Writing Contest

2010-02-19

Breathless Press Will Give 20 Authors the Chance to Shine During The Holidays

 

Calgary, Alberta-Think the Holidays are months away? If you’re a writer you might want to head to the computer right now because Breathless Press is offering 20 lucky authors and their stories a chance to be featured on their Web site during the months of October and December.

Breathless Press is currently looking for the following stories-

 For October-Witches and Demons (stories must contain a demon or witch element).

For December-Naughty or Nice (stories must contain the themed element of being naughty or nice).

All stories must be erotic or be in the category of a 2+ heat rating (please see the Breathless Press site for details), must be under 35k but above 1k, (no flirt lengths). Both categories are open to unpublished and published writers. There will be ten winners in each category. Stories must be original and not have been published elsewhere. Stories will be treated like any other one published by Breathless Press. They will be available from the time they are live to the time the contract expires upon which it may be renewed. Each story will get their own, unique cover with a graphic that sets them apart from regular Breathless Press stories. The author will receive the standard Breathless Press royalty of 35% of net sales.  In addition each winner will receive the following-

A $10 gift card for the book or books of their choice on the All Romance Ebook Web site www.allromanceebooks.com .

50 bonus points on the Breathless Press We site ($50 value)

Deadline for the Witches and Demon stories is June 30^th, 2010 at 12.00 a.m. Eastern Time

Deadline for the Naughty or Nice stories is September 30^th, 2010 at 12.00 a.m. Eastern Time

Stories should be e-mailed to acquisitions@breathlesspress.com

Please visit the Breathless Press Website www.breathlesspress.com for submission format requirements and/or to view a sample contract.

 

Breathless Press home to books guaranteed to take your breath away.

Fault Zone:

Words from the Edge 

An Anthology of Short Stories 

 

Call for Entries! 

Fault Zone: Words from the Edge, an anthology of short stories, will be published this fall by the SF/Peninsula Branch of California Writers. Non-members of our branch are encouraged to submit their short stories in our writing contest. Your piece should relate to the anthology’s theme in some way. Interpret as you wish and have fun. We can’t wait to see it! 

First Prize is $300 and publication in our Fault Zone anthology. Second Prize is $100. Third Prize is $50. Contest deadline is Sept 30, 2010. Reading fee is $15. 

Previously published work will be considered. Novel excerpts must stand on their own. 

Submission Guidelines:  

Hard Copy Mailed In Submissions: 

Submit 2 copies of your short story or stand-alone novel excerpt. Title and author should be on each page, as well as page number. Include word count on first page. 

Please submit work typed, double-spaced, 12 pt. Times Roman, with standard margins.  

Word limit: 2,500 max. (more or less, within reason). Shorter entries are encouraged!  

Mail to: SF/Pen CWC, P.O. Box 853, Belmont, CA 94002 

 

Submit 45-80 pages of poetry with a $25 reading fee (personal check only, please; no money orders), a cover letter with your bio and your manuscript's acknowledgments, and your email address for results (no SASEs please; manuscripts will be recycled. Check website for winners.)  Please do not bind, fasten, or clip your manuscript in any way.

IMPORTANT:  Checks payable only to "TNPR"

ENTRY ADDRESS FOR BOOK PRIZE ONLY:

THE NATIONAL POETRY REVIEW

PO Box 2080

Aptos, CA  95001-2080

Postmark Deadline :  September 30, 2010.  

OR you can submit and pay online:

First, click "Buy Now" to transmit your fee.

Then, email your entry, put your name in the subject line, include a copy of your PayPal paid receipt, and send to editor@nationalpoetryreview.com.

The winner of The National Poetry Review Book Prize will receive $1000  plus publication and 15 copies of the book. All entrants will be considered for publication.  In 2006 two runners up were given publication contracts in addition to the winner. In 2008 one runner up was given a publication contract in addition to the winner.

Previous Winners:

Bryan Penberthy, James Haug, Dorinne Jennette, Ravi Shankar (2009)

Previous Runners-Up:  Dan Kaplan, Karl Elder, Sarah E. Barber, James Grinwis (2009)

Please note that students, close friends, and family of the editors are not eligible for the prize.  We believe that this policy promotes objectivity in judging and fairness in publication.

