What Happens When an Oil Company Actually Chooses to Be a Sociopath? #AntiChevron Day

Reposted from the Eye on the Amazon

You gotta give Chevron's management credit for bringing people together – across oceans, continents, and borders. Not because the company is a good neighbor; quite the opposite. Communities on five continents who live where Chevron operated, operates, or seeks to operate, came together yesterday in a worldwide day of protest to denounce the oil giant's environmental and human rights practices.

May 21st, the inaugural International #AntiChevron day, marked a new chapter in the company's deteriorating relationship with the communities where it works and a major challenge to its brand as concerned citizens in twenty countries pledged to target Chevron products. Despite what senior management is saying from behind their rose-colored glasses, it was a referendum on the company that seems slated to grow unless Chevron changes course. But time and again, Chevron management has made major strategic miscalculations, whose effects can now be seen literally around the globe. (for a list of organizations and communities in solidarity with these movement, look here).

Chevron has truly become the poster child for crimes against the environment and human rights. The bizarre thing is that their management chose that mantle and they appear to be sticking with it.

When Chevron (operating as Texaco) made the choice to save $3 per barrel by designing oil extraction systems which deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the pristine Ecuadorian rainforest, they never imagined that they'd one day be found guilty and ordered to pay $9.5 BILLION for it. A very bad calculation. Not too long after that initial choice, they doubled down and rejected pleas to safely line the growing number of waste pits, stating that $4 million was too high a price to avoid poisoning local communities.

Later, Chevron calculated they could delay and eventually derail the decades-long legal battle in New York and then Ecuador. They blew that calculation, too. Not once did they listen to the math lessons given to them by concerned shareholders, government officials, indigenous communities, the environmental and human rights community – it's more costly in the long run for everyone if you refuse to do the right thing and clean up your messes.

The current Chevron CEO, John Watson, is by no means solely responsible, but his math skills may be worst of all. After helping to orchestrate the Chevron-Texaco merger (despite full knowledge of its massive liability in Ecuador), Watson has led the company down the path to its current status as an international pariah. He did this by insisting that rather than accept its clear responsibility for environmental destruction in Ecuador and elsewhere, the company should attack, overwhelm and crush its critics wherever they are. And, tellingly, it then spent millions on ad campaigns telling the world that Chevron cares, because Chevron knows that is where it's most vulnerable.

On May 21, 2014, it became clearer than ever that Chevron's choices are going to come back to haunt them – with financial consequences (the only kind they actually care about). You see, yesterday people were outraged in Argentina, where Chevron has considerable assets – and is investing more. They were protesting in Romania, a key location for Chevron's plans to expand its fracking operations. They were in the streets in Bulgaria, Brazil, and Bolivia, too. And pretty much throughout Europe: the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden. And lets not forget Australia and the Philippines; yes protests took place there, too.

These actions took place because communities living with Chevron's deliberate environmental destruction and human rights crimes in Ecuador, Nigeria, Argentina, Romania and Richmond, California ASKED for them. Because it's obvious to anyone paying attention that Chevron's actions wherever it operates are a growing threat to human rights and the environment everywhere. That Chevron has as little regard for democratic principles in Romania as it does in Richmond. That Chevron's abuse of the rule of law in Ecuador is a dangerous threat to workers in Australia. They all see that Chevron is not just an irresponsible oil company and poor “global citizen” – its behavior is akin to a sociopath's: antisocial, often criminal, and that lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience with no signs of remorse or reform.

Chevron smugly announced that it has no assets in Ecuador and so it will never pay what it owes to the 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants it poisoned. But it does hold quite a lot of assets in Canada. And yes, protests took place there, too. Indeed, Chevron's strategy in the Canadian judicial system may be the next example of poor calculating as the Ecuadorian's efforts to seize assets progress there.

Next week, Watson will sit in front of shareholders, take their questions and face four separate resolutions challenging his authority on these issues. Last year, one of the resolutions challenging Watson's authority related to the Ecuador liability garnered a whopping 37% shareholder support, representing $73 billion in company assets. This year will they begin to do the real math?

