Fox News: Chevron Shares Held Down by $27b Ecuador Environmental Liability

Chevron has been desperate to downplay its potential $27 billion environmental liability in Ecuador. It employs dozens of lobbyists and lawyers to distract attention from the fundamental fact the company's financial picture is materially and adversely affected by the Ecuador liability. It spends millions on a widespread legal and public relations assault against the affected indigenous communities, directed by the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. But it appears that the markets aren't buying what Chevron and its law firm are selling. According to this article that appeared on Fox Business, Chevron's shares have been shedding value due in part to the massive liability the company faces in Ecuador. The Gibson Dunn lawyers clearly need to step up their game if they hope to continue billing massive amounts of money in an increasingly futile effort to get their client off the hook for its human rights violations in the Amazon. Read on:

Chevron Down as It Continues to Fight $27B Environmental Lawsuit in Ecuador

By Jennifer Booton

Published August 24, 2010

FOXBusiness

Despite tripling its second quarter profit last month, Chevron (CVX: 73.74 ,-1.32 ,-1.76%) has since fallen nearly 2.46%, as it remains under the grip of a $27.3 billion lawsuit, the largest environmental damages lawsuit ever tried.

The company reported quarterly earnings last month of $2.70 a share on sales of $48.9 billion, beating estimates by 24 cents, though missing revenue expectations by $9.7 billion.

The strong results catapulted Chevron's stock to a 10-day winning streak, peaking on Aug. 10 at $79.32.

But the oil company has lost much of its gains over the past few weeks as it continues to fight a lawsuit in Ecuador that alleges Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, wrecked portions of a jungle while drilling for oil in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chevron has fought the accusations, filing a petition earlier this month before the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos in Lago Agrio in Ecuador seeking dismissal.

The court's decision, expected in the months ahead, may be appealed to Ecuador's Supreme Court, and the energy giant has vowed to do so if it loses the case.

Chevron traded in the red Tuesday, down about 1.20% to $72.15 at 2:40 PM EST

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Chevron P.R. Campaign Gets It Wrong Again

Last week Chevron's P.R. mavens were at it again – this time spinning out a number of carefully edited and selected outtakes from the documentary "Crude" to as part of an all-out assault on the lawyers for the 30,000 Ecuadorians suing the company for destroying an area of the rainforest the size of Rhode Island. Chevron is trying to intimidate the lawyers by using the edited film clips as the basis for fraud charges that are a cynical and desperate 11^th-hour attempt to escape liability by any means necessary.

(Recently, Chevron got access to the private film outtakes of celebrated documentarian Joe Berlinger from his award-winning documentary "Crude" – in a highly criticized, unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. After a long court fight, Berlinger surrendered the film to Chevron after the company promised not to use it for any purpose other than litigation. Take a look at this post here.)

Chevron has claimed that the video outtakes show that the plaintiffs' lawyers have manufactured the lawsuit against the company out of "smoke and mirrors" that are "all bullshit" and are simply an extortion racket to get money from the oil company. Over the last week the company's lawyers and public relations specialists have been working bloggers and journalists to try to push this view as far and wide as possible. Among Chevron p.r. firms is Hill & Knowlton, which used the same playbook for the tobacco industry, and Creative Response Concepts, which invented the Swift Boat ads that targeted John Kerry.

Of course, Chevron's not telling the truth about what the video outtakes do show. In fact, any viewing of the actual film footage – and not Chevron's edited, hand-picked, out-of-context scenes - shows exactly the opposite. Even the concept where the plaintiffs' attorney is making the comments Chevron has zeroed in on is in the context of a methodical outlay of the massive amount of the scientific evidence proving the company's guilt for creating the world's worst environmental disaster. Chevron has not disputed this – but it has refused to release the entire scenes, or the unedited video on which it was basing its public relations assault on the plaintiffs.

Nor, of course, does Chevron publicize the hundreds of hours of outtakes provided by Berlinger that point clearly to its own misconduct in Ecuador.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Chevron has a long history of playing fast and loose with video, using misleading and mischaracterized film footage to try to score public relations points. Almost a year ago, Chevron spliced and diced footage that it claimed showed a bribery scheme in Ecuador – a claim that was later completely discredited as a company "dirty tricks" operation. Before that, Chevron paid a former CNN anchor, Gene Randall, to produce a video about the lawsuit that appeared to be a legitimate "investigative reporting" newscast, presumably to trick viewers into thinking they were watching an independent report on the issue.
The company has proven it will stop at nothing to try to find a way to evade its liability in Ecuador – earlier this week The Atlantic reported that a freelance reporter for the publication was flown to Columbia and offered $20,000 to go undercover on behalf of the company.

For all of the efforts to attack the lawsuit, it is interesting what Chevron has not done: focus on the evidence that clearly prove its responsibility for the worst oil-related contamination on the planet.

After more than 17 years of litigation, Chevron has not seriously disputed the scientific evidence that conclusively shows it is responsible for creating the world's worst oil-related disaster. In the Ecuador trial, more than 64,000 chemical sampling results – 80% of which were provided by Chevron's own scientists – and a 200,000 page trial record has produced a mountain of evidence showing the extent of the contamination. The evidence is clear: over 26 years of operations, from 1964-1990, Chevron produced a legacy of environmental destruction that is at least twice as large as the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico in sheer size.

It is time for Chevron and its bloggers to stop misrepresenting film clips, quit the public relations battle, and take a look at the hard science that proves it is responsible for the horrible contamination.

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Chevron Outed for Corporate Espionage Spy Scandal in Ecuador’s Amazon Rainforest

Chevron's latest desperate attempt in its effort to avoid a potential $27.3 billion liability for illegal dumping in Ecuador's rainforest? The company has taken to trying to hire journalists in an unethical attempt to derail the litigation. Take a look at the below press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition explaining the company's entanglement in the spy scandal below:

Chevron Outed for Corporate Espionage Spy Scandal in Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest

Atlantic Magazine Exposes Offer to Journalist to Go Undercover to Sabotage $27 Billion Environmental Case

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron, long accused of engaging in an illegal dirty tricks campaign in Ecuador, tried to recruit an American journalist to take part in a corporate espionage spy ring in Ecuador's Amazon to undermine an expected multi-billion judgment against the oil giant in a high-profile environmental lawsuit, according to an article published in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

Mary Cuddehe, an Iowa-born graduate of Columbia University with a Masters degree in Journalism, published an article documenting that the investigative firm Kroll has been running an espionage operation in Ecuador on behalf of Chevron, which faces a $27 billion damages claim for creating what experts believe is the worst oil-related catastrophe on the planet.

A Kroll employee offered Cuddehe $20,000 for six weeks of work to appear as an independent journalist while working as an undercover spy in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. Lago Agrio is the jungle town in the Amazon where the trial is being held at Chevron's request after the case was originally filed in New York federal court several years ago.

The Kroll employee, identified as a former journalist named Sam, paid for Cuddehe to travel to Bogota where the case was explained and she was offered the money in the suite of a luxury hotel. Cuddehe said in a blog that she has published articles in The New Republic, the Miami Herald, and for the Associated Press.

"Last February, I got an offer from Kroll … to go undercover as a journalist-spy in the Ecuadorian Amazon," wrote Cuddehe in the article, titled "A Spy In the Jungle".

