BP has promised to emerge from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico “smaller and wiser”. And with the replacement of CEO Tony Hayward with self-professed ‘Son of the Gulf’ Bob Dudley, announced on Monday, a new mood has swept through BP, one focused on pushing to the future. Starting anew.

But the disaster in the Gulf is not over. BP’s recovery may be measured by its bottom line, but for the population of the Gulf the process of rebuilding is fraught with obstacles and there is no clear line to map its progress.

Nervousness hovers unnaturally within the vibrant communities of Louisiana. It has swept in with the tide of oil, along with confusion, distrust and misinformation, and has done little to help the image of the British oil giant who promised to “make whole” the communities and the environment of the Gulf. The same promise Exxon made 21 years ago to the communities of the Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Exxon employed an army of 23,500 to clean up the oil that washed up on the rocky shoreline of Alaska after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef in the early hours of Good Friday 1989 spilling its cargo into the pristine waters of the Prince William Sound. It was the biggest environmental disaster in US history, until the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico eclipsed it after 37 days.

The story of the cleanup effort dominated the headlines during the summer of 1989. But when the press slouched away as the looming threat of Alaska’s harsh winter brought the cleanup to a close, Exxon’s legal might revved into action. The dance that Exxon choreographed through the courts lasted 19 years with the final punitive damages settlement only reached two years ago. Exxon fought the original damage settlement of $5 billion for 14 years until the amount was cut to $507 million. Exxon was also fined $150 million under the Clean Water Act, but only paid $25 million. Both amounts were reduced in recognition of Exxon’s cooperation in cleaning up the spill.

BP doesn’t have the “appetite” for litigation that Exxon has, said an industry insider, and frequently chooses to settle out of court. But cooperation, as well as the amount of oil actually spilt, are key factors in deciding BP’s liability when this disaster moves out of the cleanup phase.

The emotions from the summer of 1989 remain raw in Alaska and the protracted legal battles have kept the wounds open. In the years after the spill the small town of Cordova, with a population of less than 2,000, saw a massive rise in domestic violence, drug abuse and alcoholism. There were divorces that happened post spill and the promise of the compensation from the litigation was written into the divorce settlements, leaving them hanging over people for 20 years. There were also suicides.

“I think because we made the conscious decision not to be the victims of the spill, we were able to see other opportunities and we left,” said Sylvia Lange, a fisherwoman from Cordova, Alaska, who together with her husband and new baby, left Cordova half way through the summer of 1989 to fish out West. “Some people got real active. Some people got real rich. And some people just ruined their lives and just sat here and couldn’t let go.”

The spill of 1989 offered a short-term boom as spending on the cleanup jump-started the Alaskan economy out of recession. Locals still refer to “spillionaires” who were paid small fortunes to help clear up the mess, and stories circulate of people who traveled to Washington State to buy new boats to hire them out to Exxon. They made their money back in three months the story goes.

“That fall you saw brand new pick up trucks and Cadillacs on the roads, and new boats in the harbour,” said Joanne LeRue, a long time resident of Valdez.

Sylvia Lange recalls a conversation with a fisherman that summer. “I asked him, ‘Are you going to go work for Exxon?’ and he said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone this rich to fuck up this badly’.” He got rich that summer. Spent it. Then he left.

Cracks appeared in the small communities of the Prince William Sound; divisions between those who wanted to help and those who wanted money. Between the outsiders and the residents. Between the fishermen and the oil industry. Between Exxon and the local government.

John Devens who was mayor of Valdez in 1989, remembers fighting to get into Exxon’s “information loop” that summer. “It was like someone coming into your home and spilling something nasty on your carpet. And then saying, ‘Get out of the house, I’ll clean it up and you better be satisfied with what I do’,” said Devens, “I think they felt they could muscle the communities into line and it probably cost them millions of dollars more by being that arrogant.”

As the cleanup response progressed, Devens’ frustrations grew as he found himself repeatedly coming into conflict with Exxon and Federal officials. Sitting next to Ted Stevens, Alaska’s long serving Republican Senator, at a press conference, Devens recalls Stevens turning to him. “John, you don’t understand, your priorities are different from ours. You’re worrying about the locals. We’re worrying about the reputation of the country,” he said.

But the disconnect between local concerns, government priorities and corporate motivation is a byproduct of a deeper disconnect inherent within today’s cleanup effort in the Gulf, as it was in Alaska in 1989: That an oil spill can be cleaned up. That the environment can be made right.

“They would have done more good flying over in a 747 and dumping the $2.2billion right over the top of the oil spill itself,” says Dune Lankard, an Eyak native and fisherman from Cordova, Alaska who in 1989 joined the cleanup effort, “They haven’t learnt a damn thing from the Exxon Valdez. They haven’t learnt that everything that we’ve gone through, everything that we’ve learnt, is that everything their doing doesn’t work. There’s no way that they can clean it up. There’s no way that they can make our lives whole again. They’ve no way.”

As Exxon endeavored to make right the Prince William Sound, they focused on rebuilding the size of the salmon population that sustained the local economy. And within 5 years the area had regained its position as the largest fish producer in US, and the fifth largest in the world. But the Alaskan waters are producing larger quantities of lesser quality hatchery salmon with fewer, bigger boats. The size and diversity of the wild salmon populations have never returned, neither have the herring. The natural cycle of the fishing season that defined the year for much of Alaska’s coastal population has never been restored.

