Remember last August's EPA-administered toxic waste spill in Colorado's Animas River that befouled the water of that and two adjoining States? Remember how I instinctively called it not an "accident," but a deliberate plot to frame local mining companies to justify another huge power and wealth grab, which those local mining companies angrily alleged?
The House Natural Resources Committee has now confirmed it.
See, I told you so:
The Republican chairman of a congressional panel investigating a four-million-gallon spill of toxic wastewater from an inactive Colorado gold mine said Tuesday the mine was purposely breached by a government "cleanup" team.
The assertion by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop of Utah-1 contradicts claims by the Obama administration that the cleanup team was doing only preparatory work at the Gold King mine.
Once it was breached, wastewater loaded with lead, arsenic and other contaminants fouled downstream rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
Bishop cited an email in which an Interior [Commissariat] official said the spill last August occurred when the U.S. Environmental P[ollu]tion Agency team used an excavator to remove a dirt and rock "plug" blocking the mine's entrance.
The plug was holding back pressurized wastewater that had accumulated for years inside the mine north of Durango.
"There was nothing unintentional about EPA's actions with regard to breaching the mine. They fully intended to dig out the plug and breach it," Bishop said during an Interior [Commissariat] Budget hearing. [emphases added]
In a sane world - which is to say, with a Republican administration - this declaration by a congressional committee chairman would be, shall we say, "explosive".....
Heck, the spill itself would have been the biggest scandal since Watergate, given the usual stereotyped assumptions the media always makes about Republicans.
But with Barack Obama on the throne? Not a peep....
....not even Gina McCarthy's resignation - which would have been the honorable thing to do, under the circumstances. And her ass hasn't even been hauled up to Capitol Hill about this "incident," to my recollection.
Because, you see, it was justified, to "get" those "evil, greedy, polluting" miners. Because the EPA must destroy the environment in order to "save" it. Because it isn't about "environmental protection," but maximizing leftwingnut political power. What's the water quality of three entire States compared to that loftily "righteous" goal?
It'd be nice if Chariman Bishop's committee zeroed out Interior's and EPA's budgets until appropriate corrective and disciplinary action was taken at a minimum. But then so would a Star Trek replicator and holosuite, wouldn't it?
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