Word: spills
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...patently criminal: the use of civilians as human shields, the mistreatment of prisoners of war and the targeting of civilian populations. But was the polluting of the Persian Gulf during the second week of the conflict a war crime? There is room for doubt about the causes of the spill...
...crew fully two days before pool footage arrived. A group of nonpool journalists driving near the Iraq-Saudi border last week got a scoop when four hungry Iraqi army deserters approached them and surrendered. Complaints about the pool reports have been growing. "Why didn't we get the oil spill? Why wasn't a pool on the ((battleship)) Missouri when it fired its guns?" asks Thomas Giusto of ABC, who is coordinating pool coverage for the four U.S. networks. "The pools have not been granted access to things when they are happening...
Such techniques work best during the early days of a spill, before the crude begins to separate. Unfortunately, by the time a U.S. oil-spill assessment team arrived on the scene, the more volatile components of the oil had evaporated, leaving heavier chemicals that were whipped by waves into a thick water-oil "mousse" or turned into tar balls, which sink...
Birds, including terns, sandpipers, curlews, ducks and cormorants, will be among the most immediate and visible victims of the spill. Their plumage becomes coated with oil, depriving them of the ability to regulate their body temperature. Hundreds of Saudis in the Jubail area have volunteered to wash the oil off birds. But even if some birds are cleaned, many will die from eating contaminated mollusks and worms in the mud flats...
Nature has a way of confounding even experts' predictions. After all, Prince William Sound recovered from the Exxon Valdez disaster more quickly than expected. But no one has ever seen a spill of this size, and no one can say that "eco-terrorism" in the gulf is over. The Iraqis could, in the words of an American engineer, let "rivers of oil run into the sea." Saudi and U.S. forces would try to stop that, but it may already be too late to prevent the teeming gulf from becoming a dead...