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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

by CatharineCruz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

The Senate began investigating the CIA’s detainee program nearly six years ago. It completed a draft of its report two years ago. Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the report’s blistering executive summary. (The full report remains classified.) What took so long? It’s a tale of White House indecisiveness, Republican opposition, and CIA snooping.

More coverage of the CIA torture report.


“Rectal Feeding,” Threats to Children, and More: 16 Awful Abuses From the CIA Torture Report


No, Bin Laden Was Not Found Because of CIA Torture


How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report


Read the Full Torture Report Here


5 Telling Dick Cheney Appearances in the CIA Torture Report


Am I a Torturer?

It’s January 2009. Obama takes office. Within days, he shuts down the CIA’s detainee program. But he says he’d rather not dwell on the past.

January 11, 2009: President-elect Barack Obama tells George Stephanopoulos he’s not interested in a broad investigation of Bush-era intelligence programs, saying, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

January 22, 2009: Obama issues an executive order banning the use of torture.

However, the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to investigate. Lawmakers say they expect to conclude their inquiry sometime between August 2009 and March 2010.

February 27, 2009: On the condition of anonymity, Senate officials tell reporters that the intelligence committee plans to probe the CIA’s detainee program. The Associated Press reports that the review will take six months to a year.

March 5, 2009: The panel votes 14-1 to proceed with the investigation. Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Kit Bond, R-Mo., formally announce the investigation. The press release says the review should take one year.

Then Obama signals he might reverse course and prosecute CIA employees involved in torture. The Senate investigation starts going off the rails.

April 16, 2009: Attorney General Eric Holder releases four of the Bush administration’s legal opinions sanctioning “enhanced interrogation.” Obama says he will not prosecute the CIA employees who acted on the Justice Department’s orders and “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

April 20, 2009: Feinstein asks Obama to “withhold judgment” on CIA prosecutions until the committee review is finished. “This study is now underway, and I estimate its completion within the next six to eight months,” she writes to the president. “A study of the first two detainees has already been completed and will shortly be before the committee.”

The same day, then-CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry tells “Lou Dobbs Tonight” the report should take six to eight months to complete, but “obviously a lot of people are looking for it to happen a little bit quicker since this has been going on for a long time.”

April 21, 2009: Obama suggests he might be open to prosecutions. “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama says. “I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”

Mid-2009: The CIA creates a secure facility where congressional aides will be allowed to view the documents related to the investigation. Feinstein later says the CIA provided a “stand-alone computer system” that was “segregated from CIA networks.”

Aides start sorting through six million pages of documents. The process is initially slow because the CIA hires contractors to read each document before giving it to the committee, to ensure the Senate aides don’t get access to sensitive documents unrelated to the detainee program. “This proved to be a slow and very expensive process,” Feinstein later says.

August 24, 2009: Holder opens a “preliminary review” into potential prosecutions.

The next week, Feinstein tells “Face the Nation” she wishes the Justice Department would wait for the committee to complete its report.

“We’re well along in that study,” Feinstein says. “And I’m trying to push it along even more quickly.”

September 26, 2009: Republicans on the committee withdraw from the panel’s review. They say the Justice Department’s concurrent investigation will make CIA employees afraid to answer the committee’s questions.

“Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the committee’s review,” Bond says in a statement.

Feinstein says the committee’s investigation will continue without the Republicans’ support.

Senate aides notice some fishy things happening at the CIA. The committee blows past its projected deadline.

February 2010: Around this time, about 870 documents disappear from the computers in the CIA facility where congressional aides are conducting the investigation, Feinstein later alleges.

May 2010: Another 60 documents allegedly go missing. As Feinstein tells it, CIA personnel first deny that the documents are missing, then blame the IT contractors, then blame the White House. The White House says it did not tell the CIA to remove the documents.

May 17, 2010: The CIA apologizes for removing the documents, Feinstein later says.

At some point in 2010: According to Feinstein, around this time, aides discover the “Panetta Review” – an internal report written for then-director Leon Panetta that acknowledges “significant CIA wrongdoing.”

She says “some time after” aides find the Panetta Review, those documents disappear from the computers too.

The committee keeps working. The Justice Department closes its inquiry without pursuing prosecutions. In 2012, the committee starts hinting at the report’s findings. New ETA: Soon. Real soon.

June 30, 2011: After a preliminary review, the Justice Department’s special prosecutor clears CIA employees of wrongdoing in 99 cases of alleged detainee mistreatment. He recommends that the Justice Department investigate just two cases of detainee deaths.

April 27, 2012: Reuters reports that the committee has found “no evidence” that CIA torture led to any significant intelligence breakthroughs. At this point, the report is still being finalized.

April 30, 2012: Feinstein and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., issue a press release saying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not help the government find Osama bin Laden. They say the committee will complete its review “soon.”

August 30, 2012: Attorney General Eric Holder announces he is not prosecuting any CIA employees for detainee deaths.

September 6, 2012: The New York Times reports that the committee’s review is “nearing completion.”

