, there’s nothing to do, and there’s nothing to fix, and officers are allowed to fester, they’re allowed to stay in office, they’re allowed to offend again.
AARON MATÉ: I want to ask about the role of the federal government. The Obama administration certainly has been very active in going after police departments entering into a number of different consent decrees. The most recent case was Cleveland just last month, Cleveland agreeing to a series of reforms. How effective can the federal government be in reforming police forces?
CHERYL DORSEY: Well, you know, it is effective only as long as that consent decree is in place, right? We had a consent decree on LAPD when I joined. That is one of the reasons that I was able to get through such an expidited process. They were ordered to hire more women and minorities. And so Cleveland is under a consent decree and they’ll behave for a while, but if you don’t change that system, if you don’t change the mindset of the officers, if you don’t change — and it is top-down. So I’m talking about police chief down. If you don’t change that mindset, if you don’t change that culture, there’s really no teeth behind consent decrees because if there’s no accountability, if there is no consequence for the bad action, then how do you deter it? It’s great to make a recommendation, it’s great to have an observation about what should be done, but when that’s not done, and there is no consequence, there’s no accountability, how do you deter it from happening again?
AMY GOODMAN: Well Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Sergeant Dorsey spent over two decades at the Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest police department in the country. Her autobiography called, The Creation of a Manifesto: Black & BlueThis is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we look back at the Arctic 30, Greenpeace attempting to stop drilling in the Arctic. You’ll find out what happens. Stay with us.
The Arctic 30: How Greenpeace Activists Risked All to Stop Oil Drilling in New Climate Battleground
The Arctic is now the center of one of the world’s great environmental battles. As temperatures rise in the region, the world’s largest oil companies are eyeing vast new untapped reserves once covered year-round by ice. Environmentalists are pushing back in an attempt to save the pristine Arctic and keep the oil underground. We look back at a 2013 protest that caught the world’s attention, when activists from Greenpeace attempted to board a Russian oil drilling rig owned by the Russian state oil company Gazprom. In total 28 Greenpeace activists and two journalists were arrested and brought to Russia where they were charged with piracy and held for two months. They had faced up to 15 years in prison. They became known as the Arctic 30. We are joined by two guests: Peter Willcox, the captain of the Greenpeace ship involved in the action who spent two months in a Russian jail; and Ben Stewart, a longtime member of Greenpeace and author of the new book "Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30."
Image Credit: Greenpeace
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the Arctic, the center of one of the world’s great environmental battles. As temperatures rise, the world’s largest oil companies are eyeing vast new untapped reserves once covered year-round by ice. Environmentalists are pushing back in an attempt to save the pristine Arctic and keep the oil underground. Protesters in Seattle recently staged days of action against Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to resume oil exploration in the Arctic. Last month, the Obama administration gave conditional approval to Shell’s resumption of fossil fuel exploration in the Arctic. But today we look back at a 2013 protest that caught the world’s attention. That’s when activists from Greenpeace attempted to board a Russian oil drilling rig owned by the Russian state oil company Gazprom. What happened next is chronicled in the documentary Black Ice.
DIMA LITVINOV: We believe that your platform and the activities being carried out in preparation for drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean represents a real immediate threat to the environment both here and globally.
FRANK HEWETSON: We started being chased everywhere we went, everywhere we tried to get a lineup. We only had a few minutes within which to get climbers up underneath that heavy platform. But there was a chase, and we were losing time rapidly.
SINI SAARELA: I managed to get a rope up and I started to climb up on it, but that just when I was attaching myself to the rope the Coast Guard boat came and started pushing our boat away.
FRANK HEWETSON: They realized we were going to continue, and we were going to try our hardest to get a climber onto that rig. And they had made a decision that was not going to happen. And they drew guns and pointed it straight in my face.
RADIO VOICE: — in our faces. Two guns pointed directly at our faces.