 

The National Poetry Review is a non-profit organization.

Download Ayi-Interview-smp.mp3

3 minute excerpt from interview

AYI KWEI ARMAH

Interview 1: A 1 hour in depth lecture and interview of possibly the greatest writer of the African Diaspora, Ayi Kwei Armah, author of legendary books such as, Two Thousand Seasons, The Healers,The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Osiris Rising, KMT, andWhy Are We So Blessed, The Eloquence Of The Scribes, discusses Africa, Identity, Politics, History, Community, Creativity, his works and much more. This is an intense wisdom filled hour.

GO HERE TO ORDER FULL 1-HOUR  INTERVIEW

“The Best Tool Available”: Portugal’s José Rodrigues dos Santos on Truth vs. Fiction

September 6, 2010 Edward Nawotka

• José Rodrigues dos Santos, one of Portugal’s best known journalists and novelists, discusses the relationship between truth and fiction.

• “If I was doing journalism, I should tell the truth, right?” he posits, only to reveal that sometimes fiction is, indeed, “the best tool available” — the proverbial lie that tells the actual truth.

By José Rodrigues dos Santos

LISBON: The American Super Stallion helicopters landed in the Kuwaiti desert amongst much dust and panache, and the US Marines took position in the sandy grounds in full combat gear, pointing their guns towards invisible enemies hidden somewhere in the horizon.

It was a terrific, almost Hollywoodean, scene. The troops were combat-ready and it was precisely at that moment that the American press officer waved to the reporters waiting on the road.

“You can go now,” he said.

We came to the desert in three buses rented by the Marine Corps and we all felt eager to join the action. Our newsrooms demanded good war pictures. So, when the press officer gave us the green light, the reporters stampeded towards the Marines, looking for the best angles to use their cameras.

It was at that moment, when the crowd of correspondents was running downhill towards the waiting soldiers, that I began to laugh. It seemed a scene out of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. There were hardly sixty Marines camped in the sand, and three hundred reporters soon surrounded them with all their camera gear, clicking and filming. M16s against Nikons and Sonys. Who would win?

I decided my day’s story would not be “US Marines combat-ready in the Kuwaiti desert”, the angle surely desired by the people who had brought us here, but “Reporters outnumber US Marines in Kuwaiti desert show for cameras.” If I was doing journalism, I should tell the truth, right?

Wrong. My cameraman got the whole scene on video and, when I went back to my hotel room to view all the pictures before editing, I was stunned by what the small screen showed me. Despite the fact that the reporters heavily outnumbered the Marines, my cameraman managed to film the entire scene without a single journalist showing up in the pictures. Not one reporter was in view.

The story I wanted to tell my viewers could not therefore be told. I had no pictures for that. That episode was a major lesson and, believe me, it provided me plenty of food for thought about my profession. For it was at that moment that I came to realize that, in my journalistic work, I wasn’t dealing with reality anymore. I was a fiction writer of sorts.

So you can see how easy it was for me to move from journalism to fiction. So many other reporters had followed the same path in the past: Ernest Hemingway for starters, but the list is plentiful: Isabel Allende, José Saramago, Amin Maalouf, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, to name a few… I understood now why.

And I understood it better when I began writing novels, for I realized too that through fiction I managed to tell the truth better than through non-fictional discourse. It was weird, but in time that realization became clearer and clearer. How was this possible?

It works like this. All non-fiction writers have to base what they say in sources. Sometimes these sources manipulate the rules under which you operate and trap you in a lie. The story I was forced to tell in the Kuwaiti desert was basically a lie. The Marine’s press officers were aware that newsrooms demanded war scenes and knew that cameramen would focus the soldiers in their videos, avoiding anything that “spoiled” the picture. Like reporters. Just by providing you a combat-attractive setting, they manipulated our work. It was clever, of course, and it was not their fault that journalism is driven by commercially attractive pictures. They just used our motivations to their advantage.

No such problems in fiction. You know something is true and you just say it without having to “prove it”. That’s why I love writing novels. I can express intuitive truths without having to prove them at all. I can travel into the mind of one of the Marines waiting in the desert for the reporters and explain how he sees the scene unfolding before him.

“Stupid crowd”, he thinks, caressing his M16 while the reporters stampeded towards him –- I would write.

