Today's Stories

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

May 11, 2009

Corporate Poisoners Walk in Sickening Verdict

No Justice for Libby

By ANDREA PEACOCK

A collective stunned silence hit the state of Montana last Friday at lunch, as news filtered out from federal district Judge Donald Molloy’s Missoula courtroom that W.R. Grace and three of its former executives had been acquitted of all crimes in connection with the asbestos poisoning of Libby, Montana.

Then the emails, phone calls and FaceBook messages started: “We are sick to our stomachs…” “What an injustice, tell me who I can write to…” “Not guilty?? Pardon me, but WTF?? This is shocking.” “Surely 2,000 cases of illness and about 225 deaths in the Libby area are not their fault. B*tards.”

Court watchers were less surprised. From the nature of the charges themselves and the statutes of limitations, from the rulings prohibiting evidence Molloy deemed prejudicial to the final jury instructions, Grace’s lawyers prevailed on nearly every point that gave them an edge, making it all but impossible for the 12 jurors to come to any other conclusion.

At issue were criminal charges for environmental crimes against the U.S. government and people of Libby, Montana: namely, that Grace and these men knowingly exposed generations of a small Montana town to lethal doses of a particularly virulent form of asbestos from its vermiculite mine there, violating the Clean Air Act in a conspiracy to defraud the federal government, and obstructing the subsequent investigation. More than 270 people from Libby lie in their graves due to asbestos from the mine, and another 1,800 (from a community of about 12,000) walk around with the likely death sentence of an asbestos-related diagnosis.

The government’s case walked a razor’s edge of dates and crimes. The Clean Air Act provisions Grace was accused of violating didn’t exist until 1990, the year the mine closed. Furthermore, the five-year statute of limitations began running at the end of 1999, when a newspaper series brought the tragedy in Libby to light. Since charges weren’t brought until 2004, that left a very thin sliver of time in which to find evidence of wrongdoing.

So while prosecutors were permitted to introduce evidence of the conspiracy dating back to 1976, it also had to prove that this conspiracy continued through the Clean Air enactments of 1990, and into the relevant time period after 1999. This was particularly problematic as it related to the human defendants: Robert Bettacchi, Henry Eschenbach, William McCaig, Robert Walsh, and Jack Wolter. McCaig, for instance, retired before the 1990 Clean Air Act provisions came into existence. Wolter was fired in 1994, and Eschenbach retired in 1996. (There were originally seven defendants along with Grace: Alan Stringer died before having his day in court; O. Mario Favorito had his case severed due to his unique status as Grace counsel. Charges against Walsh and McCaig were dismissed at the tail end of the case, when the government realized the court’s restrictions on evidence made it impossible to prove the charges against them.)

The government’s theory of the case was elegant despite these challenges: each charge complemented and necessitated the others. Grace knew the specific and unique toxicity of its tremolite asbestos fiber, prosecutors asserted, yet withheld crucial pieces of evidence from regulatory agencies in order to keep turning profits and avoid liability. Company memos discuss these goals in detail through the 1970s, as executives debated what to do about Libby product lines while federal regulations regarding asbestos were in flux. This was the conspiracy.

The deception took on some urgency in 1990, the theory continued, when federal law made it a crime to release a hazardous substance into the ambient air, knowing that it created the risk of imminent death or serious injury. Assistant U.S. attorney Kris McLean accurately likened the vermiculite left around town to land mines set for Libby’s citizens to step on.

When W.R. Grace executives closed the Libby mine in 1990 and split town, they did so knowing that the high school and middle school running tracks had been paved with mine tailings; that the Plummer Elementary School ice skating rink was constructed with its ore; that the former screening plant sold to a local family, the Parkers, for their nursery and storage businesses was blanketed with asbestos-contaminated vermiculite; that the export plant it donated to the town—which was subsequently leased for a family-run retail lumber and planing business—was also chock full of the stuff.

Grace was sloppy with a product it knew to be lethal, allowing it to be spread around the Little League baseball fields, to be used by a local sand and gravel company, to be loaded by pickup trucks and carried to gardens and yards throughout town, and to “sand” the dirt road running up Rainy Creek to the mine, frequented by locals to access hunting and by kids to get to a popular party meadow.

In the prosecution’s narrative, the citizens of Libby became unwitting agents of Grace, indirectly causing the hazardous releases while going about their day-to-day lives. These were the Clean Air Act violations.