DENIS SINYAKOV: I used to be a war photographer in Reuters Agency France Press, and when I saw this aggressive soldiers, I knew the main point now is not only hanging the banner, but I had to take photos how they pointed the gun at the Greenpeace activists.
SINI SAARELA: It was such a bizarre thing to see a gun pointing at you, that I maybe couldn’t even take it seriously because it just felt so wrong. We were there during a peaceful protest. We were not threatening anyone or anything, and they come there with their guns.
AARON MATÉ: Two of the Greenpeace activists were detained aboard the Russian oil rig. A day later, Russian special forces raided the Arctic Sunrise. This is another excerpt from Black Ice.
DIMA LITVINOV I was sitting in the mess, I remember, I think we were just finishing up lunch when I heard a lot of screaming and running around in the corridors outside. People shouting, "helicopters coming, helicopters coming." I went out on deck and from that moment on, I was in the middle of a James Bond movie.
PETER WILLCOX: Well, when the boarding happened, I was actually down on an exercise machine in the hold and a heard the engine stop, and about a minute later, some panic stricken crew member came running up and got, "oh, my God, they’re jumping out of a helicopter." And I though, oh.
DIMA LITVINOV I went out on the heli-deck and I saw the first of this masked, camouflaged, heavily armed troopers, slide down the wire onto the deck of the Arctic Sunrise started shouting at us in Russian, telling us to "get down on the deck." Guns were being pointed more or less in the direction of the people. I turn around and I ran for the bridge. As I was running up the steps, I saw Frank standing in front of the door, and I saw him being pulled back and thrown down to the ground by another trooper. I stopped in front of his body and then I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back and shoving me forward, and I stumbled and fell onto Frank’s prone body.
AMY GOODMAN: In total, 28 Greenpeace activists and journalists were arrested and brought to Russia where they were charged with piracy and held for two months. They faced up to 15 years in prison. They became known as the Arctic 30. Today, we’re joined by two guests, Peter Willcox was the captain of the Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise. He spent two months in a Russian jail, legendary figure in the environmental world, was also captain of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, which was blown up by the French government. Two French secret service agents, 30 years ago, killing the photographer Fernando Pereira. Also with us, Ben Stewart, longtime member of Greenpeace, who led the first Greenpeace expedition to challenge Arctic oil drilling off the Greenland coast. He is author of a new book, Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30. He was a leading figure in the campaign to free the Arctic 30. So Peter Willcox, talk about what happened next. So we see what happens on the boat. Talk about what happens when you’re taken off to prison. How are you taken?
PETER WILLCOX: We arrived in Murmansk late one afternoon. We were met by a number of embassy officials and then we were told to —
AMY GOODMAN: How many different countries did the Greenpeace come from?
PETER WILLCOX: I think there were 18 different countries that we represented. I’m not sure if everybody’s counselor or official was there. Mine certainly was there from St. Petersburg, the US counselor.
AMY GOODMAN: From Florida.
PETER WILLCOX: I guess so. I can’t remember. But he was worried. I was —- at that point, I was like, look, we have been arrested, we’ve done this before -—
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning your counsel was from St. Petersburg, Russia.
PETER WILLCOX: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Ah.
PETER WILLCOX: Sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: But was the U.S. counsel.
PETER WILLCOX: Yeah, so it was the US counsel who was — the consulate is in St. Petersburg. The embassy is in Moscow. And they — as far as we were concerned, it was all business as usual. We had been arrested in Russia before. My first campaign there was a 1983. It’s all going to plan. Things didn’t start to get exciting until we got into the investigator’s office that evening, and they said, well, you’re not going back to the boat. You’re being arrested, you’re being sent to detention for two months. And we are charging you with piracy, which is 10 to 15 years. And that was a little disconcerting.
AMY GOODMAN: So you’re watching this, Ben. You are not in this action, but you’re the communications director. What are you thinking at this point? Where were you?