I couldn’t write that in a work of non-fiction. And you know what? I would probably be close to the truth in the fictional writing.

So, that’s what I try to do in my novels. When I wrote by new novel, The Einstein Enigma, for example, I wanted to explain what science had uncovered about the existence of God. A lot, I came to realize. So, using the discovery of a new Einstein manuscript with a hidden enigma and enveloping it in a spy story involving cryptograms and Iran’s quest to develop a nuclear bomb, I managed to explain to my readers the amazing discoveries really made by scientists on this major issue.

For fiction, believe it or not, is the best tool available to us to tell the truth.

José Rodrigues dos Santos is one of Portugal’s best known journalists and novelists. He is the author of the international bestseller Codex 632. His new novel, The Einstein Enigma, is published in the United States this week by Harper Collins.

DISCUSS: Can Fiction Be Trusted to Tell the Truth?

READ: José Rodrigues dos Santos’s recent essay about Einstein, Stephen Hawking and the existence of God at the Huffington Post.

 

_________________________________________________________

Jose Rodrigues dos Santos

Posted: September 4, 2010 06:59 AM

GOLDSTONE REPORT

Goldstone FactsAbout us On September 15th 2009, the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone released its report (executive summary can be found here) on the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The report concluded that there exists strong evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by Israel and Hamas during the Gaza conflict. The report emphasized that Israel and Hamas committed actions amounting to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. Goldstonefacts.org is a project created by a group of individuals from around the globe who decided to dramatize portions of the Goldstone Report. We are all volunteers and amateurs. Our professional backgrounds are diverse as are our ethnic and national origins. In fact, most of us have never met each other. We managed to find professional actors willing to read the script, and Prof Noam Chomsky graciously agreed to read the report's factual and legal findings for our first three clips. Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, Director Ken Loach, actor Mia Farrow, erstwhile Prime Minister of Netherlands Dries Van Agt, and writer Chris Hedges have all expressed an interest in cooperating with us on future segments of our project. We have no outside funding, and at this point do not feel the need for it.  The documentary GOLDSTONE FACTS-The real story behind Israel's invasion of Gaza, presented as several segments, distills the report's salient findings and conclusions in order to make them more accessible to the public.

___________________________________________________________________

Arundhati Roy

Ken Loach

GOLDSTONE FACTS The Real Story behind Israel's Invasion of Gaza   Chapter 10 of the Goldstone Report Indiscriminate Attacks by Israeli Armed Forces Resulting in the Loss of Life and Injury to Civilians  Factual Findings narrated by Film Director Ken Loach and writer Arundhati Roy Legal findings narrated by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire Highlights include moving testimonies  by Mr Mohammed Abu Askar and Mr Ziad al-Deeb with voice-over by Ross Vachon

Chapter 13 of the Goldstone Report Attacks on the Foundations of Civilian Life in Gaza Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure, Food Production Factual Findings narrated by Ross Vachon Legal findings narrated by Noam Chomsky The Destruction of Sawafeary Chicken Farm and al Bader Flour Mill (Highlights include Mr Sawafeary's appeal to Ban Ki-moon)