John Devens Jnr, son of Mayor John Devens, worked for Exxon cleaning up the Sound’s oiled shoreline during the summer of 1989. “We knew the cleanup was going to be evaluated not on what was actually done but how many man hours and how much money they spent on it,” he said. And likewise, the long-term restoration effort in Alaska has been focused on quantifiable goals.

Today trailers, motor homes and boats adorned with ‘For Sale’ signs litter the parking lots throughout Valdez, the namesake town of the now-infamous tanker. ‘For Rent’ signs bleached of their color hang in the windows of long empty shops. The campaign banners line the streets in preparation for the midterm elections in November as if demanding a better future.

Everyone in Prince William Sound has a story to tell about the summer of 1989. “My father missed my birth,” says Jen Smith, 21. She was born a month after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef. “He was cleaning oil.”

In the Gulf the uncertainty of what’s to come hangs over the coastal communities.

Walter Gisclair, 52, stands on the dock with one rubber booted foot on a crate of crab. “I usually have 70 boxes by now,” he says gesturing at the 14 boxes that surround him, “But I hope I don’t get any more. I can’t sell them. Who wants to eat fish from where the oil’s at?” He says he doesn’t think the oysters will return in his lifetime.

Amanda Domangue, owner of a specialist oil trucking company called Justice Transport in Houma, Louisiana, is barely making ends meet since the moratorium cut business by 80 per cent. Oil industry workers fall into a grey area. They don’t qualify to file a claim under the $20 billion escrow fund or $100 million claims program specifically set up for rig workers. The only option left to Amanda is a lawsuit, but Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the escrow fund, admitted at a town hall meeting in Houma on July 15 that they were unlikely to win a case against the federal government.

“There’s no option. There’s really nothing,” said Amanda, “File a lawsuit that he [Feinberg] says there really no chance of winning. So that’s nothing. And we have no recourse. We have nothing.” 330,000 people fall into this grey area in Louisiana alone.

In August the permits that Amanda requires to operate her business, including a $20,000 down payment for insurance, come up for renewal. She has to make the decision now whether to make that investment, or write off the entire year.

“2010 was going to be all about change,” said Lorrie Grimaldi, of St Bernard, Louisiana, as she cracks open a crab with the practiced dexterity of a fisherman’s wife. Lorrie and her family moved into a new house in March of this year. They had lived in a FEMA trailer for five years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. “I thought it was going to be the best year of my life, ever. And then, guess what. But the hardest part is not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

Reports suggest that BP may be close to stopping the flow of crude oil into the Gulf. With the flow abated one of the worst unknowns in this disaster, how long it’s going to go on for, will start to come into focus. This may serve as small consolation to the residents of the Gulf coasts many of whom felt unable to start picking up the pieces of their shattered way of life and economy until they knew what they had lost.

The battle between BP and the Macondo well has seen man pitted against the elements as scientists and engineers fought to overcome a force greater than their shared intellectual might. And if man has now vanquished the well congratulations and a huge feeling of relief will rightly follow.

But with the most dramatic thread of this disastrous story over, a few lessons need to be learnt from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 to make sure that from here on the focus is on rebuilding communities and restoring the environment, and not on the legal strength of BP.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was different from the events surrounding the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe on many fronts. The amount of oil spilling into Alaska’a Prince William Sound was from a finite source, and estimates quickly settled 11 million gallons as the total. In the first days after the spill, the cause seemed clear: a drunk Captain had absconded his duties and left an under qualified third mate in charge of an off course tanker that was traveling too fast. This lead to Captain Hazelwood becoming the most vilified man in the US and international media.

But after the first few weeks, when the cleanup effort had started, the flow of dramatic photos of oiled otters had ebbed and comparisons between Alaska’s bright blue-white glaciers and the dark invasion of crude oil in the Sound had been exhausted, the media started to slouch away. And with their focus gone, public pressure was diverted elsewhere and the most devastating damage to the communities of Prince William Sound and the people who came to help restore it was done.

The federal government was notable only in their silence over the Exxon Valdez disaster. And as the outside media turned away (local papers remained and were central in exposing the full implications of the disaster), the federal government was able to continue its line of disinterest.

The feds only reared their heads when it came time to divide up responsibility for overseeing a fund set up by Exxon to restore the natural environment at the instigation of a State of Alaska led court battle against the oil company. The federal government then demanded that a large proportion of the final settlement reached in 1991 to be administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for further environmental studies.

The State of Alaska victory against Exxon, was followed by a 19 year legal battle between Exxon, the State and the victims of the oil spill. The final settlement reached in 2008, after repeated appeals by Exxon, demanded $25 million from the oil giant that recorded $45.2 billion profits that year.

This drawn-out complex legal dance that Exxon choreographed was allowed by a lack of governmental strength, which was in turn permitted by a rapid decline in public pressure.

Fast forward 21 years and the Obama administration secured a $20 billion escrow fund from BP on June 16, 58 days after the blow out preventer failed on the Macondo well, putting them $20 billion ahead of their counterparts in 1989.

Obama has received no end of criticism for his handling of the disaster in the Gulf, but, as I’ve said in pervious posts, the current administration is in a very difficult position. Although concrete action is what the public might want to see, there is little Obama can deliver beyond rhetoric. The Escrow fund was a clear victory for the government and the victims of the disaster, but this was quickly overshadowed by niggling questions: Is it enough? Who will administer the fund? Will it be done fairly?