BEN STEWART: Well, I was in London and it’s the same as what Pete said, we thought this was a standard Greenpeace action. It’d been pretty good. There had been some good footage, there had been some media attention. The presumption was that those guys would get kicked out of the country and be telling their stories in a bar in Norway that evening. We got the news when Dennis, who is just on that film, went to court. And it was a shock to him. It was a shock to all of us. They were being charged with piracy. Minimum 10 years in a country where 99% of people that go to trial get found guilty. And suddenly, for us, this became a humanitarian crisis. We had 28 activists and two journalists there and we thought that we were going to lose them into Russia’s new Gulag system for the next 10 to 15 years.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, on the point of being in the Gulag system, can you talk about the conditions for the activists when they were in prison?
BEN STEWART: For the book, I interviewed about 16 or 17 of them when they got out. The truth is, that they didn’t have it as bad as many of the Russian prisoners. I think that Putin realized that if these guys were maltreated, it would be bad for Russia’s reputation. Some extraordinary things happened in jail. I spoke to Dima, who was on there, who told me how, effectively, the Arctic 30 were taken under the wing of some of the prisoners, some of the Mafia bosses, The Katlavia [sp] who controlled the place actually decided that the Arctic 30 had been the subject of a gross injustice by Putin, and so in a sense, they were kind of protected. They were given access to this extraordinary communication system in the jail, called the Doroga which translates as "the road," which is a is a kind of physical prison Internet. Each evening the prisoners would get ropes out and string them up down, left and right outside their window and create a grid system and then they put socks on that rope and exchanged what they called e-mails, which were, they were messages like 423 Dima, how you doing, and it would go off. They would exchange sugar and cigarettes and all these kinds of things. And this Doroga was how the Mafia bosses dispensed justice and controlled the prison.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain, I mean, you describe this at the beginning of the book, the piping system within the jails, how it’s used to communicate.
BEN STEWART: It’s used as a prison telephone system. And Frank Hewetson, who again was in the film you showed there, told me how he was lying there one night and one of his cellmates called him off his bunk and Frank went down and the guy pulled off the u-bend from the toilet —
AMY GOODMAN: The u-bend in the pipe.
BEN STEWART: The u-bend. Put it to Frank’s ear and Frank heard his friend, Roman Dolgov, saying Frank, Frank, can you hear me? And they had a conversation. And realize that this is how the prisoners communicated with each other. And I think it shows, actually how important human contact is to people to survive. Lots of these guys in there had done very, very bad things on the outside, but they were human beings, and their way of living, was to communicate. It was as important as food and water to them.
PETER WILLCOX: Remember, too, Ben, that in the detention, you’re in isolated in your cell for 23 hours a day.
AMY GOODMAN: How many people were with you?
PETER WILLCOX: One, sometimes none. Some people had two cellmates. You are taken for an hour to a bigger cell to get to walk around and get a little exercise, supposedly. But, it really was isolation. I mean, you weren’t — there weren’t — there wasn’t — you didn’t eat with your other prisoners. You didn’t see your other prisoners. So the communication at night was a fundamental thing.
BEN STEWART: The women were kept in — there were eight women in the Arctic 30, they were kept in solitary confinement. And they worked out how to communicate by developing code. They would tap on a radiator pipe that went through all of their cells with a spoon. One tap meant a, two, b, three, c, and they showed me their notebooks when they got out of jail. And they were full of these conversations, each sentence about the length of a tweet, but it would take 20 minutes to tap it out. And by the end of it, they knew each other so well. They had only been with each other 11 or 12 days on the ship. But when they got out, they were so close because they knew everything about their families, boyfriends, merely by this code tapping away. And again, I think, in an era of instant communication with tweeting, it shows something important about the importance of communication by using that spoon on that radiator pipe.
AMY GOODMAN: So we’re going to go to break and then come back to the discussion about why you were doing, what you were doing, Peter and Ben, as the Communications Director. Again, Ben Stewart’s book, Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30. This is Democracy Now! Back with them in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Bonnie Prince Billie, "Black Captain." Revised for Peter Willcox who is our guest today. That’s right, we’re joined by Peter Willcox and Ben Stewart who wrote, Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30. I’m Amy Goodman with Aaron Maté.