It is instructive to juxtapose the 'findings' of the just released Israeli document  Gaza Operation Investigations: Second update with what actually transpired. Observe how this farcical report tries to justify the destruction of the chicken farms. The Sawafeary chicken coops were located only a few meters away from one of the key IDF positions. The IDF position was, itself, dictated by the lay of the terrain in the area. As the command investigation determined, this IDF position could not be adequately secured if the chicken coop structures were left intact. The demolition of these structures was needed to allow a clean line of sight for protection of IDF forces. Following this logic, the IDF would have been quite justified in flattening the whole of Gaza strip in order to allow a 'clean line of sight for protection of IDF forces'. Relevant Excerpts from the Report    The Sawafeary Chicken Coops 122. According to allegations included in the HRCFF Report,58 in January 2009 IDF forces bulldozed several chicken coops owned by the Sawafeary family in Zeytoun, purportedly as part of a deliberate strategy of destroying civilian infrastructure. 123. The command investigations conducted with regard to this incident reveal that the Sawafeary chicken coops were destroyed for reasons of military necessity. 124. Specifically, the investigations revealed that the area around the Sawafeary chicken coops was occupied by an IDF ground force beginning on 4 January 2009, as part of the ground maneuver, with the intention to take control of rockets and mortar launching sites and reducing the number of terror attacks on Israeli territory. The force took positions in several houses, including one house that was adjacent to the chicken coops. This positioning was necessary to secure the area for military operations against Hamas and to protect the IDF troops in those operations. The IDF’s defense plan for this area needed to meet three serious threats to the safety and security of the IDF troops: the firing of anti-tank and RPG missiles on IDF positions; sniper fire; and infiltration of terrorist operatives into the immediate vicinity of the forces in order to plant and detonate explosive devices, including by suicide bombers. 125. The terrain in the area made this location more dangerous for IDF forces. The area was agricultural in its original use and thus included many orchards, groves, and greenhouses, located between and around the houses occupied by the IDF. This made it harder for the IDF to identify Hamas positions and fighters. The threat was not theoretical—on 5 January 2009, an RPG missile was launched at one of the IDF positions in that area. In addition, several shooting incidents occurred originating from the orchards located to the south of the chicken coops. 126. In order to overcome these threats, the IDF decided to create a security zone around each of the IDF positions with a perimeter of 20–50 meters around each post, which would allow uninterrupted observation and firing capabilities for the force in each position, as well as joint protection among the different IDF outposts. These security zones allowed IDF forces to anticipate at an earlier stage the approach of terrorist operatives. 127. The Sawafeary chicken coops were located only a few meters away from one of the key IDF positions. The IDF position was, itself, dictated by the lay of the terrain in the area. As the command investigation determined, this IDF position could not be adequately secured if the chicken coop structures were left intact. The demolition of these structures was needed to allow a clean line of sight for protection of IDF forces. The investigation also determined that the decision to destroy the coops was consistent with the demands of the principle of proportionality: there was a compelling military need for the area to be cleared for the safety of the IDF forces and for the success of IDF operations against the Hamas forces operating in the area. The local commanders determined that these advantages outweighed the damage to private property that would result from the demolition. The commanders avoided the destruction of residential buildings or other facilities in the area, when such destruction was not required by military necessity or appeared to be disproportional. 128. The MAG reviewed the findings of the command investigation and concluded that the destruction of the chicken coops was lawful, as it was necessary to protect IDF forces operating in the area. It did not violate the limitation on destruction of private property because it was justified by military necessity. The MAG also found that the destruction of the chicken coops did not violate the ban on destroying any object that is indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. It was dictated by the location of specific operations against Hamas, and not part of a campaign to interfere with the production of food supplies in Gaza. It was not intended to deny the civilian population in Gaza access to essential commodities.59 As a result of these findings, the MAG determined that no further proceedings were necessary. 129. Although the MAG found no violation of the Law of Armed Conflict in this incident, he recommended several changes to IDF procedures in cases involving destruction of private property, which are detailed below in Section IV of this Paper. In particular, the MAG found that the decision to destroy the chicken coops was made by a relatively junior IDF officer, and that such decisions were more appropriately and typically made at more senior levels. While the MAG found that the particular rank of the officer making the decision did not indicate wrongful or criminal conduct (as neither the Law of Armed Conflict nor IDF procedures at the time required that such decisions be taken by an officer of any particular rank), he has recommended that the IDF’s procedures for destruction of civilian property be reviewed in several respects, as detailed in Section IV below.

Chapter 11 of the Goldstone Report Deliberate Attacks against the Civilian Population Factual Findings narrated by Ross Vachon Factual and Legal findings narrated by Noam Chomsky Live Testimonies of Khalid, Kawthar and Samar Abd Rabbo, relevant to the Goldstone Report's Findings

