Collateral Damage

The drone mentality

2011-11-08T22:17:00.001-05:00

Saturday, Nov 5, 2011 12:05 PM Eastern Standard Time

The drone mentality

(updated below [Sun.])

In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith describes a meeting he had in Pakistan with residents from the Afghan-Pakistani border region that has been relentlessly bombed by American drones; if I had one political wish this week, it would be that everyone who supports (or acquiesces to) President Obama’s wildly accelerated drone attacks would read this:

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey. . . .

On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.

The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them. . . .

On Monday, [Tariq] was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.

But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.

And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.

This tragedy repeats itself over and over. After I linked to this Op-Ed yesterday on Twitter — by writing that “every American who cheers for drone strikes should confront the victims of their aggression” — I was predictably deluged with responses justifying Obama’s drone attacks on the ground that they are necessary to kill The Terrorists. Reading the responses, I could clearly discern the mentality driving them: I have never heard of 99% of the people my government kills with drones, nor have I ever seen any evidence about them, but I am sure they are Terrorists. That is the drone mentality in both senses of the word; it’s that combination of pure ignorance and blind faith in government authorities that you will inevitably hear from anyone defending President Obama’s militarism. As Jonathan Schwarz observed after the U.S. unveiled the dastardly Iranian plot to hire a failed used car salesman to kill America’s close friend, the Saudi Ambassador: “I’d bet the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. has closer ‘ties’ to Al Qaeda than 90% of the people we’ve killed with drones.”

As it turns out, it isn’t only the President’s drone-cheering supporters who have no idea who is being killed by the program they support; neither does the CIA itself. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described internal dissension in the administration to Obama’s broad standards for when drone strikes are permitted, and noted that the “bulk” of the drone attacks — the bulk of them – “target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups”; moreover, the administration refuses to describe what it even means by being “associated” with a Terrorist group (indeed, it steadfastly refuses to tell citizens anything about the legal principles governing its covert drone wars).

Of course, nobody inside the U.S. Government is objecting on the ground that it is wrong to blow people up without having any knowledge of who they are and without any evidence they have done anything wrong. Rather, the internal dissent is grounded in the concern that these drone attacks undermine U.S. objectives by increasing anti-American sentiment in the region (there’s that primitive, inscrutable Muslim culture rearing its head again: they strangely seem to get very angry when foreign governments send sky robots over their countries and blow up their neighbors, teenagers and children). But whatever else is true, huge numbers of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — defend Obama’s massive escalation of drone attacks on the ground that he’s killing Terrorists even though they — and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama himself — usually don’t even know whose lives they’re snuffing out. Remember, though: we have to kill The Muslim Terrorists because they have no regard for human life.

This is why it’s so imperative to do everything possible to shine a light on the victims of President Obama’s aggression in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere: ignoring the victims, rendering them invisible, is a crucial prerequisite to sustaining propaganda and maintaining support for this militarism (that’s the same reason John Brennan lied — yet again — by assuring Americans that there are no innocent victims of drone attacks). Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.

Over the last week, I had the genuine privilege of spending substantial amounts of time with participants in the truly inspiring Occupy movement around the country, including visiting Occupy Oakland on Thursday. This same dynamic is at play there. Many sneer at the protest encampments because they include the homeless, the unstable, the “dirty,” the jobless, and those who are otherwise downtrodden, dispossessed and unable to live decent lives. Much of that sneering is due to the desire that these people remain hidden from sight, invisible, so that we can avoid facing the reality of what our society has produced on a large scale (having Dirty, Disobedient People be part of a movement vaguely associated with liberalism also harms the ability of progressive media stars to maintain their access to the Halls of Seriousness). But they are and should be part of that movement precisely because the disappearance of the middle class and booming wealth and income inequality produces exactly this type of human suffering. There are those who love to parade around as supporters of the marginalized and poor who prefer that they remain silent and invisible — distant abstractions — because being viscerally confronted with their human realness is unpleasant and uncomfortable. That’s exactly why victims of President Obama’s relentless drone attacks remain invisible and many prefer to keep it that way — it’s best not to confront the reality of the misery that one’s policies wreak — and it’s exactly why everything should be done to prevent that disappearing from happening.

* * * * *

Pratap Chatterjee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism attended the meeting in Islamabad which Smith describes in that Op-Ed and wrote in detail about it. Chatterjee posted video of Tariq at that meeting — who is seen on the video, posted below, in the dark shirt and yellow hat just days before his death-by-American-drone — and wrote the following:

Among the group was Tariq Aziz, a quiet 16-year-old, who had come after he received a phone call from a lawyer in Islamabad offering him an opportunity to learn basic photography to help document these strikes. . . .

Tariq was proud to be part of this meeting. About 18 months earlier, in April 2010, his cousin Aswar Ullah was killed by a missile fired from a drone as he rode a motorcycle near Norak. . . .

What none of us could have imagined was that 72 hours later, this football-loving teenager would himself be killed by a CIA drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed Khan. . . .

Tariq and Waheed’s death brought the total number of children killed in drone strikes to 175, according to the Bureau’s own findings. As part of an ongoing investigation, the Bureau has documented 306 strikes from remotely piloted drones that have killed between 2,359 and 2,959 people. Over 85% of them have been launched by the administration of President Barack Obama.

Tariq came from a poor community on the border with Afghanistan. He was the youngest of seven children. His father, Mumtaz Khan, was away working in the United Arab Emirates as a driver to support his family. Waheed’s family was equally poor – the 12-year-old worked in a local shop for a salary of just Rs 2000 a month (roughly £15 or $23)

As I’ve noted before, the statistical methodology used by the Bureau to count innocent victims is the most conservative possible, meaning the numbers are almost certainly much higher. The only thing unusual about Tariq is that his death is receiving substantial attention because of the coincidence that he met with Westerners 72 hours before his life was ended. Most Tariqs simply die without anyone in the country responsible being bothered with hearing about it.

Tariq Short from TBIJ on Vimeo.

UPDATE [Sun.]: VastLeft comments on these matters by cartoon.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

The Terrible Post-9/11 Truth: Our Government's Been Hijacked. Democracy has been commandeered by a self-interested gang.

2011-09-26T14:43:00.002-04:00

The Terrible Post-9/11 Truth: Our Government's Been Hijacked. Democracy has been commandeered by a self-interested gang.

by Michael Winship | September 26, 2011 - 8:55am

About a year after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, I visited Oklahoma City and went to the bombsite with a friend who had covered the attack as a television news cameraman. No memorial or museum had yet been built; fencing covered with teddy bears, flags and scrawled messages surrounded an empty, grass-covered lot.

There was a simplicity to that empty lot that appealed, an understated eloquence that, to me at least, said all that needed to be said. Now, despite all the hubbub and handwringing surrounding its design and construction, in many ways, the new 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero in Manhattan captures some of that same, straightforward plainness -- the names of the dead punched into bronze, the waterfalls gracing two great voids where the towers used to be, muting the noise of visitors’ voices and quieting the surrounding city. No filigree or statues.

We went to the new memorial for the first time last week. It was a perfect, end-of-summer day. Sunlight sparkled in the two pools, and you could see in one of them the wavy reflection of an American flag hanging from across the street. When the breeze was just right, a light mist from the waterfalls caressed your face.

I was pleased, too, by the vast plaza, so reminiscent of the one that used to separate the original towers, the wind corkscrewing around their height and sending hats into orbit. In the next few years, when all the construction around the site has ceased and the landscaped trees and other greenery have more fully grown, this will be the place for contemplation that was intended. And perhaps those who come here will reflect not only on the events of 9/11 but their unexpected consequences and whether we as a nation are ever prepared for what comes next.

On the afternoon we visited the memorial, I was already downtown, attending a daylong conference on post 9/11 worker protection and community health, sponsored by the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a coalition of labor, civil rights, medical, faith-based and environmental organizations.

"Are we ready for another 9/11?" Dr. Linda Rae Murray, president of the American Public Health Association, asked us. "Hell, no! Were we ready for Katrina? Or the tornadoes? Or the H1N1 flu? We don’t have the resources; we’ve let our infrastructure disappear. No, we’re not ready."

The World Trade Center collapse created the largest number of workplace fatalities in the history of the United States. Government bumbling and dissembling about air quality downtown and conditions at the site, the rush back to business as usual, may have irreparably killed and injured countless others. In the words of Bruce Lippy, formerly with the International Union of Engineers, who spent weeks working on the pile, "They didn’t want to turn Manhattan into a Superfund site." Chip Hughes of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of the NIH) added, "There should be an apology."

Many of the health consequences for those who survived and continued as rescue and recovery workers have been summed up in a recent study of 27,449 participants in the World Trade Center Screening, Monitoring, and Treatment Program. The stark statistics were published in the September 3 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet:

"Findings: 9-year cumulative incidence of asthma was 27.6% (number at risk: 7027), sinusitis 42.3% (5870), and gastro-esophageal reflux disease 39.3% (5650). In police officers, cumulative incidence of depression was 7.0% (number at risk: 3648), PTSD 9.3% (3761), and panic disorder 8.4% (3780). In other rescue and recovery workers, cumulative incidence of depression was 27.5% (number at risk: 4200), PTSD 31.9% (4342), and panic disorder 21.2% (4953). 9-year cumulative incidence for spirometric [lung capacity] abnormalities was 41.8% (number at risk: 5769); three-quarters of these abnormalities were low forced vital capacity."

This doesn’t include all the others who lived, worked or studied at or near Ground Zero, inhaling smoke, ash and dust -- air some have described as more caustic than Drano. Nor does it include the cases of neurological disorders, mesothelioma, and other cancers appearing more and more among 9/11 survivors -- illnesses that legislators and activists are now battling to add to the list of conditions covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

It was hard enough passing the Zadroga Act in the first place, beating back years of resistance and wrangling in Congress, a GOP filibuster and so-called "compassion fatigue" around the rest of the country (at the NYCOSH conference, Jon Stewart was applauded as a local hero for his role shaming opponents of Zadroga into approval). Seeking new coverage for 9/11 cancer patients is another uphill fight against indifference and overt hostility.

So for those who will come to Manhattan from everywhere else to pause and reflect at the new 9/11 Memorial, better perhaps to consider some other implications and side effects of the terrorist attacks that impact not just the greater New York area but the entire country and beyond. In fact, many of the issues being battled over in Washington and across the Dr. Seuss-like landscape of the 2012 election campaign have a direct bearing on future 9/11’s in America, no matter where and when they may happen. (And why do all the Republican presidential debates remind me of those cheesy paintings of dogs playing poker?)

Infrastructure? Think of all those decaying roads, bridges and tunnels, and the chaos if they fail during an evacuation. Deregulation? If anything, 9/11 demonstrates that certain OSHA and EPA rules on safety, clean air and water need expansion and better enforcement. Conservative attacks on public employees and organized labor? The first at the scene on 9/11 were the firemen, police, emergency medical technicians and union construction workers who stayed on the pile until the last scrap of steel was gone, not to mention the Communication Workers of America members who risked their lives restoring phones, microwave links and IT; the electricians, plumbers, and engineers.

Budget cuts adversely affect training and response times. Politics interfere with scientific research. State labs are underfunded or closing. Universal health care, if it existed, already would have taken care of many of the doctor’s appointments, tests, treatments and medications being funded, but still only in part, by Zadroga and other programs.

Another article in that September 3 issue of The Lancet chronicles "Adverse health consequences of US Government responses to the 2001 terrorist attacks." According to its authors, Dr. Barry S. Levy and Dr. Victor W. Sidel, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "caused many deaths of non-combatant civilians, further damaged the health-supporting infrastructure and the environment (already adversely affected by previous wars), forced many people to migrate, led to violations of human rights, and diverted resources away from important health needs."

In Iraq, "Oil spillages, contaminated ash, unexploded ordinance, and depleted uranium at and around US military bases have all caused environmental damage." The health status of Afghans is "lower than almost any other country," life expectancy at birth is 48 years, only 27 percent of the population has access to clean water.

According to the report, "The initial $204 billion spent on the Iraq War could have reduced hunger throughout the world by 50% and provided enough funds to cover the needs for HIV/AIDS medicine, clean water and sanitation, and immunization for all children in developing countries for almost 3 years. Within the USA, the federal budget for the 2011 fiscal year for the war in Afghanistan -- $107 billion -- could have provided medical care for 14 million US military veterans for 1 year."

Domestically, "After 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak shortly afterwards, the USA and other countries have improved emergency preparedness and response capabilities, but these actions have often diverted attention and resources from more urgent health issues."

The coalitions and alliances that have formed in the decade since 9/11 -- the professionals and ordinary citizens who from day one have stepped up when official bureaucracy has not -- are the one bright light shining through tragedy. But it’s not enough. "Do we understand that we’ve been hijacked by a small group of people using government for their own benefit? This is our government," the Public Health Association’s Linda Rae Murray declared. "It doesn’t work well but it’s ours and we have to seize control of it and put in place what we need to keep ourselves and our neighbors healthy."

When you visit the 9/11 Memorial, think about that simple, fundamental truth as you remember the fallen, the heroes -- and everyone else struggling to survive.
_______

About author Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

2011-09-11T12:10:00.003-04:00

Robert Scheer's Columns

How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11

Posted on Sep 8, 2011

AP / Brennan Linsley

An unidentified detainee peers out from his cell inside the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

By Robert Scheer

For a decade, the main questions about 9/11 have gone unanswered while the alleged perpetrators who survived the attacks have never been publicly cross-examined as to their methods and motives. It is not conspiratorial but rather obviously plausible to suggest that they have been kept out of sight because legal due process, constitutionally guaranteed to even the most heinous of criminals, might provide information that our government would find embarrassing.