AARON MATÉ: As we turn to some of the voices of the Arctic 30, these are excerpts of letters they wrote while imprisoned Murmansk. Greenpeace produced this video featuring a dramatic reading of their letters.
SPEAKER 1: Dear, James.
SPEAKER 2: Dear, supporters. It’s been over a month now that special forces dropped by helicopter and took over our ship at gunpoint. What a terrifying moment, I must admit. Surreal, out of an action movie. Since then, life has been quite difficult.
SPEAKER 3: We were towed into report under armed guard, Murmansk being the final destination.
SPEAKER 1: When we were taken off the ship to be arrested, it felt like a scene from the Cold War. It was dark. I was scared.
SPEAKER 4: The hardest moment was the first night in prison, being shown to my cell and introduced to a couple of strangers. It was frightening, to say the least. The cell is about eight meters long, four meters wide, and six meters high. I spend 23 hours a day in here without nothing but the occasional book and my thoughts.
SPEAKER 5: The weather is turned to winter.
SPEAKER 3: Everyone sleeps with their clothes on.
SPEAKER 1: I heard that from December, Murmansk is dark for six weeks. God, I hope I’m out by then.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of the Arctic 30. Ben Stewart, do you think Greenpeace adequately prepared for the potential of this harsh Russian crackdown? And how did Greenpeace respond after it became clear that the activists were not going to be released.
BEN STEWART: OK, so two questions there. I think the first one — that’s a very fair question that Greenpeace has been asked a lot. Were they naive to go up there and not imagine that Putin’s judicial system would come down really hard? And I think the opinion is split, to be honest. I mean, some of the Arctic 30 think that Greenpeace really should have known, and should have predicted it. Others say, no, that’s not true, Greenpeace went up a year before and did a similar protest and didn’t get this kind of reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we had Kumi Naidoo on the phone here in the Democracy Now! studio broadcasting live as he was being pummeled with the Arctic water, that they were shooting at him from cannons hanging off the side of the ship and he is the head of Greenpeace.
BEN STEWART: And now was exactly a year before the events that we’re talking about here, and there wasn’t this Russian reaction. Then a year later, this huge Russian overreaction. So, I don’t think I’m qualified to say whether Greenpeace was naive or not. There’s split opinion on it. The second question, what was Greenpeace’s reaction? Well, we immediately went into crisis mode. Everybody in the organization was put on the job of getting these guys out of jail. We immediately realized that we were in some kind of geopolitical chess game with Putin. And, to be honest, we felt a bit out of our depth. We were advised by senior analysts who said don’t make Putin the focus of this. If you blame it all on Putin, then he’s going to feel cornered and his pride won’t let him release them. And he says that that is the mistake that the lawyers for Pussy Riot made. We had to give Putin quote, "a wide turning circle." So we made Gazprom, his energy company, the focus of the campaign. In a sense, a proxy for Putin, and went after Gazprom and kicked them as hard as we could.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Gazprom was doing.
BEN STEWART: Gazprom was up there, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with this rig that we saw images there; the pre-Islamnia oil rig. They were trying to be the first company to pump oil from the icy waters of the Arctic, and therefore, spark a new Arctic oil rush. Greenpeace’s position was that we have to keep the oil in the ground, we can’t be looking for new sources of oil and exploiting them. So this, at that point was the most controversial oil rig in the world, and that’s why these guys planned to hang a one ton survival pod off of it and focus attention on that rig by having people live in the pod for days, maybe weeks. And then we saw these events that you saw in film, the massive overreaction, shots fired and these guys dragged off to prison for 15 years.
AMY GOODMAN: And the issue why the focus on the Arctic? This is 13 percent of the world’s untapped oil. Can you give us a layout of just what’s at stake here with the risk of drilling and how much energy we’re talking about?