Future chapters will be available shortly with legal findings narrated by other prominent personalities.   The just-released Israeli document  Gaza Operation Investigations: Second update (July 2010) exonerated the IDF war criminals who, as our Chapter 11 video shows, deliberately shot four members of the Abd Rabbo family, in the process killing three, and rendering the fourth Samar Abd Rabbo a paraplegic for the rest of her life. The relevant excerpts from the document are quoted here to reinforce the point that only an international investigation into the crimes committed by Israel could bring justice to its victims.   Amal, Souad, Samar, and Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo & Adham Kamiz Nasir 108. This incident involved the alleged shooting of four Palestinian civilians on 7 January 2009 in the neighborhood of Izbat Abd Rabbo, and was reported to Israeli authorities by several human rights organizations.51 The MAG referred the complaint to a direct criminal investigation which was recently concluded. In the course of this comprehensive investigation, the MPCID collected testimony from eleven Palestinians who witnessed the events. Some of them were unable or unwilling to testify before MPCID investigators, but provided detailed affidavits. In addition, the investigators reviewed medical reports and death certificates, as well as aerial photographs provided by an Israeli NGO, which helped identify the different units involved in the incident. More than fifty commanders and soldiers from these units were also questioned by the MPCID. Some were questioned multiple times in order to clarify the circumstances of the case. 109. The evidence collected in the course of the investigation could not confirm the description of the incident by the complainants, who claimed that a soldier standing on a tank had opened fire at a group of civilians. The substantial discrepancies between the complaint and the findings of the investigation—in particular, the identity of the force and the sequence of events—led the MAG to conclude that the evidence was insufficient to initiate criminal proceedings. 110. A second part of the complaint alleged that the IDF fired at a horse-driven carriage attempting to evacuate the civilians injured in the first shooting incident and subsequently killed the carriage’s driver. 111. The investigation confirmed that the carriage was fired upon by an IDF unit operating in the Izbat Abd Rabbo neighborhood. The unit had received a concrete warning that Hamas planned to send such a carriage loaded with explosives to detonate near an IDF position. The soldiers fired warning shots at the approaching carriage, which was loaded with bags that the soldiers thought contained explosives. When the carriage did not respond to the warning shots and continued its approach, the unit fired in its direction. 112. Under these circumstances, the MAG determined that the soldiers who fired at the carriage were not criminally liable. The MAG found that the soldiers’ decision to fire was made in light of their belief, at the time, that the carriage posed an immediate threat to the force. (The investigation revealed that the bags did not contain explosives.) Thus, despite the unfortunate results of the incident, the MAG decided to close the case.

Praise for GOLDSTONE FACTS "...how could you possibly improve it?  It is an excellent piece.  Congratulations & thank you.  I hope it will find wide distribution." -- Hedy Epstein "A faithful and compelling dramatization of a historic document" --  Norman G Finkelstein "I found the documentary to be very moving indeed, choosing as it did material that could engage one's interest within a time frame that seems to suit attention spans of our time. I found your selection of the incident to be exactly right: it is the one that has troubled me most." --  Colonel Desmond Travers

The US Soldier Who Committed Suicide After She Refused To Take Part in Torture

Greg Mitchell

September 13, 2010  

 

 

With each  revelation, or court decision,  on US torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo -- or  the airing this month of  The Tillman Story and Lawrence Wright's My Trip to Al-Qaeda --  I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who died seven years ago this week.  Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what most would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, on September 15, 2003.

Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the US Senate committee probe and various  press reports, that the "Gitmo-izing" of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spc. Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers who died in Iraq.   Her death under these circumstances should have drawn wide attention.   It's not exactly the Tillman case, but a cover-up, naturally, followed.

Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. She was a valuable  Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a "non-hostile weapons discharge."

A "non-hostile weapons discharge" leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials "said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson's own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian." And that might have ended it right there.

But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, not satisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, "just on a hunch," he told me in late 2006. He made "hundreds of phone calls" to the military and couldn't get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations.

Here's what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston worked, reported:  "Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

The official probe of her death would later note that earlier she had been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of the report, in fact, is this: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she ... could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."

She was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. "But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle," the documents disclose.

The official report revealed that a notebook she had written in was found next to her body, but blacked out its contents.

The Army talked to some of Peterson's colleagues. Asked to summarize their comments, Elston told me: "The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties. That was the consistent point in the testimonies, that she objected to the interrogation techniques, without describing what those techniques were."

Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, which suggested that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note. It did not emerge.

Peterson, a devout Mormon -- her mother Bobbi claims she always stuck up for "the underdog"--  had graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship.  She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003, reportedly going in place of another soldier who did not wish to go.