We remain in ignorance as to what drove religious zealots formerly allied with the United States to turn against us, and what was the role of our ally, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for most of the hijackers and their financing. Why in the aftermath of the attack did the United States embrace Pakistan, which was one of only three governments (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the others) to diplomatically recognize the Taliban and which turned out to be harboring the fugitive Osama bin Laden? And why did we instead invade Iraq, a nation known to be engaged in a deadly war with bin Laden and his al-Qaida?

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to “rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members” that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

“We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.”

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That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.

The fear of a public trial is apparently that it will be an occasion to humanize the presumed perpetrators of barbaric acts, but by that standard no alleged murderer should ever be tried in civilian court. The counterargument is that we as a society have, from the drafting of our Constitution, been committed to due process of law. But an even more compelling objection to the present secrecy flows not from the inalienable rights of the accused to justice but rather from the need to fully inform the public as to the dangers faced by our society.

Major policy developments, including two undeclared wars, were conducted in the name of defeating the perpetrators of 9/11 without the public being made aware of the relevant facts. Surely a public trial would have revealed, to the deep embarrassment of the Bush administration, that there was no connection between the 9/11 hijackers and the government of Iraq that the United States overthrew.

At the very least, such testimony would have shed light on the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the key leaders of al-Qaida, particularly the American-educated Mohammed, recruited by the CIA to join the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It certainly could also have proved embarrassing to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who, during the Bush administration, opposed public trials and managed last March to get President Barack Obama to reverse his pledge of civilian trials. Gates boasted in his 1996 memoir of his long history of working with Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, dating to his days in the Carter administration. As his book publisher bragged at the time, Gates exposed “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Of course 9/11 changed everything; nations were invaded, trillions of dollars were wasted, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives were lost, torture became acceptable and the public has come to tolerate a daily governmental assault on privacy as normal. But for all of the high drama and cost of the U.S. response, when it comes to understanding the forces behind the attack, we still do not know what we are talking about.

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Secrecy Killed on 9/11

2011-09-10T17:48:00.002-04:00

Secrecy Kills

WHO IS RICH BLEE?

What do they have to say?

Read the joint statement in response to the video by CIA Director George Tenet, CTC Director J. Cofer Black, and Richard Blee of Alec Station.

Also see our email back and forth with Tenet, Black and Blee, and our reply to their joint statement.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Get the latest news from @SecrecyKills and our Facebook page.

ZZZZZ,
It was a pleasure to speak with you briefly over the phone late last Thursday. Thank you for forwarding the following request to Mr. Tenet, as per our conversation.

Best,
Ryan

Dear Mr. Tenet,

I write as part of a documentary production team working in association with the Emmy-winning media firm Globalvision, also the winner of a George Polk Award for Journalism. We've been investigating the Mihdahr/Hazmi matter for several years, and we would like to speak with you by phone soon, either for a recorded interview or, less preferably, off-the-record.

CIA insiders, as well as others at NSC, FBI, and DOD, have already spoken to us, and if you will speak with us I think you will be interested to learn that the picture they've painted often differs greatly from that recounted in your book At the Center of the Storm.

In ten days, we will be releasing via public television one such interview -- with Richard Clarke -- ahead of our full release on the 9/11 anniversary. We are providing it to you now in a private YouTube link here:

YouTube Video (link has been changed to allow public access)

We sincerely hope that you will speak with us in order to set the record straight and respond to specific allegations made by Clarke and others.

Thank you,
Ryan XXXXX
Associate Producer

FF4 Films
Globalvision

Mr. XXXXX,

ZZZZZ relayed to us your request to interview George Tenet.

Mr. Tenet does not wish to be interviewed either on camera or on background for your project.

However, in light of some of the absurd and patently false statements made by Richard Clarke in the YouTube clip you shared, Mr. Tenet reached out to Cofer Black and Richard Blee. Together they are providing the attached joint statement to you. We request that you make their statement available, in its entirety, to any media organization to which you distribute your interview with Richard Clarke.

Bill Harlow

Joint Statement
from George J. Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee

August 3, 2011

Richard Clarke was an able public servant who served his country well for many years. But his recently released comments about the run up to 9/11 are reckless and profoundly wrong.

Clarke starts with the presumption that important information on the travel of future hijackers to the United States was intentionally withheld from him in early 2000. It was not.

He wildly speculates that it must have been the CIA Director who could have ordered the information withheld. There was no such order. In fact, the record shows that the Director and other senior CIA officials were unaware of the information until after 9/11.

The handling of the information in question was exhaustively looked at by the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, the CIA Inspector General and other groups.

The 9/11 Commission quite correctly concluded that “...no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case.”

In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail to CIA) did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.

Since 9/11 many systemic changes have been made to improve the watchlisting process and enhance information sharing within and across agencies.

Building on his false notion that information was intentionally withheld, Mr. Clarke went on to speculate--which he admits is based on nothing other than his imagination--that the CIA might have been trying to recruit these two future hijackers as agents. This, like much of what Mr. Clarke said in his interview, is utterly without foundation.

Many years after testifying himself at length before the 9/11 Commission and writing several books but making no mention of his wild theory, Mr. Clarke has suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.

We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony.

###

Mr. Harlow, Thank you very much for providing that joint statement. We will make it available in its entirety to any media organization to which we distribute the Clarke interview, as requested.

We are passionate about telling an accurate story, but the refusal of Mr. Tenet, Mr. Black, and Mr. Blee to discuss it even on background makes that impossible, as we are forced to rely on the info we've been provided by those who will talk to us. I have summarized the highlights of that information in an attached doc, including many, many issues still unaccounted for with regard to CIA's handling of Mihdhar/Hazmi, none of which have anything to do with Mr. Clarke's judgement or accuracy.

If there are simple -- even benign or admirable -- explanations for those issues, I sincerely wish Mr. Tenet, et al, would break their media silence and simply provide those answers. I want them to realize that their failure to do so only appears to give credence to speculation like that in the Clarke interview.

Furthermore, Mr. Clarke is not the only gov't insider who has stated to us that he/she believes these unexplained events can be explained by high-level deliberate choices within the CIA. If these folks are wrong, Mr. Tenet, et al, could easily choose to make them look foolish and set the record straight for all concerned by going through this story with us and providing explanations in detail, case by case. Their motivations in continuing to refuse to do so a full decade after the terrible tragedy and in the face of accusations from other gov't officials is, frankly, baffling to me.

Also, a quick correction on a couple items in the joint statement: Mr. Clarke did previously make this same accusation in his 2009 book Your Government Failed You, p. 165-171. Also, the Commission line quoted, "no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA about the case" actually began "It appears that..." and concerned only the search for Mihdhar/Hazmi from Aug 2001 onward, although we have spoken to an insider from Alec who claims even that simple fact was not the case. In fact, they should be made aware that in our interview with Chairman Tom Kean, he told us explicitly that he believed the withholding of Mihdhar info was deliberate and purposeful (though he believed this was due to an absurd culture of secrecy within the Agency) and also stated that he and his staff believed Mr. Tenet provided false testimony on a number of points ("No, I don't think he misspoke. I think he misled.")

If you will, please pass on the attached list of issues with the CIA story, if anyone wants to provide a more detailed response. Thank you again.

Best,
Ray Nova
Producer / Co-Director

FF4 Films
Globalvision

Got your voice mail message over the weekend...sorry it has taken a little while to get back to you.

Yes....the material you originally sent via XXX was made available to Tenet, Black and Blee and the statement I provided to you was their response in light of that material.

None of them have any plans to go beyond that statement or to respond to the additional material you sent via email on 8/4/11.

Bill Harlow

Understood, Mr. Harlow. Thank you for the response. Also, we truly hope Mr. Blee feels better soon.

Cordially,
Ray

AP Review Finds No WikiLeaks Sources Threatened

2011-09-10T17:29:00.001-04:00

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2011 by the Associated Press

AP Review Finds No WikiLeaks Sources Threatened

by Bradley Klapper and Cassandra Vinograd

WASHINGTON — Federica Ferrari Bravo's story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

In this July 14, 2011 photo, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to members of the media during a news conference in central London. The U.S. has condemned the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks for putting lives in danger. But how many is unclear. An Associated Press review of some of the hundreds of U.S. diplomatic contacts deemed especially sensitive turns up several people who are either comfortable with their names out in the open or even surprised that their information was so highly valued, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011. So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

"I don't think I said anything that would put me at risk," the Italian diplomat said.

There are similar stories involving other foreign lawmakers, diplomats and activists cited in the U.S. cables as sources to "strictly protect."

An Associated Press review of those sources raises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaks' disclosures and the Obama administration's angry claims, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening. U.S. examples have been strictly theoretical.

The question of whether the dire warnings are warranted or overblown became more acute with the recent release all of the 251,287 diplomatic memos WikiLeaks held.

Tens of thousands of confidential exchanges were dumped, emptying a trove of documents. They were released piecemeal since last year, initially with the cooperation of a select group of newspapers and magazines that blacked out some names and information before publishing the documents.

The latest cables were published in full, without names blacked out. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland branded the action "irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous," and the U.S. said the release exposed the names of hundreds of sensitive sources.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has blamed Britain's Guardian newspaper for publishing a secret encryption code, allowing intelligence agencies to access the cables and forcing WikiLeaks to provide the people affected the same information.

But the AP's review of the sources found several of them comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death. Others are dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations. Some have written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government.

The AP survey is selective and incomplete; it focused on those sources the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky.

The AP did not attempt to contact every named source in the new trove. It's generally up to the embassies themselves to decide which identities require heightened vigilance, officials say.

Hadzira Hamzic, a 73-year-old Bosnian refugee, wasn't bothered about being identified as one of thousands of victims from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

"I never hid that," she told the AP. "It is always hard when I have to tell about how I had been raped, but that is part of what happened and I have to talk about it."

In Asia, former Malaysian diplomat Shazryl Eskay Abdullah was shocked that an "unofficial lunch meeting" he had several years ago with a U.S. official meant his name ended up on a formal report. But he said his role in southern Thailand peace talks was well known. "I don't see why anyone would come after me," Shazryl said.

Ferrari Bravo's subject matter was also by no means mundane. A veteran of her nation's embassy in Tehran, Ferrari Bravo worked at the time on the Italian Foreign Ministry's Iran desk and discussed with the U.S. her government's view of the Iranian nuclear standoff. She urged continued dialogue.

"There is nothing that we said that was not known to our bosses, to our ministers, to our heads of state," she said. On having her identity protected, she said: "We didn't ask. There is nothing to protect."

U.S. officials say they have two criteria for sensitive sources. The first deals with people in totalitarian societies or failed states who could be imprisoned or killed, or perhaps denied housing, schooling, food or other services if exposed as having helped the United States.

The State Department also has sought to censor names of people who might lose their jobs or suffer major embarrassment even in friendly countries, if they were seen offering the U.S. candid insights or restricted information.

One such case involved the dismissal in December of a top aide to German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle after he provided details on coalition talks and debates over issues such as U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.

Still, the total damage appears limited and the State Department has steadfastly refused to describe any situation in which they've felt a source's life was in danger. They say a handful of people had to be relocated away from danger but won't provide any details on those few cases.

Units throughout the department have been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be "outed." Some, such as Hamzic, Sharzyl and Ferrari Bravo, say they were never contacted. Presumably, endangered individuals would have been prioritized.

Clearly, sensitivities depend on context. Revelations that may cause personal or political discomfort for a U.S. embassy contact in Western Europe may be life-threatening for an informant in an undemocratic nation. In the cables, they may both be "strictly protected" sources, highlighting relative danger levels in different places.

In Vietnam, the U.S. seemed to be dealing with sources whose names demanded vigilance: the wife of a dissident sentenced to five years in prison; a Buddhist leader condemning the arrest of a fellow priest; a dissident who says people "held his family hostage" until he renounced his activism; a Christian preacher complaining of police pressure on him to renounce his faith; another who speaks of a colleague forcibly sent to a mental institute.

A Syrian human rights activist warned the U.S. of a looming crackdown on anti-government activists as far back as 2009. If the activist wasn't threatened by the disclosure last year, he may be now that the country is in the throes of a brutal five-month security operation.

In Mexico, the term "strictly protect" appeared to be attached to interlocutors indiscriminately, even when officials offered only flattering assessments of their government or said little that wasn't common knowledge. It perhaps makes more sense in the context of a country where organized crime networks have essentially fought an insurgency against the government, where allowing a valued source's name to get out could affect that person's safety.

Assange, an Australian, has defended his actions by saying no one has died as a result of WikiLeaks.

Current and former American officials say that argument misses the point.

Making people think twice before providing the U.S. with information — or simply refuse ever again to help — hurts the good causes of human rights and democracy that American officials are promoting, they argue.

Take Arnold Sundquist, a Swede whose life isn't in danger. He provided the U.S. Embassy with sensitive details on an Iranian attempt to buy helicopters and said he was unhappy that his actions were now public. Last year, Swedish media with access to the WikiLeaks trove reported on the incident but didn't mention him by name.

"It is what it is," he said. "I can't do anything about it."

But will he or others in a similar situation, be as ready to help American authorities again?

Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda thinks not. His identity was exposed in a document describing how he told the U.S. ambassador in 2009 that according to one of his sources, Colombian rebel leaders had visited Caracas for secret meetings with senior Venezuelan government officials. Bocaranda published the account in one of his newspaper columns.

"I feel betrayed by WikiLeaks," Bocaranda told the AP on Friday. But he said that as a journalist it's natural for him to talk with diplomats from various countries. "I think the ones who have been betrayed basically are the American diplomats," he said.

"It's going to be more difficult for them because I think no one is going to want to talk for fear of coming out in print with their name," he said, adding that would apply those who might otherwise supply sensitive information.

He said he doesn't feel his work or personal security face additional threats as a result of his name being exposed but said he suspects President Hugo Chavez's government could try to "cast doubts on me, to say that I am a member of the CIA."

Bocaranda said that he has nothing to hide and that the information he publishes in his newspaper columns and on the Internet is public. "I don't think my sources are going to shut me out," he said.

Other governments have echoed the U.S. criticism of WikiLeaks, saying it jeopardizes invaluable diplomacy — the exchanges that aim to promote understanding, avoid war and improve global security.

The anger from Assange's home nation, Australia, was prompted not by the release of sources, but of 23 Australians who had been in contact with a Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and were being monitored. Still, a government statement couldn't point to a direct threat from the disclosure, only a potential danger.

"The large-scale distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified United States government documents is reckless, irresponsible and potentially dangerous," Australian Attorney-General Robert McClelland said.

Vinograd reported from London. Associated Press writers Nicole Winfield in Rome; Sean Yoong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sabina Niksic in Sarajevo, Bosnia; Ian James in Venezuela; and Karl Ritter in Stockholm contributed to this report.

How the Internet is destroying the middle class

2011-09-01T19:55:00.004-04:00

and

Topic:

Internet Culture

Wednesday, Aug 31, 2011 09:32 ET

How the Internet is destroying the middle class

Artist and theorist Jaron Lanier argues that high-tech "innovations" are making us poorer and less ambitious

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Jaron Lanier

In a wide-ranging interview for the online magazine Edge, theorist Jaron Lanier diagnosis many of the ills that ail the Internet-age economy.

Apropos of nothing except the subject's brilliance, I strongly urge you to read this truly epic interview with Jaron Lanier at Edge. It's about, well, pretty much everything that affects you day-to-day -- the decline and death of the middle class, the awesome utility of the Internet as a means to spread hate, superstition and lies, the dicey relationship between humans and machines, the reduced expectations of the younger generations.

Lanier also gets into the market dominance of Wal-Mart, Google, Apple and other huge corporate entities, and their role in what he calls "The Local-Global Flip," wherein companies become arrogant and authoritarian global players very quickly, concentrating massive amounts of data in very few hands and creating "a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others."

It's an extraordinary interview, packed with insight and often grimly funny. Lanier is a composer, computer scientist and visual artist, and the author of some wide-ranging and important bits of writing, including You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" and the 2006 Edge essay, ""Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism." I've quoted a few choice bits of the the interview, which runs almost 9,000 words. It's worth taking time to read it all.

On the notion that the Internet would make people freer and help create wealth:

Everyone's into Internet things, and yet we have this huge global economic trouble. If you had talked to anyone involved in it 20 years ago, everyone would have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth. This ought to create wellbeing; this ought to create this incredible expansion in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of that's happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn't happening enough, if it's happening at all.

On young people's diminished expectations in the Internet era:

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s.

On the possibility of a "third way" of modeling the online economy that "could grow the middle [class] back."

The thing that I'm thinking about is the [Theodor Holm "Ted"] Nelson approach, the third way where people buy and sell each other information, and can live off of what they do with their hearts and minds as the machines get good enough to do what they would have done with their hands. That thing is the thing that could grow the middle back. Then the crucial element of that is what we can call a "social contract," where people would pay for stuff online from each other if they were also making money from it. When people get nothing from a society, they eventually just riot ...

The most complex and important part of the interview concerns what Lanier calls the "local-global flip." This term refers to what happens when a company -- Wal-Mart, Google and Apple are his three main examples -- conquer certain sectors of the economy quickly and completely, and their dominance over that sector is so complete that it creates a stranglehold over that part of the market, effectively destroys the so-called "Mom-and-Pop" vendors that used to coexist with it, and turns those companies into gateways that control how other people get their goods, services or ideas into the marketplace.

The upsides of this phenomenon are (1) consumers get a massive array of cheap, convienient-to-purchase goods and services and (2) the owners of these companies, some of their executives, and certain associates get very, very rich.

The downsides, however, can be immense, and it can take a long time for the big companies to see them because they're accumulating so much loot in the short-term. Such a company's success, Lanier suggests, can impoverish parts of the population that were doing fine before. And the way that the successful company's system is set up -- with a "My way or the highway" mentality -- can turn vendors and business partners into indentured servants who are terrified to innovate, or even quit their association with the big company, for fear of being financially obliterated.

The result is low-level economic paralysis and depression that persists over years or decades, and that has has far-ranging, often hard-to-see ripple effects, including a localized devastation caused by the mauneverings of these global giants. As Lanier puts it:

The network effects can be so powerful that you cease being a local player. An example of this is Wal-Mart removing so many jobs from their own customers that they start to lose profitability, and suddenly upscale players, like Target, are doing better. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.

We can see this same process at work in other industries, Lanier says. "The finance industry kept on thinking they could eject waste out into the general system, but they became the system ... Insurance companies in America, by trying to only insure people who didn't need insurance, ejected risk into the general system away from themselves, but they became so big that they were no longer local players, and there wasn't some giant vastness to absorb this risk that they'd ejected, and so therefore the system breaks. You see this again and again and again. It's not sustainable."

Matt Zoller Seitz is Salon's staff television critic. More: Matt Zoller Seitz

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

CONVERSATION

A Conversation with Jaron Lanier [8.29.11]

"If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"

Introduction

by John Brockman

We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons.

In a freewheeling hour-long conversation, Lanier touches on, and goes beyond the themes he launched in his influential 2006 Edge essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism." What he terms "The Local-Global Flip" might be better expressed as "The Lanier Effect". Here's a sampling:

... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster.

... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. ... when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

... The reason this breaks is that there's a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. ... In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google's ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you're guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It's no longer just, "Well, I don't know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

... Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. ... This is the pattern that we'll see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That's the stark choice we have in the long-term.

...if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. ... But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and I'm certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it.

Read on. Or better yet, treat yourself to an interesting hour of watching the video and engaging with Lanier and his ideas.

JARON LANIER is a computer scientist, composer, and visual artist. He is the author of You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto.

Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page

The Reality Club: Dougas Rushkoff

The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect"

JARON LANIER: One of the things I've been thinking about is how computation is a human-centric concept. In the abstract, aliens don't recognize our bits. There has to be a cultural setup for us to recognize stored information. And that cultural setup can bring into it all kinds of fundamental ideas which could have a huge effect on how society runs, how the economy works, and how our lives are put together.

I've focused quite a lot on how this stealthy component of computation can affect our sense of ourselves, what it is to be a person. But lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to economics.

In particular, I'm interested in a pretty simple problem, but one that is devastating. In recent years, many of us have worked very hard to make the Internet grow, to become available to people, and that's happened. It's one of the great topics of mankind of this era.

Everyone's into Internet things, and yet we have this huge global economic trouble. If you had talked to anyone involved in it twenty years ago, everyone would have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth. This ought to create wellbeing; this ought to create this incredible expansion in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of that's happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn't happening enough, if it's happening at all.

The situation reminds me a little bit of something that is deeply connected, which is the way that computer networks transformed finance. You have more and more complex financial instruments, derivatives and so forth, and high frequency trading, all these extraordinary constructions that would be inconceivable without computation and networking technology.

At the start, the idea was, "Well, this is all in the service of the greater good because we'll manage risk so much better, and we'll increase the intelligence with which we collectively make decisions." Yet if you look at what happened, risk was increased instead of decreased.

In parallel it seems as though the middle classes have been having trouble all around the world, not just in the U.S., but in all developed societies at the same time that the Internet has been rising. I'm concerned that it's not a matter of the Internet doing some good, but not enough good to undo unrelated coincidental troubles. I'm afraid the Internet, as we've conceived of it thus far, has been part of the problem. I'm also interested in the idea that if we conceive of it differently, it could be a solution.

This brings us back, literally thousands of years to an ancient discussion that continues to this day about exactly how people can make a living, or make their way when technology gets better. There is an Aristotle quote about how when the looms can operates themselves, all men will be free. That seems like a reasonable thing to say, a precocious thing for somebody to have said in ancient times. If we zoom forward to the 19th century, we had a tremendous amount of concern about this question of how people would make their way when the machines got good. In fact, much of our modern intellectual world started off as people's rhetorical postures on this very question.

Marxism, the whole idea of the left, which still dominates the Bay Area where this interview is taking place, was exactly, precisely about this question. This is what Marx was thinking about, and in fact, you can read Marx and it sometimes weirdly reads likes a Silicon Valley rhetoric. It's the strangest thing; all about "boundaries falling internationally," and "labor and markets opening up," and all these things. It's the weirdest thing.

In fact, I had the strange experience years ago, listening to some rhetoric on the radio ... it was KPFA, in fact, the lefty station ... and I thought, "Oh, God, it's one of these Silicon startups with their rhetoric about how they're going to bring down market barriers", and it turned out to be an anniversary reading of "Das Kapital". The language was similar enough that one could make the mistake.

The origin of science fiction was exactly in this same area of concern. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine foresees a future in which there are the privileged few who benefit from the machines, and then there are the rest who don't, and both of them become undignified, lesser creatures. Separate species. The first literary description of the Internet, which preceded the invention of the computer by many years, was E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops, which continues the theme. And another nice example is Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Player Piano, which is yet another statement of it.

But at any rate, let's get to what the question is. Let's suppose that machines get good enough that one can say a lot of people are extraneous, that the machines are doing what needs to be done. It has to immediately be said that this wouldn't in fact happen, because software will probably be buggy and machines will be unreliable, so there would still have to be human oversight. The machines will screw up. The way I phrased it was careful—"one can say"—because the crucial thing about very high-functioning machines, artificial intelligences and what not, is how we conceive of the things that the machines can't do, whether those are considered real jobs for people or not.

Let me give you just a couple of examples that are right on the threshold of becoming mainstream. One of them is a self-driving vehicle. Not only Google, but also some other researchers in Europe and in Asia have been demonstrating cars that are quite effective at driving themselves around. The reasons for wanting cars that can be self-driving are so extraordinarily powerful ... you couldn't have better reasons.

Human are terrible drivers. We kill each other in car accidents so frequently that car accidents are a much more serious problem than wars, terrorism, a great many diseases. It's one of our biggest sources of death and pain, and it's awful. It's very unlikely that robots could drive as badly as people. That's compelling.

But there's much more. If the cars could coordinate with each other, instead of people fighting each other in little tiny ego-wars to merge between lanes on the freeway causing this huge backup going miles back, the cars could coordinate and cleanly merge together, taking full advantage of the hypothetical bandwidth of the freeway. They could be cognizant of their wakes, and they could manage the airflow together to improve their efficiency. A lot of streetlights could go away. They would simply know that there's no other car coming, and there's no pedestrian, and they could just proceed through without stopping, which would be a huge, huge gain for energy efficiency, since you wouldn't have to accelerate from a stop as often. And it goes on and on. There are just many, many, many benefits.

Then there are some problems. One of the problems is that when there is a screw-up, it could be a huge one. If a whole freeway of cars hit each other because of a snag, it would be something like a plane crash instead of a little tiny thing. That's conceivable when there are a lot of cars connected together, and moving rapidly under the same software system. Then, of course, there's the existential issue of losing freedom, how do people feel about that? All of these things have been talked about a great deal.

But finally, there's this very interesting issue, that you can't make it 100 percent. If people are going to be people at all, somebody has to tell the car where to go and something about how to do it, and there has to be some failsafe, and there has to be some human responsibility if not on the part of the people who are passengers in the car, at least somewhere. And here's where we get into very, very interesting territory.

I just listed a bunch of ways that automating driving would create efficiencies. It would save huge amounts of money because there would be fewer people going to the hospital, there's less fuel, and people get places faster. There is this huge increase in efficiency, but the interesting thing is that increasing efficiency by itself doesn't employ people. There is a difference between saving and making money when you're unemployed. Once you're already rich, saving money and making money is the same thing, but for people who are on the bottom or even in the middle classes, saving money doesn't help you if you don't have the money to save in the first place.

If you look at the labor prospects of the middle classes, a whole lot of middle class people are behind a wheel. There's a whole bunch of cabbies, and truck drivers, et cetera, and we're talking about throwing all of those people out of work—forever—pretty soon, basically. It's very, very likely that at some point, not next year, but this century at the very least, and probably the early part of the century, that it would just be inconceivable to put a person behind the wheel of some big truck. People will just think it's insane. Similarly cabs will be safer in an automated mode. What do all those people do?

This becomes interesting. There aren't that many options, and let me list what those options are.

One option is the one that Marx advocated. That option is: The society is saving a lot of money, it's getting more efficient, so we'll apply that to taking care of the unneeded people. In that case, well it's a tricky one… Because in every example in which there have been very large numbers of people who were just taken care of by a society, it eventually breaks.

