Leeville, La., a coastal community still hurting from the impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Matthew Lee is a professor of sociology and associate vice chancellor in the Office of Research and Economic Development atLSU and has been closely involved in LSU's research response to the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

It's been three years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and forever changing the way the world views the Gulf Coast. While the $4 billion verdict against BP has finally been handed down as justice for damages, it's not going to help many of the people directly impacted by the spill's impacts. It's time for a reminder of the long-term impacts accompanying technological disasters — and for the development of a better system for addressing the mental well-being of coastal residentsand their communities after these all-too-frequent events.

As a sociologist in Louisiana, I've tracked the status of these men, women and families — people who have history in their geography, whose families have worked the same jobs in the same places for generations. These people do hard, back-breaking labor to provide our nation with seafood, oil and gas. They maintain the largest port system in the world, and are exposed to some of the worst hazards imaginable — hurricanes and oil spills, just to scratch the surface.

Through our research, published this week in the journal Social Science Research, my colleagues and I have demonstrated the deep impact the spill had on coastal residents. We conducted the study during the BP spill, several months after the well was capped, and a year after the spill erupted, and we have documented how stressful that event has been on the psyche of the affected citizens.

Not surprisingly, households involved in the fishing industry were particularly impacted, and unlike households employed in other industries, their stress levels actually got worse over the year following the event, not better. We know that a number of factors affected the mental health of this population, but it is safe to say that personal economic status was a top contributor.

There is a significant lesson to be learned here. Policymakers who oversee disaster-relief efforts should be tuned in to the fact that some groups — for example, those that make a living off of natural resources and deal largely in cash-based economies — will have recovery needs that are different from people in other types of settings. "One size fits all" disaster relief packages cannot possibly be efficient or effective in meeting the needs of local communities that have unique cultural and ethnic histories, different community-based resources or specific labor-force configurations. [Disaster Laws: Will Gulf Oil Spill Change Anything?]

Louisiana's coastal population is indeed one of a kind, but it is a major contributor to our national economy. Our state provides the largest fishing haul in the lower 48 states — a catch that nets the United States more than $3 billion annually. As the top producer of domestic oil, we also inject more than $70 billion in energy profits into the economy each year. During these lean financial times, such numbers cannot be ignored.

As the fishing households of coastal Louisiana remind us, technological disasters don't affect all local residents equally, and relief programs — which are supposed to help community residents recover and move forward with their lives — have a responsibility to remain flexible enough in their resource allocation guidelines to be able to assist all those who have been harmed. There needs to be a serious re-evaluation of the way Louisiana's coastal communities — and others who have been impacted by such disasters — are faring. Right now, they need help — help specifically targeted to their needs.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, gave no details as to when or where sarin may have been used.

The Geneva-based inquiry into war crimes and other human rights violations is separate from an investigation of the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria instigated by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which has since stalled.

President Bashar al-Assad's government and the rebels accuse each another of carrying out three chemical weapon attacks, one near Aleppo and another near Damascus, both in March, and another in Homs in December.

The civil war began with anti-government protests in March 2011. The conflict has now claimed an estimated 70,000 lives and forced 1.2 million Syrian refugees to flee.

The United States has said it has "varying degrees of confidence" that sarin has been used by Syria's government on its people.

President Barack Obama last year declared that the use or deployment of chemical weapons by Assad would cross a "red line".

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

The New Normal: Boston Bombing Suspect Interrogated Without Counsel

Archangel Michael has said that the Boston Bombings were carried out by domestic right-wing extremists who oppose the powers of the federal government. This man hardly fits that description. Moreover he said that the government was aware of who did it and connived with them. So this pursuit of the wrong suspect is doubly damning.

The New Normal: Boston Bombing Suspect Interrogated Without Counsel

Kurt Nimmo, Infowars.com, May 5, 2013

http://www.infowars.com/the-new-normal-boston-bombing-suspect-interrogated-without-counsel/

According to lawyers Derege Demissie and Susan Church, Robel Phillipos, the teenager accused of lying to investigators after the Boston Marathon bombings, was interrogated without the benefit of a lawyer.

