Coast Guard bans reporters from oil cleanup sites

Anderson Cooper: 'We are not the enemy here'

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."

The Coast Guard order states that "vessels must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law."

But since "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be."

source

One to five years of prison? They are censoring the situation for reasons we can only guess about. Probably, some of the stories here on ATS are merely fear-mongering, but what if the scale of this disaster is beyond our imagination?

PS - I ran a quick search but couldn't find this story yet, please close this thread if its a duplicate.

Interesting. How would the Coastguard be able to enforce this should the oil and the reporters, and any operation be in international waters? Would they have any power of arrest?

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