In December 2012, the committee votes to start the declassification process. Now lawmakers just need the CIA to provide its comments on the report, and then the committee can vote again about which parts should be released.

December 13, 2012: The committee votes 9-6 to approve the report for the declassification process. Feinstein says the report is more than 6,000 pages long.

Committee co-chair Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., votes against approving the report. He says the report contains “significant errors, omissions, assumptions and ambiguities – as well as a lot of cherry-picking.”

But the report isn’t declassified right away — the first step is to send the report to the White House, the CIA and other federal agencies for their comment. “After that is complete in mid-February, the committee will vote again on how much of the report should be declassified,” the New York Times reports.

The CIA does not like the report.

January 30, 2013: Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., expresses his disappointment that CIA director nominee John Brennan has not yet reviewed the committee’s report.

February 7, 2013: Brennan reads the 300-page summary of the committee’s report in time for his confirmation hearing. He tells the panel, “I must tell you that reading this report from the committee raises serious questions about the information that I was given at the time.”

He adds, “I don’t know what the facts are or what the truth is. So I really need to look at that carefully and see what CIA’s response is.”

February 15, 2013: Comments are due to the committee. Neither the CIA nor the White House submit a response by the deadline.

March 7, 2013: The Senate confirms Brennan as CIA director. An anonymous senior intelligence official tells the Wall Street Journal that the agency objects to most of the committee’s report.

March 26, 2013: Brennan is now responsible for assembling the CIA’s response. Anonymous former senior CIA officials tell the Washington Post that an early draft is “highly critical” and finds “loads of holes” in the committee’s report.

May 7, 2013: Anonymous former officials tell the Washington Post that the CIA is still assembling “a defiant response.”

May 10, 2013: Brennan meets with President Obama and shows him the CIA’s response, the Intercept later reports. White House photographer Pete Souza snaps this photo, which reportedly shows Brennan holding the response:

Pete Souza

June 2013: The State Department sends a classified letter urging the committee not to declassify the report. In the letter, then-assistant secretary of state Philip Goldberg warns that if the committee reveals the CIA’s cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, it could endanger American diplomats and harm foreign relations.

June 27, 2013: The CIA officially responds to the report. The 122-page secret rebuttal reportedly lists errors and criticizes the committee for failing to interview any CIA employees. A committee aide says the panel tried to interview those involved, but the CIA did not cooperate.

The same day, Udall issues a statement accusing intelligence officials of leaking “inaccurate information” critical of the committee’s report. Udall alleges that the CIA and the White House “repeatedly rejected requests to discuss the Committee’s report with Members or Committee staff.”

But the committee thinks the CIA hasn’t properly considered one important piece of evidence – the agency’s own internal report, which allegedly acknowledges CIA wrongdoing. Lawmakers push forward.

Between June 27, 2013, and January 15, 2014: The committee concludes the CIA’s official response is at odds with the Panetta Review, which found evidence of wrongdoing. At some point during this period, congressional aides take printed copies of the Panetta Review out of the secure CIA facility where they have been assembling their research, without the CIA’s permission.

July 19, 2013: Feinstein says she’s leading a push to declassify at least the 300-page executive summary of the report.

Chambliss says he disagrees with the report’s conclusions, but he thinks both the summary and the CIA’s response should be released. He adds that the report is flawed because it relied too heavily on documents. “The folks doing the report got 100 percent of their information from documents and didn’t interview a single person,” he says.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says the Obama administration still wants to address some “factual questions,” but the administration thinks “some version of the findings of the report should be made public.”

July 25, 2013: The New York Times predicts the report will be partly declassified “in the next few months.”

November 26, 2013: Nothing has happened. The ACLU files a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the committee’s report and the CIA’s response to the report.

Late 2013: Feinstein asks the CIA to give the committee “a final and complete version” of the Panetta Review.

December 17, 2013: Udall publicly discloses the existence of the Panetta Review in a congressional committee hearing. The committee asks the CIA to hand it over.

January 6, 2014: Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House compel the CIA to respond to remaining information requests. He also asks for “a public statement from the White House committing to the fullest possible declassification of the Committee’s study in the most expedient and responsible manner possible.”

Early January 2014: The CIA refuses to give the committee the Panetta Review, arguing that the documents are privileged.

The CIA accuses Senate aides of hacking into the agency’s computer networks. The Senate committee accuses the CIA of hacking into its computer networks. The brawl goes public.

January 15, 2014: As Feinstein later recounts, on this day, Brennan calls an “emergency meeting.” He tells her that the CIA searched the committee’s “stand alone” computers for copies of the Panetta Review. He believes committee aides may have obtained the documents through illegal means. Feinstein says the documents were made available on the committee’s computers.

January 17, 2014: Feinstein writes to Brennan and asks him to end his investigation of the Senate committee, citing separation of powers.

Sometime during this chaos: The CIA’s inspector general files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the CIA spying on the Senate.

The CIA’s general counsel files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the Senate spying on the CIA.