The Obama adminstration sought to answer all of these questions and concerns (which are absolutely valid). He put Kenneth Feinberg in charge, who handled post 9/11 compensation, and made it clear that the $20 billion amount, to be paid in $5 billion installments over the next four years, does not represent a final settlement. Obama also managed to demand the oil giant maintain the $20 billion in US assets to make sure that the money was readily available.

The root of the discounted over Obama’s handling of the Escrow fund episode may be the apparent ease with which he procured a deal from BP: it lacked the ‘ass kicking’ the president had repeatedly promised the public.

But ass kicking, despite it ability to sell papers and it appeal to public consciousness (I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know exactly how Obama would kick someone’s ass- a slice to the side, a boot from the back or a high kick?), is not the most productive approach when trying to bring about a solution. The federal government, largely through the Coast Guard, has to forge a constructive relationship with BP.

The importance of pursuing a unified approach to the Gulf situation has frequently made it appear that the Coast Guard and the Federal government are limply following BP’s lead, as the same rhetoric appears in all of their statements. But rather than taking the cynical approach, how about viewing that as a positive: they’re talking to each other!

This was lacking in the response to the Exxon Valdez. Although the Coast Guard and Exxon repeatedly appeared as if they were cut from the same cloth, the coast guard was lacking the support of the federal government to actually put itself in a controlling position.

The web of failure that lead up to the Exxon Valdez is disturbingly similar to the failings that created the current disaster in the Gulf: a slow economy and lax regulation proceeded by eight years of a Republican government. But today’s government recognized the public relations nightmare that BP is trapped in and understood that now while public pressure is palpable is the best, if not the only, moment that they can demand that BP step up to the plate financially.

A change in the status quo that the oil industry enjoys can only come through tougher regulations, and the introduction of citizen oversight councils. The latter is happening, and the most successful oversight group in Alaska, Prince William Sound Regional Citizen’s Advisory Council (PWS-RCAC), which monitors the tanker terminal in Valdez, is in close talks with the Gulf states to set up similar groups. This is with the strong support of the White House.

If public pressure continues, and the Republicans don’t sweep the table at the Midterms, then a true and lasting change to the way the oil industry is allowed to operate in this country may be on the table.

Scientists today are hoping that the Macondo well is still under high enough pressure for them to put the containment cap in place. High pressure means the structure of the well is still sound, while low pressure would indicate that oil is leaking through many smaller gaps. High pressure is essential to see progress on all aspects of the Gulf disaster. It is only as pressure drops and time elapses from a disaster that monitoring slackens and corners are cut.

Correction:
I incorrectly referred to the spill from the Exxon Valdez as totally 11 million barrels- it is in fact 11 million gallons. 14 July 2010

Update:
The total amount of oil that leaked into the Prince William Sound from the grounded Exxon Valdez Tanker is still under dispute. The actual figure could be as much as 3 times the 11 million gallon figure. Exxon counted all the liquid they lightered off the stricken Exxon Valdez onto three other tankers as 100% oil when in fact it contained large amounts of sea water (tankers are balanced with sea water). The Exxon Valdez allegedly had 54 million gallons on board before hitting the reef, and Exxon claimed to have lightered off 43 million gallons of “oil”, leaving 11 million spilled. Probably half what they lightered off was sea water, and hence the more likely 30 + million gallons of oil spilled. The size of the Exxon spill came from Exxon and its contractors. It never received a complete investigation from state or federal regulators. 14 July 2010

Further to my post the other day about the England – US World Cup match draw reflecting, or not, the UK – USA tensions created by the BP oil disaster, I am happy to report that the President and Prime Minister have settled the score with an exchange of beers.

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oilrig that killed 11 men and unleashed a torrent of oil into the gulf is a tragedy.

A Greek tragedy is a play in three acts. Act one sets the scene, act two brings it to a climax, and act three sees the final catastrophic resolution. All of this unfolds antagonist versus protagonist. As the drama develops the audience is meant to gasp with pity and cry in fear as they recognize the unmerited misfortune of the everyman hero.

But where are we in that tragedy? And why do the roles of antagonist and protagonist seem to be as difficult to define as the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico?

Until this week pushed the political circus in Washington into supercharge, the tragedy was about the Gulf coast. The protagonist was the people of the four Gulf States, shocked and hurt by the environmental catastrophe that the oil was spelling for their home while recognizing the importance and necessity of the oil industry. The antagonist was BP. The catastrophe of act three was still yet to unfold, but the impending hurricane season was casting a dark shadow over the stage.

But this week a new tragedy has begun. A tragedy that is threatening to, and arguably already has, taken primacy over the afore mentioned performance.

Act one was Obama’s address to the nation. Act two, the climax, the congressional hearing on Thursday. And act three continues to develop with the final resolution coming in November with the midterm elections. Whether that contains the catastrophic resolution required of a tragedy will depend on which side of the political fence you sit on.

As this is the problem. This new tragedy, The Tale of Two Parties lets call it, has continued to obscure the issue at hand.

When Joe Barton apologized to Tony Hayward at the congressional hearing this week, Tony Hayward was the most awkward figure in the room. He had prepared to be defensive (he actually didn’t say anything the whole day apart from ‘I don’t know’) and was wholly unprepared to be suddenly thrust into the role of embattled protagonist. And the role didn’t stick. Even if it had, the characterization would have been momentary as photos of a man who looked suspiciously like Hayward on board Hayward’s yacht at the Isle of Weight Yacht Race yesterday emerged. It is vice, as apposed to frailty of character, that distinguishes the antagonist from the protagonist in a Greek tragedy.