BEN STEWART: Well, two things. I mean, there’s a supreme irony here that as the ice melts, oil companies, instead of seeing it as a profound warning to humanity, they’re saying, right, we have an opportunity to get our hands on the oil that used to be under the ice. So they’re going there to drill for the oil that caused the melting. When they burn it, it will cause more melting, so they can drill for more oil. This is a vicious circle and Greenpeace was up there to try to break that circle. As well as that, it would be impossible to clean up an Arctic oil spill. You saw what happened with the Deepwater Horizon. It took 6,500 boats to clean that up. You can’t get that kind of response up in the Arctic.
PETER WILLCOX: And they didn’t clean it up.
BEN STEWART: And they didn’t clean it up. And also, as the ice returns in the winter, it would stop them actually drilling a relief well, so that oil would pump, if there was a blowout up there, for month after month, collecting under the ice and then circulating around the pole. We got shells oil spill response plan through Freedom of Information, and it showed that one of the methods that they had planned for cleaning up an oil spill was to deploy a [indecipherable] with a gps collar that was supposedly going to sniff out the ice. They would then remove the icebergs and melt them on land and take the oil out. This is a fantasy. And that is why there is a big focus on Seattle at the moment where there are plans for Shell to send the Polar Pioneer rig up to the Alaskan Arctic. So really, America is the focus of this Arctic campaign now, and there’s some fantastic stuff happening in Seattle.
AMY GOODMAN: And G7, what just came out of it, your assessment as people hail this as groundbreaking around the issue of climate change?
BEN STEWART: Well, they say they’re going to phase out fossil fuels by 2100. Great, about 70 years too late. I think we’ll be toast by then.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Willcox, the issue of Seattle right now, the kayaks that are coming out, the politicians in them, activists, Greenpeace is also at the center of this, the protesting of Shell drilling in the Arctic.
PETER WILLCOX: Yeah, I think it’s becoming obvious to more and more people that if we burn even one quarter of the fossil fuels we have in hand now we’ll push global warming up as the two degrees Celsius mark, which some scientists say is just a recipe for disaster. We have already changed it 0.8 degrees. If we stop burning all fossil fuel tomorrow, it would still go up another 0.8 degrees. So we’re sniffing two degrees Celsius change and there are already people are dying from global warming. And when the waters come up — I mean, India has just built a massive electric fence between itself and Bangladesh because they don’t want the people from Bangladesh trying to get into India when the waters rise. I mean, it’s a huge problem. There is no excuse for oil companies to be looking to make more profit from something that we can never use. It’s a huge waste of energy.
AARON MATÉ: What’s striking about the Shell decision, the recent approval, is the Interior Department a few months ago says there is a 75 percent likelihood of a spill of 1000 barrels or more in the Arctic offshore region. So the government’s own assessment say 75 percent chance of spill, yet that is a reasonable risk, I suppose.
PETER WILLCOX: And part of shells plan for cleaning up a spill is the use of more dispersants, which were so destructive in the Gulf of Mexico and didn’t help matters. It just forced the oil to settle on the bottom, where it’s going to continue mixing into the environment.
Rainbow Warrior: 30 Years Later, Will France Ever Apologize For Fatal Bombing of Greenpeace Ship?
Next month marks the 30th anniversary of a turning point in the history of Greenpeace. On July 10th, 1985 the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French government agents and sunk in a harbor in Auckland, New Zealand. The ship was preparing to head to sea to protest against French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira was killed in the attack. Our guest Peter Willcox was the captain of the ship and on board when the boat was blown up.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Bonnie Prince Billie, "Black Captain." Revised for Peter Willcox who is our guest today. That’s right, we’re joined by Peter Willcox and Ben Stewart who wrote, Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30. I’m Amy Goodman with Aaron Maté.
