Source: Earthjustice
represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their lawsuit against the Army Corps. He is a staff attorney at Earthjustice.
A new chapter opens in the legal fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe renews their lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers challenging its recently completed review of the pipeline’s impacts.
Attorney Jan Hasselman explains the significance of this legal development.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a “supplemental complaint” in its existing lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps over permits for the Dakota Access pipeline.
The supplemental complaint renews the lawsuit in response to new developments since the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won part of its lawsuit against the Corps last year.
On Aug. 31, 2018, the Corps released a two-page document affirming the permits for DAPL, despite a court finding that they were critically flawed. The Corps released its long-awaited report on Oct. 1 explaining that decision. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Council, the Tribe’s governing body, voted unanimously on Oct. 18 to challenge the remand decision.
Today’s supplemental complaint challenges the Corps’ decision to affirm its original permits in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are flawed. Read the Corps’ report, redacted for public release:
READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE.
The PPJ Gazette 
Nov 21, 2018 @ 02:05:14
VANITY FAIR
OH! WHAT A LUCRATIVE WAR
BY
MICHAEL SHNAYERSON
APRIL 2005
Unexpectedly demoted from her job as the highest-ranking civilian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bunnatine Greenhouse is blowing the whistle on how Halliburton subsidiary KBR got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq. How KBR spent some of the money is even more shocking.
At the Corps, as at other government agencies, senior officers often leave for cushy jobs with the very companies they negotiated with on the government’s behalf. Especially the biggest ones, such as Halliburton and Parsons. Greenhouse’s mission was to be sure some of the pie was saved for small and minority-owned businesses. That wasn’t just policy—it was the law.
Greenhouse herself saw another dynamic was at work. “I think what this was all about was that Rumsfeld had made very negative statements about the Corps,” she says. Rumsfeld saw the Corps as a bunch of geeky engineers, mostly tinkering with public works in the U.S. He’d actually raised the idea of sliding the Corps over to the Interior Department, which oversees all federally owned lands. That was anathema to the Corps, in name and tradition an integral part of the U.S. Army.
So Lieutenant General Robert B. Flowers, at that time the Corps’s chief engineer, made it his goal to show Rumsfeld what the Corps could do. “He was pushing everything that he could to get the Corps in the limelight,” Greenhouse says.
So eager was he, Greenhouse believes, that Rumsfeld saw Flowers could be used.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/04/shnayerson200504
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Nov 21, 2018 @ 02:03:35
From PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility)
HALLIBURTON GENERAL NOW TO SEEK FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Corps Revolving Door with Industry Continues to Swing
Posted on Jul 19, 2004
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commander who approved the controversial Halliburton contracts in Iraq is now going to work for a major private contractor seeking to expand its business with the government. The move casts further suspicion on the integrity of federal contract award decisions, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
General Robert B. Flowers, who officially retired earlier this month, will head a new subsidiary of the HNTB Companies whose mission is to win big engineering contracts from the federal government. Flowers, a career Army officer with the Corps, personally approved a controversial series of no-bid contracts between the Pentagon and a subsidiary of Halliburton for a range of reconstruction work in Iraq.
Flowers becomes just the latest in a parade of Pentagon officials and Corps commanders who have left the government to work for the very companies whose eligibility for government contracts they formerly managed. The last five former top Corps commanders have joined consulting, engineering and transportation companies that depend on the Corps or other federal agencies for the bulk of their business.
At HNTB, Flowers will become the chief executive of a newly formed subsidiary that is to provide “federal sector clients a wide range of engineering and architecture services, including civil engineering, security planning, and military facility design,” according to the company’s press release. These services are precisely the type of work Flowers oversaw in his position at the Corps.
https://WWW.PEER.ORG/NEWS/PRESS-RELEASES/HALLIBURTON-GENERAL-NOW-TO-SEEK-FEDERAL-CONTRACTS.HTML
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Nov 21, 2018 @ 02:02:26
Dakota Access accused of violating North Dakota corporate farming law
AMY DALRYMPLE Bismarck Tribune
Jul 3, 2018
The North Dakota Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Dakota Access LLC, alleging the company is in violation of the state’s anti-corporate farming law.
The company purchased much of the Cannonball Ranch north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in fall of 2016, when pipeline protests were ongoing in the area.
https://bismarcktribune.com/bakken/dakota-access-accused-of-violating-north-dakota-corporate-farming-law/article_90d2a9c6-48ac-5363-a924-69bfe2bcda35.html
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Nov 21, 2018 @ 02:00:51
North Dakota Attorney General Challenges Oil Company’s Land Rights at Standing Rock (Updated)
Jul 18, 2018
UPDATE, August 22, 4:15 p.m.: North Dakota prosecutors on Monday dropped all serious charges against Chase Iron Eyes in what defense attorneys call a major victory for water protectors at Standing Rock, according to a press release from the Lakota People’s Law Project.
“As the Sioux nation, we have a prior and inherent authority to govern ourselves, to seek a liberated and self-determined destiny in our homelands, and we entered into treaties with the United States to protect those rights,” he said. “That day, we were expressing that inherent authority in places where the United States to this day tries to prevent us from expressing our sovereignty. We had a prior right to be there under our own authorities but also certainly to conduct religious ceremonies on treaty land, our own land.”
The DAPL fight is part of a history of U.S. state-sanctioned violence against Native tribes. Protests that started in 2016 fueled a Native American resistance worldwide. Despite protests and lawsuits citing Native environmental and treaty rights, the pipeline moving North Dakota oil to Illinois opened last June and has already leaked multiple times.
https://rewire.news/article/2018/07/18/north-dakota-attorney-general-challenges-oil-companys-land-rights-standing-rock/
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