Barton’s performance maybe pushes the show to becoming a farce, as the neatly coifed Republican Representative returned to the stage hours after his first soliloquy to apologize for his apology. This time his hair was in disarray and he looked like he had been subjected to the Chicago style shakedown he had earlier accused the Obama administration of inflicting on BP. But his performance contains a serious message for the state of Washington in the way both Democrats and Republicans seized upon it.

Barton’s performance, commented NPR’s Ken Rudin, has come in the kick of time to rescue the Democrats: “Game, set, match,” said Rubin. White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, quickly brought the issue round to the midterms when he tweeted: “Who would the GOP put in charge of overseeing the energy industry & Big Oil if they won control of Congress? Yup, u guessed it – JOE BARTON”.

But if Barton’s apology is a great victory for the Democrats, it spells a terrible tragedy for the state of Washington politics.

In the run up to the midterms most expected the two parties to be rivaling for first prize in the ‘who can be hasher on BP’ competition. But this competition appears to have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by the battle between the parties. And the fact that oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico appears to have become an incidental sub narrative to the entire affair.

On Tuesday, Republican Representative for Louisiana Anh “Joseph” Cao called on Tony Hayward to fall on his own sword. “Mr. Stearns asked you to resign. In the Asian culture we do things differently. During the Samurai days we just give you a knife and ask you to commit hara-kiri,” said Cao, who is of Vietnamese descent. Hara-kiri is considered a noble death. The only way for a warrior to regain respect and pride when he has committed a serious wrong.

Hayward is not the only figure in this performance who should take heed of Cao’s words. A Greek tragedy ends with the protagonist’s final undoing as he realizes too late the frailties of his own character. That kind of self-awareness is still a long way from the stage in this performance, but every character, the Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration and BP, could do with a little self-analysis.

Obama’s first Oval Office address to the nation opened with a militaristic tone. Faced with the biggest environmental disaster the US has ever seen, and the biggest challenge Obama has seen so far from the White House, the president opened with talk of troops mobilized to fight this man made disaster.

The speech quickly moved away from the day-to-day fight that the four Gulf Coast states face to talk about the long term. Obama made mention of the difficulty to define what the long term game plan will be as the damage continues to unfold on the Gulf’s shoreline.

The uncertainty caught up this disaster has repeatedly surfaced in the conversations I’ve had since I’ve been in Louisiana. Comparisons to Katrina frequently place this disaster further up the trauma scale as the cost remains unknown. This is intensified by the need, post-crisis, for people to be active as they seek to restore normality. Many people are feeling that the cleanup effort is in many ways futile as more oil continues to wash up on shore. By addressing this emotive aspect of the BP disaster, Obama should have scored points as an ‘understanding’ president.

The focus on the long term restoration of the Gulf’s environment, and a move to more preventative measures to limit further oil damage, suggested the development of close fraternal bond between The White House and the Gulf Coast states. This comes at a time when many Gulf residents are feeling isolated as yet another crisis blows over their shores. This was echoed on the local radio today as New Orleans’ most famous radio anchor, Garland Robinette, described Louisiana as a tiny third world country attached to the United States.

The call to the long term, may also help to alleviate some of the criticism that the White House’s response to the BP crisis has been all rhetoric while the action has been left to the local governments. But, the administration will now have to follow these strong words with action, and quickly.

This may be hard to do. The completion of the relief wells that should stop the leak is scheduled for August. In the meantime, there is little Obama can do apart from continue to cheerlead the cleanup effort and slam BP. His promise to remove the payout of claims to businesses affected by the crisis from BP’s control and into the hands of an unbiased arbitrator will help fill the gap. But only if the impact of this change is immediately felt on the ground.

The final judgment of Obama’s call to action tonight won’t happen until August when the relief wells have either worked or failed. And if the outcome in August is anything other than a clear success (and remember the many shades of grey that have already surfaced as BP has answered what appear to be straight forward yes and no questions), then the next chapters of this cathartic tale might also be the closing ones for a presidency.

This evening’s speech had the tone of a President trying to maintain control of his 4 year term in the face of the unexpected. If it weren’t for the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Obama would currently be in Indonesia making good the promise he made last year in Cairo to end “cycle of suspicion and discord” in the Muslim world. The spill has also seeped into time that the White House wanted to spend on immigration reform, and has flattened the one concession that might have lured Republicans into a deal on climate change- more offshore drilling.

The president addressed the climate change point as he shifted gear to call for an end to “our addiction to fossil fuel”. And his choice of words made clear that the idea of a concession for the Republicans was absolutely off the table.

The phrase ‘fossil fuel’, rather than oil, offered a split with his predecessor – in 2006 Bush announced, “we are addicted to oil” – and the Republicans. The choice of words is also important as the President is currently struggling in the same state that created the fodder for many of Bush’s harshest critics, and Obama needs to seize every chance he has to distance himself from that legacy if his own is to extend beyond 4 years.

Obama continued to turn the Republican ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra on its head as he used the statistic commonly used to support the opposition’s case – that the US consumes 20 per cent of the world’s oil – to support his own- a clean energy future – with the addition of one detail: the US holds only 2 per cent of the world’s oil reserves.