AARON MATÉ: As we turn to some of the voices of the Arctic 30, these are excerpts of letters they wrote while imprisoned Murmansk. Greenpeace produced this video featuring a dramatic reading of their letters.
SPEAKER 1: Dear, James.
SPEAKER 2: Dear, supporters. It’s been over a month now that special forces dropped by helicopter and took over our ship at gunpoint. What a terrifying moment, I must admit. Surreal, out of an action movie. Since then, life has been quite difficult.
SPEAKER 3: We were towed into report under armed guard, Murmansk being the final destination.
SPEAKER 1: When we were taken off the ship to be arrested, it felt like a scene from the Cold War. It was dark. I was scared.
SPEAKER 4: The hardest moment was the first night in prison, being shown to my cell and introduced to a couple of strangers. It was frightening, to say the least. The cell is about eight meters long, four meters wide, and six meters high. I spend 23 hours a day in here without nothing but the occasional book and my thoughts.
SPEAKER 5: The weather is turned to winter.
SPEAKER 3: Everyone sleeps with their clothes on.
SPEAKER 1: I heard that from December, Murmansk is dark for six weeks. God, I hope I’m out by then.
AMY GOODMAN: Voices of the Arctic 30. Ben Stewart, do you think Greenpeace adequately prepared for the potential of this harsh Russian crackdown? And how did Greenpeace respond after it became clear that the activists were not going to be released.
BEN STEWART: OK, so two questions there. I think the first one — that’s a very fair question that Greenpeace has been asked a lot. Were they naive to go up there and not imagine that Putin’s judicial system would come down really hard? And I think the opinion is split, to be honest. I mean, some of the Arctic 30 think that Greenpeace really should have known, and should have predicted it. Others say, no, that’s not true, Greenpeace went up a year before and did a similar protest and didn’t get this kind of reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we had Kumi Naidoo on the phone here in the Democracy Now! studio broadcasting live as he was being pummeled with the Arctic water, that they were shooting at him from cannons hanging off the side of the ship and he is the head of Greenpeace.
BEN STEWART: And now was exactly a year before the events that we’re talking about here, and there wasn’t this Russian reaction. Then a year later, this huge Russian overreaction. So, I don’t think I’m qualified to say whether Greenpeace was naive or not. There’s split opinion on it. The second question, what was Greenpeace’s reaction? Well, we immediately went into crisis mode. Everybody in the organization was put on the job of getting these guys out of jail. We immediately realized that we were in some kind of geopolitical chess game with Putin. And, to be honest, we felt a bit out of our depth. We were advised by senior analysts who said don’t make Putin the focus of this. If you blame it all on Putin, then he’s going to feel cornered and his pride won’t let him release them. And he says that that is the mistake that the lawyers for Pussy Riot made. We had to give Putin quote, "a wide turning circle." So we made Gazprom, his energy company, the focus of the campaign. In a sense, a proxy for Putin, and went after Gazprom and kicked them as hard as we could.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Gazprom was doing.
BEN STEWART: Gazprom was up there, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with this rig that we saw images there; the pre-Islamnia oil rig. They were trying to be the first company to pump oil from the icy waters of the Arctic, and therefore, spark a new Arctic oil rush. Greenpeace’s position was that we have to keep the oil in the ground, we can’t be looking for new sources of oil and exploiting them. So this, at that point was the most controversial oil rig in the world, and that’s why these guys planned to hang a one ton survival pod off of it and focus attention on that rig by having people live in the pod for days, maybe weeks. And then we saw these events that you saw in film, the massive overreaction, shots fired and these guys dragged off to prison for 15 years.
AMY GOODMAN: And the issue why the focus on the Arctic? This is 13 percent of the world’s untapped oil. Can you give us a layout of just what’s at stake here with the risk of drilling and how much energy we’re talking about?