"At first I thought I was underqualified for the job. But as it turned out I was exactly what they were looking for: a pawn."

She added: "…there was a reason [Chevron] wanted me… If I went to Lago Agrio myself and pretended to write a story, no one would suspect that the starry-eyed young American poking around was actually shilling for Chevron."

Representatives for the Amazon communities who are victims of the environmental damage blasted Chevron and Kroll for engaging in corporate espionage. The article suggested that numerous Kroll employees were working on the Ecuador project from a base in neighboring Colombia.

With headquarters in New York, Kroll is considered the largest investigative firm in the world and is publicly traded.

"This is disturbing evidence of questionable if not outright illicit conduct by Chevron and Kroll, possibly subjecting Chevron's lawyers to sanctions or penalty in the U.S.," said Jonathan Abady, an American lawyer who represents the plaintiffs. "It is hard to imagine Kroll engaging in this conduct alone without oversight from Chevron's lawyers."

"Legitimate investigations are fine; paying journalists to lie is unethical and a direct attack on the credibility of all journalists worldwide," he added.

Abady noted that Kroll investigators who misrepresent themselves at the behest of legal counsel could be violating the ethical rules of the legal profession, subjecting Chevron's lawyers to sanctions in the United States.

Events described in Cuddehe's article fit with a larger pattern in recent years of unethical and potentially illegal activity by Chevron to undermine the rule of law in Ecuador. The company has admitted to deliberately dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon when it operated an oil concession from 1964 to 1990.

Last year, the Amazonian communities accused Chevron of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Ecuador by engaging in a "sting" operation where a bribe was offered to help remove the trial judge from the case. An investigation determined that the "sting" operation and bribe offer was made by a long-time Chevron employee, Diego Borja.

Chevron later paid to move Borja to a luxury villa close to Chevron's global headquarters in California to avoid questioning by Ecuadorian prosecutors.

Once in the U.S., Borja was taped in a telephone conversation with childhood friend Santiago Escobar as saying Chevron was "cooking" evidence in the Ecuador trial, using fake soil samples, and representing its own laboratory as independent when in fact it was operated by Chevron agents. He described himself to Escobar as being in charge of Chevron's dirty tricks campaign in Ecuador.

Borja also admitted to Escobar that Chevron bribed an Ecuadorian army official in 2005 to charge local indigenous leaders were planning a terrorist attack against Chevron's lawyers, forcing the cancellation of a critical judicial inspection of a contaminated Chevron well site.

Information relating to the Borja sting operation has been turned over to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2006, lawyers for the Amazonian communities were hit with a series of anonymous threats that prompted protest letters from the International Commission of Jurists and the United Nations.

The U.S. law firms employed by Chevron to defend the Ecuador trial are Gibson Dunn, King & Spalding and Jones Day. One or more of the firms likely is overseeing Kroll's work, said Abady.

"I have two words for Chevron's management and Board of Directors: Hewlett Packard," said Ilann Maazel, who represents the Amazonian plaintiffs in the United States. "This is outrageous and potentially exposes Chevron to even more liability."

In 2006 the Chairperson of Hewlett Packard's Board, Patricia Dunn, was forced to resign and fight criminal charges from California's Attorney General for authorizing espionage to find out the source of leaks to journalists. Chevron is a California-based company.

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Movie Industry, Media Outlets Line Up Against Chevron Over Film Battle

Chevron's latest legal maneuver to avoid its potential $27.3 billion liability for illegal dumping in Ecuador's rainforest is startling. The company is now trying to violate the 1^st Amendment rights of filmmaker Joe Berlinger by forcing him to turn over more than 600 hours of private video outtakes from his film Crude. But Chevron's actions have not gone unnoticed, and virtually every major U.S. media company – and dozens of luminaries – have come to Berlinger's defense, asking the courts to stop Chevron's abuses. Take a look at the press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition explaining the issue below:

Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Allen, Academy of Motion Pictures Join Filmmaker In Showdown with Chevron over Ecuador Footage

Robert Redford, Bill Moyers, Mikhail Gorbachev, Trudie Styler Also Line Up Against Oil Giant In Legal Battle
Key First Amendment Case Attracts Wide Attention

Amazon Defense Coalition
14 July 2010 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Hinton at 703-798-3109 or karen [at] hintoncommunications.com

New York, NY – Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have joined forces with celebrated filmmaker Joe Berlinger as he faces a key legal showdown Wednesday with Chevron over its attempt to access 600 hours of private video footage from the film CRUDE that documents the oil giant's massive environmental contamination of Ecuador's Amazon.

"The battle lines have been drawn between a major oil company accused of human rights abuses and the rights of the journalistic and artistic communities to expose corporate misconduct," said Ilann Maazel, who represents 30,000 rainforest plaintiffs who have sued Chevron for discharging billions of gallons of toxic waste onto their ancestral lands.

"Chevron committed wrongdoing in the Amazon with an environmental impact far worse than that the BP disaster," said Maazel. "This case is about Chevron's use of ill-gotten profits to intimidate a filmmaker who captured the company's misconduct on tape.'

A federal appeals court in New York will hear arguments Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. over a decision by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in May that ordered Berlinger to turn over to Chevron his entire body of outtakes from CRUDE, or roughly 600 hours of footage. Kaplan's decision has been met with widespread criticism as hundreds of journalists, actors, filmmakers, and writers – many of them Academy Award winners – have joined virtually every major U.S. media company in supporting Berlinger.

The list of notables reads like a "Who's Who" of the arts and journalist communities, including Redford, Bill Moyers, Norman Lear, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, and Trudie Styler in addition to DiCaprio and Allen.

Also supporting Berlinger are three dozen of the largest media companies in America, including The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, Dow Jones, the Associated Press, HBO, the Washington Post, the Hearst Newspapers, the Daily News, and the Gannett Company. The media companies filed a brief in which they noted that Chevron seeks to subpoena the "largest amount of film outtakes" in American history.

Also backing Berlinger are the Sundance Institute, the Director's Guild of America, the Writer's Guild of America, the International Documentary Association, the Tribeca Film Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting, and the Center for Asian American Media, among others. In a separate brief, they argued that Kaplan's order will make it "nearly impossible for filmmakers who report on controversial issues to obtain candid interviews."

A letter from the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it fears Kaplan's decision "could have far-reaching, potentially devastating consequences ... for the bond of trust between journalist and subject..." Redford wrote in The Huffington Post that the "potential ramifications of [Kaplan's decision] for the journalist community, film world and society in general are both shocking and profound."

Gorbachev, a Nobel Prize Laureate, released a letter from the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation (where CRUDE won a major award last year) that said Kaplan's ruling endangers "independent documentary filmmaking and the work of investigative journalists everywhere."

For its part, Chevron has attracted the support of Dole – a company that like Chevron faces accusations that it committed crimes and violated human rights abroad by exposing banana field workers to toxic chemicals. Dole, represented by the same U.S. law firm as Chevron, had previously sued a Swedish documentary filmmaker who investigated and documented the pesticide poisoning of Dole workers in Nicaragua.

Berlinger shot CRUDE, which won 22 festival awards and premiered at Sundance, between 2005 and 2008. The film chronicles three years of the Ecuador trial phase of the 17-year legal battle between indigenous groups and Chevron. The case against Chevron is considered the largest environmental class action in the world; damages are estimated at up to $27.3 billion.

