A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [84]
Let’s make the rapid trip from no sense to incensed: Shortly thereafter, Wheelan got into his car and drove away, but he was soon pulled over. It was the same cop, but this time he was with a guy whose badge read “BP Security.” The cop stood by as “BP Security” interrogated Wheelan for twenty minutes, asking him who he worked with, who he answered to, what he was doing, why he was down here in Louisiana. Mr. BP Security phoned someone and, just to be mean, confiscated Wheelan’s bird-helper volunteer badge. Eventually, he “let Wheelan go.” But bear in mind, this is a private security guard, pulling a citizen off a public road.
It gets better. “Then two unmarked cars followed me,” Wheelan says. “Every time I pulled over, they pulled over.” This went on for twenty miles.
Bye-bye, God bless America; hello, corporate police state. So easy. And no blood.
Coda: the “law officer” was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy for Terrebonne Parish. Off duty—and working in the private employ of BP. The deputy failed to include the traffic stop in his incident report. In other words, he abused his authority and then hid the fact. But he had support from higher up: a major in the sheriff’s office tells the magazine’s writer, Mac McClelland, that an off-duty deputy using his official vehicle to pull someone over while working for a private company is “standard and acceptable practice” because—get ready—Wheelan could have been a terrorist.
Of course he could. It’s not like BP is at the epicenter of a giant oil blowout and someone with a video camera might want to post an image of BP’s headquarters, with its huge logo, on the Web, or anything like that. It’s much more likely that a terrorist would be standing across the street with a video camera and a magazine writer in broad daylight, talking to BP’s guards.
Ergo, back to Thad Allen: “The media will have uninhibited access anywhere … except … if it’s a security or safety problem.” And it’s always a security or safety problem—because that’s all they ever have to say to do anything they want.
It could be a cleanup; it could be a cover-up. You can’t tell. You can’t tell because the Big People are undermining our ability to ask. But let’s make it simple, people: Either there’s freedom of speech or there isn’t. Either there’s freedom of assembly or there isn’t. Either there’s freedom of movement or there isn’t. Either there’s freedom. Or not.
And what there is here and now is: bullying and lying at the speed of sound. Illegal, sure; but when law enforcers agree, it gets very hard to deal with. Why they agree, why they get turned against the public, I’m not sure. Something about the liberal media? Something against outsiders? Boredom and a chance to throw their weight around with impunity? It’s all a little dose of “the banality of evil” (a phrase originally coined in reference to the Nazis). The idea: it doesn’t take terrible people to do bad things in an official capacity. It takes average people. Average people who want to do a good job for their superiors, want to be loyal, who know how to go along to get along, and who like to avoid any risk to themselves. Unfortunately, that’s all it takes. Average people.
Who are the “terrorists”? Who are the ones acting against America’s principles? The people who don’t want you to see the pictures, or those who do? The people who abuse their authority, or the ones they abuse? The people whose reckless rush risked hurting all “the little people,” or the people with little, who stand tall?
And here’s the main thing: even if the Coast Guard has taken the spirit of Allen’s media-access memo to heart and fully embraced his directive (I said “if”), BP and local law enforcers are ignoring it. They’re doing whatever they want when they feel like pushing people around. And this is America. These companies are multinational. Imagine what they do elsewhere.
What they do: In Nigeria, an amount of oil roughly equivalent to that lost by the Exxon Valdez spills into the Niger Delta every year. It has