March 4, 2014: McClatchy first reports on the feud.

Udall sends another letter to the White House. “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he writes. “It is essential that the committee be able to do its oversight work – consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers – without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

March 5, 2014: Brennan denies allegations that the CIA spied on committee members. “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan says.

March 11, 2014: Feinstein tells the whole story on the Senate floor. She accuses the CIA of violating “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

March 12, 2014: The president says he will not “wade into” the dispute between the committee and the CIA.

March 19, 2014: Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, writes to Brennan and Holder to notify them that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms will investigate charges that the CIA accessed the committee’s computer network.

March 31, 2014: The Washington Post details the main conclusion of the committee’s report: that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress about torture.

The committee votes to declassify the summary of the report.

April 3, 2014: The report is now more than 6,200 pages, and the executive summary is 481 pages. The committee votes 11-3 to declassify the executive summary and conclusions.

Now it’s up to the CIA to complete its declassification review. The White House says the process will be expedited. Feinstein anticipates it will take just one more month.

April 11, 2014: McClatchy publishes the report’s findings. Among them: torture was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence, the CIA repeatedly misled the Department of Justice, and CIA employees used “interrogation techniques” that had not been approved by CIA headquarters or the Justice Department.

Feinstein says she is opening a new investigation to find out who leaked the findings. “If someone distributed any part of this classified report, they broke the law and should be prosecuted,” she says. “The committee is investigating this unauthorized disclosure, and I intend to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House oversee the declassification process instead of the CIA.

July 31, 2014: CIA acknowledges that, despite Brennan’s earlier denial about what he called “spurious allegations,” the agency did in fact spy on Senate investigators. An internal agency review found that CIA officers created a false online identity to access to computers used by the investigators and read their emails. The review also said that when CIA officers were first asked about the spying, they showed a “lack of candor.”

August 5, 2014: Release of the report is put on hold after the Senate objects to CIA trying to redact evidence that the agency had misled investigators. “I have concluded the redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions,” said Feinstein.

December 9, 2014: The Senate Intelligence Committee releases the executive summary of the report. It concludes the CIA mislead the public, Congress, and the White House both about the severity of treatment and about effectiveness of torture.

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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

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FDA Panel: Don’t Let Gay Men Give Blood

by Blaine3524 Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

It turns out, in the eyes of the Food and Drug Administration’s experts, that even a year without sex isn’t enough to guarantee the safety of blood donated by gay men.

Last week, the agency’s Blood Products Advisory Panel met to discuss revoking the agency’s 32-year-old prohibition on gay men donating blood. The prohibition, introduced during the early days of the AIDs crisis, forbid any man who had had gay sex since 1977 from giving blood—regardless of the circumstances or how long it had been since his last sexual encounter. The rule has remained unchanged, despite vast improvements in our medical knowledge of HIV and AIDS, and our ability to screen blood samples to ensure they’re free of disease.

Activists were hopeful that the FDA’s 17-member panel would vote to revoke the rule. Last month, a different committee of medical experts convened by the Department of Health and Human Services voted 16-2 in favor of a hypothetical rule that would let men give blood so long as they had not had sex with another man for at least a year. And while even this may be overkill—modern blood tests can detect HIV within a few weeks of infection—it is less discriminatory than the current ban.

Yet that modest step was too much for the FDA’s experts, who wrapped up last week’s meeting without voting on the proposal. “There’s too many questions in science that aren’t answerable,” one panelist concluded. “It sounds to me like we’re talking about policy and civil rights rather than our primary duty, which is transfusion safety,” noted another.

The panel’s calls for further research before lifting the ban left LGBT activists frustrated. “It was met with an alarming amount of resistance that just I didn’t expect,” said Ryan James Yezak, founder of the National Gay Blood Drive, who gave a presentation for the panel. He was taken aback by the claim that there’s not enough research to determine whether loosening the ban on donations would pose a risk to the blood supply. “That’s simply not true,” Yezak told me. “There is evidence that supports moving to a one-year deferral, at the minimum.”

He cited, for example, a study of Australia’s one-year deferral policy, and support for a similar policy from organizations such as the Red Cross and American Medical Association. But the committee wasn’t swayed. “I felt like it went in one ear and out the other,” Yezak said. “I may as well have not been there, because I don’t feel like the discussion reflected what happened at the HHS meeting.”

The FDA could still approve the one-year deferral plan without the endorsement of its Blood Products Advisory Panel, but there’s no timeline for considering such a decision, and the agency isn’t in the habit of rewriting rules against the recommendations of its own experts.

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FDA Panel: Don’t Let Gay Men Give Blood

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The Sneaky New Way Republicans Could Sabotage Obamacare

by SandraSlama Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Now that Republicans control Congress, they’re again threatening to end Obamacare. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed to hold a repeal vote when Republicans take over the upper chamber in January, adding that GOPers “will go at that law…in every way that we can.” Obamacare is not going anywhere as long as President Barack Obama is in office. But there is a sneakier way GOPers could deal a blow to the health care law in the next two years: They can make the law look more costly than it is, boosting the case for dismantling it.

