Ctr for Constitutional Rights ccr
multiple orgs?
NY supports 350 and pipleline resistance; ntbc w/ wackos
kids movie hoot soft core ecoterorism, charlotte's web (ctr for consumer freedom ---) NRA says ani rights biggest threat to 2nd amend :redgreen potter
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https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/new-report-details-impact-secretive-american-legislative-exchange
New Report Details Impact of Secretive American Legislative Exchange Council on Communities of Color
Contact: press@ccrjustice.org
December 3, 2019, Phoenix, Arizona – Today, a coalition of human rights organizations released an in-depth report about the role of the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the adoption of state laws that disproportionately harm communities of color. “ALEC Attacks: How evangelicals and corporations captured state lawmaking to safeguard white supremacy and corporate power” traces the establishment of the organization by evangelical conservative activists in the 1970s to counter advances made by the civil rights movement, through to the transformation of ALEC in the early 1990s to be a more stridently pro-corporate lobbying organization.
The report details how ALEC’s corporate, conservative, and state lawmaker members have come together to promote the adoption of some of the most infamous state laws of the past two decades, which continue to affect communities of color today. In particular, the report includes in-depth discussions of Stand Your Ground laws, Voter ID laws, laws that punish participation in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, and laws that punish protests against so-called “critical infrastructure” such as oil and gas pipelines. ALEC will hold its annual States and Nation Policy Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, beginning tomorrow and running through Friday.
“ALEC is a leading example of how corporations and conservatives capture lawmaking processes to undertake the everyday maintenance of America’s racist and pro-corporate political system,” said Dominic Renfrey, Advocacy Program Manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Far from being content with 46 years of circumventing democracy by providing pay-to-play private access to lawmakers for its corporate and conservative members, ALEC is still brazenly attacking the movements that dare to advance human rights and protect the environment.”
“ALEC Attacks” describes the process by which corporate executives and conservative activists pay membership fees to meet regularly in private with conservative lawmakers to develop draft laws that serve the interests of ALEC’s members, which are then introduced in state legislatures around the country. The negative impacts arising from these laws are often felt by people of color. For example, through ALEC, lawmakers worked closely with members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) to enact Stand Your Ground laws in several states. The report discusses the infamous case of 17-year-old Black teenager Trayvon Martin, killed in Florida gated community by George Zimmerman—who was then acquitted of the murder because of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The report cites studies indicating that the rates of homicide by firearm have increased in states with Stand Your Ground laws, and that acquittal rates on the basis of those laws exacerbate racial disparities in findings of “justifiable” homicide.
Similarly, “ALEC Attacks” documents how ALEC has been instrumental in enacting strict Voter ID laws, that tighten voting requirements and disproportionately impact Black and Latinx people. In one case a North Carolina court found its state Voter ID law was enacted with discriminatory intent and “target(s) African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
“The story of ALEC is the story of a white supremacist political and economic elite harnessing their control of the means of government to perpetuate their own power,” said Rachel Gilmer, Co-Executive Director of Dream Defenders, which is based in Florida. “Maintaining this system by necessity requires maintaining economic and political control over the lives of Black, brown, immigrant, and poor people, and the murder of Trayvon and many others like him is a symptom of this situation.”
ALEC members have referred to the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement in support of Palestinian rights as “economic terrorism” and supported the proliferation of state laws that prohibit public entities from doing business with entities that boycott Israel. The report describes Palestinian-Americans who have been unable to continue job contracts or participate in school events because of the anti-boycott laws.
“ALEC's legislative attacks on advocacy for Palestinian rights are one part of its racist, reactionary agenda, and should concern all who are working for social justice in the U.S.” said Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal. “But the movement for Palestinian rights continues to grow, in part because of the connections it is building with other communities targeted by ALEC's legislative repression.”
The report also documents ALEC’s role in the adoption of a spate of “critical infrastructure” laws in several states that have been enacted by conservative lawmakers in response to protests by Indigenous water protectors, and their allies, against the Dakota Access Pipeline that was built through Standing Rock Sioux territory in North Dakota. “Critical infrastructure” laws heighten criminal penalties for water protectors protesting against oil and gas infrastructure development. Indigenous and non-indigenous activists, as well as at least one journalist, have been arrested under critical infrastructure laws and face lengthy prison terms if they are convicted.