The take-home for shareholders is that while Watson can talk and tout his company's scorched earth legal tactics and attacks on victims of its own contamination until he's blue in the face at this year's AGM (and he most certainly will), yesterday's actions underscore that none of its bad boy tactics appear to be insulating it from risk, and in fact they are escalating it. There's a sea change needed, starting at the top, of corporate culture that understands that doing the right thing can also be good for business.

Looking out the window in Midland, TX, Watson won't see the hundreds of protesters he would have had he not decided to move the shareholder meeting from Chevron's San Ramon headquarters, but he won't escape the voices chanting for justice from Chevron because they now emanate from every corner of the planet.

Chevron's Ecuador Plan B

Reposted from the Huffington Post

The big news this week in the Chevron-Ecuador saga is the Patton Boggs settlement with the oil giant, which should not be shocking to anyone following the financial troubles of the law firm.

Patton Boggs' money problems began before the Ecuadorians fighting Chevron retained its lawyers to represent them in their legal battles with the oil company in the U.S.

What is shocking is that the Ecuadorians, who have suffered the contamination of their ancestral lands in the Amazon rainforest, have been completely forgotten.

Very few reporters writing about the settlement dealt with the issue of a law firm abandoning clients, who happen to be some of the poorest and most disenfranchised people on the planet, and then ALSO agreeing to turn over case documents so it could save itself from a demise brought on by factors having little, if anything, to do with the Ecuadorians.

(I should note that the Patton Boggs lawyers driving the decision to settle were not the lawyers who actually worked on behalf of the Ecuadorians.)

The legal community in Washington, DC and New York is brattling about this new development with no interest in what the Ecuadorians (and myself for that matter) have urged the American public via its news media to consider before passing judgment on this 20-year-old lawsuit: the vast, overwhelming evidence of culpability by Chevron's predecessor Texaco and Chevron's economic coercion against lawyers and consultants assisting the Ecuadorians.

I believe Chevron's intent is to malign (and financially destroy in some instances) anyone who has spoken out against its alleged environmental crimes or funded or worked on behalf of the contamination lawsuit. This is what the Ecuadorians' supporters here and around the world (myself included) have charged and experienced firsthand.

So when Chevron General Counsel Hew Pate called on all of the Ecuadorians' supporters to disavow their cause, after the Patton Boggs defection, we assumed some PR maven removed the "or else" from his statement.

Some legal columnists concluded that because a bunch of lawyers decided to put their economic interest above their clients' Chevron therefore was innocent.

Well, not so fast.

The Ecuadorians' U.S legal adviser and the focus of Chevron's attacks, Steven Donziger, will never win the Lawyer of the Year award but the evidence against him is either weak, coerced or paid for. (See here and here.)

The real news is not about Patton Boggs, but Chevron's alleged cover-up of the mess Texaco left behind.

Below are soil test results that Chevron doesn't want you or anyone interested in the long-running Ecuador contamination litigation to see.

Chevron submitted these results to the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, on September 11, 2004. You can view other Chevron test results here.

These test results suggest the company's guilt and blow up its alternative narrative that it is the victim rather than the indigenous peoples and villagers living in the rainforest Texaco polluted. The Ecuadorians have made this charge in numerous court briefs.

Chevron's own independent experts took the tests during an eight-year trial in Ecuador. These experts, paid by Chevron, found high levels of harmful toxins; some are known human carcinogens. Tens of thousands of test results similar to the ones I describe here are found in the Ecuador court record. They are Chevron's documents. Not the Ecuadorians.

Based largely on Chevron's own evidence, an Ecuador court awarded the Ecuadorian villagers $9.5 billion in damages in 2011, resulting from what it said was the company's deliberate contamination of the rainforest during oil exploration from 1964 to 1992.

An appellate court and the country's Supreme Court upheld the judgment.

The Ecuadorians attempted to submit these test results and others into the record of a U.S. court, where Chevron argued the judgment was a fraud, but Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan refused their request, saying the trial wasn't about the contamination at all.

Exactly how Kaplan can rule the judgment was obtained fraudulently and not allow contamination results, I don't know how to explain.

What I do know is that Chevron's management team has refused to pay the judgment, even though the company fought relentlessly to conduct the trial in Ecuador after the villagers originally filed it in New York federal court in 1993 – yet another example of the company's subterfuge.