In 2012, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—which produces official budget projections—calculated that the combined effect of the tax increases and spending cuts in the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit by $109 billion over the next decade. (This is the CBO’s most recent estimate.) Conservatives cried foul, saying that the CBO double-counted savings in the law and ignored billions in health care spending in order to make the economic effects of the law seem rosier than they were. They charged that Obamacare actually adds billions to the deficit. The CBO and other economists say these assertions are nonsense. But Republicans kept complaining. Now that they control both houses of Congress, they can do something about it. All GOPers have to do is install a new CBO director who is willing to change the agency’s budget math to make it appear that Obamacare adds to the deficit. Republican leaders are reportedly considering roughly a dozen candidates to replace the current CBO chief, Doug Elmendorf, and conservatives are demanding a new director who doesn’t “cook the books” on Obamacare.

In a letter to House and Senate GOP leadership last month, conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist called Elmendorf’s analysis of how Obamacare would affect the budget a “facade” and urged Republicans to replace him. Democrats fear that Republicans will appoint someone who is willing to change the math to make Obamacare look more expensive, according to a congressional aide. At least one of the candidates Republicans are reportedly considering—James Capretta, a health care policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute—is on record claiming the law increases the deficit.

Spokesmen for Senate budget committee chair Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and House budget committee chair Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who will have the final word in selecting the new CBO director, declined to comment. But Sessions and fellow Republicans on his committee agree that the CBO should change how it calculates Obamacare’s effects on the budget. In October, the Senate budget committee’s Republican staff released a report claiming the Affordable Care Act will increase the federal deficit by $131 billion over the next decade, and touted support for the new analysis from several conservative health policy experts.

The CBO stands by its math. Elmendorf wrote in June that the CBO and the Joint Committee an Taxation, which calculates how tax laws affect revenue, “have no reason to think that their initial assessment that health reform would reduce budget deficits was incorrect.”

“CBO has accounted for deficit reduction in exactly the same way in previous Congresses, under both political parties,” Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), wrote in 2012. “Until opponents of health reform latched onto the notion, no one accused CBO of faulty accounting.”

If Republicans succeed in making the law look like a huge burden on taxpayers, they could ease the way for efforts to chip away at the health care law, says Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and coauthor of Health Care Reform and American Politics: “The conservative push is serious and part of the subterranean attack to ‘prepare the battlefield’ for the new Republican Congress.”

It is still possible that GOPers will reappoint Elmendorf as CBO director. Several prominent conservative economists have praised his work. But congressional aides told the New York Times last week that they are betting against him.

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The Sneaky New Way Republicans Could Sabotage Obamacare

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

by VedaWhited Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

The Senate torture report seems likely to be published this week in some form or another, but there’s already a campaign in full swing to keep it under wraps. Why? Because its release might put Americans in danger. Paul Waldman acknowledges that this might be true, but provides the right response:

The cynicism necessary to attempt to blame the blowback from their torture program on those who want it exposed is truly a wonder. On one hand, they insist that they did nothing wrong and the program was humane, professional, and legal. On the other they implicitly accept that the truth is so ghastly that if it is released there will be an explosive backlash against America. Then the same officials who said “Freedom isn’t free!” as they sent other people’s children to fight in needless wars claim that the risk of violence against American embassies is too high a price to pay, so the details of what they did must be kept hidden.

There’s another thing to be said about this: our conduct during the early years of the war on terror almost certainly inflamed our enemies, bolstered their recruitment, and prolonged the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This cost thousands of American lives.

President Obama may have banned torture during his administration, but is there any reason to think we’ve now given up torture for good? Not that I can tell, and it will cost many more thousands of American lives if it happens again. So for our own safety, even if for no other reason, we need to do everything we can to reduce the odds of America going on another torture spree.

How do we do that? Well, all it will take for torture to become official policy yet again is (a) secrecy and (b) another horrific attack that can be exploited by whoever happens to be in power at the moment. And while there may not be a lot we can about (b), we can at least try to force the public to recognize the full nature of the brutality that we descended to after 9/11. That might lower the odds a little bit, and that’s why this report needs to be released. It’s not just because it would be the right thing to do. It’s because, in the long run, if it really does reduce the chances of America adopting a policy of mass torture again in the future, it will save American lives.

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American Lives Will Be Saved, Not Lost, If We Release the Senate Torture Report

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How Newt Gingrich’s Language Guru Helped Rebrand the Kochs’ Message

by CarmineGraebner Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

For the Koch brothers’ donor network, the 2012 elections were a keen disappointment. Not only did they lose what Charles Koch had famously billed as the “mother of all wars” to oust Barack Obama, but they poured some $400 million into electoral and advocacy efforts with, at best, lackluster results in federal and state races, leaving a number of their investors and operatives unhappy.