A report in The Arizona Daily Sun of Flagstaff -- three years after Alyssa's death -- revealed that Spc. Peterson's mother, reached at her home in northern Arizona, said that neither she nor her husband Richard had received any official documents that contained information outlined in Elston's report.

In other words: Like the press and the public, even the parents had been kept in the dark.

Kayla Williams (left), an Army sergeant who served with Alyssa, told me me that she talked to her about her problems shortly before she killed herself.   Williams also was forced to take part in torture interrogations, where she saw detainees punched. Another favorite technique: strip the prisoners and then remove their blindfolds so that the first thing they saw was Kayla Williams.

She also opted out, but survived, and is haunted years later.  She wrote a book about her experience in the military,  Love My Rifle More Than You. 

Here's what Williams told Soledad O'Brien of CNN : "I was asked to assist. And what I saw was that individuals who were doing interrogations had slipped over a line and were really doing things that were inappropriate. There were prisoners that were burned with lit cigarettes."

When I wrote a piece about Peterson last year, her brother, Spencer Peterson, left a comment:

Alyssa is my little sister. I usually don't comment on boards like this, and I don't speak for the rest of my family (especially my folks), but I think she probably did kill herself over this. She was extremely sensitive and empathetic to others, and cared a lot more about the welfare and well-being of the people around her than she cared about herself.....Thank you to everyone for your continued support of our troops and our family. Alyssa's death was a tremendous loss to everyone who knew her, and we miss her sweet and sensitive spirit.    No one is happier than I am that (many of) our troops are coming home from Iraq, and I pray that the rest of our brave soldiers return home safely as soon as possible. Support our troops - bring them home!

Kayla Williams told me me she spoke with Alyssa Peterson about the young woman's troubles a week before she died -- and afterward, attended her memorial service. 

So what, in Williams' view, caused Alyssa Peterson to put a bullet in her head in September 2003 after just a few weeks in Iraq? And why were the press and the public not told about it?   Much more from Kayla and another woman who served with her,  in Part II of this article tomorrow.   Here's a moving slide show with narration by Alyssa's mom.

Greg Mitchell, former editor of Editor & Publisher, has written nine books, including "So Wrong for So Long" on Iraq and the media, which includes several chapters on soldier suicides in  Iraq. Email:  epic1934@aol.com

 

Where's The Oil? On The Gulf Floor, Scientists Say

by The Associated Press

Associated Press

This undated handout photo provided by Samantha Joye, UGA Department of Marine Sciences, shows a layer of oil on a sediment core. Researchers are finding oil dripping "all over the place" on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor, some as much as two inches thick. A University of Georgia scientific cruise is collecting at least ten instances of what appears to be fresh oil on the sea floor emanating out from the site of BP oil rig disaster.

text size A A A

NEW ORLEANS September 13, 2010, 05:00 pm ET

Far beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, deeper than divers can go, scientists say they are finding oil from the busted BP well on the sea's muddy and mysterious bottom.

Oil at least two inches thick was found Sunday night and Monday morning about a mile beneath the surface. Under it was a layer of dead shrimp and other small animals, said University of Georgia researcher Samantha Joye, speaking from the helm of a research vessel in the Gulf.

The latest findings show that while the federal government initially proclaimed much of the spilled oil gone, now it's not so clear.

At these depths, the ocean is a cold and dark world. Yet scientists say that even though it may be out of sight, oil found there could do significant harm to the strange creatures that dwell in the depths — tube worms, tiny crustaceans and mollusks, single-cell organisms and Halloween-scary fish with bulging eyes and skeletal frames.

"I expected to find oil on the sea floor," Joye said Monday morning in a ship-to-shore telephone interview. "I did not expect to find this much. I didn't expect to find layers two inches thick. It's weird the stuff we found last night. Some of it was really dense and thick."

Joye said 10 of her 14 samples showed visible oil, including all the ones taken north of the busted well. She found oil on the sea floor as far as 80 miles away from the site of the spill.

"It's kind of like having a blizzard where the snow comes in and covers everything," Joye said.

And the look of the oil, its state of degradation, the way it settled on freshly dead animals all made it unlikely that the crude was from the millions of gallons of oil that naturally seep into the Gulf from the sea bottom each year, she said. Later this week, the oil will be tested for the chemical fingerprints that would conclusively link it to the BP spill.