The way that can work is maybe if people are broken into societies that are very ideologically, ethnically, and in other ways homogenous so they somehow can accept each other. That way, they can accept similar tradeoffs, and coordinate with each other. It'd be very hard to do it in our heterogeneous crazy society filled with a lot of surprises. People would have to rely purely on democracy; you couldn’t rely on capitalism anymore for a sense of liberty. You’d have to argue with people and agree on things. Sometimes that's just impossible. Government can only work so well.

The beauty of money is it creates a system of people leaving each other alone by mutual agreement. It's the only invention that does that that I'm aware of. In a world of finite limits where you don't have an infinite West you can expand into, money is the thing that gives you a little bit of peace and quiet, where you can say, "It's my money, I'm spending it".

I know that there are a great many leftists around here who think that when the machines get good the government will support everybody, and somehow we'll agitate for our rights, and everybody will have this kind of liberty and ability to do as they please. But I find that very hard to believe. I just don't think that that would work. Even in the places that are called anarchistic, in fact, what happens is a new kind of order, which is often very oppressive if you don't happen to fit in. In San Francisco you can be attacked by mobs of bicycling advocates who've occasionally been quite ruthless because they believe in bicycles, and they think that they're the most enlightened, free people in the world, and yet if somebody doesn't agree with them, then they have trouble.

Similarly, Burning Man, which people who fit in at Burning Man must perceive is the most open, accepting place in the world is, in fact, extraordinarily unaccepting of people who don't conform. Just a mild example of that is if you show up in an RV you're pooh-poohed by a lot of people.

This hope that socialism can preserve liberty is pretty unlikely to work out. I hesitate to say that because most of the people who say that are these rigid Tea Party nut cases these days in the United States. I hate to be saying something that sounds similar, but that doesn't make it untrue. It still is a problem.

All right, so let's leave aside Marx's answer. Another possibility is that the extraneous people just suffer, and are maybe given inexpensive amusements. This is also foreseen in science fiction quite a lot. Most recently as a pop phenomenon, "The Matrix" movies might have expressed that the most, where there's this conceit that somehow people's human bodies are useful as batteries, although anyone who sees the movie is thinking, "Oh, there's got to be a better battery. Why would they keep the people around?" So even as batteries, people are unlikely to be needed.

And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that's the world we're entering. I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that's such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it does become a problem.

What that leads to is the world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about, where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses, just barely enough to keep the poor in check, and perhaps somehow not breeding, and they just kind of either wither away through attrition or something. Or medicine gets good enough and expensive enough that those on the wealthy side of it live and those on the other, once again through attrition, fade away.

Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is that the aging populations are buying into their own impoverishment. There's this strange way in which people who are older tend to be conservative, and what conservative means now is no government: "Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options."

But if you look at how this transformation has come about, where the elderly are, for the most part, advocating their own impoverishment and misery, you find the same thing, this prevalence of social media, new media. You tend to find "conservative," nutty politics using social media better than mainstream sensible stuff. And that's true both on the left and the right, but it's the right that's taken off with it, and that's striking to me. Of course, that story is still unfolding, so we don't know how it will turn out, but it's absolutely remarkable.

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

This "rights" kind of stance, as opposed to a "wealth" kind of stance, it's exactly the mirror image of what you see in Tea Party older America, of "we don't want our healthcare paid for. What we want is the right to not have our healthcare paid for, and that's more important to me."

It's very strange, this notion of impoverishment and lack of prospects, but this absoluteness of expression and speech. And in a way maybe that's admirable, maybe there is something about that that's very American, and very pure. I don't know. But at any rate, it's not sustainable, whatever it is. I don't think it leads to a workable scenario, and I also think it just includes too much suffering and cruelty.

Just to recap where the argument is so far, I've described two ways to cope with machines getting good.

One is a Marxist way, where you have some form of socialism, some institutional attempt for everybody to get along and use politics to arrange for their own liberty instead of some more abstract mechanism like money, and I'm concerned that that's not realistic given human nature.

A second way is for people to just suffer, and for the poor to wither away through attrition, as they can't afford medicine or some scenario like that over time. I should say that this notion of the poor withering away does seem to be normative right now, and it concerns me a great deal.

I believe there is a third way, which is a better way, and it happens to have also been the initial idea for the Internet, interestingly enough. My poster boy for expressing this is Ted Nelson, the eccentric character who initially proposed the Web, or something like it ... it wasn't called the Web then ... as early as 1960, which is over a half century ago, amazingly, when I was born.

Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.

I remember when I first met Ted as a teenager, we talked about how you need to have some system like this where people are making a living with their hearts and heads, and trading online, and this was before the word "online" even existed in the way we know it today. It's the only way to have a future of liberty.

Silicon Valley totally screwed up on this. We were doing a great job through the turn of the century. In the '80s and '90s, one of the things I liked about being in the Silicon Valley community was that we were growing the middle class. The personal computer revolution could have easily been mostly about enterprises. It could have been about just fighting IBM and getting computers on desks in big corporations or something, instead of this notion of the consumer, ordinary person having access to a computer, of a little mom and pop shop having a computer, and owning their own information. When you own information, you have power. Information is power. The personal computer gave people their own information, and it enabled a lot of lives.

At the turn of the century we turned it all around, and there's two ways it got turned around. One exemplified perhaps by Google, and another way by Apple, although I should point out at this point I'm working with Microsoft, which to some people's minds might make me partisan in this. I have a special arrangement with them where they even encourage me to criticize them in public, and I do, and many of the things I critique here can be applied, as well, to various Microsoft businesses (Bing does exactly what Google does) and so it's not about company versus company stuff. Also the people at Apple and Google are my friends, and I've made money from Google. It's not personal. I like Google. And it's not about company rivalries, and I hope I can persuade people of that.

But at any rate, the Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class.

Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster.

What's happened now is that we've created this new regimen where the bigger your computer servers are, the more smart mathematicians you have working for you, and the more connected you are, the more powerful and rich you are. (Unless you own an oil field, which is the old way.) II benefit from it because I'm close to the big servers, but basically wealth is measured by how close you are to one of the big servers, and the servers have started to act like private spying agencies, essentially.

With Google, or with Facebook, if they can ever figure out how to steal some of Google's business, there's this notion that you get all of this stuff for free, except somebody else owns the data, and they use the data to sell access to you, and the ability to manipulate you, to third parties that you don't necessarily get to know about. The third parties tend to be kind of tawdry.

We tend to now be courting the seedier side of capitalism more than the dignified side of capitalism. There tend to be a lot of ambulance chasers, and snake oil salespeople who become our customers. Not all. There are some stories that are very positive. There's the occasional person who builds a career by blogging, or getting on YouTube, or who can build a small business by selling ads on some of these services. Those people exist, but there's a Horatio Alger quality where there just aren't enough of them to create a middle class. They create a false hope rather than a real trend. And it's plain as day that that's the truth, that there aren't hoards and hoards of these people, but just tokens.

It's funny to say that because I'll often get a lot of pushback and they'll say, "No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that's free", and I'll say, "Well, show me. Where's all the wealth? Where's the new middle class of people who are doing this?" They don't exist. They just aren't there. We're losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.

If we used to be a bell curve society, we're ending up as a U-shaped society, turning into what Brazil used to be, or something like that, that's where America is going. You can see the Apple model, and it's not just Apple, but this notion of the elite-controlled thing serving the upper horn of the U, and you can see the Google model, which is like the seedy pawn shop and cash store kind of approach to the Internet where, "Oh, we'll give you coupons, and we'll sell advertising to you, and it's free, free, free, free, free." That attaches itself to the lower horn of the U.

The thing that I'm thinking about is the Ted Nelson approach, the third way where people buy and sell each other information, and can live off of what they do with their hearts and minds as the machines get good enough to do what they would have done with their hands. That thing is the thing that could grow the middle back.

Then the crucial element of that is what we can call a "social contract" where people would pay for stuff online from each other if they were also making money from it. When people get nothing from a society, they eventually just riot. And to my mind, that's kind of what's going on on the Internet. Basically, people can expect free stuff from the Internet but they don't expect wealth from the Internet, which to me makes it a failed technology at this point, although I hope it's revivable. I'm sure it is. I'm positive it is.

And so when all you can expect is free stuff, you don't respect it, it doesn't offer you enough to give you a social contract. What you can seek on the Internet is you can seek some fine things, you can seek friendship and connection, you can seek reputation and all these things that are always talked about, you just can't seek cash. And it tends to create a lot of vandalism and mob-like behavior. That's what happens in the real world when people feel hopeless, and don't feel that they're getting enough from society. It happens online.

I feel certain that if people had an opportunity to make a living from it, some number of them would be drawn to become scammier, of course, because that's also part of human nature, but on the whole, it would reinforce a social contract which people would buy into. They would treat it as something valuable in a way that—even with all the talk about the Internet and these incessant clichéd ways in which every story has to be Internet-centric if there is any plausible way it can be, even with all that—it still could be so much more, because it could be the way that we can make a living from our hearts and heads. That's what it must be. It must become that somehow.

I promised I'd mention two ways that the machines are getting good, and I just mentioned driverless cars. I should say a little bit more about that, perhaps. The interesting contest that will happen—in about ten years is when this will come to head—is the contest between a purely driverless car, where you just get in a robot taxi and you say, "Take me to the airport", and it says, "Okay, airport", and then we go (Makes Zooming Sound), and then it shows you ads along the way, or forces you to drive by billboards, or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something, or whatever the scam is that would come about from a Google-driven car. That's one way.

There's another way to do it, which is you still drive the car, but with a fancy user interface, where you have autonomy much of the time, however when there is either an intersection with other cars approaching, or there's congestion on a freeway, or an imminent collision, if there is some other reason that automation is better, it can take over. But in the meantime it gives you fantastic user interface. It helps you be a much better driver, and get where you want faster if that's your desire, or whatever it is. That's like an augmented reality car blended with a fully automated car, and that might be the thing that works better. If it does, there's more of a human role, and there's more potential for employment. There might even be a cabby driving that thing, that's conceivable. There might even be a trucker in that truck, and it might work better. But anyway, that's something that we'll sort out.

Another thing like driverless cars that's going to come along and have this huge impact is 3-D printing, and automated manufacturing at a small-distributed scale in other ways. This is a hobbyist phenomenon right now where you have a machine that takes some gloop, that connects to your computer, and then the gloop is printed out into something you might like, like a new Frisbee, or coat hanger, or clarinet mouthpiece, whatever it is. As this gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes possible that more and more things can be manufactured onsite instead of made in China or wherever, and then moved over through a huge transportation network. The system will remember what it made, so it knows what each thing is made of, and how to take it a part, so recycling can become vastly more automated, more efficient rapidly, and so there is a whole systemic potential improvement in efficiency.

Once again, whenever you improve efficiency, when you save money, it's only the same thing as making money if you're already rich. If there are people who aren't rich enough to benefit from that, it just makes them poorer because they have less to do, and less ways to earn money. This is another potential huge increase in efficiency with enormous benefits. And the interesting question is where does it leave various kinds of people?

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo.

It should be pointed out that the original design of the Internet didn't have even a copy function, because it originally just seemed stupid. If you have a network, why would you copy something? That's just inefficiency. I'm convinced the reason copying happened on the Internet was because Xerox PARC was so important as an early supporter of computers, that for Alan Kay to go to the Xerox people and say, "Oh, by the way, copying itself, even in the abstract will become obsolete because of computer networks", would have just blown their minds. We ended up with copying on a network.

But anyway, when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

If 3-D printers become good and ubiquitous, the number one question is going to be, can somebody make up an object and get paid for it? Just hypothetically, let's say 3-D printers are good enough to print out a new phone, which is conceivable, not immediately but it will happen, or to print out a new computer, a new tablet you'd want to use, or some other device. Is the company that operates the advertising auction system at the back end that's paying for the network connection the only party that makes money at that point? I don't think that's a sustainable future, and society would break before we hit that point, but right now what's funny is that is the path we're headed towards. When you're headed towards a path that's impossible, it means that something's going to break, and so you should get on a different path that's more plausible, and it's urgent that we find that other path.

The rise of 3-D printers could be particularly destabilizing in that it could hit economies that are reliant on particularly low-end manufacturing. It could be a disaster for China, and it could happen rather quickly. And at the same time, if you think about this: You have machines that can make machines… If people could get paid for creatively coming up with things for them to do, if you can make a living from that, from what you do with your heart and your head as regards to the creation of physical things…

Recycling is efficient suddenly because of the way this all happens. You can take old things and turn them into new things very efficiently, which you could do because just as you can have assembling robots and 3-D printers, you can also have disassembling, and de-printing robots.

In that world, you could have an incredible amount of employment, and generation of liberty and autonomy for people who are just helping things get creative, instead of the manufacturing paradigm where there’s a limited number of things that can be made.

Instead, they'll constantly be recycled, so there could be this entire churn, and all these new things. When this technology works, is this going to be a technology that just benefits whoever's auctioning off the advertising?

It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that. "Oh, no, there are useful ads, and it's increasing your choice space", and all that, but if you look at the kinds of ads that make the most money, they are tawdry, and if you look at what's happening to wealth distribution, the middle is going away, and just empirically, these ideals haven't delivered in actuality. I think the darker interpretation is the one that has more empirical evidence behind it at this point.