Berlinger is arguing that his footage is covered by First Amendment privileges that safeguard the ability of reporters and filmmakers to play their traditional watchdog role to expose corporate and governmental abuse. Chevron claims Berlinger's footage is likely to contain evidence of misconduct that can help in its defense.

Chevron's pursuit of the footage is a "sideshow" meant to intimidate journalists and distract shareholder attention from the company's enormous liability for illegal dumping in Ecuador, lawyers for the indigenous and farmer communities suing the company said.

"Chevron's management is now trying to run over the Constitution just like it ran over the rights of indigenous groups in the Amazon," said Maazel.

Chevron has admitted in court that Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately discharged billions of gallons of toxic wastewater into the streams and rivers of Ecuador while it was the exclusive operator of a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Evidence before the court indicates that cancer rates and other oil-related diseases in the area where Texaco operated have skyrocketed.

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Chevron Lobbying Over Ecuador Lawsuit Criticized by Sierra Club, Catholic Bishops

Chevron's long-running lobbying campaign to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences over a potential $27.3 billion environmental lawsuit brought against the company by more than 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous people has attracted the criticism of several influential and wide-ranging groups. Recently the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Sierra Club – America's largest and oldest environmental group, with more than 1.3 million members and supporters – wrote letters to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, urging him to ignore Chevron's "improper" lobbying. Archbishop Howard Hubbard, the chair of the USCCB's Council on International Justice and Peace, expressed concerns over attempts to "misuse" trade policy to "punish the very people trade preferences are intended to help when people try to defend the environment and human rights," while Executive Director Michael Brune of the Sierra Club wrote that trade "preferences were not intended to be, and should not be, used as a means of pressuring any government to foreclose the constitutional rights of its citizens who seek to use the legal system to protect and restore the natural world."

This isn't the first time Chevron's improper lobbying has drawn condemnation. In 2009 26 U.S. Congressmen sent a letter to the Obama administration, calling on the administration "to reject Chevron's request and reaffirm that U.S. trade agreements will not be used as leverage to interfere in private claims progressing through Ecuador's legal process." Earlier, then-Senator Barack Obama and Senator Patrick Leahy had similarly urged the USTR to ignore Chevron's improper actions.

Take a look at the letters themselves: you can read the USCCB letter here and the Sierra Club letter here. The letter from the 26 Congressmen is available here and the Obama letter here.

You can read a press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition about the criticisms below:

Chevron Draws Fire from U.S. Council of Bishops, Sierra Club over Improper Ecuador Lobbying

Oil Giant's Campaign to Cancel Ecuador's Trade Preferences Derailed for Fifth Straight Year

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron's lobbying campaign to cancel Ecuador's trade preferences over a $27 billion environmental lawsuit brought by indigenous groups appears headed for failure yet again.

Last week, the office of the United States Trade Representative submitted a report to Congress that flatly ignored Chevron's attempt to have Ecuador's trade preferences canceled. It was the fifth consecutive year the oil giant had engaged the USTR on the issue and failed to achieve its objective. Each time, Chevron used heavyweights such as former Clinton Administration officials Mickey Kantor and Mac McLarty and Republican super-lobbyist Wayne Berman to carry its message.

Chevron's lobbying of the USTR, called an "attack on the rule of law" by the indigenous leaders, recently was criticized either implicitly or expressly by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Sierra Club, and numerous Congressmen. All wrote letters to USTR Ambassador Ron Kirk urging that his office reject Chevron's proposal, which would have cost Ecuador 350,000 jobs had it been accepted.

Chevron's lobbying also had been criticized by the Los Angeles Times, which editorialized that "halting the [Ecuador] trade agreement at Chevron's behest would harm broader U.S. interests."

The lawsuit, which is being tried in Ecuador at Chevron's request, accuses the oil giant of deliberately discharging more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon forests and waterways when it operated a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Six indigenous groups have had their traditional lifestyles decimated and more than 1,400 people have died of cancer due to Chevron's sub-standard practices, according to the lawsuit.

The amount of oil discharged by Chevron in Ecuador is far greater in quantity that the amount spilled in the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the plaintiffs. The damages claim against Chevron in Ecuador is $27.3 billion.

The letter from the Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent June 23 to Kirk, urged the Obama Administration "to resist direct or indirect interference in any legal processes Ecuador or its citizens may have initiated to assert their right to defend their environment and the health of their people."

Most Reverend Howard Hubbard, writing for the Bishops, also expressed concern over efforts to "misuse" trade policy to "punish the very people trade preferences are intended to help when people try to defend the environment and human rights."

In its letter, the Sierra Club wrote in reference to Chevron that trade "preferences were not intended to be, and should not be, used as a means of pressuring any government to foreclose the constitutional rights of its citizens who seek to use the legal system to protect and restore the natural world."

"This is especially true when our government is being asked to do so by, and for the economic benefit of, a powerful corporation that does not contest the central fact of pollution on a vast scale at issue in the case, only its own liability," said the letter, signed by Executive Director Michael Brune.

With 1.3 million members and supporters, the Sierra Club is the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States. Both the Sierra Club and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are considered highly influential in Washington lobbying circles.

For years, the USTR – under both the Bush and Obama Administrations -- has snubbed Chevron over its Ecuador lobbying. Last year, 26 members of Congress, including several powerful senior members, urged the USTR to reject Chevron's effort to use trade agreements "as leverage to interfere in private claims progressing through Ecuador's legal process."

In 2006, then-Senator Obama and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) also wrote a letter to the USTR urging it to reject Chevron's lobbying and to steer clear of the private legal dispute in Ecuador.

The lawsuit, originally filed by 30,000 Ecuadorians in New York in 1993, was transferred to Ecuador after Chevron filed 14 sworn affidavits to the U.S. court praising the fairness of that country's court system. Shortly after the trial in Ecuador began in 2003 and the evidence pointed to Chevron's culpability, the company started to attack the courts it had previously praised and initiated the lobbying campaign over trade preferences.

The USTR report is only a recommendation to the Congress, which must decide by the end of the year whether Ecuador's trade preferences will be extended. Like the USTR, for several years running Congress has rejected Chevron's request over Ecuador's trade preferences.

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Chevron Should Follow BP’s Lead

In its negotiations with the White House to fund a $20 billion escrow account, BP could have stuck to its legal guns and followed Chevron's example of thumbing its nose at victims of its environmental practices in Ecuador. Instead, BP distanced itself from Chevron's strategy of blaming anyone but itself for the extensive oil contamination it caused to Ecuador's rainforest.

We will see how BP handles liability issues going forward, but this is a step in the right direction.

Chevron should accept what the BP spill makes abundantly clear: profits over safety is not a business plan. In fact, it could put you out of business.

That is proving true for Chevron in Ecuador, where an independent court expert has determined that the company faces more than $27 billion in damages for illegally dumping billions of gallons of oil-related toxins directly into the Amazon from 1964-1990. Audits conducted by Chevron, as well as the company's own sampling results, overwhelmingly prove the company's culpability.

While the BP disaster was an accident, Chevron's dumping was done intentionally as part of a plan to cut costs.

In regard to Chevron's Ecuador liability, two other things have become abundantly clear:

• Had oil companies like Chevron been held accountable for what happened in Ecuador the likelihood of accidents like the one in the Gulf would have been drastically reduced. Incentives would be different. Companies would have been forced to invest in safety, because they would have known they could not externalize environmental damage to local inhabitants, as has been done in Ecuador and the Gulf.
  