“While Indigenous Water Protectors and Land Defenders have been organizing to prepare for the struggle to stop fossil fuel infrastructure development on the ground, so have energy corporations been hard at work passing ALEC-sponsored critical infrastructure legislation to criminalize our people,” said Melanie Yazzie, a founding member of The Red Nation. “The Red Nation calls upon all people of good conscience to take action and stop ALEC-sponsored critical infrastructure bills in your state. Indigenous people will not be the only casualty of these laws. So, too, will the water we drink and the air we breathe. Dismantling ALEC is a crucial step. Start by reading this report.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) brings together corporate executives, conservative activists, and state lawmakers to craft model legislation that ALEC lawmakers then introduce in state legislatures around the country. Hundreds of corporations and conservative think tanks with non-profit charitable status are members, along with thousands of politicians. The organization’s membership list is secret. Corporate executives reportedly pay tens of thousands of dollars to ALEC for private access to lawmakers at ALEC meetings. Each year hundreds of ALEC model bills become state law.
“ALEC Attacks: How evangelicals and corporations captured state lawmaking to safeguard white supremacy and corporate power” was authored by Center for Constitutional Rights, Dream Defenders, The Red Nation, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Palestine Legal.
Read the report at http://www.alecattacks.org/.
The Center for Constitutional Rights works with communities under threat to fight for justice and liberation through litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Since 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken on oppressive systems of power, including structural racism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and governmental overreach. Learn more at ccrjustice.org.
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shac-7
https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/us-v-shac-7
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was an international, grassroots animal rights campaign to close Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. Huntingdon tests products like household cleaners, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and food additives on around 75,000 animals every year, fromrats to wild-caught baboons. By targeting the pillars of support for the lab (e.g. its investors, customers, stockbrokers, etc.), pressuring these companies to cut their tie with HLS, and holding residential pickets in the neighborhoods of executives of these companies and of HLS, the SHAC campaign pushed Huntingdon to the bring of bankruptcy mulitple times.
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The main organizing tool of U.S. arm of the campaign was the SHAC-USA website, which advocated and reported on both legal and illegal protests against the lab. SHAC expressed ideological support for any protest tactic that did not harm a human or non-human animal.
In 2004, six SHAC-USA activists and the organization itself (the SHAC 7) were indicted on federal "animal enterprise terrorism" charges, for allegedly conspiring under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA). None of the defendants were accused of personally engaging in any independent illegal act--no assault, no vandalism, no threatening communications. All of the activity alleged against the defendants is protected by the First Amendment: publishing a website, advocating lawful and unlawful protest activity, organizing and attending protests, contacting companies by phone and mail, etc. All defendants were convicted and sentenced to four to six years in federal prison.
CCR wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the defendants in their appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging the convictions as an incitement prosecution that flies in the face of well-established free speech doctrine. The Third Circuit upheld the convictions, ruling 2-1. The Panel acknowledged that much of Appellants’ speech and advocacy was protected by the First Amendment, but impermissibly allowed the mere presence of unlawful activity committed by anonymous individuals in the course of the campaign, coupled with defendants' ideological support for unlawful protest, to constitute a criminal conspiracy.This is highly problematic under the First Amendment.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/12/28/st-charles-parish-louisiana-sheriff-pipeline-records-standing-rock
On December 27, a state* appeals court ordered a Louisiana’s sheriff’s department and its sheriff to release information about its officers’ trip to North Dakota during the heated protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The extended, indigenous-led protests near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation drew a highly militarized response from public and private law enforcement. Out-of-state cops, including those from Louisiana’s St. Charles Parish, flooded North Dakota to support it via an interstate agreement.
The latest move reversed a decision by a district court, which denied a public records request made by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a human rights law firm which has worked on behalf of environmental groups* in Louisiana, after parish law enforcement spoke out against Dakota Access pipeline opponents and endorsed the Bayou Bridge pipeline, a similar oil pipeline in Louisiana.
“We saw a dangerous blurring of the lines between law enforcement and private corporations at Standing Rock,” Pamela Spees,a senior staff attorney with CCR, stated when first filing suit for the public records in December 2017.