Because Chevron stripped most of its remaining assets from Ecuador in anticipation of losing the case, the affected villagers have filed enforcement actions in Brazil, Canada and Argentina. Chevron does have assets in those countries – substantial assets that collectively approach $20 billion in value. The villagers plan to seize enough of them to force Chevron to comply with the Ecuador judgment so they can conduct a long-awaited cleanup of their sacred ancestral lands.

Chevron says these courts do not have jurisdictional authority (the Ecuadorians argue otherwise) but no court that respects the rule of law will let the oil giant off the hook, when it sees these contamination tests.

The vast majority of test results from the Ecuador trial support what the villagers in the former Chevron concession area always have alleged: Chevron contaminated their land, using substandard drilling practices to minimize costs and maximize profit. See this video.

Along with Chevron's independent experts, the technical experts for the affected communities and numerous court-appointed experts found high levels of total petroleum hydrocarbons. TPH is a measurement of toxic and, in some cases, carcinogenic chemicals and metals in soil.

Ecuador law allows 1,000 parts per million of TPH in residential areas, while, guess what? – Chevron argues that 10,000 TPH should be the limit. That's 100 times more than in the United States where many states allow only 100 TPH.

Why is 10,000 TPH protective enough for Ecuadorians – in Chevron's estimation at least – but not for Americans?

Chevron's tests also reveal that the oil giant has obfuscated to both U.S. and Ecuador courts about its main line of defense: the 1995 remediation agreement with the Government of Ecuador. The Ecuadorians argue the agreement did not release Chevron from liability, but even if it had, Chevron's own test results show that the remediation itself was inadequate at best and, most likely, fraudulent.

For example, Chevron's tests from well sites Sacha 94 and Sacha 57 show illegal contamination, even though Texaco said it cleaned them. Chevron can't blame anyone but Texaco for this environmental damage: Texaco alone built and closed these sites.

At these sites Chevron found up to 8700 TPH levels – almost 9 times greater than permitted under Ecuadorian law and evidence that Texaco did not clean the well sites adequately, if at all. There are many just like these with even greater TPH levels.

Texaco, it seems, simply poured dirt over oil pits to mask their danger. And, if lying about the cleanup wasn't bad enough, many villagers built their homes near or on the sites because they believed they had been cleaned.

Chevron's experts also found illegal amounts of benzene, barium, cadmium, lead and other chemicals in the environment – all toxic and dangerous to human health. For example:

Benzene: 18 mg found at the Sacha Norte 2 well site; Ecuador law allows only 0.05 mg. Benzene is a colorless liquid made mostly from petroleum; it is also a known human carcinogen.

The CDC says this about benzene:

"Long-term exposure to benzene can cause cancer of the blood-forming organs. This condition is called leukemia ... The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has determined that benzene is a known carcinogen (can cause cancer)."

Barium: 10,100 mg per kg, found at SSF-25; Ecuador law allows only 750 mg per kg. Barium is a metal used as drilling mud during oil exploration.

The CDC on barium:

"Eating or drinking very large amounts of barium compounds that dissolve in water or in the stomach can cause changes in heart rhythm or paralysis .... Some people who did not seek medical treatment soon after ... have died. (Some who ingest smaller amounts) ... may experience vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, difficulties in breathing, increased or decreased blood pressure, numbness around the face, and muscle weakness."

Cadmium: 4.1 mg per kg found at Sacha 18 well site; Ecuador law allows only 1 mg. Cadmium is a mineral that enters soil, water and air as a result of oil exploration.

The CDC on cadmium:

"Breathing high levels of cadmium can severely damage the lungs. Eating food or drinking water with very high levels severely irritates the stomach, leading to vomiting and diarrhea. Long-term exposure to lower levels of cadmium in air, food, or water leads to a buildup of cadmium in the kidneys and possible kidney disease. Other long-term effects are lung damage and fragile bones. HHS and the International Agency on Research of Cancer have determined that cadmium and cadmium compounds are human carcinogens."

Lead: 294 mg per kg, found at SSF 25; Ecuador law allows only 80 mg per kg. Lead is a metal that enters soil, water and air through oil exploration.

