Trade Group Asks Oil Companies to Recruit Employees for ‘Citizen' Rallies

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 16, 2009

A petroleum industry trade group is asking oil companies to recruit employees and retirees to attend rallies attacking climate-change legislation, an approach to grass-roots politics that resembles strategies used recently by some opponents of health-care reform.

In a memo this month, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard detailed plans for "Energy Citizen" rallies to be held in 20 states during the final two weeks of Congress's August recess. Gerard wrote that the intent was to put a "human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy," including a climate-change bill passed by the House in June.

"Please indicate to your company leadership your strong support for employee participation in the rallies," Gerard wrote in the memo, saying that contractors and suppliers should also be recruited.

Environmental groups on Saturday criticized the rallies, which they described as manufactured events intended to pass as organic assemblies of concerned citizens. Greenpeace activists said they saw parallels to the health-care debate, where opponents of reform -- including some organizations that receive heavy funding from industry groups and individuals -- have organized efforts to shout down lawmakers at "town hall" meetings.

"It's the most powerful among us, masquerading as grass-roots outrage to stifle debate on global warming," Michael Crocker, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said of the oil group's plans. "These are manufactured concerns, and the people who get involved in this are paid to put on this theater."

The memo, obtained by Greenpeace, was first reported on by the Financial Times Saturday.

Kert Davies, another official with Greenpeace, said the group opposes the climate bill, too, deeming it too lenient on polluters.

In a telephone interview, Gerard defended the meetings as events of education and discussion. He said they are designed to be standalone rallies, not efforts to pack lawmakers' scheduled meetings.

"There's a lot of folks out there that would like to suggest that anybody that doesn't agree with their views somehow doesn't play by the rules. We disagree strongly with that," Gerard said. His group says the bill passed by the House would cost millions of jobs and burden the U.S. economy with higher energy costs.

This skirmishing over the memo shows how hot the debate on climate-change legislation has become, even with health care dominating the Hill. Last week, the Center for Public Integrity found that 1,150 firms and advocacy groups were lobbying over climate- change legislation.

The House bill calls for a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, measured against 2005 levels, by 2020. It would also require polluters to buy "allowances" for each ton of emissions and allow them to exceed their allotted share of pollution only by buying more allowances.

Democratic leaders in the Senate have said they will use the House bill as a model for their version of the legislation.

The oil industry seems divided on the issue. Shell Oil and BP America, both members of the American Petroleum Institute, are also members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which has supported a "cap and trade" approach. Spokesmen for both companies said yesterday they would not participate in the "Energy Citizen" rallies.

And former vice president Al Gore's group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, is part of an effort to hold rallies attended by people who have -- or would like to have -- jobs in the renewable-energy sector. Their economic prospects might improve if a climate bill passes.

Alice McKeon, a spokeswoman for the group, said she did not think attendees were being recruited through their employers, in the way the oil group aims to do.

"They're reaching out to the businesses directly and getting their people involved in it, as employees, and that's not something that we've used as a tactic," she said.

Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

HULUGHO, Kenya — A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab, a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia, beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any Americans or Europeans who get in their way.

In most places this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.

Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda did in 1998.

Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text messages warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass buildings.”

The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”

Then on Saturday it happened again: Somali gunmen, widely believed to be with the Shabab, stormed the offices of an aid organization and kidnapped three aid workers from a Kenyan border town before melting back into Somalia.

American and British advisers are working closely with Kenyan counterterrorism teams, but the area along the Somali border is known to be a gaping hole.

“The Kenyans don’t have the skills to close the border, even if they wanted to,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “People are very concerned. But on some level, we can’t defend Kenya’s border for them.”

When asked to assess the level of security at the Somali border, the diplomat flatly stated, “There is no security.”

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.

Late last month, American officials acknowledged that they had shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia’s transitional government, a disclosure that has only sharpened the Shabab’s anti-American sentiments.

Kenyan security forces are now flooding into their borderlands, marching along the shimmering roads and across the unforgiving landscape, their assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

But the 400-mile border is inevitably porous, and Somali-speaking nomads from both countries flow seamlessly back and forth in diaphanous shawls and worn-out wooden carts. And the biggest proverbial holes may be in the police officers’ pockets.

Just this month, Transparency International listed Kenya as the most corrupt nation in East Africa. The region’s most corrupt public institution? The Kenyan police.

Even though the border is officially closed, Hassan Mohamed, a refugee who used to build houses in Somalia but got driven out by war, explained how thousands of Somali refugees find their way into Kenya each month.

“It’s easy,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together in the universal sign of a bribe. “If you pay, you can come in.”

The cracked wooden shelves in the border-town markets are heaped with the telltale signs of a flourishing smuggling business: sacks of Pakistani sugar, foreign brands of sodas and soaps, cigarettes with Somali labels — all illegal imports from Somalia that somehow made it past the dozen police checkpoints on the Kenyan side.

Abdi Dimbil Alan, an elder who lives in Alin Jugul, a town near the Somali border, says that nearly every night he witnesses the same Somali businessmen paying off the Kenyan police to allow consumer goods and even assault rifles to slip through the border.

“These guys are so corrupt,” Mr. Abdi said, referring to the border police, “that if 100 Shabab pulled up with a truckload of weapons and said they were coming to Kenya to kill the president, the police would let them through — for the right price.”

Erick Kipkorir, a district officer in Alin Jugul, said Kenyan forces were hard-working and honest.

“We can’t say that nothing is coming in because, as you see, the border is very expansive,” he said. “But as for bribes, that has never happened.”

Ever since Al Qaeda blew up the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands, American counterterrorism officials have been watching East Africa warily. But in the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, it seems that anti-Americanism is still spreading, despite the millions of dollars the American government has spent on a hearts-and-minds campaign.

Take an American-built well in the village of Raya. No one is using it, though Raya is desperately poor and dry.

“The Americans wanted to finish us,” said one villager, Ibrahim Alin, convinced that the American water engineers who built the well had poisoned it to sterilize him.

The Somali-speaking areas of Kenya have always been an uneasy fit, and Kenya has often responded brutally.

This area tried to secede in the 1960s and join Somalia, leading to a guerrilla war. In 1984, Kenyan security forces imprisoned and then killed thousands of ethnic Somali men at a remote airstrip, according to Kenyan human rights groups.

In recent weeks, Human Rights Watch accused Kenyan security services of raping women and smashing the testicles of men during a crackdown in northeastern Kenya in October.

“We’re trying to find a way that when they do deploy,” the Western diplomat said, “they do more helping than hurting.”