There's this question of why is there so much economic pain at once all over the world, what happened? There are a number of different explanations that can be helpful. Hitting some hard limits to growth in the world is part of it, the rise of new powers of India, and China, and Brazil, so that suddenly there are more people with means. That's part of the story. But there's something else going on here, too, which is that the mechanisms of finance just completely failed and screwed everybody. If we look at exactly what happened with the mortgage meltdowns and the utter failure of complex financial instruments in which securities were bundled in ways that were beyond human understanding, essentially, if you look at the extraordinary ways in which the whole world seemed to go into debt at once, what happened there?

There's a short answer to that question, which is finance got networked. The big kinds of computers that had made certain other industries efficient were applied to finance, and it broke finance. It made finance stupid. Let's back up a little bit.

The first example of computer networks really transforming an industry on a global scale did not come from a social networking site, or from search, or any of those Silicon Valley things, it was Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pioneered the use of networking resources to make a global efficiency. Their supply chain was driven by real-time data, and extraordinary amounts of computation, and I had a window into their world because I had a consulting gig with them when they were doing it, and it was absolutely extraordinary.

Essentially what Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system. And all the people who succeed the best at using networks do precisely that. It's been done again and again. But Wal-Mart was in a way the pioneer.

If you want to, you can talk about the intelligence agencies as being the earlier pioneers, perhaps, but in a way Wal-Mart is the most impressive one, totally transformed the world. I'm not going to condemn them, because overall they brought so much good in their wake that it would be hard to condemn them. Consider that before Wal-Mart one of the greatest anxieties many of us had was the rise of China. What would that be like? Wal-Mart said, "Oh, the rise of China is going to be as a peaceful manufacturing partner." And China started to get rich, got happy, got nicer, and it just turned the rise of China into something that was so much better than anyone had foreseen, and Wal-Mart played a huge role in that. Without information systems there's no way that whole thing could have been coordinated to happen so quickly. That's an extraordinary good for everybody in the loop. You can't find a villain here and say, "This is the horrible thing", because a lot of these are complex and nuanced large-scale phenomena.

What Wal-Mart did with manufacturing, retail, the whole supply chain, and transportation preceded the consumer Internet, the general Internet. When the general Internet got good, Google had this idea of providing information services for free because the real money was in paid influence, or what they call advertising. I'm uncomfortable calling what Google does "advertising." In the history of capitalism, advertising has been a crucial component, whether we like it or not, because it romanticized human production. Without advertising, we wouldn't have had the rise of capitalism, as we know it. Many people can feel uncomfortable with that, they can find it manipulative, and they can find that it leads to waste and excess, that it's materialistic. There are all kinds of criticisms. But at any rate, whatever everyone's judgment is, advertising was indispensable to the rise of capitalism, and since I haven't seen any alternative that creates liberty for people better, I have to therefore respect it.

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you." It's a gate keeping function. It's an arbiter of access. It's turning connections instead of being open into being paid. That's essentially what Google does. "We'll own the data, you'll pay for access to other people, but we'll give a whole ton of other stuff for free." And then it leads to this very strange schizophrenia, I'd say, where you think you're the user, but you're the used, or you're the product, and then you end up doing all this stuff to control your online presence, and your online reputation, and people become obsessed with that. But the real representation of you is the one you can't access, which is the one that's used to sell access to you to third parties. The whole thing is just, to my mind, increasingly perverse. And the real information about you isn't even separable. There's no dossier on you that you could get; it’s this correlative effect from all the other data that they have, this giant, proprietary correlative model of the world.

Anyway, back to Wal-Mart. With Wal-Mart, the consumer, or the ordinary person who was a shopper at Wal-Mart was confronted with these two pieces of news. One is, stuff they wanted to buy got cheaper, which of course is good, but the other thing is their own employment prospects were reduced, which is bad, and Wal-Mart's rhetoric sometimes try to balance these things and say, "We cost a lot people their jobs, and we also save people a lot of money", but the thing is you can't equate the two.

Once a particular party in a market has achieved a threshold where they have enough that they could lose, then saving becomes the equivalent of making, but if they haven't reached that threshold, saving is not the equivalent of making.

Wal-Mart created efficiencies, lowered costs, and yet overall made people poor, so it's a great example of efficiency often not being good for people, but it's all based on how you think about it. It's an interesting thing. Let's move forward to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has done the same thing. It's created efficiencies, but in a way that makes people poorer lately, and whether one likes this or not is a different question than whether it's even a sustainable path, and I would argue it simply isn't. We can't go on like this.

In the recent recession, what happened is that Wal-Mart's victories, its triumphs of using networking technology to make these global efficiencies were copied by the financial sector. Interestingly enough, this retailer was first. There were a few people in finance who were thinking about this and dabbling in it, but the big time came later, after Wal-Mart had demonstrated the principle.

I remember this well, because I also had a direct window on it, because they were recruiting. They were looking for quants to work on these things, so I knew a lot of the people who were starting to use major computation resources for finance in the early days of it, and coming up with schemes.

If you can collect all the information, you can find little things, you can find little differentials. I knew people who were moving money around banks around the world in weird cycles because they could take advantage of various slight differences in the times when they would close accounts, or weird little fluctuations. There were other people who were doing totally automated, statistical micro-fluctuation analysis to pull money out of a system, and all kinds of other schemes.

The interesting thing about this is that it completely defeats every argument for why a market should work, because there's no risk management. You can argue that there is, but empirically there isn't.

Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did.

This is the pattern that we'll see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That's the stark choice we have in the long-term.

In the case of the recent financial meltdowns, there are a couple of interesting features. One is the use of automation to avoid responsibility, and this is a phenomenon that you see again and again.

This has also happened in the American healthcare system. What you want to do is increase your rewards and reduce your risks. So you associate risk-taking behavior with an algorithm, or with some network effect, so it's very hard to personalize it when this happens. In a sense this is an inevitable correlate to saying that it's those who own the network who should benefit. If owning the network is the reason you benefit rather than decisions made on the network, then obviously it benefits the owners, but it also removes monetized roles from other people who are using the network. It's no longer choice that gets rewarded, or gets monetized. But then the flip side of that is that the risks which are taken are just dissipated to the world. We see this in healthcare.

I also had a wonderful window into the transformation of healthcare by computer networks because I had a consulting gig with some of the largest insurers as they were starting to make use of computer networks to improve their actuarial results. Once you can gather information in real time with a network, you can see so much more that the traditional idea of the insurer managing risk becomes absurd, because now you can say, "Well, I have enough information that it's not so much of a mystery what will happen, and what I want to do is just insure the people who won't need the insurance". Then you start breaking the whole system. Of course, this is exactly what happened in finance, as well, where the idea was to push all the risk onto others so that you, who run the network, are left with none of it.

The reason this breaks is that there's a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard.

In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google's ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you're guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It's no longer just, "Well, I don't know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

Exactly the same thing happens whenever somebody concentrates power using a big global network. And the thing about that is that you can rise to power so quickly in the way that something like Facebook rises quickly. The network effects can be so powerful that you cease being a local player.

An example of this is Wal-Mart removing so many jobs from their own customers that they start to lose profitability, and suddenly upscale players, like Target, are doing better. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet. The finance industry kept on thinking they could eject waste out into the general system, but they became the system. You become global instead of local so that the system breaks. Insurance companies in America, by trying to only insure people who didn't need insurance, ejected risk into the general system away from themselves, but they became so big that they were no longer local players, and there wasn't some giant vastness to absorb this risk that they'd ejected, and so therefore the system breaks. You see this again and again and again. It's not sustainable.

If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?

It's not about Google, it's a general business idea which Google played a role in pioneering, but it's shared by Facebook, and also companies with which I am now affiliated through my work. It's not at all specific to Google at this point, but… People have to understand that there's no such thing as "free," that when they buy into a system in which they upload their videos to YouTube without expecting to make anything (unless they're very lucky to become a token Horatio Alger story) at the end of the day, or when they contribute to services like Google+, or Facebook, or other social networks, what's happening is they're working for the benefit of someone else's fortune by creating data that can be used to grant or deny access based on pay to these third parties, the tawdry third parties I mention so often.

There's a sense of, if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and I'm certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it.

We're not going to be able to test tomorrow because we've gone down this path so far that it will be a decade's long project to begin to explore it, but we must find our way back. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a century after Ted Nelson first proposed this thought in 1960 that this is how the Internet should be. It might be a century before we even start to seriously try to do it, but that's how things go sometimes in history. Sometimes it just takes a while to sort things out.

Douglas Rushkoff :

I am heartened to see Jaron applying himself to these problems, as they are the ones that have consumed me for the past decade or so. As I have come to understand the terrain, there are a few interrelated dynamics at work. All of them, however, in one way or another boil down to operating systems – and our reluctance to dig down and determine the biases of those systems.

Our refusal makes us much less likely to be the users of our technologies – or any social system – than the used. (Or, my parlance, the programmed rather than the programmers.) It's not just an Internet story at all, but one exacerbated by the speed and depth of the Internet. This is the way different media environments combine and influence each other. The trick is to avoid thinking of the net as the only arbitrary player or movable piece in... [+]

U.S. storage sites overfilled with spent nuclear fuel

2011-04-04T23:11:00.002-04:00

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U.S. storage sites overfilled with spent nuclear fuel

By admin on Mar 24, 2011 in State Of The World

71,862 tons, with more created every year, and no permanent disposal solution

The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States — the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.

The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.

Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.

Spent fuel at Dai-ichi overheated, possibly melting fuel-rod casings and spewing radiation into the air, after Japan’s tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the plant.

The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S. reactors has been put into dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited into a Yucca-like facility.

The U.S. nuclear industry says the waste is being stored safely at power-plant sites, though it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility. Meanwhile, the industry’s collective pile of waste is growing by about 2,200 tons a year; experts say some of the pools in the United States contain four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.

The AP analyzed a state-by-state summary of spent fuel data based on information that nuclear power plants voluntarily report every year to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. The NEI would not make available the amount of spent fuel at individual power plants.

While the U.S. Department of Energy previously reported figures on overall spent fuel storage, it no longer has updated information available. A spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plant safety, said the agency was still searching for a compilation of spent fuel data.

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

Four states have spent fuel even though they don’t have operating commercial plants. Reactors in Colorado, Oregon and Maine are permanently shut; spent fuel from all three is stored in dry casks. Idaho never had a commercial reactor, but waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania is being stored at a federal facility there.

Illinois has 9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country, according to industry figures. It is followed by Pennsylvania with 6,446 tons; 4,290 in South Carolina and roughly 3,780 tons each for New York and North Carolina.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.

How dangerous these elements are depends on how easily can find their way into the body. Plutonium and uranium are heavy, and don’t spread through the air well, but there is a concern that plutonium could leach into water supplies over thousands of years.

Cesium-137 is easily transported by air. It is cesium-137 that can still be detected in a New Jersey-sized patch of land around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the Ukraine in 1986.

Typically, waste must sit in pools at least five years before being moved to a cask or permanent storage, but much of the material in the pools of U.S. plants has been stored there far longer than that.

Safety advocates have long urged the NRC to force utility operators to reduce the amount of spent fuel in their pools. The more tightly packed they are, the more quickly they can overheat and spew radiation into the environment in case of an accident, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Industry leaders say new technology has made fuel pools safer, and regulators have taken some steps since the 9/11 terror attacks to reduce fuel pool risks. Kevin Crowley, who directs the nuclear and radiation studies board at the National Academy of Sciences, says lessons will be learned from the crisis in Japan. And NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko says his agency will review how spent fuel is stored in the U.S.

A 2004 report by the academy suggested that fresh spent fuel, which is radioactively hotter, be spread among older, cooler assemblies in the spent fuel pool. “You’re buying yourself time, basically,” says Crowley. “The cooler ones can act as a thermal buffer.”

First Energy, which runs two nuclear power stations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, was able to reconfigure the spent fuel rods in its pools to make more room. Still, the company is now running out of space, says spokesman Todd Schneider. Ohio has 1,136 tons of spent fuel in pools and 37 tons in dry casks.

The casks in the U.S. are kept outdoors, generally on concrete pads, but industry officials insist they are safe. Unlike the pools, the casks don’t need electricity; they are cooled by air circulation.

One cask model, selling for $1.5 million, places spent fuel inside a stainless steel canister, which is placed inside an “overpack” — an outside shell composed of a layer of carbon steel, 27 inches of concrete and another layer of carbon steel. When in place, the system stands 20 feet tall and weighs 190,000 pounds, said Joy Russell, said spokeswoman for manufacturer Holtec International of Florida.

Russell said engineers have designed the system to withstand a crash from an F-16 fighter jet and survive the resulting jet fuel fire.

Plant operators in some states have moved aggressively to dry cask storage. Virginia has 1,533 tons of nuclear waste in dry storage and 1,105 tons in spent fuel pools. Maryland has 844 tons in dry storage and 588 tons in spent fuel pools.

Utilities in Texas, though, have not. There are 2,178 tons kept in spent fuel pools at reactor sites there, and zero in dry casks. In New York, 3,345 tons are in spent fuel pools while only 454 tons are in dry storage.

No cask is totally invulnerable, but the academy report found that radioactive releases from casks would be relatively low.

“If you attacked a fuel cask and managed to put a hole in it, anything that came out, the consequences would be very local,” Crowley said.

Casks can be licensed for 20 years, with renewals, said Carrie Phillips, spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which has a dozen such casks at its two-reactor Joseph M. Farley plant near Columbia, Ala. She said officials have “every expectation” the casks could last “in excess of 100 years by design.”