Obama continued as if in answer to the predictable criticism that the other side will level at the plan- the cost. “$1 billion is sent each day to foreign countries for its oil,” the President said, as he explained that the transition to clean energy does not need to be an economic burden. That saving combined with the potential to create millions of jobs, should require critics to develop a slightly more intellectual argument against the President’s plan. Though, “he can’t”, is likely to be the starting point for many critics, nonetheless. That being said, Robert Gibbs better have some solid facts and calculations to back up the President’s $1 billion statement, and how its going to translate into savings for us all.

The President also called to a partnership between “workers and entrepreneurs” in his clean energy utopia. This last point was a quiet knock down of the criticism Obama has received for sitting down with ‘experts and academics’ over the BP crisis rather than seeking to gain an understanding of the situation from the workers.

Even with all the talk of partnerships – Obama and the Gulf, workers and entrepreneurs – the partnership offer does not appear to extend over party lines. Obama made only one direct reference to the Republican Party as he offered them a fleeting invitation to join his clean energy campaign on the proviso that “they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuel”.

Despite this single direct reference to partisan divides, the entire speech centered on them. The mid terms are looming towards the President and they are bigger and darker than oil that continues to spew into the Gulf. If the current administration is going to be anything other than ceremonial figurehead in the second half of its first term, then it needs to be clear about what it is, what it stands for and what it’s going to do about it all. And it needs to make that clear now.

As opinion polls have continued to show, Obama needs to follow his seventeen minutes of precisely pitched rhetoric with action.

Did England goalkeeper Robert Green have oil on his gloves when he let USA’s Clint Dempsey’s offering from 25 yards slip past him on Saturday?

Things have got personal between the UK and the USA, and with the BP oil crisis nearing the end of its 56th day, emotions on both sides of the Atlantic are running high.

The British tabloids have taken Obama’s repeated use of BP’s old name, British Petroleum, as a personal slur against the British. “Stop being nasty to BP,” demanded the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, before concluding with the kind of verbose sulkiness that teenage girls usually reserve for their fathers: “He turned on BP in a cynical attempt to deflect public anger from his own lacklustre performance, for which purpose it was useful to bash the British.”

Major of London, Boris Johnson, joined in the fray to denounce Obama’s “anti-British rhetoric”, saying that it was “a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves”.

And, The Mirror jumped on the chance to denounce Obama’s anti-Britishness by claiming to have the exclusive information that blow out preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, whose failure lead to this whole mess, was manufactured by an American company, Cameron International: Barack Obama’s “anti-British” attack on BP backfires, read the headline.

I have to add that I’m thankful that Obama didn’t try to call a parallel between the blow out manufacturer’s name and Britain’s new Prime Minister as another reason why the UK were to blame for the spill because I’m pretty sure that the quick-witted investigative journalists at The Mirror would have called them out on that one too.

Obama’s anti-British qualifications, according to the popular voices of the British tabloid media, rest on his repeated use of BP’s old name, British Petroleum. But when I started looking for instances when Obama has referred to BP by anything other than it’s two letter initials I drew a blank. As Giles Whittell pointed out in a comment piece in The Times the other day, Obama has “not repeatedly, not pointedly, not — as far as anyone who has bothered to search the record can tell — at all” called BP British Petroleum, “Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, has used the words instead of the initials, but he is a different person.”

And, to have tried to accuse America of being anti-British for what it’s press secretary said might have pushed even Melanie Phillips to admit that the argument only worked when yelled from the mouth of a teenage girl, quickly followed by a perfectly inflected “I hate you” and a well timed slam of the door.

The fact is that both the UK and the USA are allowed to be feeling a little bit fraught over the BP disaster. The UK have watched share price of their biggest corporation plummet. Added to that is concern over pensions, which are heavily invested in the oil company.

On the other side of the pond, the US is looking at an environmental and financial catastrophe in the Gulf, and Obama is desperately trying to keep hold of the reigns of his presidency. Add to that the detail that most of the fallout from this disaster is playing out in the ‘Katrina state’, makes it an absolute requirement that Obama is seen to act where Bush dragged his feet. But what can the President do beyond cheering on the clean-up crews and blaming BP?

But no matter how you look at the crisis caused by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon 56 days ago, this is not a fight between the UK and the USA. It never has been, and the only circumstance under which such a fight could occur is if Cameron now demands Obama to hand over the beer they bet on the UK-USA World Cup match, because, come on no one can argue against it, Dempsey’s goal was a fluke.

Great speech by Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, given at the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on 23 May. To call it semantics, as AJE does, downplays what Fisk is trying to day- it’s about right and wrong and what the point of journalism is.

Journalists are taught, encouraged and made to deal in shades of grey. But some things are black and white, and it’s the medias job to say it. Call a spade a spade.

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Is this because we no longer care about linguistics? Is this because lap-tops ‘correct’ our spelling, ‘trim’ our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

Let me show you what I mean.

For two decades now, the US and British – and Israeli and Palestinian – leaderships have used the words ‘peace process’ to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people.

I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo – although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis. Poor old Oslo, I always think! What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty – in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies – even timetables – were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn – though, yes, we remember the images – upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Qur’an, and Arafat who chose to say: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. President.” And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was ‘a moment of history’! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? “The peace of the brave.” But I don’t remember any of us pointing out that “the peace of the brave” was used originally by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We western journalists – used yet again by our masters – have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan as saying that their war can only be won with a “hearts and minds” campaign. No-one asked them the obvious question: Wasn’t this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam war? And didn’t we – didn’t the West – lose the war in Vietnam?