• The $27 billion in damages for the Ecuador mess is beginning to sound modest considering the astounding scope of the toxins that Chevron has admitted to dumping in Ecuador. Chevron refers to the number as a "shakedown." But in light of the $60 billion (and growing) price tag of the BP liability and cleanup, $27 billion sounds like a bargain given that the contamination in Ecuador is far larger than the Gulf spill estimates.
  

How many more Ecuadors and Gulf of Mexicos do we need to suffer through before the oil industry is held accountable?

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Shan: Chevron Loses a Round in First Amendment Battle over Ecuador Film Footage

The below post appeared on ChevroninEcuador.com today – take a look below or after the jump:

Victory for First Amendment, Filmmakers, & Amazon Communities in Battle Vs. Chevron Over Ecuador Footage!

Chevron suffered a significant legal setback in the courts today in its sprawling cynical effort to evade accountability for its environmental devastation in Ecuador

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger will get an Appeals Court hearing of his appeal of the lower court decision ordering him to turn over 600+ hours of raw footage shot during the making of his award-winning documentary CRUDE. The ruling by the three-judge panel of the Circuit Court also 'stays' the subpoena ordering the production of the footage while Berlinger's appeal is pending.

This is excellent news for supporters of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment, and documentary filmmakers and investigative journalists– and everyone that benefits from the work done by these people to shine a spotlight on issues of social and political importance. In other words, this is great news for everyone.

Furthermore, this is a victory for those who have dared to discover the truth about Chevron's environmental disaster in Ecuador, and the communities struggling to hold the oil giant accountable.

Chevron's lawyers from corporate law behemoth Gibson Dunnhope to mine the CRUDE outtakes for any material that they might find useful to their relentless legal and public relations schemes to discredit the plaintiffs, their attorneys and supporters, and the courts in Ecuador.

In response to the ruling, Mr. Berlinger's lawyer Maura Wogan told The Wrap:

"Today's decision signals that the appeals court takes seriously the rights of investigative journalists like Joe Berlinger."

And Joe Berlinger had this to say:

"I am delighted that the appellate court seems to understand the significant public interest in my appeal being heard. The stay that was granted today will allow us to argue the merits of our position before the Court."

The ruling by the Circuit Court of Appeals vindicates the position of the growing number of high-profile supporters who have spoken out for Berlinger.

On Friday, film legend and environmental activist Robert Redford penned a powerful opinion article in the Huffington Post, entitled 'Joe Berlinger vs. Chevron: Why We Must All Defend Independent Filmmaking'.

Redford's argument couldn't be more straightforward:

Filmmakers like Joe Berlinger fulfill a crucial role in today's society by providing independent information on pressing contemporary human rights and social issues. Their success as storytellers depends on access to those men and women willing to talk on camera. If the subjects of those documentaries are fearful of the ramifications of telling the truth then the filmmaker has no story.

Without a shield law, there is no recognized journalist/filmmaker/source protection, creating the very scenario we have now. The judges in this case must recognize this is first and foremost a first amendment issue. The higher courts need to overturn the decision and adhere to higher standards of journalistic privilege.

If we allow the voice of the independent artist to be stifled we should expect nothing less than extreme repercussions for freedom of information... and freedom in general.

Also last week, Floyd Abrams, perhaps the best-known First Amendment lawyer in the country, filed an Amicus Curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The brief was joined by 13 (!) major media organizations– ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, The Washington Post, The New York Times Company, Gannett Company, Hearst Corporation, the Daily News, the Directors Guild of America, and the International Documentary Association.

The New York Times' Dave Itzkoff, who has been following the case closely for the Arts Beat blog at NYTimes.com, wrote:

The brief says the district court's ruling "was fundamentally flawed" in its interpretation of the 1999 case Gonzales v. NBC, in which the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that even confidential materials can be released if they are likely to be relevant to a significant issue in the case and are not reasonably obtainable elsewhere.

Judge Kaplan's ruling, the brief said, "effectively shifted the burden of alleged unfairness onto the filmmakers, rendering this circuit's requirement of a relevance showing meaningless," and "made it far too easy for Chevron to obtain far too much, precisely what Gonzales forbids."

In the June 1, 2010 amicus brief, Abrams writes more on Judge Kaplan's misreading of the Gonzalez case and gets to the the real heart of the matter:

The vast distance between the District Court's reading of Gonzales and its text and spirit is illustrated by the Court's emphasis in both its May 10 and May 20 orders on the proposition that, because the individual subjects captured in the outtake footage voluntarily chose to expose themselves to public scrutiny through the inevitable screening of a completed film, it would "not credit any assertion that the discovery of the outtakes by Petitioners would compromise the ability of Berlinger or, for that matter, any other film maker, to obtain material from individuals interested in confidential treatment." This analysis completely ignores the relationship between a documentary filmmaker and the individuals that he or she interviews; it assumes, wrongly, that the participants in such a project would see no difference between the public circulation of a final film painstakingly prepared and edited by the filmmaker who solicited their contribution and whom they entrusted with telling their story and the potentially unlimited display of their every word in a widely-publicized multi-billion dollar international litigation.

And lastly, last week ahead of today's hearing, NPR's All Things Considered covered the legal battle in a story called 'A 'Crude' Awakening: Chevron Vs. The Documentarian'. The story predictably gives Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro of Gibson Dunn and company spokesman Kent Robertson each a chance to weigh in with their cynical spin. After today's loss in the courts over their attempts to get at Berlinger's CRUDE outtakes, I'm sure they're huddling up to devise their next tactic in Chevron's treacherous strategy to deceive, deny, and delay... until it all goes away.

But the communities in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest have other plans, and have vowed to struggle until they get the justice that has been denied them so long.

And of course, Berlinger's legal battle isn't over. While the Circuit Court stayed the lower court's order to turn over all his raw footage to Chevron, Berlinger still has to argue his case on appeal. Want to help with the costly legal battle? Any amount you can donate to the CRUDE First Amendment legal defense fund is deeply appreciated.

And if you still haven't seen the explosive, award-winning documentary CRUDE, see it, and judge for yourself.

– Han
Han Shan is Coordinator of Amazon Watch's Clean Up Ecuador Campaign

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Norman Lear Latest to Blast Chevron for Trying to Seize Ecuador Film Footage

This article, by Norman Lear, appeared today on The Huffington Post:

Was Oil Named 'Crude' Because of the Way Oil Companies Do Business?

Let me leave it to you; which is it? "Couldn't be" or "certainly possible"? The recent BP crisis could be called the greatest of "natural" disasters. Natural for a company that had already received 760 citations for "egregious, willful violations," accounting for "97% of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry..." according to the Center for Public Integrity,as quoted by Frank Rich in this past Sunday's New York Times.

Currently setting another high standard for crude behavior in the oil business is Chevron. As for the battle between Chevron and the indigenous groups of people in Ecuador who are suing the oil company for despoiling a swath of the Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island that is their habitat, and upon which they depend for their sustenance, I am not taking sides. It is Chevron's reaction to a documentary on that very subject, Crude, which received the most glowing reviews in 2009, with which I take issue.