But not the needed tens of thousands of years. For long-term storage, the government had looked to Yucca Mountain. It was designed to hold 77,160 tons — 69,444 tons designated for commercial waste and 7,716 for military waste. That means the current inventory already exceeds Yucca’s original planned capacity.

A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.

The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it. Nevadans have fiercely opposed Yucca Mountain, though a collection of state governments and others are taking legal action to reverse the decision.

Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power. He created a commission last year to come up with a long-term nuclear waste plan. Initial findings are expected this summer, with a final plan expected in January.

“They are 13 years late,” says Terry Pickens, Director of Nuclear Policy at Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that operates three reactors in Minnesota. Xcel is building steel-and-concrete cask containers to hold old waste on site, and suing the government periodically to pay for them. “We would like them to get done with what they said they would get done.”

Some countries — such as France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom — reprocess their spent fuel into new nuclear fuel to help reduce the amount of waste.

The remaining waste is solidified into a glass. It needs to be stored in a long-term waste repository, but reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by three-quarters.

Because reprocessing isolates plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear weapon, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter put a stop to it in the U.S. The ban was later overturned, but the country still does not reprocess.

France produces 1,300 tons of nuclear waste per year, and reprocesses 940 tons. Still, fuel is only reprocessed once and then it, too, needs to be stored. France is expecting that engineers will eventually succeed in building a new type of nuclear reactor called a fast reactor that will use the waste it can’t reprocess as fuel.

“They’ve kicked the can down the road,” says Frank von Hippel, a director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Other countries, such as Germany, store spent fuel in casks. Finland is building a repository it says will store waste safely for 100,000 years.

Even though there is no long-term storage in the U.S., utility customers and taxpayers have been paying for it — twice.

Customers have paid $24 billion into a fund Congress established in 1982 to pay for such storage. The charge — a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours — would typically add up to about $11 a year for a household that received all its electricity from nuclear plants.

Users pay as taxpayers, too — for dry storage. Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget.

ALERT: US Stores Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods at 4 Times Pool Capacity

2011-03-28T23:34:00.002-04:00

US Stores Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods at 4 Times Pool Capacity

by Rady Ananda / March 28th, 2011

In a recent interview with The Real News Network, Robert Alvarez, a nuclear policy specialist since 1975, reports that spent nuclear fuel in the United States comprises the largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet: 71,000 metric tons. Worse, since the Yucca Mountain waste repository has been scrapped due to its proximity to active faults (see last image), the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has allowed reactor operators to store four times more waste in the spent fuel pools than they’re designed to handle.

Each Fukushima spent fuel pool holds about 100 metric tons, he says, while each US pool holds from 500-700 metric tons. A single pool fire would release catastrophic amounts of radioactivity, rendering 17-22,000 square miles of area uninhabitable. That’s about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont – from one pool fire.

In a March 25th interview, physician and nuclear activist, Dr Helen Caldicott, explains that:

There’s far more radiation in each of the cooling pools than there is in each reactor itself…. Now the very short-lived isotopes have decayed away to nothing. But the long-lived ones, the very dangerous ones, Cesium, Strontium, Uranium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, Neptunium, I mean really dangerous ones, the long-lived ones – that’s what the fuel pools hold.

As a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Alvarez was part of a multi-disciplinary international team that looked at possible terror attacks on nuclear facilities, focusing on the spent fuel storage pools. In 2003, they released a report, Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power-Reactor Fuel in the United States, which calls for transferring the spent fuel from the pools into dry-cask storage. (Summary here.)

The report recommends that 75% of the spent rods be removed from each of the pools and stored in ultra-thick concrete bunkers capable of withstanding aerial impact. The project would take about ten years and would “reduce the average inventory of 137Cs (radioactive cesium) in U.S. spent-fuel pools by about a factor of four.”

The NRC attempted to suppress the IPC report, Alvarez says. “The response by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and nuclear industry was hostile.” But the National Academy of Sciences agreed that a fire in an overloaded fuel pool would be catastrophic. The NRC attempted to block the Academy’s report, as well.

The NRC serves industry, not the public, and by controlling the purse strings, Congress has forced the NRC to “greatly curtail its regulatory programs,” says Alvarez.

Engineer Keith Harmon Snow couldn’t agree more. He recently lambasted the NRC and mainstream media for downplaying the ongoing catastrophe in Japan. He notes that, “The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies.” [emphasis added]

And that’s just one US nuclear plant, out of 104, not to ignore the undisclosed number of research sites. Then consider that several nuclear plants sit on geologic faults, as this image by Public Integrity reveals:

Also see this global map of earthquake activity and nuclear power plant locations.

Nuclear waste is a serious, deadly and growing problem that the industry refuses to address, preferring to externalize disposal costs onto the public (even suing the US government to clean up its mess for them, under a 1998 law it no doubt favored).

Unless the radioactive waste is laser-launched toward the sun, we’re stuck with waste that will contaminate the biosphere for thousands of years, for the measly prize of 25-30 years of electricity, as nuclear activist and mathematician, Gordon Edwards, so eloquently explained. The risk far outweighs the benefit; this energy choice exemplifies the insanity of the nuclear industry and its government protectors.

Further Sources:

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, by Alexey V. Yablokov and Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko (English publication: 2009), recently reviewed by toxicologist Janette Sherman on BlipTV, and also reviewed last year by Professor Karl Grossman.

Nuclear Reactors in Earthquake Zones around the Globe (TreeHugger, compiling various sources)

US Radiation Monitoring Map in Real Time (Radiation Network)

Video Maps Spread of Radioactivity in Real Time (Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Austria)

Rady Ananda began blogging in 2004. Her work has appeared in several online and print publications, including three books on election fraud. Most of her career was spent working for lawyers in research, investigations and as a paralegal. She graduated from The Ohio State University’s School of Agriculture with a B.S. in Natural Resources. Read other articles by Rady.

This article was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Disasters, Energy, Japan.

There Ought to Be a Law: Criminal Nuclear Recklessness

2011-03-28T22:54:00.001-04:00

There Ought to Be a Law: Criminal Nuclear Recklessness

by Ralph J. Dolan / March 28th, 2011

Every nuclear power plant on earth ought to be designated as a crime scene of nuclear recklessness based upon the very threat of catastrophic consequences and upon the nuclear industry’s woeful lack of readiness to handle the most predictable mishaps.

There is a solution so simple and elegant of design. Bring the politicians and the businessmen who profit from the nuclear power industry before an International Criminal Court. Strip them of their recklessly acquired wealth. Allow them to subsist on entitlement programs alone – subsidized housing, food stamps and a modest stipend. Require them to ‘volunteer’ for Disaster Response Teams where they would be trained in all the state-of-the-art protocols of first responders for any nuclear crisis anywhere in the world. Be sent into the plant spewing radioactive poison and do what must be done and be involved in the wide-ranging clean-up. With such a consequence hanging over the heads of those who are profiting from this madness we would see swift reform.

This would never happen, of course, because the very people charged with overseeing the nuclear industry for safety are the ones who like it the way it is and profit from it handsomely.

It has been said of Tokyo that it is a city waiting to die because of Japan’s location atop volatile tectonic plate activity. So it has been common knowledge. We knew. Books have been written about the insanity of building nuclear power plants in this active earthquake zone. And now the nightmare unfolds before our eyes.

Where is the international body of wise, far-sighted men and women empowered to say “No! There will be no nuclear power plants here! Too dangerous!” Why do we proceed in such dangerous terrain from recklessness and not from the highest standards of human enlightenment?

We have given over the leadership of this world, Starship Earth, to slick con-artists, addicted to gambling for high stakes. They work together, make the rules, build the structures, make off with the profits and let the people pay the terrible price when the containment walls burst.

Is there an echo? It sounds so familiar.

The crux of the matter is this: Our leaders look out for themselves. They’ll shovel the pretty rhetoric at us about freedom, equality and the sacredness of human life. But their words lie. Only their actions tell the truth. And the truth is that all of our leaders are in it only for the money and the people be damned. One cannot make it to the highest levels of government/corporate structures without a willingness to play this money-game.

Our leaders ought to be made to wear patches on their clothing, like race-car drivers, revealing the names of the organizations that are bank-rolling all of their initiatives. The masses of human beings upon this earth are the fodder of the rich to be manipulated and exploited in the work place and in the market place and to pay with their flesh and blood, their homes and their families, their loves and their dreams when the debts come due.

What folly!

Ralph J. Dolan is a retired family therapist living in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at bodhibananaman@aol.com Read other articles by Ralph J..

This article was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Disasters, Japan.

Radioactive rain in Massachusetts

2011-03-28T09:53:00.003-04:00

BostonHerald.com

Radioactive rain in Mass.

Health bigs: Water supply ‘unaffected’ by Japan fallout

By O’Ryan Johnson
Monday, March 28, 2011

State health officials said the fallout from crippled Japanese nuclear reactors has unleashed a radioactive rain over the Bay State, but they insisted levels are too low to pose a threat to health.

“The drinking water supply in Massachusetts is unaffected by this short-term, slight elevation in radiation,” said Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach. “However, we will carefully monitor the drinking water as we exercise an abundance of caution.”

Auerbach said routine sampling of rainwater last week in Massachusetts as well as California, Pennsylvania and Washington all showed similar elevated levels of radioiodine-131. Air samples in the same Massachusetts location showed no elevated levels. Health officials declined to reveal the town where the sample was taken.

Ronald Ballinger, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed that fallout from the crippled Japanese reactors is not dangerous to the continental United States. He said even if the plant were to melt down, the radiation making its way to the Bay State would be unlikely to reach a level dangerous to humans. These levels, he said, are nothing to worry about.

“The concentrations are so low as to be absurd,” Ballinger said, when contacted by the Herald. “The event is pretty much contained, right now. They have power back to the site.”

State officials said they believe the rainwater readings are the result of radiation emitted shortly after the earthquake and tsunami when the highest levels were recorded. Radiation from natural sources including rocks, bricks and the sun is about 100,000 times higher than the radioactive trace material determined to have come from Japan, health officials said.

Auerbach said in addition to being harmless levels of radiation, the half-life of the material is about eight days, meaning it will shortly dissolve to an undetectable level. Meanwhile, state health officials said they are sampling water supplies across the state for elevated readings. Thus far, the testing has shown no detectable levels.

Radiation fears - March 28, 2011:

ojohnson@bostonherald.com

Low-level radiation found in Massachusetts rainwater

BOSTON | Mon Mar 28, 2011 4:43am EDT

BOSTON (Reuters) - Trace amounts of radioactive iodine linked to Japan's crippled nuclear power station have turned up in rainwater samples as far away as Massachusetts during the past week, state officials said on Sunday.

The low level of radioiodine-131 detected in precipitation at a sample location in Massachusetts is comparable to findings in California, Washington state and Pennsylvania and poses no threat to drinking supplies, public health officials said.

Air samples from the same location in Massachusetts have shown no detectable radiation.

The samples are being collected from more than 100 sites around the country that are part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Radiation Network monitoring system.

"The drinking water supply in Massachusetts is unaffected by this short-term, slight elevation in radiation," said Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach.

"We will carefully monitor the drinking water as we exercise an abundance of caution," he said.

At concentrations found, the radioiodine-131 would likely become undetectable in a "relative short time," according to a statement issued by agency.

Trace amounts of radiation believed to have originated from damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in the aftermath of Japan's devastating 9.0 earthquake on March 11 have also been detected in air samples in several western U.S. states, but at levels so small they posed no risk to human health. (Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Steve Gorman and Todd Eastham)

The Other Tsunami -- worldwide economic pain

2011-03-19T17:52:00.002-04:00

Saturday, March 19, 2011

The Other Tsunami -- Worldwide Economic Pain

By John Little (about the author)

japanese nuclear reactor by bradblog

The world changed dramatically on March 11, 2011. One of the biggest tremors to rock the Earth over the past 200 years has brought the third largest economy on the planet to its knees. Mother Nature's one-two punch has demonstrated once again that humans may be at the top of the food chain, but they are only the bridesmaid to the planet. Ol' Mom Nature has decided to put us runts in our place.

Japan not only suffered one of the worst earthquakes in recorded history, but they also suffered one of the worst tsunami disasters as well. And now we are learning that the hallowed sanctity of nuclear reactors has become not only mortal, but deadly. Where the calamity of the Chernobyl held sway anon as the epitome of nuclear disasters, Japan undoubtedly will muster a challenge and quite likely, take over that unfortunate title.

But we are just at the beginning of the next level of tsunamic pain in this tragedy. According to reuters as of 9:00 am GMT on Friday, March 18, 2011, "Toyota Motor Co has halted operations at its 12 main assembly plants in Japan. Honda Motor Co is extending the production halt in Japan to Wednesday (March 23) from March 20. Nissan Motor Co said output has been stopped at three of its four car assembly factories in Japan. Mazda Motor Corp said it plans to suspend production at two plants in southwestern Japan until Sunday (March 20), but has not yet decided how to proceed after that." Fuji Heavy Industries Co. have shut down all their Northern Subaru-related parts plants,. Sony can barely open one plant. Toshiba, Canon, Nikon, Panasonic and Renesas have closed manufacturing plants.

These are not two-bit players on the global stage. These are powerhouses.

And already, Hawaii is suffering from the first tsunami. According to acanadianbusiness.com headline recently, "Financially hobbled Hawaii bracing for downturn of Japanese travellers after deadly earthquake." Japan has integrated itself into the fabric of the world economy quite nicely. In fact, it was only outdone by the US until recently when China muscled through.