Yet now we western journalists are actually using – about Afghanistan – the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades, in some cases used by the very same soldiers who peddled this nonsense – at a younger age – in Vietnam.

Just look at the individual words which we have recently co-opted from the US military.

When we westerners find that ‘our’ enemies – al-Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban -have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it ‘a spike in violence’. Ah yes, a ’spike’!

A ’spike’ in violence, ladies and gentlemen is a word first used, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up, then sharply downwards. A ’spike’ therefore avoids the ominous use of the words ‘increase in violence’ – for an increase, ladies and gentlemen, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar – a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands – they call this a ’surge’. And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these ’surges’ really are – to use the real words of serious journalism – are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to wars when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about ’surges’ without any attribution at all! The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the ‘peace process’ collapsed. Therefore our leaders – or ‘key players’ as we like to call them – tried to make it work again. Therefore the process had to be put ‘back on track’. It was a railway train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. So the train had to be put ‘back on track’. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC.

But there was a problem when the ‘peace process’ had been put ‘back on track’ – and still came off the line. So we produced a ‘road map’ – run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who – in an obscenity of history – we now refer to as a ‘peace envoy’.

But the ‘road map’ isn’t working. And now, I notice, the old ‘peace process’ is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And two days ago, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies that the TV boys and girls call ‘experts’ – I’ll come back to them in a moment – told us again that the ‘peace process’ was being put ‘back on track’ because of the opening of ‘indirect talks’ between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ladies and gentlemen, this isn’t just about clichés – this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between power and the media. Through language, we have become them.

Maybe one problem is that we no longer think for ourselves because we no longer read books. The Arabs still read books – I’m not talking here about Arab illiteracy rates – but I’m not sure that we in the West still read books. I often dictate messages over the phone and find I have to spend ten minutes to repeat to someone’s secretary a mere hundred words. They don’t know how to spell.

I was on a plane the other day, from Paris to Beirut – the flying time is about three hours and 45 minutes – and the woman next to me was reading a French book about the history of the Second World War. And she was turning the page every few seconds. She had finished the book before we reached Beirut! And I suddenly realised she wasn’t reading the book – she was surfing the pages! She had lost the ability to what I call ‘deep read’. Is this one of our problems as journalists, I wonder, that we no longer ‘deep read’? We merely use the first words that come to hand …

Let me show you another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East.

We are told, in so many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are ‘competing narratives’. How very cosy. There’s no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. ‘Competing narratives’ now regularly pop up in the British press. The phrase is a species – or sub-species – of the false language of anthropology. It deletes the possibility that one group of people – in the Middle East, for example – are occupied, while another group of people are doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly ‘competing narratives’, a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are – are they not – ‘in competition’. It’s two sides in a football match. And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an ‘occupation’ can become a ‘dispute’. Thus a ‘wall’ becomes a ‘fence’ or a ’security barrier’. Thus Israeli colonisation of Arab land contrary to all international law becomes ’settlements’ or ‘outposts’ or ‘Jewish neighbourhoods’.

You will not be surprised to know that it was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as secretary of state to George W. Bush, who told US diplomats in the Middle East to refer to occupied Palestinian land as ‘disputed land’ – and that was good enough for most of the American media.

So watch out for ‘competing narratives’, ladies and gentlemen. There are no ‘competing narratives’, of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, however, you’ll know the West has lost.

But I’ll give you a lovely, personal example of how ‘competing narratives’ come undone. Last month, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of one and a half million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, “hotly dispute” that this was a genocide. So the interviewer called the genocide “deadly massacres”.

Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She could not call the massacres a ‘genocide’, because the Turkish community would be outraged. But equally, she sensed that ‘massacres’ on its own – especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians – was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the ‘deadly massacres’. How odd!!! If there are ‘deadly’ massacres, are there some massacres which are not ‘deadly’, from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

In the end, I told this little tale of journalistic cowardice to my Armenian audience, among whom were sitting CTV executives. Within an hour of my ending, my Armenian host received an SMS about me from a CTV reporter. “Shitting on CTV was way out of line,” the reporter complained. I doubted, personally, if the word ’shitting’ would find its way onto CTV. But then, neither does ‘genocide’. I’m afraid ‘competing narratives’ had just exploded.

Yet the use of the language of power – of its beacon-words and its beacon-phrases -goes on among us still. How many times have I heard western reporters talking about ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them ‘foreign fighters’. And then immediately we western reporters did the same. Calling them ‘foreign fighters’ meant they were an invading force. But not once – ever – have I heard a mainstream western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan. And that most of them, ladies and gentlemen, are in American or other Nato uniforms!

Similarly, the pernicious phrase ‘Af-Pak’ – as racist as it is politically dishonest – is now used by reporters when it originally was a creation of the US state department, on the day that Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoided the use of the word ‘India’ whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, ‘Af-Pak’ – by deleting India – effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir – after all, Holbrooke was made the ‘Af-Pak’ envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase ‘Af-Pak’, which totally deletes the tragedy of Kashmir – too many ‘competing narratives’, perhaps? – means that when we journalists use the same phrase, ‘Af-Pak’, which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the state department’s work.

Now let’s look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W. Bush thought he was Churchill as well as George W. Bush. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam war protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the ‘appeasers’ who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, ‘the Hitler of the Tigris’. The appeasers were the British who did not want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill’s waistcoat and jacket for size. No ‘appeaser’ he. America was Britain’s oldest ally, he proclaimed – and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true.