The CDC on lead:

"The main target for lead toxicity is the nervous system, both in adults and children.... Lead exposure may also cause weakness in fingers, wrists, or ankles. (It) also causes small increases in blood pressure, particularly in middle-aged and older people. Lead exposure may also cause anemia. At high levels of exposure, lead can severely damage the brain and kidneys ... and cause death.... The HHS has determined that lead and lead compounds are reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens based on limited evidence from studies in humans and sufficient evidence from animal studies, and the EPA has determined that lead is a probable human carcinogen."

Reporters who have been covering the long-running litigation know these tests exist. But they don't write about them. Many say they are simply too difficult for their readers to understand. Others say they are boring.

That is exactly what Chevron is counting on: that the news media, the courts and members of the public interested in the case will never learn of the overwhelming scientific evidence against the company but instead will focus on the sensational and largely baseless allegations of fraud and bribes, backed by tainted and corrupt testimony paid by Chevron or extorted via economic pressure.

It looks like crying "fraud" in the face of the overwhelming evidence against it was Chevron's Plan B from the beginning.

In Long-Fought Victory for Anonymous Email Users, Chevron Agrees to Withdraw Google and Yahoo! Subpoenas

Reposted from EarthRights International

After more than a year and a half of litigation, Chevron has withdrawn subpoenas issued to Google and Yahoo! and agreed to end its efforts to obtain private usage and identity information associated with email accounts belonging to activists, attorneys, journalists and others who have spoken out against the company.

In September 2012, Chevron issued sweeping subpoenas to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in connection with its RICO lawsuit in New York against the Ecuadorian villagers and their lawyers who won a $9 billion judgment against the company in Ecuador for massive pollution in the Amazon. The subpoenas sought identity information and nearly a decade of IP login and usage information about the holders of more than 100 email accounts.

ERI, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), represented the owners of 37 email accounts, arguing that the subpoenas infringed their First Amendment rights to speak anonymously and associate freely and appeared to be an effort to intimidate Chevron's critics and chill future speech about the company. None of the individuals represented by ERI and EFF were defendants in the underlying RICO lawsuit.

Magistrate Judge Cousins in the Northern District of California ultimately quashed the Google and Yahoo! subpoenas for all but seven of our clients' email accounts. ERI and EFF appealed the decision on behalf of the remaining seven accounts. Recognizing the First Amendment interests at stake, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Yahoo! and Google not to turn over any information to Chevron about six of the seven remaining accounts until it had time to decide the appeal, but allowed Chevron to obtain limited information about the one remaining account.

In the Northern District of New York, however, Judge Kaplan—the same judge who presided over the RICO trial in the Southern District of New York, sitting by designation—refused to quash the subpoena issued to Microsoft. ERI and EFF appealed the decision, but Judge Kaplan ordered Microsoft to turn over the Hotmail account information immediately, including four accounts owned by clients of ERI and EFF, before the Second Circuit could weigh in on whether the information should have been protected from discovery.

With oral argument approaching in both appeals, Chevron agreed earlier this month to withdraw the Google and Yahoo! subpoenas and drop its pursuit of information about email accounts owned by clients of ERI and EFF. While Chevron's lawyers had already obtained account information for five of our clients' accounts, Chevron agreed that all the information it has obtained so far will be remain confidential and not made public or used in unrelated cases. Chevron did not and will not obtain any information about the owners of the other 32 email accounts represented by ERI and EFF.

The settlement and Chevron's withdrawal of the subpoenas is a victory for the individuals who have fought for more than a year and half to defend their First Amendment rights and protect their private information against Chevron's abusive discovery requests. We are proud to have been able to assist in that fight and to have ultimately succeeded in protecting the rights of more than 30 activists, lawyers, journalists and other brave individuals who stand up to corporate power and speak out against injustice around the world.

The Bush Doctrine Comes to Oakland Courtesy of Chevron

Reposted from Eye on the Amazon

Chevron continued its unprecedented campaign of attacking its critics last week when I was forcibly removed from a half-day conference I paid $75 to attend simply because I was affiliated with Amazon Watch. The strangest part was the excuse given for the outrageous step was that it was a preemptive act for something they feared I might do.