With no precedent for such a broad action, Chevron has subpoenaed the filmmaker, Joe Berlinger, to turn over his entire vault of footage -- over 600 hours shot (Berlinger is an exceedingly thorough filmmaker) plus the notes and sources the film was based on -- by citing the relevance of three scenes totaling about six minutes in a film that has a running time of 105 minutes and represents an infinitesimal fraction of the total hours shot.

Let me say that again: Chevron wants it all, every scene, 600 hours, because they believe they've found six minutes of footage that they think can help discredit the class-action suit filed against them by 30,000 Ecuadorians. Who would have guessed that Chevron would find a crudely sympathetic ear in U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan? Flouting the First Amendment, the author's right to keep his sources and work product private, and simple common sense (600 hours for the six minutes that they hold in question, my God!!) Judge Kaplan, ruling in favor of the company, ordered the largest turnover of a reporter's work product in American history.

Giving deep-pocketed corporations the right to rummage around in the files of a well-respected, independent documentarian like Berlinger will not only send a very discouraging message to anyone involved in the news-gathering business, but also to anyone who might want to talk to reporters about exposing the kind of corporate negligence or potential villainy that made the BP disaster possible. Chevron is the largest corporation in California and the fifth largest on the planet. I am quite confident that the Founding Fathers did not want corporations to use their vast profits to discourage this kind of reporting from taking place and at the same time place considerable financial burdens on filmmakers like Berlinger to defend their constitutional rights.

Although the American media has been on hand to catch BP with its tactics and ethical shorts down, the Chevron situation took place far from the lens of most American journalists and is the kind of story often overlooked by the mainstream American press. Whatever the reason for that may be, the chilling effect that this ruling will have on investigative filmmakers like Berlinger will mean that stories like this might not be told in the future. This is such a matter of grave importance that the bulk of American media companies signed on to leading constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams friend-of-the-court brief recently filed on behalf of Berlinger's case. The group filing included all three major broadcast networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The crudest thing of all in this story is the tilt in this country in favor of corporations. From the Supreme Court's recent decision allowing corporations to flood Washington with campaign finance -- which in turn keeps our country tethered to an antiquated fuel source that is destroying our environment -- to Chevron's current attempt to destroy the protections that allow a free press to function, it is time we put the future of this country back in the hands of its citizens, not its corporations.

Having observed hundreds of thousands of Americans in almost 50 states wait in line as long as 90 minutes to spend a moment with a touring original copy of the Declaration of Independence, born the night of July 4, 1776, our country's birth certificate, I am here to report that the American people, the solid American people, are ready for a rebirth of citizenship. They are ready to be freed, to become born-again Americans -- citizens who once more declare their independence, this time from the growing corporatocracy in which we find ourselves today.

I suggest that we begin by applauding today's appellate court decision granting Berlinger a stay in order to have a full hearing on his appeal. I, along with my fellow citizens, hope that these judges will continue to put the sanctity of the First Amendment ahead of the rights of corporations when Berlinger's appeal is heard in July.

* * * * * * *

To learn more about how to help with Mr. Berlinger's legal efforts, please click here

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Chevron’s Ecuador Corruption and Ricardo Reis Veiga

The environmental crime committed by Texaco in Ecuador – and now defended by Chevron in a multi-billion litigation there – is intimately tied to the malfeasance of Chevron lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga. Reis Veiga is known as the architect of Chevron's fraud in Ecuador. It is no coincidence that Chevron has hidden the formerly high-profile Veiga under the sheets for some time now, trying to keep him out of public view while the awful consequences of his misconduct play out in the trial in Ecuador and in the health problems of thousands of people.

To put it bluntly, Reis Veiga was Texaco's corporate hit man in Ecuador. He used fraud, money, deceit and the oil giant's raw power to help it evade responsibility for the deliberate dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon while Texaco operated an oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Reis Veiga, along with ten Ecuadorian officials with whom he is accused of conspiring, is currently under indictment for fraud in Ecuador for lying about the results of a sham remediation Texaco did in the mid-1990s.

While Reis Veiga supervised the trial in Ecuador, terrible strategic mistakes were made. Chevron took numerous soil samples that proved that the previously remediated sites were in fact not remediated, even though Reis Veiga and his colleague and Chevron lawyer Rodrigo Perez Pallares signed off on the clean-up. Under Reis Veiga's brilliant supervision, Chevron's local lawyers essentially proved the case of the plaintiffs.

For this brilliant legal work, Chevron has spent tens of millions of dollars in fees.

The latest issue for Reis Veiga is the role he played in directing Chevron employee Diego Borja in his failed effort to entrap a trial judge in Ecuador in a bribery scandal to derail the trial where the company faces a $27.3 billion liability.

The so-called "bribery" videotapes have been discredited since Chevron released them in August 2009. They do not show anyone taking a bribe; the judge never discusses a bribe. The two men who made the videotapes are not the good Samaritans Chevron portrayed them to be. American Wayne Hansen is a convicted felon and inveterate liar; Borja is a man who bragged to a friend that "crime pays" and said that Chevron "cooked" evidence in the lawsuit, created a dummy laboratory to process soil samples, and engaged in all sorts of malfeasance that if known in full would allow the plaintiffs to win the case in the time it takes him to snap his fingers.

Borja has worked for Chevron in Ecuador since at least 2004. On tapes recorded by childhood friend Santiago Escobar, Borja said he was hired by and took all of his direction from Chevron's Miami office headed by none other than the indefatigable Reis Veiga. Let's just say this type of behavior would be consistent with Reis Veiga's historical pattern. See transcripts of Borja's recorded conversations with Santiago Escobar, the childhood friend. (Transcript 6, October 1, 2009 p. 7-8; Transcript 2, October 1, 2009, pages 2-3)

Borja for years collected soil samples for Chevron during the Ecuador trial, for which he was paid $10,000 per month – a millionaire's wage in Ecuador. His wife, Sara Portillo, worked at the so-called "independent" laboratory that processed the company's soil samples and then presented them as "evidence" to the court.

In his conversations with Escobar, Borja said Chevron was concerned about a possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violation should anyone discover that the oil company had anything to do with the bribery scandal. The Act prohibits American companies from bribing or otherwise offering benefits to foreign government officials to obtain business.

Borja wrote in an online chat: "Imagine I disappear and say that everything is planned by the company…. They'll shit themselves, because the corruption law would apply in that case, and they'd close down their operations in the U.S." (9/15 online chat).

Chevron's management needs to bring Reis Veiga out from under the sheets to answer some basic questions about his relationship to Borja and the video scandal.

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Bob Herbert of NYT on Chevron: Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde

Bob Herbert's column today detailing the extent of the disaster caused by Chevron in Ecuador is not the first time his attention has turned to the tragedy in the region. The below article appeared in the New York Times on October 20, 2005.

You can find the original at: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html

October 20, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde?

By BOB HERBERT

Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation.

On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have "helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness."

Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.

According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers.

Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped "wasn't necessarily toxic."

"We've done inspections," the spokesman said. "We've done a deep scientific analysis, and that analysis has shown no harmful impacts from the operations. There just aren't any."

You would have a very difficult time selling that story to the people in the rain forest who have been drinking and bathing in water fouled with the byproducts of oil-drilling processes. Parents have watched their children play and their livestock feed in areas contaminated with oily substances. Pits that perpetually ooze gunk and oil are ubiquitous.