Fast-forward to 2014, and the Koch network seems to be riding high. Having budgeted nearly $300 million for advocacy and political drives, with a bigger field operation and better data to mobilize conservative voters, the network helped the GOP capture the Senate, expand the House majority, and re-elect Koch-favored politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Three of the new GOP senators—Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Iowa’s Joni Ernst—recently attended Koch policy and fundraising retreats; at the network’s Dana Point, California confab this past June, all three heaped praise on the assembled donors and Koch operatives.

What changed? Of course, the Koch network—and the GOP generally—capitalized on public dissatisfaction with President Obama, the “six year itch” most two-term presidents face, and a bad electoral landscape for Democratic Senate candidates. But the Kochs and their allies also learned from their past mistakes. They’ve used the last two years to adapt, refine, and expand their operations with an eye to sharpening their anti-big government messages to appeal to more voters. The Koch network, one donor told me, has been focused laser-like on “trying to perfect their language.” For help, they have turned to an A list of conservative political consultants including the man best known for selling the nation on Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America: Pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz.

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How Newt Gingrich’s Language Guru Helped Rebrand the Kochs’ Message

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The Freedom Tower Was Supposed To Be the Greenest Building in America. So What Went Wrong?

by Jeramy66Jmllpv Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

One World Trade Center, or the “Freedom Tower,” as it was formerly known, soars above New York City, finally filling a void left by the 9/11 terror attacks. The brilliant blue-silver facade glints no matter where you are in the city—nothing less than a “beacon of hope, just like the Statue of Liberty,” says the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the site in a joint venture with real estate giant the Durst Organization.

The tower is now the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. And it’s also supposed to be one of the greenest—a first on its scale to aim for the US Green Building Council’s LEED gold certification, a coveted prize for sustainable building design. One World Trade Center features lighting that reacts to sunshine, rain harvesting, and a state-of-the-art onsite fuel cell installation, one of the largest of its kind in the world. In 2008, then-New York Gov. David A. Paterson praised this “space-age energy technology,” adding, “I can think of few sites in the country where the symbolism of this is more important.”

Then came Sandy.

A 26-page trove of internal documents obtained by Climate Desk from the Port Authority reveals for the first time a substantial hit to the project’s green ambitions: Superstorm Sandy caused critical damage to the World Trade Center’s $10.6 million clean-power sources—those world-class fuel cells—a third of which went unrepaired and unreplaced, in part because of a costly flaw in the main tower’s design, and pressure to honor a billion-dollar deal with Condé Nast, the global publishing powerhouse and high-profile anchor tenant.

What happened in the basement of One World Trade Center after Sandy is a previously untold—and as yet unresolved—chapter in the site’s redevelopment, already dogged by false starts, political squabbling, and cost overruns, involving some of the biggest names in New York City’s world of corporate real estate.

Breaking the Port Authority’s Green-Energy Promise?
In 2007, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a state agency created in the aftermath of 9/11 to coordinate rebuilding efforts, introduced aggressive green standards for the Freedom Tower and its surrounding complex—”unprecedented in their scope and depth,” according to the building’s architects. The World Trade Center towers would be required to attain LEED gold certification, achieve net zero CO2 emissions (by purchasing green-energy credits), and operate with at least 20 percent more energy efficiency than the state’s current building code. “Every day is Earth Day at the World Trade Center,” claimed the Port Authority.

Another key requirement in the agreement was a fleet of fuel cells, which work by converting natural gas into electricity using an energy-efficient electrochemical process, rather than by burning it. They’re also cleaner because they don’t emit greenhouse gases or soot on location; the heat and water they generate as a byproduct can be used for cooling and heating the tower.

And so, in 2008, the Port Authority helped orchestrate a $10.6 million dollar deal with Connecticut’s UTC Power to provide nine fuel cells to supply power to three main towers at the site, including One World Trade. In Tower One, the fuel cells would provide up to 10 percent of the building’s electricity source, according to the fuel cell manufacturer; in towers Three and Four, they would supply a combined 30 percent.

Then, three years later, Sandy hit. Some 200 million gallons of water cascaded into the lower levels of the site, flooding the National September 11 Memorial Museum with at least five feet of water, according to the New York Times. What no media outlets reported, though, was that the flood also destroyed all nine fuel cells.

And while towers Three and Four now have new fuel cells, the main tower’s have never been replaced. The building opened without them—despite the fact that they were required in the original agreement.

So why didn’t the Port Authority replace the fuel cells? Evidence suggests that the reason had to do with financial pressure.

Pleasing High-Profile Tenants—and a Costly Design Flaw
In May 2011, the publishing giant Condé Nast signed a $2 billion deal to become the tower’s anchor tenant. Built into the terms of the lease was a move-in deadline: The Port Authority would be liable for penalties or lost earnings if Condé Nast was forced to wait beyond January 1, 2014, to begin the process of moving in. (Climate Desk contacted Condé Nast, but the company did not respond on the record.)