Spees, who was raised in Lake Charles, one of the communities that will be affected by the Bayou Bridge pipeline, is leading a lawsuit by Louisiana environmental groups seeking public records fromSt. Charles Parish Sheriff Greg Champagne. She was also an attorney in a lawsuit against Bayou Bridge Pipeline, LLC, which so far has unsuccessfully challenged the company's right to use eminent domain to confiscate land to build the pipeline, which is nearly operational.
The Dakota Access pipeline is owned by Energy Transfer (formerly known as Energy Transfer Partners), the principal owner of the also-contested Bayou Bridge pipeline, a 163-mile-long pipeline that cuts across southern Louisiana from St. Charles, near the Texas border, to St. James, on the Mississippi River. Despite ongoing legal battles in federal and state courts, the Bayou Bridge pipeline has been nearly completed.
Louisiana Sheriffs, a Pipeline Company, and a Private Security Firm
According to a CCR press release, the center’s request “also seeks to investigate larger connections among SCPSO [St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office], Sheriff Champagne, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), and TigerSwan LLC, in light of ETP’s proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline project in Louisiana.”
TigerSwan, a private security firm involved in the Dakota Access response but denied a license to operate in Louisiana, is a corporate donor to the National Sheriffs’ Association’s $3.46 million budget, according to the association’s most recent tax forms. Under Sheriff Champagne’s leadership, the association lobbied Congress for surplus military gear and other undisclosed issues related to the Dakota Access pipeline, according to a review of federal lobbying disclosure forms by Steve Horn for DeSmog.
The center’s public records request, filed September 18, 2017, was made after St. Charles Parish’s Sheriff Greg Champagne and others connected to law enforcement, including Joseph Lopinto, the newly elected sheriff of Jefferson Parish who spoke on behalf of the National Sheriffs’ Association at a Bayou Bridge permit hearing, publicly criticized pipeline opponents.
At the time of his October 2016 visit to Standing Rock, Sheriff Champagne was also the president of the National Sheriffs’ Associationand made largely unsubstantiated claims about the Dakota Access protests against the pipeline. In a Facebook postChampagne wrote: “Despite the statements coming from the media and protesters that they were completely peaceful and prayerful, it has been a fact that more militant protestors [sic] (terrorists) have destroyed property and physically beaten employees of the company in recent weeks."
[lopinto vid]
February 2017 Sheriff Lopinto voiced support for the Bayou Bridge pipeline at a permit hearing in which he claimed that Dakota Access protesters shot at law enforcement officers. “We don’t want the same thing occurring in Louisiana,” he said.
Were North Dakota Trip Photos and Videos Destroyed?
The records Spees is seeking include receipts for all travel expenses, which reportedly add up to nearly $36,000, and video and photos taken by St. Charles Parish deputies during their trip to North Dakota.
Though the appeals court ruling makes clear photos and video taken in North Dakota by Captain Patrick Yoes, commander of the St. Charles Parish Special Services Division, should be released, Spees worries those may never surface because it is unclear whether the department retained the materials.
Captain Yoes testified that “the files from the devices were loaded on a hard drive, and he provided all of the files relating to the EMAC [Emergency Management Assistance Compact] to the [North Dakota Morton] county’s sheriff and the public information officer.” However, Yoes said the original camera memory cards which he returned to Louisiana with may not have been preserved and it is unclear if the data on to the hard drives left in North Dakota have been preserved.
Spees doesn't see anything controversial about the records request and considers its initial denial unfortunate, because it compelled the center to litigate on behalf of opponents of the Bayou Bridge pipeline.
Champagne could appeal the federal court’s decision with the Louisiana Supreme Court. I reached out to Champagne’s communications officer but did not receive a response.
*Update 12/29/18: This story has been updated to reflect that a state, not federal, appeals court reversed the decision and that CCR filed the public records request and lawsuit, which was not filed on behalf of environmental groups.
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The legislation is not without precedent. Since 1990, nearly a dozen states have passed bills known as "ag-gag" laws that prohibit surreptitiously recording inside feedlots and breeding facilities. Many came after exposés of horrific conditions and animal abuse.Three of those laws were subsequently overturned by courts.
