EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "Since the early 1990s, two western oil companies have partnered with the Burmese military regime in a remote corner of southern Burma (Myanmar) on one of the world?s most controversial development projects: The Yadana Gas Project by France-based Total and US-based Chevron. "Yadana", which means "treasure" in Burmese, is a large-scale project that transports natural gas from Burma?s Andaman Sea to Thailand through an overland pipeline that passes through a secluded and environmentally sensitive region in southeast Burma. From the project?s beginning, the Burma Army has been tasked with providing security for the companies and the pipeline and has committed widespread and systematic human rights abuses against local people. Well-documented allegations of violent and systematic abuses include extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, forced labor, land confiscation, and forced relocation. Many of these abuses and others are ongoing and are documented in the ERI report "Total Impact"(2009). Total and Chevron have repeatedly denied complicity in abuses committed by the Burma Army against people living in the pipeline area. The truth has been laid bare, however, through multiple lawsuits brought by Burmese villagers in U.S. and European courts, in out-of-court settlements between the companies and victims of abuses, as well as in detailed and firsthand documentation by EarthRights International and others, published in numerous advocacy reports since 1996. Rather than accept responsibility to mitigate harms caused by their operation, to this day Total and Chevron continue to misrepresent their impacts in Burma, to the detriment of the people directly affected by the project and the people of Burma as a whole. This report documents in detail how impact assessments commissioned by Total were flawed in methodology and factually inaccurate and incomplete, particularly those undertaken by the Corporate Engagement Project (CEP) of US-based CDA Collaborative Learning Projects (CDA). It also documents and analyzes brazen misrepresentations of the project by the oil companies, who continue to claim that there are no abuses in the pipeline area and that their project in Burma is wholly positive. CDA describes its Corporate Engagement Project, under the rubric of which it has conducted field assessments for Total in Burma, as an initiative that aims to help companies ensure that their operations? impacts on local communities are positive rather than negative. Branded as "independent experts" by Total, CDA has visited Burma five times since 2002 and published five reports based on a mere 20 days in the pipeline region. The reports promote an overall favorable view of Total and Chevron?s impacts and presence in Burma. This is in stark contrast to the enormous body of evidence and testimony of villagers in the Yadana region collected by ERI and other organizations since the mid-1990s. This report and its companion, "Total Impact", are intended to provide an accurate and current picture of the Yadana Project. Part I of this report details CDA?s myriad flaws in Burma in no less than 10 areas pertaining to its methodology for assessing Total?s impacts in Burma, and ranging from its naive and misguided attempts to conduct "open" interviews with villagers in Burma?s repressive and closed society, to their failure to adequately assess impacts in villages just outside the narrowly-defined pipeline corridor. Among other oversights, CDA interviewed villagers within earshot and eyesight of military intelligence, soldiers, Total staff, and through interpreters provided by Total. Information obtained in such compromised settings is questionable in any human rights investigation or impact assessment, but especially in Burma where retaliation against critics of the regime and its business partners is well-documented. The fact that CDA failed to take proper security precautions for those it interviewed, who in advance of CDA?s visits were warned by the Burma Army about criticizing the companies, further casts doubt on CDA?s findings. Even if the conclusions of the CDA reports were not compromised by these and other methodological flaws described in Part I of this report, the reports have been repeatedly distorted and publicly misrepresented by Total and Chevron. Part II of this report catalogues the companies? perversions of their presence in Burma as well as the companies? public misuse of the CDA reports. For example, Total has repeatedly made false, bold and unsubstantiated claims to have eradicated forced labor in the pipeline corridor, and has claimed further that both CDA and the ILO have found there is no forced labor in the pipeline corridor, which is untrue: This report documents that neither CDA or the ILO have ever stated that forced labor has been eradicated in the pipeline corridor. On the contrary, forced labor is prevalent and ongoing in the pipeline corridor; even more so in the entire pipeline area. EarthRights International?s documentation indicates that human rights abuses connected to the Yadana Project are ongoing and systematic, that the companies are responsible for these crimes, and that Total and Chevron have misrepresented their impacts in Burma. There is a great deal the companies could do to improve their presence in Burma. "Getting it Wrong" concludes that the Yadana Project is far from a model of responsible investment under difficult conditions, and CDA?s assessments of the project should no longer be relied upon as accurate or credible."