In a flagrant violation of my right of association, last Wednesday, the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (OMCC) held an "Economic Development Summit for Energy and Sustainability" sponsored by Chevron. As an Oakland-based environmental organization it would seem to follow that Amazon Watch would be a welcome participant at just such an event. However, the moment my affiliation was made known I was told "Amazon Watch is not welcome here." And security was called to remove me. Why exactly?

Of course, Amazon Watch has repeatedly spoken out against Chevron attempts to greenwash itself of its Ecuador disaster. And so apparently, when Amazon Watch tweeted that we planned to attend a "sustainability summit" to ask why Chevron was the primary sponsor (given their record) that was deemed justification to have me forcibly removed. While at the conference I spoke to only one person in attendance and when asked if I was planning to "hand out information" I answered politely: "No. I am simply here to attend the conference and listen to the presentations." So despite my assurances that I was doing nothing more than attending, somehow the conference organizers deduced that I was going to be "disruptive" and took "preemptive action".

I wonder if the OMCC thinks the national news coverage and angry calls, emails and tweets  they've received since their outrageous acts were more "disturbing" than allowing me to stand and listen at their conference.

Once ejected, I immediately called the office of Oakland's mayor Jean Quan. The mayor had been a speaker at the conference less than an hour before the incident. Her office did reach out to the OMCC on my behalf, but they were "too busy" to answer the repeated calls. Perhaps they were on the other line with Chevron at the time. Later that day the OMCC issued what the mayor's office referred to as an apology(?). It states:

"We're sorry to have asked a paying attendee to leave, and have reimbursed the cost of his ticket. Previous actions by Amazon Watch in other venues and their social-media messaging in advance of our conference raised our concern that this attendee (an employee of Amazon Watch) intended to be disruptive. We regret any misunderstanding on our part."

Of course, that was a lie. Chevron and the OMCC were determined to make sure Amazon Watch was not permitted to attend. The excuse that they feared we were going to be disruptive is unacceptable. Nor was this an isolated incident, but rather part of a growing threat to environmental advocacy for corporate accountability. 

Chevron is so scared of the truth that even having someone in the room who might talk about their acts is a threat. Is it any wonder they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on greenwashing ads, fake news websites, bribes and retaliatory legal attacks?

The Unnecessary Truth: Reflections on What Wasn't Told in the Chevron Ecuador RICO Case

Reposted from EarthRights International

Last November, Marissa took a leave of absence from ERI to volunteer on the Chevron v. Donziger trial in support of the Ecuadorian defendants. These are her thoughts from the case.

Lago Agrio, Ecuador: It is a Sunday afternoon in the Sucumbíos province in Northeastern Ecuador. Donald Moncayo navigates his way across a series of floating logs at the Aguarico 4 pit. He stops and dips his hand into a thick black pool and holds it up for us to see: black crude left by Texaco's operations.

Each year, several dozen delegations of people come down to the Oriente region of Ecuador to participate in one of Donald's "toxic tours." Learning about the history of contamination from Donald is how they bear witness to one of the greatest environmental justice battles of the past century.

I first met Donald under very different circumstances – when he traveled to New York last November to serve as a witness in the now infamous trial for the retaliatory lawsuit that Chevron brought against dozens of Ecuadorian "afectados" (affected peoples), their lawyers, and supporting scientists in an effort to collaterally attack a judgment issued against it by an Ecuadorian court for decades of deliberate contamination in the Oriente.

At the time, I had taken a leave of absence from ERI to serve as a volunteer on the trial team in support of the Ecuadorian defendants – the Lago Agrio plaintiffs (the LAPs). ERI has supported justice for the LAPs at various stages, but ERI was not directly involved in the trial, and my work there was independent of my work for ERI. For several months, I worked alongside an amazing team of young volunteer human rights lawyers, a handful of plaintiff-side trial lawyers, their family members and children who volunteered as paralegals, and law student externs. But the most meaningful work I did was alongside witnesses like Donald, who had traveled from Ecuador to tell their story.