Two years ago, a reporter from The Times interviewed a man named René Arévalo who lived near a separation plant that was once operated by a Texaco subsidiary. The house in which Mr. Arévalo and his five children lived had been built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater had been dumped.

The family got its water from a well. "If you dig here just a meter deep," said Mr. Arévalo, "you hit oil. The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?"

Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001. From the early 1970's to 1992, the Texaco subsidiary was part of a consortium that ran the oil-drilling operations in an area of virgin rain forest known simply as the Oriente - the East. Texaco discovered oil there in the late 60's.

According to nearly all accounts, neither Texaco nor its primary partner in the consortium, Ecuador's state oil company - Petroecuador - paid much attention to the effects of the venture on the surrounding environment and its people. Tremendous amounts of waste generated from the drilling, extraction, processing and transportation operations - billions upon billions of gallons - were dumped into unlined pits in the ground or poured into freshwater streams.

"The systematic way that they disposed of toxic waste in Ecuador was to dump it into open-air pits that they dug out of the jungle soil, or directly into rivers, streams and swamps in one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet," said Steven Donziger, who is part of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers handling the lawsuit.

Crude oil was also spilled in the jungle, millions of gallons of it.

Disasters of this kind, involving poor people in remote areas of foreign countries, tend to stay low on the level of awareness of the American news media. The suffering tends to go unnoticed by the outside world.

The families in the vicinity of the Ecuadorean oil-drilling operations have had to drink from contaminated rivers and streams because they had such limited access to running water. And any pollution-related illnesses they may contract pose an even greater danger than normal because of their abject poverty and the absence of adequate health care.

Officials at Chevron do not see any of this as their problem. They will tell you that they've cleaned up any mess they might have made, and then some. And they will deny to their dying breath that they have harmed anyone.

After all, they're champions of the environment.

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Chevron Lawyer Admits Chevron Corruption

One of Chevron's chief Ecuadorian lawyers, Rodrigo Perez Pallares, has admitted under oath that the company has been lying to courts in the United States and Ecuador to evade a potential $27 billion liability in Ecuador. Chevron is accused in a lawsuit of deliberately dumping more than 18.5 billion gallons of toxic "produced water" and oil waste into Ecuador's Amazon rainforest when Texaco (now Chevron) operated and reaped the profits of an oil concession there from 1964 to 1992.

For years, Chevron's primary defense in the case – given that the scientific evidence of pollution is overwhelming -- is that the government of Ecuador "released" it from any future liability in return for a partial "remediation" even though that so-called "remediation" has been exposed as a complete fraud.

But the sworn testimony of Perez Pallares, Chevron's own lawyer and the man who negotiated and signed the "release" agreement, proves what the Amazonian communities have long said – that Chevron knows that this legal defense is bogus. When Perez Pallares was asked in a deposition in the United States if the "release" impacts claims of third parties parties who did not sign the release (like those of the Amazonian residents currently suing Chevron) his response was simple: The release has no impact on those claims.

This testimony directly contradicts what Chevron is saying in various courts around the world, to its shareholders, to journalists, and to the SEC and regulatory authorities. Perez Pallares made his statements on November 16, 2006, during a deposition in a separate litigation between Ecuador's government and Chevron in New York federal court. In that case, Chevron hastily withdrew the "release" claim when it appeared a U.S. federal judge could actually review it and issue a ruling.

An excerpt from the stunning testimony of Perez Pallares:

Q: But what [Article 8 of the MOU] does do instead is it carves out entirely any action brought by parties who were not parties to the settlement agreement. Would you agree with that?

The Witness (Pallares): I agree…

Q: If I'm understanding you correctly, and I don't mean to mischaracterize your testimony – you'll tell me if I'm incorrect – I think what you're saying is that a plaintiff can sue in Ecuador but can only obtain relief to the extent that Ecuador permits that relief.

Pallares: That's exactly it.

Q: But the MOU and the settlement doesn't affect that one way or the other. It doesn't give them rights they would not otherwise have. Is that a fair statement?

Pallares: That's correct.

Read the entire page of the testimony here.

Note also that section VIII of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Chevron and Ecuador's government in 1994 explicitly states (in reference to the release):

The provisions of this agreement shall apply without prejudice to the rights possibly held by third parties for the impact caused as a consequence of the operations of the former PETROECUADOR-TEXACO Consortium.

Remember, Perez Pallares negotiated and signed the "release" for Chevron so we can assume he knows what he's talking about.

Chevron's CEO, John Watson, and General Counsel, Hewitt Pate, know that the company has been lying about its "release" of liability in Ecuador – which is why they've been desperate to attack the people bringing the lawsuit against the company and their allies. This desperation (and Watson's thin skin about the Ecuador issue) was on display in recent days when the company's annual shareholder meeting exploded into chaos when Watson couldn't handle being confronted by critics of Chevron's abysmal human rights and environmental record. Instead of talking to the critics, who had a legal right to be present at the shareholder meeting, Watson lost control of the meeting and ordered Chevron's private security forces and the Houston Police Department to crush the protestors – arresting five non-violent company critics, including a reverend from Oakland, CA. Now Chevron and the Houston Police Department are facing additional liability for blowing their cool and treating the shareholder's meeting like a junior high school student council meeting.

Given the size of Chevron's Ecuador liability and his own involvement in covering it up, Watson's desperation is understandable. Watson and Pate know that the scientific evidence – more than 62,000 chemical sampling results – and trial record – more than 200,000 pages of evidence, testimony, and motions – conclusively demonstrate Chevron's culpability in a disaster that is several orders of magnitude larger than the terrible tragedy caused by BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Given Chevron's despicable conduct in Ecuador, it is not surprising that Watson is using any means necessary to escape the liability – even if it includes lying to U.S. and Ecuadorian courts about the so-called "release" that his own lawyer knows is a bogus defense.

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Bob Herbert of NYT: Chevron Has Its Own BP Disaster In Ecuador

The following article appeared in today's New York Times:

Disaster in the Amazon

By BOB HERBERT

BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.

“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.

It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.

What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.

Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.

A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”

The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.

Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.

The oil companies don’t care. Shell can’t wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won’t happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.

Their assurances mean nothing.

President Obama has suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we’ve learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.

They’re dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.

Chevron doesn’t believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.

The indigenous residents may be suffering (they’re in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.

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NY Times: Media Companies Join Filmmaker in Opposing Chevron

This article appeared on the New York Times "ArtsBeat" blog yesterday:

Media Companies File Brief on Behalf of Filmmaker in Chevron Case

By DAVE ITZKOFF

A group of 13 media companies has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Joe Berlinger, the documentary filmmaker who is appealing a federal district court’s ruling that the oil company Chevron can subpoena the outtakes from his film “Crude.”

The brief, filed Tuesday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, by the lawyer Floyd Abrams, and which was joined by others, including NBC Universal, the Directors Guild of America, HBO and The New York Times Company, says the work of these companies “will be seriously jeopardized” by the district court’s decision and its effect on journalist’s privilege.

Last month, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District court in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Berlinger would have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage from “Crude,” his documentary about the Ecuadorians who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron), accusing it of contaminating their water. Chevron said Mr. Berlinger’s footage could be helpful to the company as it seeks to have the suit dismissed and pursues an international treaty arbitration related to the litigation.