When people became sick, when people died, their families took Grace to court and won: sometimes settlements, sometimes guilty verdicts—all amounting to modest sums of money. To the company, it was the cost of doing business. Grace had profited from Libby, unloaded its contaminated properties, and gotten out of town more or less scott-free. This was the conspiracy, prosecutors said, in action.

Then in 1999, Andrew Schneider’s series on Libby was published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Environmental Protection Agency sent a team to town to find out what was really going on. As the EPA agents talked with Grace, the company stalled, misled and outright lied to them, both in person and in writing, causing delay in the cleanup and yet more exposures to the deadly fibers. This was the obstruction.

“They tell a little bit of the story, they tell the wrong story, they deflect, they delay…” attorney McLean argued to Judge Molloy against the defendants’ motions to acquit. “They need to continue hiding the ball, otherwise the endangerment is going to be discovered. If Grace were to tell the EPA ‘We knew the workers were going home with dust on their clothes,’ given the sickness that existed in the population, they would be responsible for that. It’s not the kind of statement they could make to the government and not let the cat out of the bag.

“This is the company line, this is what they had to say. They cannot tell the truth about this or they will suffer substantial liabilities and possible criminal prosecution.”

If that was Grace’s corporate strategy for the nearly three decades it owned the mine, it was also a brilliant legal strategy that served them just as well in 2009.

By my count, there were about a dozen different arguments put forward by Grace and the other defendants upon which the jury could legitimately have hung its not guilty verdicts. These included assertions I found ludicrous—like the notions that Libby’s fiber is not actually a regulated form of asbestos, and the sick folks up there are not really ailing, but misdiagnosed—but which might have found traction among the 12 people who haven’t spent the last 10 years researching the subject.

Other theories were designed to create confusion. Grace pounded away at the government’s science. Toxicology, geology, epidemiology are not easy subjects, and absent Grace’s specific knowledge about the asbestos in Libby, the rest of us have always been playing catch up. So when Grace attorneys put on experts who claimed the government got it wrong, how were the jurors to say, beyond a reasonable doubt, who had it right?

Lead Grace attorney David Bernick zeroed in on the unusual idea that Grace used innocent third parties to cause the release of asbestos. He likened it to having a bucket full of a hazardous substance. If he were to tell someone to kick the bucket, he reasoned, he’d be liable. But to set the bucket down on the ground and walk away, then be held liable 10 years later when someone kicked it, would be unfair, and not the intent of the law.

Grace argued that its internal debates on what to do about Libby were legitimate business discussions, not evidence of conspiracy. Attorneys, knowing full well that property rights play well in Montana, claimed Grace had every right to deny access to the mine to EPA investigators, given concerns about liability and its misgivings over the EPA’s cleanup plans. They claimed EPA questionnaires were intended as “gotchas,” an attempt to trick Grace into providing answers that would provide a basis for prosecution. They made full use of the stereotype that Montanans distrust the power of government, turning what were probably honest mistakes by federal investigators into allegations of full-scale corruption.

“What did [the prosecutors] show by their conduct?” Bernick asked in closing. “They care a lot about Libby, they had an allegiance to Libby; the somber tones of Mr. Cassidy talking about the toll of Libby. Their allegiance was to Libby, not to the law…

“They’ve taken a political story and criminalized it, want to bring it home to you and make it stick.”

It was a pretty slick argument, allowing the jury to have sympathy for Libby, empathy for the prosecutors, all the while voting for the defense.

Most convincing was evidence that the State of Montana and EPA knew enough of what was happening in Libby, they should have been all over that town 30 years ago. There is blame to share, and while that does not release Grace and these men from their responsibilities, it is utterly true.

And if 11 weeks of such confusing, conflicted testimony weren’t enough to raise reasonable doubts, the defense planted a couple ringers within the jury instructions, the court-approved guidelines sent with the jurors into their deliberations. One defined “imminent danger” as a command that the prosecutors must prove it was “more likely than not to cause death or serious bodily injury.” Defense attorneys construed this to mean that at least half the people exposed in Libby needed to be dying (instead of just the 20 percent of the community members showing evidence of asbestos-related lung disease). Another instruction specified that the releases of hazardous material placing people in such imminent danger must have happened “for the first time” after November 1999. By that logic, Bernick’s bucket metaphor applied: people had been kicking it for nearly a decade. There were no first times after November 1999.