Donald had never left Ecuador before; but he decided to come to New York and testify – to tell a courtroom full of Chevron lawyers and a federal judge about the legacy of contamination that he saw, smelled, and lived every day in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Donald came to New York thinking that he might speak truth to power. But when he arrived in New York, he learned that his truth had had little place.

In Kafka's, The Trial, there is a line that reads:

"No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world."

What is necessary then - necessary for the powerful to retain power, necessary for those who run the global economy to remain in control – becomes the rule of world. Other truths, like Donald's, become unnecessary.

At issue in the trial in New York was the validity of a judgment decided by Ecuadorian courts about facts in Ecuador under Ecuadorian law. Chevron had spent the better part of a decade arguing that the facts of the case should be heard in Ecuador, and that the courts there were competent to consider the case. That is, until Chevron lost. Badly. And then Chevron came back to New York, seeking to avoid paying the hefty judgment issued against it in Ecuador. And insisted that, when considering whether or not the Ecuadorian judgment was valid, the judge should not consider any evidence whatsoever of the existence of contamination. The judge agreed.

During the trial, witnesses like Donald were told that they could not speak about the contamination of their lands and water that Chevron's predecessor, Texaco, had deliberately caused. The attorneys were not allowed to use the word "contamination" without approaching the bench, even in a case involving one of the largest environmental justice disputes in recent history.

As lawyers, we learn about basic rules of legal procedure designed specifically to prohibit the type of behavior that Chevron exhibited in this case. Concepts such as "comity," "judicial and equitable estoppel," "forum non conveniens," "freedom of speech," and "prohibitions upon paying fact-witnesses." These concepts operate to prevent a party from adopting completely opposite positions on an issue for purely strategic reasons. They operate to ensure that courts in the United States respect the sovereign decisions of foreign judiciaries. They protect the right of individuals and activists to demand justice when they are wronged. They prevent parties from purchasing fact witness testimony in order to ensure that testimony is not influenced by money.

Each of these fundamental principles was flipped on its head in deference to Chevron. The company was allowed to first argue that the case should be heard in Ecuador and then change its tune when it turns out it played its hand wrong. Rather than respecting the foreign judgment, the court subjected the Ecuadorian judge to a cross-examination "pop-quiz" about his 188-page, single-spaced ruling – all done through translation where much was lost and little more was understood.

Rather than protecting freedom of expression, we watched as Chevron was allowed to turn good-faith advocacy campaigns and litigation into "conspiracy" or "extortion" under a law that was intended to be used by the government to prosecute mobsters. The court condoned the expense of millions of dollars to issue wide-reaching third-party subpoenas against activists, lawyers, journalists and artists who did nothing more than speak out against what Chevron's predecessor did in Ecuador. The court was even willing to tolerate Chevron's practice of hiring private corporate espionage firms to spy on us and on activists and affected peoples.

And rather than considering whether testimony was improperly purchased from a fact-witness, the court credited Chevron's star witness, a man who has admitted to both giving and receiving bribes in legal cases and who Chevron will pay upwards of $300,000 by 2015 in exchange for his testimony in the case.

As a young attorney who has decided to dedicate my career to advocating on behalf of communities like those harmed by Chevron, this new upside-down world – where the necessary becomes true, where power decides truth – is a terrifying prospect.

There is much that I could say about what it was like to be a part of that trial – from the small things: the everyday discrepancies between the size of Chevron's army of lawyers versus our small team of attorneys and volunteers; or how Chevron waited until the eve of trial to drop its claims for monetary damages and thus deprived us of our right to insist upon a jury trial, after we had spent months preparing for a jury trial; or how, without a jury present, the court gave the large, comfortable jury room to the Chevron lawyers while we were left with two small rooms only large enough for three people to stand at once; to the overwhelmingly large things like the weak legal basis upon which Chevron has proceeded – without (in my opinion) any showing of such basic legal requirements as causation, injury, standing, or the ability to seek injunctive relief under a statute that many courts agree only provides for damages in civil actions.

But when Judge Kaplan's March 4, 2014 decision in the case came down, I could think only of Donald.