BEN STEWART: Well, two things. I mean, there’s a supreme irony here that as the ice melts, oil companies, instead of seeing it as a profound warning to humanity, they’re saying, right, we have an opportunity to get our hands on the oil that used to be under the ice. So they’re going there to drill for the oil that caused the melting. When they burn it, it will cause more melting, so they can drill for more oil. This is a vicious circle and Greenpeace was up there to try to break that circle. As well as that, it would be impossible to clean up an Arctic oil spill. You saw what happened with the Deepwater Horizon. It took 6,500 boats to clean that up. You can’t get that kind of response up in the Arctic.
PETER WILLCOX: And they didn’t clean it up.
BEN STEWART: And they didn’t clean it up. And also, as the ice returns in the winter, it would stop them actually drilling a relief well, so that oil would pump, if there was a blowout up there, for month after month, collecting under the ice and then circulating around the pole. We got shells oil spill response plan through Freedom of Information, and it showed that one of the methods that they had planned for cleaning up an oil spill was to deploy a [indecipherable] with a gps collar that was supposedly going to sniff out the ice. They would then remove the icebergs and melt them on land and take the oil out. This is a fantasy. And that is why there is a big focus on Seattle at the moment where there are plans for Shell to send the Polar Pioneer rig up to the Alaskan Arctic. So really, America is the focus of this Arctic campaign now, and there’s some fantastic stuff happening in Seattle.
AMY GOODMAN: And G7, what just came out of it, your assessment as people hail this as groundbreaking around the issue of climate change?
BEN STEWART: Well, they say they’re going to phase out fossil fuels by 2100. Great, about 70 years too late. I think we’ll be toast by then.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Willcox, the issue of Seattle right now, the kayaks that are coming out, the politicians in them, activists, Greenpeace is also at the center of this, the protesting of Shell drilling in the Arctic.
PETER WILLCOX: Yeah, I think it’s becoming obvious to more and more people that if we burn even one quarter of the fossil fuels we have in hand now we’ll push global warming up as the two degrees Celsius mark, which some scientists say is just a recipe for disaster. We have already changed it 0.8 degrees. If we stop burning all fossil fuel tomorrow, it would still go up another 0.8 degrees. So we’re sniffing two degrees Celsius change and there are already people are dying from global warming. And when the waters come up — I mean, India has just built a massive electric fence between itself and Bangladesh because they don’t want the people from Bangladesh trying to get into India when the waters rise. I mean, it’s a huge problem. There is no excuse for oil companies to be looking to make more profit from something that we can never use. It’s a huge waste of energy.
AARON MATÉ: What’s striking about the Shell decision, the recent approval, is the Interior Department a few months ago says there is a 75 percent likelihood of a spill of 1000 barrels or more in the Arctic offshore region. So the government’s own assessment say 75 percent chance of spill, yet that is a reasonable risk, I suppose.
PETER WILLCOX: And part of shells plan for cleaning up a spill is the use of more dispersants, which were so destructive in the Gulf of Mexico and didn’t help matters. It just forced the oil to settle on the bottom, where it’s going to continue mixing into the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: Next month marks the 30th anniversary of a turning point in the history of Greenpeace. It was July 10, 1985, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French Secret Service agents and sunk in a harbor in Auckland, New Zealand. The ship was preparing to head to sea to protest against French nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific. Greenpeace photographer, Fernando Pereira, was killed in the attack. Our guest, Peter Willcox, was the captain of the ship, he was on board the boat when it was blown up. This is an excerpt from Bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, by Television New Zealand.
PRESENTER: The rainbow warrior is welcomed by a flotilla of small boats. It’s the time of French nuclear testing in the Pacific and some of these yachties plan to a accompany the Greenpeace mothership to Mururoa Atoll to protest. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira had waved goodbye to his family in Amsterdam a month earlier.
MARELLE PEREIRA I remember me saying then, I don’t know why, but, daddy, don’t go, because if you leave, you’re not coming back. And, of course, he then telling to a child, no, dear, I am coming home.