The brief says the district court’s ruling “was fundamentally flawed” in its interpretation of the 1999 case Gonzales v. NBC, in which the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that even confidential materials can be released if they are likely to be relevant to a significant issue in the case and are not reasonably obtainable elsewhere.

The brief said:

a party seeking to compel production of such materials must make a somewhat less demanding showing than for confidential information — but a showing that is, nonetheless, still significantly more substantial than the burden on a litigant seeking ordinary garden-variety discovery.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling, the brief said, “effectively shifted the burden of alleged unfairness onto the filmmakers, rendering this circuit’s requirement of a relevance showing meaningless,” and “made it far too easy for Chevron to obtain far too much, precisely what Gonzales forbids.”

On May 21 Judge Denny Chin of the appellate court ordered a hearing on June 8 to consider a subpoena and stayed the subpoena until that hearing.

The friend-of-the-court brief can be found here. The 13 companies that joined it are ABC, The Associated Press, CBS Broadcasting, the Daily News, the Directors Guild of America, Dow Jones & Company, Gannett Company, Hearst Corporation, Home Box Office, the International Documentary Association, NBC Universal, The New York Times Company and The Washington Post.

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Pat Murphy: Chevron’s Bogus Blogger Up to Old Tricks

Surprise, surprise: Pat Murphy, purveyor of the SanFranciscoSentinel.com (a small online "newspaper" that sells editorial control of its opinions while pretending to offer neutral commentary) is once again carrying Chevron's water in the company's never-ending campaign to escape justice for its environmental catastrophe in Ecuador.

Pat Murphy

This time, Murphy has attacked the indigenous people of Ecuador suing Chevron for having the temerity to characterize Chevron's man-made, planned disaster in Ecuador as larger than BP's accidental spill in the Gulf. In Ecuador, Chevron discharged the equivalent of at least 345 million gallons of crude into the rainforest where six indigenous groups lived for centuries. Due to Chevron, all of those indigenous groups have seen their lifestyles devastated – not dissimilar to what is happening right now to the fisherman of Louisiana.

The U.S. government's most recent estimate is that BP has discharged between 18 and 39 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. At the top end, that's about one-tenth as large as the dumping Chevron did in Ecuador when its predecessor company Texaco operated a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Texaco's sludge, now Chevron's problem, is still there: Take a look at photos of the contamination and its impacts.

The question for Murphy is: Why is it a tragedy when 18 to 39 million gallons of contamination are spilled in America, but Chevron is getting "defrauded" when people call attention to 345 million gallons the company systematically dumped in Ecuador?

The answer is simple: Because in the world according to Chevron, Ecuadorian lives aren't worth much – particularly when they are indigenous people living in the forest. And, of course, BP isn't paying Pat Murphy to spread their propaganda while Chevron is.

Amazon Watch and the Amazon Defense Coalition have demonstrated that Pat Murphy is a paid blogger who has sold editorial control of his website to Chevron – an accusation that Murphy has never denied. (He once stated that he was not being paid directly by Chevron.) Over the past two years Murphy has offered a steady stream of commentary and misleading facts meant to discredit Chevron's critics – critics that Chevron is working hard to silence. And if you are Googling the Chevron case in Ecuador from Rotterdam or some other far-flung place, you might actually think the "San Francisco Sentinel" is the leading newspaper of San Francisco rather than one of the least-trafficked news sites on the Web (it ranked 171,939 in popularity among websites, compared to 851 for the San Francisco Chronicle).

Of course, the practice of blogging or writing articles on behalf of clients without disclosing payments is considered highly unethical. But that's never stopped Murphy before, and we don't expect it to stop him now. When you lay down with dogs, as Murphy has with Chevron, you get fleas.

If Murphy really wants to understand the issues in Ecuador – and not just squander any semblance of journalistic integrity that he might have once had (or thought he had) – we would invite him to visit the impacted region. If Murphy had to drink the poisoned water being forced on the local inhabitants because of Chevron, he might be slower to take what amounts to "blood money" to help cover up an environmental and human rights tragedy that is unparalleled on Earth.

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Tragic BP Gulf Spill Casts Light on Chevron Disaster in Ecuador

The Amazon Defense Coalition put out this release today:

Tragic BP Gulf Spill Casts Light on Chevron Disaster in Ecuador

While BP Is Largest Spill In U.S.,Chevron's Ecuador Disaster Is Largest In World

Chevron Admits Dumping at Least 16 Billion Gallons of Toxic Waste into Rainforest

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As the nation remains riveted on the tragic BP spill unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron still holds the record for creating the world's largest oil-related contamination and it happened deliberately in the populated Amazon rainforest in an even more sensitive ecosystem than the marshes of Louisiana.

Chevron's illegal oil-related dumping is at the root of a class action lawsuit in Ecuador where the oil giant now faces more than $27 billion in damages for poisoning an area the size of Rhode Island with 18.5 billion gallons of toxic "produced water," or more than 474 times the amount of contamination estimated to have been spilled in the Gulf of Mexico tragedy, according to calculations made by representatives of the plaintiffs.

Chevron's contamination has decimated the traditional lifestyles of five indigenous groups in the area, and one group has disappeared, according to the lawsuit. The pollution occurred when Texaco (now owned by Chevron) was the exclusive operator of a large oil concession in the rainforest from 1964 to 1990.

A 17-year trial against Chevron taking place in Ecuador's courts – moved there from U.S. federal court in 2002 at Chevron's request – is expected to end later this year. Chevron has declared the trial court is "biased" against it and has announced it will not pay any adverse judgment.

The plaintiffs in the trial are tens of thousands of rainforest residents, including the surviving members of indigenous groups called the Secoya, Cofan, Siona, Huarani, and Kichwa.

These are the facts of Chevron's dumping in the Amazon and how it compares to the BP spill in the Gulf:

• In the 1970s, Chevron's predecessor company Texaco (bought by Chevron in 2001) perforated hundreds of oil wells across a 2,000 sq-mile swath of rainforest that was home to the indigenous groups. The area where Chevron operated is one of the most biodiverse in the world, containing almost 10% of the world's plant species.
  
• Instead of re-injecting toxic "produced water" (which contains high levels of salt, pure crude, and the carcinogen benzene) deep into the ground – the industry practice then recommended by the American Petroleum Institute – Chevron dumped 18 billion gallons of it into rivers and streams. These waters had been used thousands of years by the local population for its drinking water.
  
• The BP tragedy was an accident; Chevron's discharge in Ecuador was deliberate.
  
• Chevron, as reported by 60 Minutes last year, also built more than 900 unlined waste pits to permanently store toxic sludge – another violation of industry standards. It then built pipes to drain the sludge into nearby streams.
  
• Chevron also burned gas without controls, creating enormous air pollution and a "black rain" phenomenon in the rainforest.
  

These facts have been documented in numerous testimonies, in more than 200,000 pages of trial evidence, and in the book Amazon Crude written by law professor Judith Kimerling and published in 1991 just before Texaco fled the country in 1992, according to representatives of the plaintiffs.

Experts have concluded that the Chevron discharged at least 345 million gallons of pure crude oil directly into the rainforest ecosystem, including 17 million from ruptured pipelines. To put this in perspective, the U.S. government has estimated that between 18 and 39 million gallons have been spilled thus far in BP's disaster in the Gulf, and approximately 11 million gallons of pure crude was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Just like BP in the Gulf spill, Chevron continually tries to obfuscate the facts and cover up its responsibility in Ecuador:

• In 1972, a Chevron executive issued a memo ordering that all documents in Ecuador documenting oil spills be destroyed.
  