When Donald arrived in New York, he was told that he could not speak his truth about the massive contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon – that is was not necessary. Instead, with the Court's approval, Chevron counsel served Donald with a subpoena while he was on the witness stand in open court requesting a mirror image copy of his hard drive and then told he would go to jail if he didn't hand over what Chevron was seeking. This was so even though the discovery period had ended months before; even though the deadline for serving subpoenas had ended nearly one year before; and even though Donald Moncayo had no lawyer and spoke no English. Donald's courage to speak the truth became just one more casualty in this upside-down world.

That night our team stayed awake well into the morning hours – trying to find Donald a lawyer. The next day, I watched as Donald got into a black car with his new lawyer, a Chevron lawyer, and a digital forensic technician hired by Chevron. Donald was gone for nearly ten hours, and when he came back, he was in tears. We sat down to write a declaration together to be read in open court the next day – to express the humiliation, invasion of privacy and loss of dignity that Donald had felt. When we tried to read the declaration in open court, we were told that Chevron would seek a bench warrant which could put Donald in jail.

Some weeks ago I was down in Lago Agrio with Donald, walking out upon the pits and wells left by Texaco (now Chevron) after their nearly 30 years of operations in the Oriente region. I watched as Donald showed me how pits that were supposedly "remediated" still contain thick dried black crude within a few feet of the soil. "It's a lie," he says as he runs the dirt through water and the water takes on the thick black sheen of crude. But a necessary lie.

During the trial, Chevron could never really deny the truth: that the contamination in the Oriente is real. This was so regardless of whether there was any merit to their RICO allegations.

One night I stayed up until 3am helping to put together a pile of evidence – Chevron's own experts' samples of the illegal presence of heavy metals that were submitted to the court in Lago Agrio. But when we went to introduce those samples at trial the following day during the cross-examination of Chevron's lead scientist, Sara McMillen, the judge stopped us. The evidence never made its way in. Donald's truth was never told.

In our own way, we each bear witness even when we act as attorneys. We watch the law decide histories, decide futures. We watch the power that the law wields and the manifold ways in which power wields the law. And a trial, an American trial – at bottom – is about story telling. But there were stories that were never told during that trial. As I sit down now to read through Judge Kaplan's 497-page decision, it is as though our side wasn't even in the room – or that we didn't need to be. The story that Donald tells to any traveler willing to go out to the Oriente region of Ecuador never had its day in that New York courtroom.

The "War Room" (Steven Donziger is third from the left)

During the closing arguments of the trial, the lawyer for the LAPs, Julio Gomez, began his comments by saying: "La sabiduria nos llega cuando ya no sirve para nada." Julio then went on to say "Perhaps not a lot of people in this Court understood what I just said. And perhaps those who didn't understand what I have just said now have, for one brief moment, a sense of what my clients felt like to participate in this. Translated into English, what I have just said means, wisdom comes to us when it is no longer useful. Those are the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not mine. And he means to say, I think, wisdom often comes too late."

In this case, wisdom might have come too late for many of us – for those activists and lawyers who never envisioned a day when fundamental First Amendment activity becomes the basis for invasive subpoenas or worse – a RICO case; for Chevron who thought it could win in Ecuador, and then came running home when it didn't.

Because, as Rick Friedman, trial attorney for Steven Donziger – the New York lawyer who assisted the Ecuadorians in their legal struggle and has since been named a defendant by Chevron - told the Court in his closing arguments:

This case is bigger than just Mr. Donziger or even the 30,000 people in Ecuador who may be affected by the Court's ruling.…The legal compass that the Court has, the principles that it has to guide itself through these facts are important beyond this case. Your decision will be read by people around the world, and they will be looking for something more than whether somebody ghostwrote an expert report, or even whether somebody bribed a judge in Ecuador. They will also be looking to see if American courts will follow their own rules of law. They will also be looking to see whether there is going to be special exceptions, special rules for large American corporations.

Thousands of miles away, courts on several continents are being asked to decide what happened in the Oriente and who is to blame. They are being asked to draw lines between advocacy and extortion, between asserting rights and participating in a conspiracy. As Judge Kaplan's opinion faces scrutiny in a court of appeals and other courts consider Chevron's tactics and responsibility, I hope that wisdom will not come too late.