Britain’s old ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during World War Two. Only my own newspaper, The Independent, picked this up.

Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the German air force blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality – and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December of 1941.

Ouch!

Back in 1956, I read the other day, Eden called Nasser the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’. A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956.

Yes, when it comes to history, we journalists really do let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Today, as foreigners try to take food and fuel by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should be reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel – our own servicemen dying as they did so – to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today. Which western journalist – and we love historical parallels – has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Look at more recent times. Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – you can fit ‘WMD’ into a headline – but of course, he didn’t, and the American press went through embarrassing bouts of self-condemnation afterwards. How could it have been so misled, the New York Times asked itself? It had not, the paper concluded, challenged the Bush administration enough.

And now the very same paper is softly – very softly – banging the drums for war in Iran. Iran is working on WMD. And after the war, if there is a war, more self-condemnation, no doubt, if there are no nuclear weapons projects.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words, in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drowning our vocabulary with the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation or what I call the ‘TINK THANKS’. Thus we have become part of this language.

Here, for example, are some of the danger words:

· POWER PLAYERS

· ACTIVISM

· NON-STATE ACTORS

· KEY PLAYERS

· GEOSTRATEGIC PLAYERS

· NARRATIVES

· EXTERNAL PLAYERS

· PEACE PROCESS

· MEANINGFUL SOLUTIONS

· AF-PAK

· CHANGE AGENTS (whatever these sinister creatures are).

I am not a regular critic of Al Jazeera. It gives me the freedom to speak on air. Only a few years ago, when Wadah Khanfar (now Director General of Al Jazeera) was Al Jazeera’s man in Baghdad, the US military began a slanderous campaign against Wadah’s bureau, claiming – untruthfully – that Al Jazeera was in league with al-Qaeda because they were receiving videotapes of attacks on US forces. I went to Fallujah to check this out. Wadah was 100 per cent correct. Al-Qaeda was handing in their ambush footage without any warning, pushing it through office letter-boxes. The Americans were lying.

Wadah is, of course, wondering what is coming next.

Well, I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that all those ‘danger words’ I have just read out to you – from KEY PLAYERS to NARRATIVES to PEACE PROCESS to AF-PAK – all occur in the nine-page Al Jazeera programme for this very forum.

I’m not condemning Al Jazeera for this, ladies and gentlemen. Because this vocabulary is not adopted through political connivance. It is an infection that we all suffer from – I’ve used ‘peace process’ a few times myself, though with quotation marks which you can’t use on television – but yes, it’s a contagion.

And when we use these words, we become one with the power and the elites which rule our world without fear of challenge from the media. Al Jazeera has done more than any television network I know to challenge authority, both in the Middle East and in the West. (And I am not using ‘challenge’ in the sense of ‘problem’, as in ‘”I face many challenges,” says General McCrystal.’)

How do we escape this disease? Watch out for the spell-checkers in our lap-tops, the sub-editor’s dreams of one-syllable words, stop using Wikipedia. And read books – real books, with paper pages, which means deep reading. History books, especially.

Al Jazeera is giving good coverage to the flotilla – the convoy of boats setting off for Gaza. I don’t think they are a bunch of anti-Israelis. I think the international convoy is on its way because people aboard these ships – from all over the world – are trying to do what our supposedly humanitarian leaders have failed to do. They are bringing food and fuel and hospital equipment to those who suffer. In any other context, the Obamas and the Sarkozys and the Camerons would be competing to land US Marines and the Royal Navy and French forces with humanitarian aid – as Clinton did in Somalia. Didn’t the God-like Blair believe in humanitarian ‘intervention’ in Kosovo and Sierra Leone?

In normal circumstances, Blair might even have put a foot over the border.

But no. We dare not offend the Israelis. And so ordinary people are trying to do what their leaders have culpably failed to do. Their leaders have failed them.

Have the media? Are we showing documentary footage of the Berlin airlift today? Or of Clinton’s attempt to rescue the starving people of Somalia, of Blair’s humanitarian ‘intervention’ in the Balkans, just to remind our viewers and readers – and the people on those boats – that this is about hypocrisy on a massive scale?

The hell we are! We prefer ‘competing narratives’. Few politicians want the Gaza voyage to reach its destination – be its end successful, farcical or tragic. We believe in the ‘peace process’, the ‘road map’. Keep the ‘fence’ around the Palestinians. Let the ‘key players’ sort it out.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not your ‘key speaker’ this morning.

I am your guest, and I thank you for your patience in listening to me.

See Fisk’s speech in its original context here.

Antanas Mockus, the former “Supercitizen” mayor of Bogota who swept to power in 1993 after he dropped his trousers and mooned an auditorium of unruly students, is now the front runner in Colombia’s presidential election according to the latest polls.

Polls put Mockus twelve points ahead of the other leading candidate Juan Manuel Santos, a former defense minister who holds Uribe’s endorsement to be next president. While Uribe enjoyed popular support throughout his two terms as president for his aggressive champaign against the FARC, his administration has not been without accusations of authoritarian tactics and corruption, two labels that appear to have branded Santos’ presidential bid.

Santos, the architect of some of Mr. Uribe’s crushing blows against leftist guerrillas, had his reputation tarnished by allegations that hundreds of civilians killed by the army were counted as guerrilla combatants to increase the apparent success of the campaigns and to hide the heavy civilian toll.

Other scandals involving Uribe’s supporters’ ties to right-wing paramilitary groups have further darkened Mr Uribe’s legacy and the presidential hopes of his endorsed candidate.