But the fuel cell disaster created the real possibility that the Port Authority and Durst were not going to make that deadline, a potential financial disaster. Part of the problem was a well-documented mistake in the building’s design: A temporary underground structure serving an existing train station was preventing builders from finishing the tower’s giant underground loading dock—the central piece of infrastructure used to haul masses of equipment up into the tower. Without the loading dock, there was no way for tenants to start moving their equipment into the building. And once a new loading dock went in—budgeted to cost $18.4 million—it would be all but impossible to remove and replace the dead fuel cells. Nevertheless, with the tight deadline, Port Authority decided to build the new loading dock. That meant the fuel cells had to come out fast—and finally, after several months, they did.

The Port Authority’s director of environmental and energy programs, Christopher Zeppie, warns of construction delays if the fuel cells aren’t removed in this March 2013 letter. Earlier, in December 2012, Zeppie told officials that “we need to get the damaged fuel cells out ASAP.”

Today, more than two years after Sandy, the new loading dock still blocks access to the one window through which the fuel cells could possibly be replaced. Durst admits in a statement to Climate Desk that “in order to replace the fuel cells that were destroyed by Super Storm Sandy, One World Trade Center’s interim loading dock needs to be disassembled,” but did not say if or when that might occur.

With no new fuel cells, the Port Authority needed to figure out how the main tower was going to reach the 20 percent energy efficiency goal stipulated in the rules. According to Durst, the building has now met the goal, but the company did not detail exactly how the building now makes up energy savings, except to say it “has been achieved through a number of means,” including the use of LED lighting. Focusing on the fuel cells is “missing the forest” for the trees, said Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Durst.

But that leaves a key part of the green deal in limbo: The rule that states that fuel cells must be built “into the towers.” Durst did not deny that the building was currently in a state of noncompliance with the original 2007 agreement. Neither the Port Authority nor Durst would confirm which organization in the joint venture is ultimately responsible for replacing the fuel cells. The Port Authority declined to be interviewed or to answer a series of questions for this story, instead referring us to Durst.

The 2007 environmental standards include the requirement to build fuel cells “into the towers.”

Richard Hankin, the director of 16 Acres, a documentary that charts the deeply convoluted progress at the site, says this confusion over who’s in charge of final sign off is typical of the site in general. “Over the years, the sheer size and complexity of the bureaucracy has often made it impossible to figure out who’s responsible for any given area or ultimate oversight,” he said.

Hankin found that complications at the World Trade Center stemmed from the tremendous number of invested parties—developers, architects, insurance companies, and victims’ groups—combined with the high turnover in top positions at the agencies responsible. “It’s that classic situation: The right arm is unaware of what the left arm is doing, compounded by the fact that it’s often a new left arm,” he said.

Future Questions About WTC’s LEED Certification
In addition to potentially flouting the original agreement, it remains unclear whether or not the fuel cell fiasco will undermine the tower’s LEED certification efforts. The US Green Building Council listed the gold certification as “projected” as recently as May 2014 in its magazine. But, says Marisa Long, the communications director at the US Green Building Council, “if the calculations for the LEED certification included a component like fuel cells, and damage to that component forces a change in calculations, the number of points earned to achieve LEED will be based on the new calculations.” Those calculations appear to be based on the original 2007 deal, which contains a variety of standards, not simply those concerning energy efficiency. Durst says it will still meet LEED gold certification.

Despite the setback for the building, those involved continue to publicly laud the project’s green cred. Patrick Foye, executive director of the Port Authority, opened the building earlier this month by saying the building “sets new standards of design, construction, prestige, and sustainability.” Kenneth A. Lewis, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, told the USGBC magazine: “We want to open it up and have the LEED plaque on the door.”

While there’s still time to get the building across the line, Lewis’ hope for a grand LEED-certified opening has vanished. For now, the doors are wide open, without the plaque, and without a clear solution to the alternative energy demands of the tower.

“If one thing is delayed or goes wrong, it very much has a domino effect with all the other parts,” Hankin said. “It can result in a lot of finger-pointing.”

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The Freedom Tower Was Supposed To Be the Greenest Building in America. So What Went Wrong?

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Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Staten Island Cop in Death of Eric Garner

by AdriennYJFF Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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A Staten Island grand jury has declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

The “no-bill” decision comes despite the fact that Pantaleo was caught on camera putting Garner in a chokehold during his July 17 arrest.

Cell-phone video of Garner’s July 17 arrest shows Pantaleo wrestling him to the sidewalk on Bay Street, with the white cop’s arms wrapped around the neck of the black suspect.

On the ground, Garner was heard repeatedly yelling “I can’t breathe!” as Pantaleo and other cops held him down and handcuffed him.

The Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Garner’s death a homicide caused by “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.”

Police union leaders denied that Pantaleo used a chokehold — which is banned by the NYPD — and blasted the autopsy as part of a “political” witch hunt.

The fact that this video exists, that the cop saw it being recorded, that the grand jury watched it and then still declined to indict, should chasten anyone who thinks body cams will be a cure-all for police abuse.

