Today's Stories

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 2, 2009

A CounterPunch Special Report

A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Libby, Montana vs. W.R. Grace Corp

By ANDREA PEACOCK

Missoula, Montana.

For nearly a decade, officials of the W.R. Grace corporation have declined to defend themselves publicly against accusations that they knowingly exposed generations of a small Montana town to lethal doses of a particularly virulent form of asbestos, profiting without a backward glance as the town’s cemetery filled with hundreds of victims. Last week, attorneys for the multi-national finally broke that silence and told their side of the story in federal court.

There are no significant amounts of asbestos in the mountains near Libby, Montana, they asserted, and Grace’s vermiculite-based products carry no death. “There is no question that miners and their families suffered tragic losses as a consequence of the operation of this mine,” conceded Grace defense attorney David Bernick in his opening statement. But those deaths were the result of unregulated fibrous minerals—not asbestos—and all related to the bad, dusty old days before Grace reformed its milling processes. It was a terrible tragedy, but no one’s to blame.

As for those others, the townsfolk whose hoarse voices foretell a relentless decline from oxygen tank to perpetual breathlessness, well, it may be they got their various asbestos-related diseases from doing brake jobs, or the sort of pick-up construction work men all across the rural West use to get by on. It may be that many of them are not sick at all, just walking around under the pall of false diagnoses. In fact, the lawyers said, the idea that more than 1,200 people in this tiny community have asbestos-related diseases from Grace’s now-defunct vermiculite mine is a grim fairy tail, the invention of one greedy law firm, two incompetent doctors, and three meddlesome federal agents.

That was the message delivered between the lines during opening statements in Judge Donald Molloy’s Missoula, Mont., courtroom, where five former Grace officials as well as the corporation itself stand accused of conspiracy, violations of the Clean Air Act and obstruction of justice. The men could go to jail with sentences ranging from five to 35 years. Fines could reach between $250,000 and $750,000 for the former executives. A guilty verdict for Grace might carry a $280 million price tag.

These arguments are believable, because the alternative—stated succinctly by one defense attorney—is horrific.

“What they are trying to say is that Harry Eschenbach is a bad man,” lawyer David Krakoff said plainly. “That he didn’t care about the workers of Libby and was willing to let them suffer death and disease.”

The case against W.R. Grace is of enormous consequence: in terms of potential jail time and fines, it ranks as one of the largest criminal environmental cases in the history of the United States. The Denver Environmental Protection Agency has been so closely tied to the matter—both in terms of the cleanup and the prosecution—that acquittals would be an enormous blow to the office’s credibility.

For those who have lost family members—the death list had hit 274 as of 2006—guilty verdicts will vindicate their humanity: the corporation treated the people of this community like dirt. Their pain, their suffering, their loss will matter in the eyes of the law.

As well, guilty verdicts would vindicate the EPA’s controversial cleanup in Libby, and might finally force the federal government to acknowledge and do something about the risk to those living in upwards of 15 million buildings in the United States insulated with vermiculite-based products from Grace’s Libby mine.

The truth is, Grace and its executives are not being charged with murder, nor with any actions that contributed to the deaths of those miners. The miners’ family members who died of the dust brought home on their husbands’ and fathers’ clothing are not being avenged directly here; nor are those whose disease stems from living in a home insulated with asbestos-contaminated vermiculite.

The charges prosecutors have been able to stick beyond the reach of statutes of limitation are environmental in nature: that Grace and its managers conspired to defraud the government and violate the Clean Air Act by knowingly releasing a hazardous material into the ambient air that would cause the imminent endangerment of those who came in contact with it.

This means that prosecutors can tell the jury of the lengths to which Grace contaminated the public space of Libby, to the point where anyone going about their business in town could end up breathing death that would take decades to manifest (asbestos-related diseases have long latency periods). And more to the point, that Grace and its men knew exactly the nature of the toxic legacy they were leaving behind.

When W.R. Grace executives closed the Libby mine in 1990, they did so knowing that the high school and middle school running tracks had been paved with mine tailings; that the Plummer Elementary School ice skating rink was constructed with its ore; that the former screening plant sold to a local family, the Parkers, for their nursery and storage businesses was blanketed with asbestos-contaminated vermiculite; that the export plant it donated to the town—which was subsequently leased for a family-run retail lumber and planning business—was also chock full of the stuff.

The jury will hear that Grace was sloppy with a product it knew to be lethal, allowing it to be spread around the Little League baseball fields, to be used by a local sand and gravel company, to be loaded by pickup trucks and carried to gardens and yards throughout town, and to “sand” the dirt road running up Rainy Creek to the mine, frequented by locals to access hunting and by kids to get to a popular party meadow.

Grace and the defendants counter that everyone in government from the EPA to Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, that everyone in the town from the county commissioners to Mel and Lerah Parker, knew there was asbestos in the vermiculite. This argument must be read as the defense’s effort to cover all bases: there was no asbestos in our vermiculite—but just in case the jury decides there was, we’ll say the people of Libby made decisions with their eyes wide open.

The prosecution, in its opening statement, chose to tell a familiar story: that of a corporation with a violently impaired sense of moral responsibility. Attorneys for the government referred to Grace’s internal studies showing that their product, their ore, was far more deadly than other kinds of asbestos, that it was unusually friable (that is, susceptible to becoming airborne), and that its Libby workforce had been decimated by asbestos-related diseases. In one set of such tests, Grace was unable to find a level of contamination low enough that harmful levels of asbestos would not be released upon disturbance.