But environmentalists and free speech advocates say the new bills are part of a broader effort to recast environmental activists as criminals, even terrorists.
For example:
- In May 2017, theAmerican Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturerspublished a blog post about activists who vandalized pipelines, under the headline: "Pipelines Are Critical Infrastructure—and Attacking Them Is Terrorism."
- Last year,Energy Transfer Partnersfiled a federal lawsuit against Greenpeace and other groups seeking hundreds of millions of dollars. The complaint accuses some of the nation's leading environmental organizations of operating an "eco-terrorist" conspiracy at Standing Rock. (A judge dismissed the case against one of the defendants last month, but has yet to rule on a motion to dismiss the case against Greenpeace.)
- Another industry group launched a database to track "criminal acts on critical energy infrastructure," claiming eco-terrorism incidents were on the rise.
- In Congress, 84 members wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking if protestors who tamper with pipelines could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. Sponsors of the state pipeline bills have also invoked terrorism.
Supporters of the bills say they do not suppress lawful protests.
"There's a legal process to stop something," said Oklahoma state Rep. Mark McBride, who sponsored another bill that assigns civil liability to anyone who pays protesters to trespass. "But if you're chaining yourself to a bulldozer or you're standing in the way of a piece of equipment digging a ditch or whatever it might be, yes, you're causing harm to the project and to the person that's contracted to do that job."
Advocacy groups say the bills are unnecessary—trespassing and vandalism are already unlawful, and protesters who have disrupted operations have largely been charged under existing statutes. They fear the legislation uses a handful of dangerous incidents as a pretext to intimidate mainstream advocates and target more widespread acts of peaceful civil disobedience, like temporarily blocking access to a construction site. Several environmental and civil liberties organizations are now in talks about how to respond to the industry's actions.
"The clear attempt there is to bring environmental justice, environmental advocacy organizations into a realm of criminal liability," said Pamela Spees, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents activists in Louisiana. "They're basically trying to silence and minimize the impact of environmental organizations."
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no lnx
Room for Debate
A NEW YORK TIMES BLOG
The Memos: Torture Redefined
BY THE EDITORS APRIL 16, 2009 8:00 PM April 16, 2009 8:00 pm
CIA secret memos A screen shot of page 2 of the Aug. 1, 2002, secret memo that details interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency. To see the four memos released by the Justice Department on Thursday, go here.
Updated, Apr. 20, 10:55 a.m. | Douglas W. Kmiec, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, offers his view.
Updated, Apr. 17, 1:00 p.m. | Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution joins our discussion.
Updated, Apr. 17, 9:20 a.m. | We’ve updated this forum with commentary from David B. Rivkin, a lawyer and former official in the administration of George H.W. Bush.
The Justice Department on Thursday released four detailed memos, issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005, describing and approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the Central Intelligence Agency. President Obama said that while these techniques “undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer,” the C.I.A. operatives who relied on the legal advice would not be subject to prosecution.
We’re asking several legal and national security experts for their reaction to these memos and whether they think President Obama’s call for moving on from this chapter is the right decision.
Douglas W. Kmiec, legal adviser in Reagan administration
David Cole, Georgetown University Law Center
Kori Schake, United States Military Academy
Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
David B. Rivkin, lawyer
Kenneth Anderson, law professor, American University
Obama’s Realism
Douglas W. Kmiec
Douglas W. Kmiec is a law professor at Pepperdine University. He was a head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
President Barack Obama deserves great credit for releasing these memos, though except for the listing of tortures — and that is what they are — the tortuous reasoning that yielded these had already been known.
My sense is that in 2002, there was a confluence of genuine fear of a follow-on attack far more devastating than 9/11; a president ill-prepared for the threat with respect to intelligence in every sense of the word; and Justice Department personnel who were either too young to have perspective, too academic to have practical wisdom, or too political to be capable of judgment.
Many, I know, wish to prosecute for war crime, and perhaps Spain still will. I doubt given the mental requirements for criminal penalty such would be successful, and I admire President Obama, yet anew, for taking the political heat from his left perimeter for grasping the futility of such prosecution.
It would be worthwhile to have a Nuremberg-style citizen-conducted ethics inquiry.