• Chevron claims it was "released" from further clean-up responsibility based on a "release" signed with the Government of Ecuador. But Chevron's "remediation" was a fraud. Evidence presented at trial shows that the small number of pits "remediated" are still as contaminated as sites not touched.
  
• As a result of Chevron's fraudulent "remediation," two company lawyers and ten former Ecuadorian government officials are now under indictment in Ecuador for lying about the clean-up results.
  
• During the trial in Ecuador, lawyers for the plaintiffs have been subjected to death threats, a Nixon-style dirty tricks campaign to remove a judge, and the use of junk science by Chevron "experts."
  
• Chevron claims high cancer rates are caused not by exposure to toxins, but by the poor personal hygiene among the local population.
  
• Chevron also has tried to silence its Ecuador critics – pressuring media outlets to deny advertising about the company's human rights problems and even going as far to have five people arrested at its shareholder meeting last week.
  

For photos of this horrible disaster, click here, or get the book Crude Reflections by Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak. A complete summary of the evidence can be found here. For Chevron's lies, click here. To purchase a copy of an award winning documentary film about the case, "Crude," click here. For the latest developments, see www.chevrontoxico.com.

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Chevron’s Watson To Feds: Stop Us Before We Hurt Somebody

From a recent Dow Jones article: Chevron Corp. (CVX) Chief Executive John Watson said that the oil and gas industry has asked the U.S. government to raise safety standards for offshore drilling in order to avoid another "tragedy" like the massive spill that is still threatening the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

In other words: "Stop us before we hurt somebody."

Watson's remarks are an astonishing admission from an oil industry CEO. He's acknowledging that oil companies are incapable of ensuring safe operations and conceding they will maximize profits and compromise safety standards unless the government steps in.

But Watson knows exactly what he is talking about – the damage that he is talking about is exactly what Chevron caused in Ecuador, an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. Left to its own devices, Chevron put profits ahead of the safety of indigenous groups and the pristine environment of the Amazonian rainforest from the moment it landed its first helicopter in 1964 until it exited the country in 1992. By using substandard exploration and safety measures, Chevron "saved" an estimated $8 billion during three decades of exploitive oil drilling and exploration. This "savings" has resulted in the devastation of thousands of lives, an outbreak of cancer, and the decimation of indigenous groups.

The New York Times reported recently on a BP memo that admitted the oil company elected to use a cheaper type of cement casing system around the "blowout preventer" that experts believe may have prevented the explosion and the resulting spill. Texaco made a similar decision in Ecuador in the 1970s when it decided to not spend the $4 million at each of its well sites necessary to implement proper safety measures, such as the lining of toxic waste pits. Instead, Texaco's preferred method in the impoverished rainforest could be described quite simply: "dig and dump."

Instead of re-injecting deep into the ground the oil and toxic waste water left over from drilling well sites, as was the industry standard in the United States since at least 1962, Texaco dug over 900 huge holes in the ground and dumped a deadly mix of oil, chemicals and minerals into the unlined oil pits. Recent testing during the trial at about 100 of these oil pits and well sites revealed illegal and unacceptable levels of contamination that continue to leech into the ground, polluting the soil and water that the indigenous tribes and other Ecuadorians living in the area depend on for their survival.

The deadly consequences stemming from putting profits ahead of safety is a lesson that Chevron learned all too well in Ecuador. BP is now learning the same hard lesson in the Gulf. The question is whether either company will be held accountable.

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Chevron’s Corrupt and Cozy Relationships with Oil Industry Regulators

President Obama recently promised Americans to end the "cozy relationship" between government and the oil industry. No oil company has been better at developing these "cozy relationships" with regulators than Chevron, which is being sued in Ecuador for the worst oil-related contamination on earth. The sordid tales below give you a glimpse of just how far Chevron will go to evade laws designed to protect people and the environment.

Chevron Courts US Regulators With Money, Drugs & Sex: The news media has reported widely about the "cozy relationship" between the U.S. Minerals Management Service and the oil industry, and President Obama has promised to end it by separating conflicting regulatory functions. Recently news broke about an upcoming Inspector General's report which will detail how MMS officials allowed oil companies to write their own oversight reports.

We should not, though, forget about Chevron's corruption of the MMS detailed in a 2008 report.

In September 2008, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior accused MMS employees of accepting thousands of dollars in gifts, including ski trips, from Chevron and three other oil companies. The report also alleged drug use and sexual affairs between MMS and Chevron officials and charged that

Chevron was the only oil company that did not cooperate with the IG's investigation.

Chevron's Phony Lab Results:
The New York Times reported recently on the "cozy relationship" between oil companies and laboratories that test for contamination. The article focused on the potential conflict of interest between BP and the laboratories being used by the federal government to test for contamination of the water and soil on the Gulf Coast. State and local leaders are concerned that the labs could distort information about given that they also work for all the major oil companies. They should be concerned. In the lawsuit against Chevron for oil contamination in Ecuador, Chevron is testing soil and water samples at a lab where its own contractor worked even though it tried to pass off the lab as "independent".

Several weeks ago, the indigenous and farmer communities suing Chevron revealed new information that Chevron "cooked" evidence in the Ecuador trial to avoid a judgment – and that the oil company was providing financial support to employee Diego Borja to prevent him from going public with the company's fraud. Among Chevron's corrupt and fraudulent acts, according to Borja: the oil giant directed Borja to create dummy companies in Ecuador to make it appear that a laboratory Chevron used to process soil and water samples during the environmental trial was independent, when in fact it was controlled by Chevron.

The plaintiffs have long contended that Chevron has intentionally and fraudulently used bogus lab testing procedures to artificially lower the amount of contamination reported to the Court.

Chevron Corrupts Weak Governments: Details about the waivers and permits that U.S. federal agencies granted BP on the Gulf Coast prior to the oil spill are not comforting – they suggest that the regulators the American people were depending on to protect us from disasters have been thoroughly compromised by their cozy relationship to the oil industry. But this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who pays attention to this sector. Chevron in particular has a long history of colluding with government officials to exploit natural resources at the expense of that country's citizenry.

The most destructive and disturbing incidents occurred over four decades in Ecuador's rainforest, where Texaco (now Chevron) intentionally contaminated the waterways and soils and destroyed a way of life for indigenous groups that has led to suffering, illness and ultimately death for untold numbers of people. The "cozy relationship" that Texaco developed with the governments of Ecuador during this time (from 1964 to 1992) resulted in the largest environmental disaster on the planet.

It also produced a fraudulent remediation agreement between Texaco and the government – an agreement that Texaco and now Chevron argue releases it from any liability. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up a small number of oil sites in exchange for the release and cites the agreement as its main defense in the 17-year-old lawsuit. However, recent testing conducted during the Lago Agrio trial at the oil sites Texaco said it cleaned found them to be just as contaminated as the oil sites not cleaned. For their part in the scam, two Chevron lawyers, involved in the negotiation of the remediation agreement, along with seven former government officials, have been indicted for fraud in Ecuador.

As the oil pours into the marshes and onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast, people need to pay more attention to Chevron's disastrous story in Ecuador.

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