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SEAL Commander: XL Monsterous Terroist Target (Video And Picture)
A retired, highly-decorated Special Forces officer and member of “SEAL Team 6″ has conducted an alarming new security assessment of the vulnerabilities of a completed northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. His conclusion? It is shockingly easy for a small group of people with little or no training to attack the pipeline and cause an Exxon Valdez-sized spill into the heart of America, threatening drinking water for millions. And the government should immediately conduct a full-scale threat assessment before Secretary Kerry finishes his National Interest Determination.
Dave Cooper is the former Command Master Chief of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (known to most as SEAL Team 6) and 25-year veteran with a silver star and six bronze stars for combat valor. While he has never done a commercial threat assessment of this kind, he has spent a decade assessing threats and targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. NextGen Climate (led by Tom Steyer, a board member at the Center for American Progress) asked him to do a threat assessment of the proposed northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. Cooper says this is not an indictment of pipeline builder TransCanada — his purpose was to “objectively answer or identify the security challenges for the Keystone pipeline.”
Throughout Keystone XL’s approval process, both proponents and opponents have paid a lot of attention to pipeline safety. Some say that pipelines are safer than shipping oil by rail, while others point to pipeline explosions, spills, leaks, and failures that threaten aquifers, sensitive lands, and populous areas. The security vulnerabilities of the pipeline receive little mention. In fact, Cooper points out that the detailed discussion of how safe a completed Keystone XL pipeline would be actually provides detailed information to would-be criminals, saboteurs, or terrorists like the route, vulnerable areas, and the thickness of the pipeline. Even though much of this disclosure is unavoidable — on the part of owners and government officials — Cooper said it was “concerning” that neither spoke much about security..…MOREHERE