"It has to be a recent event," Joye said. "There's still pieces of warm bodies there."

Since the well was capped on July 15 after some 200 million gallons flowed into the Gulf, there have been signs of resilience on the surface and the shore. Sheens have disappeared, while some marshlands have shoots of green. This seeming recovery is likely a result of massive amounts of chemical dispersants, warm waters and a Gulf that is used to degrading massive amounts of oil, scientists say.

Animal deaths also are far short of worst-case scenarios. But at the same time, a massive invisible plume of oil has been found under the surface, shifting scientists' concerns from what can be easily seen to what can't be.

For Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University biological oceanographer who wasn't part of Joye's team, the latest findings confirm that government assessments about how much oil remains — especially a report on the subject by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in August — were too optimistic.

The oil "did not disappear," he said. "It sank."

Not all scientists agree with this assessment.

Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University chemist who has analyzed the spill for NOAA, doubted much oil was resting on the bottom. He said the heavier components in oil — the asphalts — make up only about 1 percent of the oil that was spilled.

And Roger Sassen, an organic geochemist at Texas A&M University who has studied natural oil seeps, said so much oil seeps naturally into the Gulf each year that it's hard to argue that the BP spill will make a significant difference.

Nonetheless, the big questions now are exactly how much oil is at the bottom and how many organisms are being exposed to it, said Robert Carney, an oceanographer and deep-sea expert at Louisiana State University. The answers to those questions could shed some light on the unseen damage to wildlife from the oil spill.

"Deep-sea animals, in general, tend to produce fewer offspring than shallower water animals, so if they are going to have a population impact, it may be more sensitive in deep water," he said. "There is also some evidence that deep-sea animals live longer than shallower water species, so the impact may stay around longer."

At first, scientists, the media and the federal government focused their attention on tracking rainbow sheens approaching land, tar balls hitting beaches, measuring oil in marshes and scouting for oiled birds and sea turtles. But a spate of recent studies increasingly points to the deep.

NOAA's Aug. 4 pronouncement that the oil was mostly gone also indicated that some 53 million gallons remained in the Gulf. At the time, federal officials said some of that could be on the sea floor, adding that the rest was mostly broken down naturally or by the widespread use of chemical dispersants.

"As we get into weathered oil, there is more likelihood that it will get into the sediment," said Steve Murawski, chief scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of NOAA.

Getting a handle on where the oil is at extreme depths will not be easy. Scientists will have to use expensive 1,000-pound devices that look like moon landers. The spindly legged machines land on the bottom and shoot tubes into the sea floor to collect 20-inch-long samples.

The terrain is exceedingly difficult. The area where the busted BP well sits is on the continental slope, formed by millions of years of deposits from the Mississippi River. It's a region of bumps and valleys, salt domes, canyons and slopes.

Government scientists acknowledge they've not done enough to look for oil in the obscure corners of the Gulf's bottom, but promise to do a better job.

"There are plans to do a considerable amount of that" sampling, said Debbie Payton, an oceanographer with NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration. In the coming weeks, NOAA and BP vessels will sample the deep bottoms, she said.

Joye's latest discovery backs up the findings of a University of South Florida crew that reported pulling up oily sediment in August.

"What we saw were flecks, little discontinued droplets, or spots" of oil on the sediment, said John H. Paul, a biological oceanographer on the USF survey. The oiled sediment was found about 1.4 miles down in the De Soto Canyon, an underwater canyon east of the blown-out well.

Sediment brought up still needs to undergo laboratory testing to verify that the oil found on the bottom comes from the BP oil spill.

For oil to sink, it must attach itself to materials that are heavier than water, such as detritus, flecks of mud, sands and other particles. Such materials are abundant in the Gulf in places where rivers, especially the Mississippi, flush mud and sand into the open sea. Oil also can sink as it ages and becomes more tar-like in a process known as weathering.

Scientists also say the oil may be sinking because it was broken up into tiny droplets by dispersants, making the oil so small that it wasn't buoyant enough to rise. One problem with oil at the sea floor is that it will take longer to degrade because of cold temperatures in the deep.

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Borenstein reported from Washington, D.C.

