This story was mention in a climate digest last night and a post by Smiley7. I wanted to bring more attention to it.
Back in 2004, an energy company proposed building a liquified natural gas plant at Jordan Cove on the shores of Coos Bay, OR, across from my old home town North Bend OR. Originally it was proposed as an import facility. When that fell apart, and the company got sold a time or two, it morphed into an export proposal.
Now keep in mind, LNG is highly volatile once it begins to warm up, so any containment breaches in pipe, ship or plant could be catastrophic. So, is the Jordan Cove site reasonably set back from inhabited areas on stable land? HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA no. Not even close. Along the shipping channel and proposed site live thousand of people. Jordan Cove is in the sand dunes, on a spit between sea and bay. In a time of rising sea levels. A spit that has been over-washed in the past by tsunamis (and one day will be again, as quakes and tsunamis are just a fact of life along the Pacific). And just a few hundred feet across the channel is...wait for it...the county airport. Doesn’t that sound totally safe to have an LNG plant under the flight path of commercial air traffic and just a few hundred feet from the airport? What could possibly go wrong? (And seriously, I wonder why the FAA hasn’t had anything official to say about this).
It’s just been reported that various LE agencies have been spying on anti-pipeline activists. And keep in mind this covers a lot of people -land owners who don’t want a pipeline on their land and fear being subjected to eminent domain, environmental activists, Rogue Riverkeeper, people living in the Coos Bay region fearing the climate impact and/or specter of disaster, tribal people, Jackson County commissioners, among many others. Veresen, the company behind Jordan Cove has been paying the Coos County sheriff’s office to maintain an office out there. The county pays nothing for this. Well, of course, they are grateful to and beholden to Veresen. They have been spying on peaceful protestors. Now this isn’t a total surprise, there is a long history of various law enforcement orgs spying on people who want to buck the status quo one way or another — be it people working on worker’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, or pretty much any cause one can think of that might possibly inconvenience the status-fucking-quo. Just another day ending in -y. BUT...what stood out to me in the Guardian article is the mention that one man, Mark Pfeifle, has been included in the loop of these emails monitoring all the scawwy scawwy activists who don’t want their homes destroyed. Now who is Pfeifle, you may be asking. Well, he is not a LEO. He does not work for a government agency like the DOI, DOJ, DOE, FAA, or any other alphabet soup agency or department one could name. He is a PR Flack. A PR flack who has been neck deep in anti-pipeline work in the midwest. Now why oh why is a PR guy being included in these so-called ‘intelligence’ emails? Oughtn’t that be strictly kept among LE agencies? Here is the quote out of the Guardian article:
An email distribution list associated with the taskforce included addressees in the FBI, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Justice (DoJ), the National Forest Service (NFS), Oregon state police (OSP), and various Oregon municipal police and sheriffs departments. But some of its recipients are outside any government agency, most notably Mark Pfeifle, the CEO of the political consultancy Off The Record Strategies.
Pfeifle was previously a Bush administration PR adviser on national security. More recently, Pfeifle worked with law enforcement on a counter-information operation against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.
How could this possibly be legal?