Japan's industry has been devastated by these events, there's no denying it. Look at the stock market indices around the world since the quake for the ripple effect of that one. But the effect is much more than the simple loss of personal monetary value, though property and personal wealth is indeed tragic. We're talking about major sections of world industries.

According to Wikipedia:

Sony is the world's fifth largest media conglomerate with US$77.20 billion (FY2010)

Toshiba-made Semiconductors are among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

Toyota is the world's largest automobile manufacturer by sales and production.

Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, as well as the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year. Honda surpassed Nissan in 2001 to become the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer.

Nikon's products include cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which it is the world's second largest manufacturer.

Panasonic, since its founding in 1918, has grown to become the largest Japanese electronics producer.

The companies of Japan have to regroup and rethink their global strategy in light of this devastating blow that Mother Nature has delivered unto their doorstep. Their ability to mass produce on a global level has been destroyed. It will be decades before the Japanese economy will fully recover, if it ever gets a second chance.

The secondary effects of this economic tsunami will be the limited worldwide supply of automobiles, electronics parts, motorcycles, and a vast array of high-tech advanced machinery that will now never see the light of day. The world paradigm of which Japan was such an integral part, will now have to be redefined in unknown ways by those who have yet to step forward.

If the banksters of the modern industrial countries wanted to scare the world into submission, Mother Nature has just upped the ante. "I'll see your phony fiat currency and raise you several nuclear power plants and the third largest economy on the planet. Uh, your move, human."

We will now see what happens when some of the largest companies in the world are suddenly and dramatically shut down and what happens to the rest of us. The banksters still have another trick up their sleeves to humble those who haven't yet been turned homeless by their previous antics. And Mother Nature is standing by to make sure that HER rules are respected, regardless of what the puny animated form known as humans might do in the interim.

Somehow I think 4.5 billion years of evolution trumps 500 years of anticipation.

54 year old Californian male - I've lived in four different countries, USA, Switzerland, Mexico, Venezuela - speak three languages fluently, English, French, Spanish - part-time journalist for Empower-Sport Magazine. I also write four newsletters.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and Cover-up

2011-03-19T15:55:00.002-04:00

Nuclear Apocalypse in Japan

Lifting the Veil of Nuclear Catastrophe and Cover-up: A Doomsday Scenario Unfolds With Characteristic Foolishness

by Keith Harmon Snow / March 19th, 2011

Only after the last tree has been cut down… the last river has been poisoned… the last fish caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

– Chief Seattle

For there shall arise false mesiahs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

– Mathew 24

As the sun set over quake-stricken Japan on Thursday 17 March 2011, we learned that four of six Fukushima nuclear reactor sites are irradiating the earth, that the fire is burning out of control at Reactor No. 4′s pool of spent nuclear fuel, that there are six spent fuel pools at risk all told, and that the sites are too hot to deal with. On March 16 Plumes of White Vapor began pouring
from crippled Reactor No. 3 where the spent fuel pool may already be lost. Over the previous days we were told: nothing to worry about. Earthquakes and after shocks, tidal wave, explosions, chemical pollution, the pox of plutonium, contradicting information too obvious to ignore, racism, greed — add these to the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine and Death. The situation is apocalyptic and getting worse. This is one of the most serious challenges humanity has ever faced.

The U.S. nuke industry is blaming Japanese experts, distancing itself from the monster it created. Instead of sending nuclear or health experts to assistance the Japanese people in their time of desperate need, US President Barack Obama first sent teams of intelligence agents and FEMA trained military grunts with special security clearances. The Pentagon floated a naval strike force led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan off the coast of Japan: advertised as a ‘humanitarian’ operation, the strike force was repositioned after it was partially irradiated. Can we trust officials and the corporate news media to tell us what is happening in an honest, timely, transparent manner? Are there precedents to the nuclear crisis in Japan? What is the U.S. defense establishment really concerned with here?

Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect private profits, national and corporate interests, and to fool the people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows — some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask — about the nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth. Prayers are not enough. It’s time to call for the resignation of President Barack Obama, to put politics aside, to take personal action to halt nuclear expansion and defend ourselves from our industrial juggernaut.

I know something about technology, and science: I have Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering — with honors — from one of America’s top Engineering schools. Before 1990 I worked in classified programs for General Electric — the maker of the nuclear reactors now irradiating Japan. I worked at GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratories: low-level classified government programs in communications, radars and missile guidance systems for Ronald Reagan’s infamous Star Wars (Strategic Defence Initiative) programs.

From 1990 to 1993 I taught English at Japan’s big Soga Shosa (trading houses) like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo Corporations, and meanwhile I biked the rivers, swam the beaches, hiked the mountains and studied the culture of Japan. Japanese corporations were paving the shorelines and rivers with concrete, sinking giant tetrapods off shore. One corporation even developed these giant rubber bladders — the size of football-fields — sunk offshore, which could be pumped full of seawater to provide a giant barrier against tsunami’s. Of course, the profit margins for these corporations supplying these bags were huge, but I wonder what happened to the technology, if these were ever deployed, and where. For the first 34 years of my life I was in favor of nuclear power. This changed when I saw young people in the United States put their bodies on the line to protest the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Station operations in Tennessee (1994). The commitment and integrity of these young people made me rethink my nuclear bias.

I began my career as a journalist by looking deeply into the rabbit-hole of nuclear power from 1993 to 2000. I visited the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Public Document Rooms — which have since been closed in many places — where I read thousands of microfilms and scanned microfiche records and excavated document after document in search of truth. I visited nuke plants in New England and industry conferences. I interviewed officials and I attended the most boring and sometimes secretive public meetings with the most stifling and unimaginative bureaucrats and with engineers (like me) so dry they squeaked. And then I reported on regulatory corruption, technical failures, undemocratic initiatives to betray the public trust, and the accumulating radiation and nuclear poisons.

Humanity now faces a deadly serious challenge coming out of Japan — the epicenter of radiation. Intentional efforts to downplay or dismiss this catastrophe reveal the immaturity of western civilization and some of our most acute human pathologies, including our worship of technology and our psychopathology of denial. The widespread distortion and cover-ups to protect private profits, national and corporate interests, and to fool the people, are unacceptable. Here are some of the deeper whats and whys and hows — some technical issues and the kinds of questions people need to ask — about the nuclear apocalypse unfolding on planet earth.

The Arrogance of Humanism

“I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Joseph Oehmen on March 13. “By ‘significant’ I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on — say — a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.”

So begins a recent U.S. business sector article titled “You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan — Here’s Why,” published four days after the earthquake struck in Japan. It has already proved false. Properly understood for what it is — a childish, myopic, arrogant attempt to belittle the truth and influence public opinion — the article provides an apt example of the rampant industry disinformation that is sweeping aside rational and compassionate and precautionary assessments with irrational jingoism, simplistic emotional appeals, and wrong-headed thinking. The post went viral and was republished widely.

How do we define apocalypse? EARTHQUAKE + TSUNAMI + AGED NUKE PLANT + LOSS-OF-COOLANT ACCIDENT + PLUTONIUM + FIRES + DISINFORMATION + GREED + DENIAL + FEAR + POLITICS = APOCALYPSE.

How many nuke plants are involved? We don’t really know. Not that we have not been told, we have. There are six reactors at the Fukushima site, one reactor at the Tokai nuclear facility and three reactors at the stricken Onagawa nuclear complex. There are toxic chemical spills, petroleum refinery fires, gas fires, dangerous debris and human pathogens from the thousands of dead people and animals. The place is an apocalyptic nightmare, to be sure, but from the beginning the most important facts regarding the status of the nuclear pants and their components, their functioning or failing systems, the operability of the control rooms or integrity of the reactor containment structures, were being denied to the public. Now we are seeing some damage control by the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the media.

It is simultaneously as though we are believed to be incapable of even the most rudimentary understanding of what is going on, while also being denied the truth in keeping with more than sixty years of secrecy and denial by the cult of the atom and its incestuous cult of intelligence.

The question is: what can we believe to be true? Look at the photos of the explosion. Are we stupid enough to believe that no radiation has been released from this reactor’s primary or secondary containment systems? On Wednesday March 16 we were finally told that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had ordered its remaining staff to evacuate areas of the Fukushima plant after radiation levels spiked and plumes of white vapour “were seen pouring from what authorities identified as [emphasis added] the station’s No. 3 reactor.”

The language about white vapors “seen pouring from what authorities identified as the stations No. 3 reactor” does not inspire confidence that ‘authorities’ had any clue about the status of things. Indeed, they are not in the control room, obviously, or anywhere near it, or anywhere near ‘the station’s No. 3 reactor’ because they are standing back trying to identify what they are seeing, to see what is going on, and where it is going on. The reactor’s are too hot: this is radiation: this is the nightmare scenario we were told could not happen. Radiation is contaminating air, soil, ocean, people.

The “You Can Stop Worrying” “article” first appeared as a reader’s comment posted following the Business Insider journal story Japan Death Toll Climbs Astronomically As Nuclear Crises Intensifies, which was itself a republished and retitled New York Times feature of Monday March 13. At first glance, the two Business Insider stories couldn’t be further apart in their general themes: “You Can Stop Worrying,” which translates to, calm down, don’t get hysterical, pay no attention to those anti-nuclear fanatics who think that even microwave ovens will kill you, versus the “Death Toll Climbs Astronomically” feature, which for all practical purposes we can translate to “Holy shit, brother! Run for your life! Duck and Cover!”

However, both stories serve as part of the unraveling global media disinformation campaign about the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan. The primary imperatives of this campaign are economic. In other words, most of the reportage out there about what is happening in Japan — so far — has been anchored in western epistemological frameworks based in money, greed, private profits and loss. The loss should not be interpreted to mean that people (mostly we are talking about people NOT affected by the apocalypse in Japan) care about who lives or dies, but rather that their primary concerns are their financial balance sheets, their corporate images, their personal retirement portfolios, and the fall of the Nikkei Index and Dow Jones trading they drool over.

Sadly, the attitudes of many “news” writers (and their readers), government officials, energy consultants, corporate executives, nuclear experts and technicians, western humanitarian relief professionals (such as World Vision careerists), or of environmentalists for nuclear power – like scientist James Lovelock — and many other people who, for one reason or another, have had something to say about the nukes crisis in Japan, or about how Japan’s nuclear misfortune can never become a Chernobyl, or how Three Mile Island didn’t kill anyone, or why the events in Japan, no matter how alarming, should not be allowed to interrupt the “nuclear renaissance” touted by U.S. President Barrack Obama, or something about the beauty of some nuke somewhere else, are all based in self-interest, not the altruistic and compassionate concerns of all humanity, of environmental stewardship or the preservation of all life on earth, but in a self-righteous, arrogant and ignorant selfishness of the kind that author David Ehrenfeld elaborated in his monumental work, The Arrogance of Humanism.

Japanese are technical geniuses. The rail system and subways were precise: you could set your watch by them. In 2003, their advanced magnetic levitation Shinkansen bullet trains performed at 581 kilometers per hour (361 mph). If the Japanese can’t do, no one can. Yet today Japan is on fire — the epicenter of deadly radiation now emanating out of that sizable island. This is not about Japan, folks, or national borders: its about all of us, everywhere.

Spent Fuel Pool Fools

While the absence of cooling water facilitated the nuclear crises in Japan, most likely some major reactor components (proven unsafe) also failed under the seismic stresses of the 9.0 quake. Key components likely cracked or shattered. The tsunami and huge aftershocks advanced the chaos. These factors were complicated by the loss of offsite electrical power (an electrical BLACKOUT), the failure of emergency diesel generators, and the subsequent loss-of-coolant (water).

Embrittlement of nickel-based superalloys that comprise reactor internals was flagged as a major safety issue as early as the 1960s, yet such problems were bureaucratically dismissed, covered over, buried in paperwork and regulatory studies produced by the NRC (“NUREG” documents), and ignored. Intergranular stress corrosion cracking of BWR core shrouds (the core shroud is next to fuel rods deep inside) is another major safety issue in GE designed BWRs built by Hitachi at Fukushima, and these plague every BWR reactor in the U.S.

We don’t know, however, and for many days we were offered the standard industry refrain: no need to worry, no threat to public health and safety. BWR core shroud cracking (NUREG-1544), reactor pressure vessel cracking (NUREG-1511), embrittled components and aging (NUREG/CR-5939), cooling system failures (NUREG/CR-6087), reactor containment isolation systems failures (NUREG/CR-6339) — all thoroughly documented.

The redundancy and ever-touted ‘defense-in-depth’ systems failed at Fukushima. All over the U.S. such systems have been routinely disabled to minimize electricity-generating outages, increase output power and maximize corporate profits. There are as many possibilities of failures outside what we have been spoon-fed — the official sequence of events — as there are dead people.

Amongst the most troubling and most deeply underplayed questions of the entire crisis concern the Fukushima Spent Fuel Pools. These basin are packed with tons of irradiated fuel rods that need to be cooled. One of the major postulated accident scenarios involves a Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) to the reactor core, but a LOCA event can also occur with a spent fuel pool. It has. Fires and explosions in Japan. The Spent Fuel Pools at the six Fukushima reactors are NOT inside primary containment. They are exposed. Burning. About to burn.