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Online: http://gulfblog.uga.edu

A Night with Ashford and Simpson at ‘Club Soul!’

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Kenya: Ethnography of the Young and the Restless in Nairobi

Postdoc researcher and director of MA programme Gender, Sexuality & Society at University of Amsterdam, Rachel Spronk, has beguiling paper in the current issue of Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute. The paper is more or less an ethnographic study of Africans she refers to as the ‘young professionals," which in Kenya refers to a relatively small group of young adults who are not part of the "larger impoverished population," nor are they part of the small political-economic elite.

They come from middle-class backgrounds; the kids of rural mission-educated parents, who migrated to the cities. Unlike their parents, the young professionals speak no ethnic languages. They speak English, Kiswahili and Sheng – the slang of the youth sub-culture. They are the blood of the urban nightscape, enjoying some nyama choma and ugali in an open-air restaurant before hitting the clubs. They work out in the gym, swim in one of the many pools of the international hotels, they have unlimited access to the internet... They articulate a cosmopolitanism with a particular Kenyan flavor of which they are proud.

My guess is this sample of Kenya's young and hip at a Goethe Institute showing for the Kenyan house band, JAB, paints a basic picture of those Spronk is trying to describe:

Using a conversation with a 'young professional' who could aptly defend the ethnic Gusii custom of female circumcision, yet it was something he actually loathed and objected to, leads Spronk to an underlying contradiction in the lives of these 'young professionals':

Young professionals perceive themselves as explorers of a contemporary identity of which they are proud; they exhibit half-hearted attitudes towards customary ways of living; they reject ‘Westernization’; and they advocate Africanness as a mode of identification... Their difficulty is that while they are very critical of what they call Western cultural imperialism, they are also part of global cosmopolitan processes that are often interpreted as Westernization. The contradiction is complete when the same processes that enable them to pursue certain lifestyles are also interpreted as causing ‘erosion of tradition’.

Spronk sees the sexuality of the 'young professionals' as a mode for identifying themselves as contemporary persons in a modern Kenya and at the same time observes that, in their heads, sexuality is also romantically linked to their conception of "Africanness," has they have to also contend with an African sexuality structured to anchor them to certain morals and behavioral norms:

The preoccupation of young professionals is Africanness. Contrary to what is often described in the literature on post-colonial subjectivities, for young professionals in Nairobi the heart of the project of modernity is not so much about being modern as a preoccupation with being African. The focus on the tension between pleasure and anxiety of sexuality helps to understand the source of young professionals’ ambiguous position. Sexuality not only entails the promise of pleasure and entitlement to modern personhood, but also harbours a potential for anxiety because of the risk of being considered un-African.

For young women, this is because the dominant discourse understands female sexuality in relation to reproduction, and associates African womanhood idealistically with motherhood, wifehood and the gerontocratic gender order. When sex is disconnected from reproduction, it threatens their reputation as ‘proper women’ and hence their sense of themselves as respectable African women. For young professional men, the anxiety is of a different kind. The dominant discourse of male sexual behaviour has its roots in ideas of primordial Africanness that connect virility and sex. For young men, the new interpretation of sexuality sees sex not as spontaneous, but instead as controllable and partner-oriented; and if perceived thus, sex has the potential to jeopardize their masculinity.

The ambiguity and anxiety Spronk refers to are perplexities I suspect the young professionals actually find necessary and, perhaps, have even come to enjoy. On the one hand the "young professionals" are part and, not a fully cooperative, parcel of the modern project that is Kenya; a project which, from a holistic view of modernity,  they also endanger by choosing to hold on to their "Africaness." On the other hand, the "young professionals" are also progressive stewards of modernity because on its behalf they endanger and erode traditions in numerous ways, especially when sexuality, in their hands, becomes, as Spronk explains, a tool for further identifying themselves as contemporary persons.

Again, like in this write up about Shelby Steele versus Obama, I attribute the paradoxical nature of the young and the restless in Nairobi to being post-modernity's agents in a neoliberalized world, who, on the the one hand, use traditions to resist the oppresive discourse of Westernization, while on the other hand employ western ideals to resist the formidable influence of Africa's traditions as well. In essense, their lot is resistance; their plight is a perpetuity of contradictions; they are postcolonial negotiators.