That said, it would be worthwhile to have a Nuremberg-style citizen-conducted ethics inquiry in which all of the opinion writers — and the opinion demanders in the Pentagon and former White House — would be required to self-critique why the Nation they most assuredly would say they love is today embarrassed if not appalled by what was authorized. The point of the exercise would be “looking forward” as President Obama properly desires, but in a manner that would be reminded out of the protagonists own attempts at explanation, why we cannot forget, and in the course of it all, to ensure that those presently exercising power, or those to come after, do not self-delude themselves into thinking it could not involve them or repeat.
Macabre and Excruciating
David D. Cole
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is the author, most recently, of “Justice At War: The Men and Ideas That Shaped America’s ‘War on Terror.'”
The four legal memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday confirm in excruciating detail that the Bush administration employed twisted and macabre legal reasoning to authorize the unspeakable – the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human beings.
The memos’ matter-of-fact clinical descriptions belie the harsh tactics to which they gave a green light. They set the C.I.A. loose to slam suspects’ heads into walls up to 30 times in a row, to deprive suspects of sleep for more than a week straight, to confine them to small dark boxes for hours at a time, to slap them repeatedly in the face and abdomen, and to suffocate them with water to induce the perception that they are drowning.
Mr. Obama’s refusal to hold accountable those responsible for the wrongs so evident from the memos is unacceptable.
A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading.
President Obama should be commended for releasing these memos. But his simultaneous assertion that he will not seek to hold accountable those responsible for the wrongs so evident on the memos’ face is unacceptable. The line C.I.A. agents are not, however, the most culpable. Rather, it is the lawyers and high-level government officials who set this scheme in motion and made it possible. These documents are irrefutable evidence that government officials, including lawyers employed in the Office of Legal Counsel, a Justice Department office meant to serve as the “constitutional conscience” of the Executive Branch, set out to manipulate the law to reach repugnant, illegal results that contravene the very ideals President Obama says must not be sacrificed.
It is not enough to say that when we have a president who does not believe in cruel and inhuman treatment and torture, the United States will not engage in such practices – while leaving open the possibility that if we again elect a president who does believe in such practices, they can be revived as a policy option. We must formally acknowledge that what was done was wrong, indeed criminal. At the very least, a credible independent investigation must be undertaken. The Convention Against Torture, which we have signed and ratified, demands nothing less wherever there is any evidence that persons within our jurisdiction inflicted cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on another human being. These memos are that evidence.
Prosecution Would Be Dangerous
Kori Schake
Kori Schake, a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
It seems to me that President Obama hit the balance about right in rejecting the use of those techniques and releasing the information, but acknowledging that the intelligence community was working on a very difficult problem and conducting the interrogations in good faith with the legal advice they were receiving.
What struck me most about the memos was that as late as August 2002, C.I.A. officials believed they were hearing “chatter” of the level and kind that proceeded the September 11th attacks. At that time, the country was still reeling from those attacks. The agency believed it had in custody enemies planning catastrophic terrorist attacks against our country and were urgently seeking information. The C.I.A. sought legal counsel and complied with the advice. Subjecting people to prosecution under those circumstances would be a dangerous politicization of difficult choices made by those serving our country.
Granting Immunity Makes Obama Complicit
Michael Ratner
Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of “The Prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.”
Yes, it is good that President Obama ordered the release of four more of the torture memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. The inhuman interrogation techniques those memos authorized which include waterboarding, walling (in which a person is slammed against a wall), confinement in a small box and sleep deprivation clearly constitute torture and other crimes under U.S. law. There is nothing abstract about the techniques: they are initially focused on one individual and even discuss his psychological weakness in language similar to the novel 1984 — although in this case, it’s bugs, not rats.
Since when did legal advice make torture into a lawful and permissible interrogation technique?
Yet President Obama goes out of his way to praise those who engaged in these unlawful practices and assures them they will not be prosecuted. In part, he asserts that the C.I.A. personnel were following, in good faith, legal advice. But since when did legal advice make torture into a lawful and permissible interrogation technique?