STEVE SAWYER: I think the idea was to hit Greenpeace, to hit Greenpeace hard, hopefully, in their minds, hard enough so that we wouldn’t come back. And we wouldn’t recover from that.
PRESENTER: Steve Sawyer, Worldwide Director of Greenpeace. He lost a ship and a friend, Fernando.
STEVE SAWYER: They make a great show about how it was not designed to cause any loss of life, which is total rubbish. I mean, if — we’re very lucky that a lot more people weren’t killed.
AMY GOODMAN: You were there, Peter Willcox. You were actually on board? You were sleeping? It was the middle of the night?
PETER WILLCOX: Mm-hm. I was sleeping in my bunk.
AMY GOODMAN: As was Fernando?
PETER WILLCOX: Just to echo what Steve said, the bombs were so powerful, that it was just a miracle that we didn’t lose more people. If they had gone off half an hour sooner, we could have lost 10 more people.
AMY GOODMAN: But there weren’t — it wasn’t just one bomb, right?
PETER WILLCOX: No, it was two.
AMY GOODMAN: So that’s how you got out.
PETER WILLCOX: Well, the first bomb put a six by seven foot hole in the engine room. The second bomb was placed on the propeller shaft. It went off maybe a minute after the first bomb. And I was standing right over it when it went off. And it was that bomb that trapped Fernando Pereira in his cabin and caused him to drown.
AMY GOODMAN: Because he had run back in to get his cameras.
PETER WILLCOX: He had gone in his cabin to get his cameras, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So 30 years later, you are still at it, Captain Willcox. Is this really worth the risk?
PETER WILLCOX: Oh, the alternative for me is not leaving my children a place where they can safely bring up their own children. I think that is how critical it is. I have two daughters in their 20’s. I think they’re both really nervous about the future, and for very good reason. We know what climate change is doing. Look at the drought in California. We’re the richest country in the world. We can support, if you will, a drought. Countries like in East Africa and other places in the world, Bangladesh where it is going to displace millions of people, they can’t deal with it. And it’s coming. And it’s only coming because we’re not willing to change the way we produce energy — we make energy. We have the technology, we don’t have the will. And that’s just ridiculous.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you have plans for another journey?
PETER WILLCOX: Sure, I’m going out in three weeks.
AMY GOODMAN: Where are you going?
PETER WILLCOX: New Zealand. Maybe Australia. There is a tuna campaign. Greenpeace’s biggest —
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to step back for a second. How is it proved that it was the French secret service agents did this?
PETER WILLCOX: Well, they were caught red-handed. They were caught 30 hours later returning a camper van to Auckland. Two — a man and woman pretending to be Swiss tourists. The police interrogated them all day. Took them to a hotel that night and said, look, we’re really sorry we arrested you, we’re going to take you to the airport tomorrow. Use the phone, call room service, don’t leave the room. They got on the phone, called up [DSGE] headquarters in Paris and said, hey, we did the job, but we’ll be delayed a day. And then within hours, they found out that their passports were fake from Switzerland. So, it was —- and they went back into it -—
AMY GOODMAN: So France claimed responsibility.
PETER WILLCOX: They admitted responsibility.
BEN STEWART: They paid compensation in the end, didn’t they?
PETER WILLCOX: They paid compensation to us and New Zealand. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Don’t trust, don’t —
PETER WILLCOX: They’ve never apologized.
BEN STEWART: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, 30th anniversary is a good time.
PETER WILLCOX: I’m not waiting for it.
AMY GOODMAN: Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg. We have 10 seconds. Why the title?
BEN STEWART: It’s "Ne ver’, ne boysya, ne proshu," a Russian phrase that the prisoners were told when they arrived how to survive jail. So their fellow cellmates said, don’t trust, because — don’t trust the prison officers, that’s disrespecting yourself, don’t fear because that gets you nowhere, don’t beg because no one ever begged their way out of jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30, is by Ben Stewart, our guest, and thank you so much to Captain Peter Willcox. That does it for our broadcast.
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