Prosecutor Kevin Cassidy ended his closing statement to the jury with an aerial photo of Libby illustrating the EPA’s sampling efforts over the years: green dots marked clean samples, red dots signified those than came back positive for asbestos. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Libby when the EPA arrived there. The town is full of asbestos contaminated vermiculite.”

It brought to mind the day when Grace lawyers superimposed the green dots on top of the red, implying that the prosecution had done something wrong by showing the red dots at all. In the Grace version, all was green. There was no asbestos. It aptly illustrated the prosecution’s point, Grace’s company line for decades: “There is nothing to see here, it all comes out in the process, it’s less than one percent, there is no problem,” Cassidy said. “There’s nothing to see here. There is no risk.”

Gayla Benefield and Norita Skramstad were five minutes away from getting in the car to make the four-hour drive to Missoula when they got word the jury had a verdict. So the two women, long-time Libby residents and advocates for the asbestos victims, both carrying the scars of Grace’s tremolite in their lungs, were not sitting in the front row to see justice done in person, as Norita’s late husband Les had hoped for.

And certainly neither of them would say justice was done at all. “They got away with murder,” Norita told me on the phone. “Molloy was their best defense, he won it for them.”

What she says is true. Judge Molloy kept out as best he could any evidence that humanized the victims in Libby: there was to be little talk of children’s exposure, no description of how it is to die from the slow suffocation of asbestosis, nothing that brought to life the cases of “occupational exposures,” the workers and their family members who were killed. Internal Grace memos that debated things like the cost of showers and uniforms for its workers were redacted or omitted all together. In one order, Molloy disallowed the use of 47 out of 54 of the government’s proposed exhibits, many on the grounds that they would be prejudicial—that is, their potential emotional impact outweighed their evidentiary value.

After all, this was not a case about lives shortened or stolen. The defense attorneys referred often to the incidence of sickness and death among workers and their families—when they acknowledged it at all— as though it was a legitimate bargain for those men to hand over their lives (and those of their wives and children) in exchange for the privilege of earning a livelihood.

Furthermore, Molloy allowed the tenor of the case to be debased: defense attorneys mocked their opponents outright, and calling the government’s attorneys and witnesses alike liars (including a particularly merciless attack by Bettacchi attorney Thomas Frongillo on the character of nursery owner Mel Parker, who if defense lawyers were to be believed, cared about having waterfront property more than he cared about his family’s health). To their credit, prosecutors McLean and Cassidy kept their composure throughout, and their focus on the real story at all times: when Grace lawyers in their closing arguments talked of how the company “followed up” with its industrial clients out of concern for asbestos levels those workers were exposed to, McLean posed a simple question drawing a chorus of objections (that were, of course, sustained): “Who followed up with the Libby residents?”

Norita asks if the verdicts can be appealed. I tell her that while they can’t, there’s still the possibility of state charges on homicide. But she has no appetite for this. “I think we’ll just go on with our lives,” she says. “Let it all go behind us.”

During the trial, an occasional lunch posse of journalists gathered at the Union Club to swap impressions. At one point when Gayla and Norita joined us, Andrew Schneider commented he was tired of writing about Libby, and I fully understood how he felt. But I also had a pretty good idea what Gayla’s response would be: “I’m tired of living with it, but I’ve got five friends dying right now. There were six, but one passed away on Sunday.”

It never was Gayla Benefield or Norita or Les Skramstad’s job to get justice for Libby. It was the job of the EPA and Department of Justice; it was the duty of Montana’s media; and it remains the responsibility of the Montana Attorney General.

Montana law allows that “A person commits the offense of negligent homicide if the person negligently causes the death of another human being.”

As of early 2007, there were 274 people on Libby’s self-kept scorecard of asbestos casualties—this includes 33 cases of mesothelioma identified by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (mesothelioma is a rare lung cancer associated exclusively with asbestos exposure), as well as miners, miners’ wives, miners;’ children, and scores of people who had no connection to the mine at all—they simply lived in Libby. Given the latency period of asbestos related diseases—which can stretch for as long as 40 years—the community will likely be burying people whose lives were shortened by the contamination Grace left lying around town well into the middle of this century.

Just because the rest of us are tired of the tragedy is no excuse: There are an awful lot of people still waiting for judgment day.

Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock can be reached at the Department of Justice, P.O. Box 201401, Helena, MT 59620. Phone (406) 444-2026, or via email: contactdoj@mt.gov

Andrea Peacock is the author of Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation (Johnson Books, 2003). She lives south of Livingston, Montana, and can be reached at apeacock@wispwest.net

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