And this begs the question: does Mockus’ popularity have more to do with the electorate’s eagerness to see in a change in the political landscape that has long been governed by a heavy handed right wing government than his own merits has Colombia’s next leader?

Is Mockus really a serious contender in Colombia’s presidential race, or a protest vote? Columbia’s Nick Clegg?

Last week’s general election in Britain saw the Liberal Democrats move out of the shadows as the UK’s third party. But despite opinion polls that placed Lib Dem popularity ahead of the ruling Labour party, and Nick Clegg well ahead of ‘dour Scot’ PM Gordon Brown, the final election results saw the Lib Dems with only 57 seats, well behind Labour’s 258.

Nick Clegg has now gone on to become Deputy Leader in David Cameron’s newly formed government, but that is the result of political negotiation rather than the electorate’s will (not that much of the British electorate is morning the loss of Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street).

What these changes at 10 Downing Street mean for the British political establishment is yet to be mapped out. But there are questions that need to be asked: Is the Lib Dems’ first foray into the Cabinet changing the long established two party dominance in British politics? Is Nick Clegg pushing his party into position whereby they can make a serious leadership bid at the next general election rather than being seen as a protest vote? Or is the UK’s political landscape going to continue to be dominated by blue and red?

Similar questions need to be asked as Colombia goes to the polls in two weeks time.

Unlike the UK’s ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system, Colombia’s next president has to secure a majority in the first round of voting, or the two front runners go head to head in a run off. This first round is schedules for 30 May and it is expected to see Mockus and Santos then battle it out in a second round play off on 20 June.

Although opinion polls are currently billing Mockus as the clear front runner, a victory is far from guaranteed. As The New York Times recently pointed out that the polls that give Mockus such a clear lead do not tell the full story: The polls are heavily focused on cities largely ignoring the opinions of the non-urban electorate where he remains a relatively obscure candidate.

However, many strategists are predicting a Mockus victory, with some even suggesting that his current popularity despite being urban-centric could carry him to the presidential palace in the first round of voting.

But can Colombia’s politics really change its colours in one election, or will it just end up like the UK’s bruised mess of blue, red and yellow?

The launch of the iPad on the US market last Saturday has once again seen the media providers pitted against the medium.

This week’s editorials have presented an image of the professional media clutching their shiny new iPad’s and muttering Gollum style about how they can turn them into money.

But the debate has again become polarised between the apparent absolute good and evil of the media world: paywalls and free content.

The FT’s John Gasper wrote, in an op-ed today, that every media provider from newspapers to book publishers think they like the iPad because it offers them the chance to “sell a professional product in a controlled setting” as an “alternative to giving away content”.

But this statement makes the assumption that free content can only ever work at the determent of revenue. This simply isn’t true. Or, it might be true today, but doesn’t (and shouldn’t) be the case.

My journo-preneur venture, News Exchange, with colleague Amy Stillman, addresses this assumption and turns it on its head. NewsExchange treats free content as the necessary prelude to the final product. The free content is required to hook the reader, and to give them a reason to invest the time, and money, in reading the final piece of quality journalism published in the mainstream media.

The iPad supports the NewsExchange model.

When the iPad was first announced it was variously described as a ‘giant iPhone’ or an ‘iPhone on steroids’, but the opinions in the last week seem to have moved in favour of the new device.

Dvice described the iPad as being used for “time-filling functions”:

“You use your iPhone for quick, discrete actions — a phone call, a quick location-based search such as for a restaurant or movie time, a quick sports score. You’ll use iPad for more time-filling functions — book or newspaper reading, movie watching, Web research.”

Despite all the praise being loaded on the iPad what it is actually for remains a mystery, BerryScoop’s Jason Cipriani was not alone it concluding his post about his first impressions of the iPad with the sentiments, “now just have to fit it into my already technology filled life”.

So, basically the iPad appears to be the commuters new best friend. You can actually read and digest the information that appears on its screen. And the screen is big enough to enjoy the visual experience. A number of early reviews of the iPad also pointed out it’s great speakers. So, all in all NewsExchange’s audio-visual experience that draws you in and then entices you to read a full written article carters to all of the iPad’s plus points.

Back at the FT, Gasper goes on to describe a successful iPad app as one that combines “depth of information with a lot of visual material in innovative ways”. NewsExchange will do just that.

We will present regional reporting through a beautifully woven digital narrative packaged via a multimedia and interactive timeline. We believe this will provide readers with an incentive to invest time in reading the final written piece.

NewsExchange’s innovative thinking and approach to these ideas will allow us to use the iPad to its full potential. Gasper pointed out that some “traditionalists in Silicon Valley” see the iPad as being counter-revolutionary rather than revolutionary (because it, apparently, will “turn engaged and interactive internet users back into passive couch potatoes”).

But for the media that’s great.

Let’s counter the revolution that brought advertising revenues crashing down around our ankles and use the iPad to explore the benefits, and necessary balances, between paid for and free content. This will require much more than a repackaging of current material, but also a shift in how to gather and present journalism. And this is where I think that NewsExchange’s developing potential within the boisterous online media crowd can work to its advantage.

Let the counter-revolution begin!

The Guarani Project is on Journalism.co.uk, the UK’s leading news and recruitment site for the journalism, with a worldwide reach and influence.

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How journalists can use the ‘Obama technique’ to self-fund the stories that matter

Love the headline!