Read about the science of implicit prejudices and what we can do to better train police.

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Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Staten Island Cop in Death of Eric Garner

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The Fracking Boom Could End Way Sooner Than Obama Thinks

by AidenLoche Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama is fond of touting America’s vast trove of natural gas—and the energy (read: economic growth) it can provide—as a reason to support fracking. “Our 100-year supply of natural gas is a big factor in drawing jobs back to our shores,” he told a gathering at Northwestern University in October.

You can hear that same optimism about US natural gas production from Democrats, Republicans, and of course, the industry itself. The conviction that America can fuel its economy by churning out massive amounts of natural gas for decades has become a core assumption of national energy policy. But what if it’s wrong?

Those rosy predictions are based on official forecasts produced by the Energy Information Administration, an independent federal agency that compiles data on America’s energy supply and demand. This spring, EIA chief Adam Sieminski told a Senate hearing that he was confident natural gas production would grow 56 percent between 2012 and 2040. But the results of a series of studies at the University of Texas, reported today in an article in the journal Nature, cast serious doubt about the accuracy of EIA’s forecasts.

The UT team conducted its own analysis of natural gas production at all four of the US’s major shale gas formations (the Marcellus, Haynesville, Fayetteville, and Barnett), which together account for two-thirds of America’s natural gas output. Then, they extrapolated production into the future based on predicted market forces (the future price of gas relative to other fuels) and known geology. Their analysis suggests that gas production will peak in 2020, 20 years earlier than the EIA predicts. What’s more, the UT researchers project that by 2030, gas production levels will be only half of EIA’s prediction.

The difference in opinion stems from a difference in the scale of the analyses. The UT team’s grid for each shale play studied was at least 20 times finer than EIA’s, according to Nature:

Resolution matters because each play has sweet spots that yield a lot of gas, and large areas where wells are less productive. Companies try to target the sweet spots first, so wells drilled in the future may be less productive than current ones. The EIA’s model so far has assumed that future wells will be at least as productive as past wells in the same county. But this approach, UT-Austin petroleum engineer Ted Patzek argues, “leads to results that are way too optimistic”.

Why do these numbers matter? The federal government, states, and the private sector all base their energy investments—research and development, infrastructure construction, etc.—on forecasts of where our energy will come from in the future. If natural gas really is super-abundant, there may be less urgency to invest in renewables like solar and wind to replace coal plants as they age or are regulated out of existence. But if there’s less recoverable natural gas than we think, we’ll need to change our strategy to avoid coming up short on power 20 years down the line. At the same time, there are international repercussions: Many countries are taking cues from the United States on how to develop their own natural gas resources, so what happens here will shape those plans as well. And a series of massive natural gas export facilities are already being proposed across the US to ship our gas overseas; what will happen to global markets if those run dry prematurely?

Because they rely on informed guesses about future market conditions, these forecasts can never be bulletproof, and the UT study doesn’t close the book on how much natural gas the US really has in store. But it’s an important reminder that we should treat politicians’ promises about fossil fuel wealth with skepticism.

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The Fracking Boom Could End Way Sooner Than Obama Thinks

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Tea Partiers Ignore Michele Bachmann’s Call for Rally Against "Amnesty"

by KristofPatteson Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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On November 20, minutes after President Barack Obama delivered a speech explaining his executive action on immigration reform that would protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) took to Fox News and called on tea partiers everywhere to come to Washington to protest.

Bachmann, the head of the House tea party caucus who is retiring from Congress in weeks, implored the audience to help her fight the “amnesty.” She urged them to “melt the phone lines” to congressional lawmakers. And she declared she would be leading a protest on Capitol Hill. “I’m calling on your viewers to come to DC on Wednesday, December 3, at high noon on the west steps of the Capitol,” she proclaimed. “We need to have a rally, and we need to go visit our senators and visit our congressman, because nothing frightens a congressman like the whites of his constituents’ eyes…We need the viewers to come and help us.”

The next day, the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest remaining tea party groups, sent out an urgent survey to its members. The email, signed by cofounder Jenny Beth Martin, said the group—which has worked closely with Bachmann in the past to organize other rallies at the Capitol—was trying to determine whether such a rally would be a good use of its resources. The email asked these “patriots” to indicate whether they would respond to Bachmann and come to Washington to protest the president’s actions on immigration. Apparently, the answer was no. The Tea Party Patriots did not sign up for this ride.

With the tea party not heeding Bachmann’s call, her “high noon” rally was downgraded to…a press conference. So on Wednesday, Bachmann appeared on the Capitol steps—joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)—and spoke to a passel of cameras and about 40 protesters. Here’s a picture of the crowd:

Stephanie Mencimer

What happened to her big protest? Bachmann’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A TPP spokesman said in an email that the “gathering in Washington is not a Tea Party Patriots event per se, but we are fully in favor of it and have encouraged our supporters in the area to come out if they can.”