“This case is about a frightened and confused 19 year old who was subjected to intense questioning and interrogation, without the benefit of counsel, and in the context of one of the worst attacks against the nation,” the lawyers wrote. “The weight of the federal government under such circumstances can have a devastatingly crushing effect on the ability of an adolescent to withstand the enormous pressure and respond rationally.”

The Sixth Amendment states:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

In Brewer v. Williams (1977) the court ruled that once an adversary proceeding has begun against a defendant, he has a right to legal representation when the government interrogates him.

It is unclear if the suspect was given his Miranda rights notification. Dzhokar Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored because he was being interrogated under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule. Obama’s DOJ has unilaterally expanded the exception far beyond what the Supreme Court has established.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Delaying Miranda warnings under the “public safety exception” – including under the Obama DOJ’s radically expanded version of it – is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. As the lawyer bmaz comprehensively details in this excellent post, it is virtually unheard of for the “public safety” exception to be used to deny someone their right to a lawyer as opposed to delaying a Miranda warning (the only cases where this has been accepted were when “the intrusion into the constitutional right to counsel… was so fleeting – in both it was no more than a question or two about a weapon on the premises of a search while the search warrant was actively being executed”). To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless.

“This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: there is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel,” Greenwald continues. “And there are ample and obvious dangers in letting the government do this.”

DOJ boss Holder and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, complained about Tsarnaev’s appearance before a judge and his right to counsel. They have called for an investigation.

If Phillipos was indeed denied counsel during his interrogation, it is another indication that the government will arrogantly ignore the Sixth and the Fifth amendments in criminal cases it defines as terrorism.

As the Indefinite Detention clause of the NDAA demonstrates, the government is determined to use the war on terror as an excuse to violate the rights of Americans. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield,” the ACLU noted after Obama signed the bill into law.

Mission Creep Police State

The government is determined to exploit the war on terror to increase its reach. The Department of Homeland Security was established in late 2002 for the purpose of responding to terrorist attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters. It has sincedeclared it is “responsible for investigating a wide range of domestic and international activities arising from the illegal movement of people and goods” and “immigration crime, human rights violations and human smuggling, smuggling of narcotics, weapons and other types of contraband, financial crimes, cybercrime and export enforcement issues.”

“September 11 provided the federal government with a bullet-proof excuse to further absorb and integrate state and local law enforcement, a project that has been underway at least since the late 1960s,” I wrote last March.

Over the last decade, the feds have established a number of efforts tonationalize law enforcement and create a number of organizations designed to supposedly “protect the homeland” from not only terrorists – mosthandled by the FBI and the CIA – but all sorts of domestic criminals, including those who engage in victimless crimes such as drug use and prostitution.

There are now dozens of organizations feeding off tax dollars dispensed by the feds – from FEMA’s Citizen Corps to Volunteers in Police Service andInfragard and beyond. In many ways, these federally-funded and organized groups rival the police state apparatus active in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The DHS has strived to incorporate non-terrorist crime into its ever-growing agenda – and subsequently promote its raison d’être as another federal agency lining up at the tax trough to gobble up billions of dollars of wealth confiscated from the producers.

For example, the DHS now “protects victims” from “domestic violence and other violent crimes” that have nothing to do with the late CIA asset Osama bin Laden or the would-be nineteen hijackers who trained on U.S. military bases. The mega-bureaucracy now doles out money to everything from“Juvenile Accountability” to anti-counterfeiting, border security, and computer incident response.

But it really shines when it comes to acting as a political surveillance tool for the establishment. It has successfully exploited the global jihad terror myth to spy on antiwar and patriot groups and recently the Occupy movement. So-called fusion centers – centralized high-tech Orwellian snoop hubs – now dot the landscape and feed data into the DHS leviathan.

Obviously, the role of a radically expanded surveillance and police state is not to protect us from terrorists the government created – and continues to create for its political theater – but to undermine and subvert opposition to the government and the establishment status quo.

In order for a police state to work effectively, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be subverted and rendered useless as well. Political enemies of the elite must not be allowed access to counsel or appear before judges.

The United States is rapidly becoming a third world dictatorship where enemies of the state disappear. It is a long-term project going back decades.

In 1987 during the Iran-Contra hearings, Congressman Jack Brooks gave us a brief glimpse of what the government has in mind – the “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis,” and the roundup and internment of political enemies.