“It was not a secret that their vermiculite contained asbestos, and it was well known that asbestos was bad for you,” assistant US attorney Kris McLean explained to the jurors. “What the government intends to show is that these defendants kept a closely guarded secret: that their product—even when it contained only a small amount of asbestos—released hazardous levels of asbestos through the air when disturbed.”

The prosecution is walking the narrowest of ledges. The provisions of the Clean Air Act under which Grace and the men are charged didn’t exist until 1990, the year the mine closed. All testimony and evidence of Grace’s activities in Libby before that date must be carefully targeted to lay the foundation only for the defendants’ knowledge and actions as they relate to post-1990 releases. And since Grace and its employees were responsible for few overt acts in the 1990s, the prosecution’s theory is that they indirectly caused the hazardous releases through the actions of ordinary citizens, unwitting partners who could not help but disturb vermiculite while going about their day to day lives.

It’s an unconventional approach, and miraculous that prosecutors have gotten even this far with the case. In June 2006, Judge Molloy threw out the original conspiracy charges due to the statute of limitations, effectively gutting the government’s case. It was only because the judge allowed prosecutors to file a superseding indictment—adding accusations of obstruction for Grace’s heel-dragging in 1999 and beyond—that these men and their corporation are now called to account for themselves.

The defense is doing its best to limit the prosecution even further: to so much as mention the fact that there’s been a Superfund cleanup in Libby, insists attorney Bernick, is to imply that something is wrong up in Libby and prejudice the jury against his client. Bernick, one of the nation’s premier trial lawyers (he defended Philip Morris and others against tobacco litigation), reportedly earns $800 to $1,000 an hour, and he questioned EPA on-site coordinator Paul Peronard as though he planned to rack up the hours. Unable to keep Peronard, a bright, compassionate and charismatic man, off the stand entirely, the defense was able to restrict his testimony to the point where he was not even allowed to venture an opinion as to whether or not the situation in Libby was hazardous.

Peronard could, for instance, describe a scene in which Mel and Lerah Parker’s young granddaughter threw clods of rocks against a wall to bust them open, and add that these rocks came from the mine site. But when he mentioned that the rocks were full of asbestos, the judge struck his testimony, advising the jury to disregard it.

Though Judge Molloy ruled in his favor often as not, Bernick seemed frustrated by the proceedings, at one point even shaking his finger at the judge.

“I am trying to be patient with you,” Judge Molloy responded. “You make your objections and I’ll rule on them.”

The trial is expected to last three to five months. After opening statements, the courtroom cleared out quite a bit. The army of grey-suited attorneys representing the defendants (there are nearly 30 lawyers involved in all, only three of which sit at the government’s table), will likely stay on, but the press bench had dwindled to a skeleton crew and members of the public could finally find places to sit by the middle of week one.

So far, prosecutors have used a delicate touch. The first witnesses called included men who played Little League baseball next to the export plant, and a woman who spent her teenage years running track. While all testified they had contracted asbestos-related diseases, it was their hoarse voices, like static on the radio, which spoke loudest. Defense attorneys warned against overly emotional testimony, yet there was little of this. More moving than anything she said was Wendy Challinor’s labored walk to the witness stand, and her attempt to fight back tears after being asked of her disease. And Vernon Riley’s simple statement about his late wife Toni, “I had her for two and a half years after she got the cancer,” that described beyond testimony the depth of his loss.

Grace attorney Bernick confronted most of these defendants with medical reports from doctors stating that they were, in fact, disease free. None of the witnesses had seen these reports before, they testified. Interestingly enough, all were from the same two doctors. Later, asbestos victim advocate Gayla Benefield clued me in: “Those are Grace’s doctors,” she said. But the inference that Libby’s doctors were misdiagnosing people had an impact. One reporter confided to me he thought there might be some sort of mass delusion going on, at least as regards the number of sick people.

Two older women sat in the courtroom for most of the proceedings, one holding a Resistol cowboy hat decorated with eagle and pheasant feathers belonging to her late husband. Despite her unassuming presence, her name and fame precede her: Norita Skramstad is Les Skramstad’s widow. Together with Gayla Benefield, the trio were to a large degree responsible for setting in motion the events leading up to this day. Both their family trees are riddled with asbestos casualties.

Les died fighting. A few weeks before he passed in 2007, we spoke and he likened Grace officials to Saddam Hussein, who had just been hung. “They all shoulda been at that party,” he noted wryly. It is damn tragedy that Les died first. In the end, it was mesothelioma—a rare, asbestos related cancer—that got him, rather than the asbestosis he’d been living with for decades.

The defense paints their clients as family men from religious and blue collar backgrounds, old men in their seventies who if sent to jail might reasonably expect to die there. Montanans are a subtle people, and none of this is lost on the jury. Les may well get his justice.

Defendants W.R. Grace, William McCaig, Henry Eschenbach, Jack Wolter, Robert Bettachi and Robert Walsh all are charged with conspiracy to defraud the government and violate the Clean Air Act. Wolter and Bettachi are charged additionally with two counts of violating the Clean Air Act, Grace faces three such counts. Grace is also accused of four counts of obstruction of justice.

A sixth co-defendant, Alan Stringer, died in 2007 of a non-asbestos related cancer. Attorney Mario Favorito is a seventh defendant on the conspiracy charge, and he will be tried separately due to his position as counsel for Grace.

The trial is expected to last between three and five months.

Andrea Peacock is the author of Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation (Johnson Books, 2003). She lives south of Livingston, Montana, and can be reached at apeacock@wispwest.net

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