The lackluster response to Bachmann’s high-noon call is a far cry from five years ago, when the congresswoman made a similar appeal on Fox for a protest against Obamacare. She asked for tea partiers to hit Capitol Hill and tell legislators “don’t you dare take away my health care.” And the fledgling tea party movement responded enthusiastically. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity dispatched dozens buses full of activists—29 just from New Jersey. FreedomWorks, then headed by former House majority leader Dick Armey, organized more. Glenn Beck promoted the event. Thousands of people showed up, as did the entire GOP House leadership. The momentum generated from that rally helped the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

Bachmann, after a failed run for the White House, is spending her last days on the Hill writing listicles for BuzzFeed. And even before her final day as a congresswoman, Bachmann, with this non-rally, seems a has-been.

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Tea Partiers Ignore Michele Bachmann’s Call for Rally Against "Amnesty"

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Inhofe’s Grand Climate Conspiracy Theory: It’s All About Barbra Streisand

by Jimmy Charles Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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The recent news on the front page of the New York Times was stark. As thousands of diplomats were gathering in Lima, Peru, to work on an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, scientists and climate policy experts were warning

that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding—events that could harm the world’s population and economy.

But with an effort under way in Lima to protect the difference, as the newspaper put it, “between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one,” one fellow in Washington is readying himself to prevent any progress toward a climate accord: Sen. James Inhofe. The 80-year-old Republican from Oklahoma is one of the most notorious deniers of human-induced climate change. He has contended that God controls the Earth’s climate, not Homo sapiens, and he has quoted the Bible to make this point: “As long as the Earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” And Inhofe, thanks to the recent elections, is in line to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee when the Republicans assume control of the Senate next month. He has vowed to do all he can to block regulations aimed at cutting emissions.

With diplomats in Lima wrestling with the challenges of climate negotiations and Inhofe counting the days until his likely ascension to one of the most powerful environment-related positions on the planet, I’m reminded of a bizarre encounter I had with the senator at a previous climate summit.

In December 2009, the United Nations hosted a global gathering in Copenhagen to hammer out what some participants hoped would be a binding accord that would compel a reduction in emissions around the world. Thousands of diplomats, policy advocates, and scientists flocked to the Danish city for the session, and thousands of reporters were there to chronicle the talks. Inhofe came too. To troll. Or, as he put it, to be “a one-man truth squad.” He slithered in and out of the cavernous media filing center, ever at the ready to speak to reporters looking for the other side quotes denigrating the proceedings, claiming that climate change was no more than a hoax, and celebrating the summit’s failure to produce a binding and comprehensive treaty.

Inhofe was usually mobbed by reporters—especially non-American journalists who found it newsworthy that a US senator would say such things. Judging from the smile on his mug, Inhofe enjoyed skunking up the party. After watching this for a few days, I could not resist the urge to engage.

As he strolled through the media center one afternoon, accompanied by several camera crews recording his pronouncements, I approached and politely asked if I could put a question to him. Sure, he said, in his folksy, avuncular manner.

Look around us, I said, spreading my arms wide. There are thousands of intelligent and well-meaning people in this gigantic conference center: scientists, heads of state, government officials, policy experts. They believe that climate change is a serious and pressing threat and that something must be done soon. Do you believe that they have all been fooled?

Yes, he said, grinning.

That these people who have traveled from all points of the globe to be here are victims of a well-orchestrated hoax?

Yes, he said, still smiling.

That’s some hoax, I countered. But who has engineered such a scam?

Hollywood liberals and extreme environmentalists, Inhofe replied.

Really? I asked. Why would they conspire to scare all these smart people into believing a catastrophe was under way, when all was well?

Inhofe didn’t skip a beat: To advance their radical environmental agenda.

I pressed on: Who in Hollywood is doing this?

The whole liberal crowd, Inhofe said.

But who?

Barbra Streisand, he responded.

I nearly laughed. All these people had assembled in Copenhagen because of Barbra Streisand. A singer and actor had perpetuated the grandest con of the past 100 years?

That’s right, Inhofe said, with a straight face. And others, he added.

By this point, he was losing patience and glancing about for another reporter who wanted to record his important observations. And I was running out of follow-up queries. After all, was I really going to ask, “And Ed Begley Jr. too?” So our conversation ended, and I headed back to reality.

But I was struck by this thought: Did this senator truly believe Barbra Streisand was the devious force behind a completely phony global campaign to address climate change? He seemed to.

In his 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe does mention Streisand—but only once, lumping her together with Leonardo DiCaprio and John Travolta as celebs whose environmental “alarmism” had to be debunked. But his book did not shy away from clearly identifying the charlatans and hoaxers who have hornswoggled the planet: “environmental activist extremists,” Al Gore, MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, and, yes, “the Hollywood elites.”

Perhaps when Inhofe seizes the reins of the Senate environment committee, he can further expose this conspiracy—and for the first witness…Barbra Streisand. It’s time for her to come clean.

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Inhofe’s Grand Climate Conspiracy Theory: It’s All About Barbra Streisand

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