Torture is torture and all the legal window dressing in the world cannot hide its essence: the infliction of pain and suffering on human beings. If legal advice can protect torturers, no official anywhere can ever be prosecuted. Legal advice then becomes a get out-of-jail free card and will be employed by every petty dictatorship to protect its abusers.
In making the decision not to prosecute, President Obama is acting as jury, judge and prosecutor. It is not his decision to make. Whether or not to prosecute law breakers is not a political decision. Laws were broken and crimes were committed. If we are truly a nation of laws as he is fond of saying, a prosecutor needs to be appointed and the decisions regarding the guilt of those involved in the torture program should be decided in a court of law.
Prosecuting those involved in the torture program, particularly the officials who conceived, authorized and ordered the torture program is not “retribution” or “laying blame for the past” as President Obama says. It is about insuring that we will not again become a nation that employs in torture. The prohibition on torture should not be dependent on who is president or on the stroke of a pen. We prosecute those who break laws to deter lawbreaking. President Obama, by granting impunity to torturers, becomes complicit with their actions. History will not judge him kindly.
No Harm, No Torture
David B. Rivkin
David B. Rivkin, a lawyer in Washington, was counsel of the President’s Council on Competitiveness at the White House under George H.W. Bush.
The release of these memos comes at a high price. By describing in great detail the most assertive set of interrogation techniques, that the United States has ever used — having determined them after a great deal of reflection and analysis to be legal — we have rendered them essentially unusable in the future. This is precisely because these techniques were not torture, did not feature brute force and worked primarily because of their psychological dimension. Now, having been exposed, these techniques would be studied by our enemies, who will then train their operatives to withstand them.
However, while this disclosure came at a great price, it also provides a great benefit. The memos are well-written, and feature careful and nuanced legal analysis. They weave together the facts and the law. They are grounded in real world experience, because nine out of 10 techniques, used against high-value detainees, were also used over a period of many years in SERE training courses, with thousands and thousands of American participants.
This data is analyzed in great detail to establish that the use of these techniques does not inflict either physical or psychological damage. The conclusions the memos reach — that the specific interrogation techniques used by the C.I.A. did not constitute torture — are eminently reasonable. To any fair-minded observer, these documents definitively establish that the Bush administration did not engage in torture. They go a long way toward rebutting shrill and unfair attacks on the integrity of Bush administration officials, and, more generally, on America’s honor.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/13/bayou-bridge-pipeline-opponents-file-intervene-hearing-private-security-firm-louisiana
A broad base of advocacy groups opposed to Energy Transfer Partners’ (ETP) proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline continue to pressure officials in Louisiana to deny the remaining permissions the company needs to build the pipeline.
The groups are also trying to stop TigerSwan LLC, one of the security firms that ETP worked with in North Dakota, from obtaining a permit to operate in Louisiana.
ETP, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, intends to build a 162-mile pipeline across southern Louisiana. If built, the Bayou Bridge will be the last leg, carrying oil fracked in North Dakota to Louisiana.
Before the pipeline can be built, ETP needs a water quality certificate from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The company already obtained another required permit to operate from Louisiana Department of Natural Resources under the state’s Coastal Zone program, but that permit is being challenged vy a lawsuit spearheaded by the St. James community, where the pipeline will end, roughly 50 miles west of New Orleans.
TigerSwan in Louisiana?
Meanwhile, TigerSwan is trying to obtain a permit from the Louisiana State Board of Private Security Examiners to operate in the state.
The Board rejected TigerSwan’s permit application in June. In part, the denial was based on the ongoing litigation filed against the company by the North Dakota Private Investigative and Security Board for allegedly providing services without the required license.
Despite being turned down for a permit twice in North Dakota, TigerSwan operated on ETP’s behalf anyway.
A few days after TigerSwan’s permit was denied in Louisiana, the company filed an appeal and hired five lobbyists who work for the lobbying firm Southern Strategy Group.
At a November 9 press conference at the office of Louisiana’s Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards, groups opposing the Bayou Bridge pipeline, including theLouisiana Bucket Brigade, Bold Louisiana, 350 New Orleans, Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, Gulf Restoration Network, Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association - West, and L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life) Camp, announced that the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a petition to intervene on their behalf. CCRwants to ensure that the groups can participate in the permit appeals hearing set for December 14.
Video: Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade
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