Reactors No. 4, 5, and 6 at Fukushima were shutdown when the earthquake struck. After the water drained and the spent fuel became exposed, the pool at reactor No. 4 caught fire, and continues to burn, as of Thursday March 17, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment. The status of the other six spent fuel pools at Fukushima is unknown. A courageous U.S. journalist Rachel Maddow explored the spent fuel pool issue with a former government official. The most important, critical point made by Princeton professor Frank Von Hippel occurs at minute 14:19 — where Rachel Maddow talks over him: these are LONG-LIFE RADIONUCLIDES being emitted from the spent fuel pool(s). Isotopes of cesium: Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years and will be around and hot for decades.

How much disaster are we talking about? The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima created about 2000 curies of radioactivity. The spent fuel pools at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (U.S.) are said to hold about 75 million curies. There are six spent fuel pools at Fukushima, but the numbers of tons of fuel rods in each have not been made public.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) did the math: If Fukushima’s Reactor No. 4 operated for 35 years and produced 30 tons of irradiated fuel per year and each ton is equivalent to 24 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, then each fuel pool could contain on the order of 24,000 times the amount of cesium-137 produced by the Hiroshima bomb, if all the produced irradiated fuel remains in the fuel pool.

Nuclear stupidity No. 1: the Fukushima reactor buildings are square (not circular) and had to absorb the force of the tsunami wave straight on. Stupidity No. 2: six reactors clustered too close together. Stupidity No. 3: no shoreline protection against a tsunami. Stupidity No. 4: reactors sited on earthquake faults. Stupidity No. 5: assumptions and calculations proving that the reactor, prior to its construction, could withstand anything that nature threw at it. Stupidity No. 6: it didn’t begin in Japan: the industry, with all its corruptions, false assumptions and technological hubris, was born in secrecy in the United States of America.

Stupidity No. 125: spent fuel pools are packed too tightly, as is well-established by industry documents, for economic reasons, discarding safety concerns. Stupidity No. 458: the Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima are suspended up high inside the reactor buildings secondary containment — the same buildings whose roofs are blowing off! Are we to believe that the massive explosions that were captured on film, and others that were not, did not damage these elevated time bombs?

How many stupidities do we need to admit before we admit that it can happen in the United States as certainly as it can happen anywhere else? Imagine those courageous Japanese nuclear workers at Fukushima — sacrificing their lives! — trying to save their families, Japan and the rest of us from our unprecedented stupidity!

During World War II we called them kamikaze: soldiers and pilots throwing away their own lives for the sake of their nation. Well, these heroic men and women get my respect now.

There is an ocean adjacent to the Fukushima complex, and yet the reactors and fuel pools cannot be kept cool. Impossible. The huge heat sink necessary to cool the melting fuel is not available. This is not about earthquakes and tsunamis — it is about loss of off-site power, backup generators and emergency systems that occur in a blackout. Do electrical outages and blackouts occur anywhere else? Blizzards? Tornadoes? Hurricanes? The world is seeing more and more extreme and unpredictable climate. Claims that a serious nuclear ‘accident’ cannot happen in the U.S., Europe or Canada are false, and nuclear industry knows it.

A Long History of Deception

Like the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials have a long history of covering up ugly nuclear realities. In a recent WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan’s lower house, told U.S. diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI) — the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy — has been “covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry.” In 2002 “the chairman and four executives of TEPCO, the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, resigned after reports that safety records were falsified.”

Such singular but remarkable events follow a pattern of wholesale U.S. cover-ups that define the industry as secretive and criminal, and they involve shoddy equipment, human incompetence, unsafe designs, inadequate safety measures, and economic decisions that have occurred since the very beginning of Japan’s nuclear power era — which itself was born out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with U.S.-made weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1960′s, TEPCO planned to build a reactor outside Kashiwazaki city: nuclear officials told the local community, for example, that radioactivity from the plant would increase rice cultivation and the coloring of the carp (a delicacy): seven reactors were eventually built there. In June 1973, radioactive waste water leaked from a storage tank at Fukushima’s reactor No. 1. In July 1974, Kansai Electric asked Westinghouse Corporation to replace the steam generator of one of Kansai’s two Mihama reactors after Mihama I experienced four major shutdowns in less than four years.

In September 1974, following the emergency shutdown of 21 of the then 55 U.S. reactors due to radioactive leaks at the Illinois Dresden Reactor No. 1, Japanese officials inspected their six Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), similar to the Dresden BWR, and they found similar defects at Fukushima I and Hamaoka. Ditto, 1975: emergency shutdown’s in the U.S. prompted inspections that discovered Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) problems at the Fukushima I and Tsuruga BWR reactors. Japan’s Mihama reactors were plagued with radioactive ‘leaks’ and faulty equipment that prompted Kansai officials to demand a refund from U.S. contractor Westinghouse Corporation. The Mihama Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) have been scrammed and shutdown and leaked. The accident at the Mihama Reactor No. 3 on 9 August 2004 was previously considered Japan’s worst nuclear accident: there was no tsunami, and no earthquake.

Japan’s fleet of white elephant nukes only grew more problematic. From April to September 1977, six of Japan’s fourteen reactors were shutdown. Japanese corporations joined with Westinghouse and General Electric in the 1980′s to export their destructive technology to other countries, mostly targeting the so-called Third World. Before 1979 there were some 25 reactors under construction or completed in Japan, and until last week there were 55 operating reactors. In 2006, GE and Hitachi Corporation teamed up to create three joint venture nuclear companies to expand nukes in North America.

One fact is certain: we have already been massively lied to about a massive and still unfolding nuclear disaster. The radiation releases from some four to six nuclear reactors in collapse are already known to be excessive, described by reputable experts as “worse than Three Mile Island but not as bad as Chernobyl.” It may be worse than Chernobyl yet.

Additional radiation has been reported at the Onagawa complex, but this was explained away as wind-blown radioactivity from the Fukushima complex. Meanwhile, in the same reports, officials said that radiation was not leaking from Fukushima, or it was minimal, and there was no cause for alarm.

After several days of lies and distortions and official government censorship, reports appeared under the headlines Japan radiation leaks feared as nuclear experts point to possible cover-up. Reports also began citing partial meltdowns of nuclear fuel rods. The threat of meltdown is real, it has been happening to some degree, and it has already occurred far more than we have been told. The physical and thermonuclear states of materials and systems and the spread of radioactivity at Japan’s reactors remains shrouded in disinformation and silence.

Clean and Green Propaganda

Of course, technology gurus and corporate executives and financial consultants are hysterical, claiming there were no deaths from Three Mile Island and that deaths at Chernobyl are exaggerated by the mass media. These claims are false. The new book, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment provides irrefutable evidence of massive loss of life.

“The book is solidly based — on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports — some 5,000 in al,” says journalist Karl Grossman. “It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.”

James Lovelock, author of the renowned GAIA Hypothesis, is a celebrated environmentalist for nuclear energy peddling nuclear power as a clean, green, renewable energy source of the future. However, Lovelock has a long history working for NASA — the outer-space division of the Pentagon — and is deeply enmeshed in the western epistemological framework.

Commenting on Japan’s nuclear crisis, Lovelock said that people were ‘prejudiced’ against nuclear power unreasonably. “It is very safe,” he said. Chernobyl, for instance, was “an idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred in the Soviet Union”, and according to UN estimates had killed only about 56 people. More people are routinely killed in oil refineries and coal mines, he pointed out.”

James Lovelock’s Chernobyl statement should immediately discredit him as a quack: Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is unwilling to go on record claiming anything less than many, many deaths. Further, Lovelock’s comment about the ‘idiotic mess-up’ by Russians is inherently racist: the Russians were the first to put a satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, for example, and NASA collaborated with the Russian MIR Space Station, which broke all kinds of records.

Lovelock suggests that nuclear reactors are our only hope to curtail global climate change, and that this may involve, for example, the ‘suspension of democracy’. However, democracy has been long since suspended for many of the earths people and species — forced to live and die with our burgeoning wastes, consumption and exploitation. Lovelock’s analysis is patently false — contaminated by his own inability to see beyond his privilege and self-interests.

Not convinced? Lovelock has also reportedly stated, wrongheadedly: “One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States’ Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War.”

Tell this to the mutant babies, weak-spined and deformed children from the Chernobyl killing zones, chronicled in Russian filmmaker Vladimir Kuznetsov’s, “While We Are Still Alive, and to the people of Bikini Atoll whose stolen island is officially acknowledged to be highly contaminated. Savannah River is another SUPERFUND site.

The nuclear power cycle involves disease, despair and death from the uranium mining to daily operations to the nuclear waste “‘dumping’. Uranium mines in Niger that have built France’s entire nuclear complex are toxic wastelands spreading radiotoxins across north and sub-Saharan Africa. The Tuareg and Toubou nomads have been completely shattered

by the confiscation, exploitation and irradiation of their lands by the nuclear complex. Native Americans continue to suffer massive epidemics of disease, contamination and confiscation of lands in the Secret Nuclear War at the American Ground Zero: the nuclear complex has compounded the native American genocide begun in 1492. Daily contamination releases into water, soil and air occur at every operating nuclear reactor in the world. There is no ‘disposal’ of deadly nuclear toxins that now exist to perpetuity, and yet wastes are typically dumped on poor communities like Barnwell, South Carolina, or native American lands.

Out of sight, out of mind: nuclear poisons are colorless, odorless, and deadly.

Start Worrying, Here’s Why

The writing You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster in Japan — Here’s Why is packed full of disinformation and technical jargon, masked as scientific expertise, meant to confound, confuse and scientifically impress the un-technical (concerned) reader. The author at first did not identify himself, which is a tactic many people use so that they do not have to take responsibility, or worry about being held accountable. Appended as a sort of disclaimer to the article that morphed out of the comment we find the statement: “Since posting this, we have learned that it was written by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT.”

In the nuclear arena, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is known for the infamous Nuclear Reactor Safety Study (WASH 1400), chaired by MIT nuclear scientist Norman P. Rasmussen (commonly known as The Rasmussen Report), that whitewashed the massive flaws and safety failures of a burgeoning, secretive, incestuous nuclear power industry, even while it exposed them to some degree.

According to a Nuclear Information and Resource Service fact sheet on Fukushima, in 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC’s top safety official, told an industry trade group that the GE “Mark I [BWR] containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of the suppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you’ll find something like a 90% probability of that containment failing.”

Produced at the height of the United States’ anti-nuclear movement in 1974, the Rasmussen Report downplayed the risk of nuclear accidents and polished the image of a technologically diseased industry. The stridently pro-nuclear MIT has spent billions of taxpayers dollars on secretive and highly biased research programs of all things nuclear. MIT is also a known hotbed of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with a revolving door from MIT to government to the CIA.

“I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake,” wrote MIT’s Dr. Josef Oehmen in his initial post of March 12. “There has not been one single report that was accurate and free of errors… By ‘not free of errors’ I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By ‘not free of errors’ I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.”

Turns out Dr. Oehmen’s report had so many errors, and yet was so widely regurgitated, that it was taken over by MIT’s nuclear experts. Dr. Oehmen employs the standard ruse of claiming that the press, which can very easily be shown to as stridently pro-nuclear as MIT itself, is instead plagued by “tendentious anti-nuclear journalism — that is quite normal these days.” He then explains nuclear power (wrongly) arriving at last at his definitive statement that, “I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.”

“The first ‘type’ of radioactive material is the uranium in the fuel rods,” wrote Dr. Oehmen, “plus the intermediate radioactive elements that the uranium splits into, also inside the fuel rod (Cesium and Iodine). There is a second type of radioactive material created, outside the fuel rods. The big main difference up front: Those radioactive materials have a very short half-life, that means that they decay very fast and split into non-radioactive materials. By fast I mean seconds. So if these radioactive materials are released into the environment, yes, radioactivity was released, but no, it is not dangerous, at all. Why? By the time you spelled “R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E”, they will be harmless, because they will have split up into non radioactive elements…”

It takes about five seconds to spell R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E and it takes about the same amount of time to read a chart (below) which shows the actual lifetimes and half-lives of radioisotopes that people need to be concerned about today.

Not only does Dr. Oehmen intentionally misinform people about the inherent design flaws and potential failures of nuclear reactors and subsystems, but he knowingly disinforms about the potential for serious health consequences and the radioactive contaminants that are typically released during a nuclear power accident. While millions of people in Japan are suffering the personal psychological terror of a possible nuclear holocaust, the fears and horrors of life and death from a natural disaster, starvation and thirst, and radioactive poisoning. Dr. Joseph Oehmen — safe in Boston Massachusetts — has been been boasting about his blog post — equally popular with people who hate it and love it — which spread like a virus on the Internet.

During nuclear fission, the uranium from the fuel rods splits into many radioactive fission products that can then escape during a nuclear power ‘event’. These include dangerous Noble Gases (xenon and krypton); Hallogens (including iodines and bromines); Alkali Metals (including cesium 137); Alkaline earths (including barium 133 and strontium 90) and the elements Tellurium and Ruthenium. Some fissionable elements decay rapidly and are inconsequential during releases, but some decay into other, more deadly nuclides. The most dangerous nuclides have half-lives in days (I-131 = 8 days), years (Cs-137 = 30 years) or centuries (Pu-239 = 24,000 years). Half-life is the time it takes for one-half of the material to decay — lest we forget that the other half is still present.

All of these fissionable products are potentially released and they have varying degrees of half-lives, mobility, migration and toxicity depending on factors like atmospheric conditions, temperature of the reactor core and operating capacity (megawatts) at shutdown, and the presence of coolants. The most dangerous of these are iodine 131 (I-131), cesium 137 (Cs-137), strontium 90 (Sr-90), cobalt 60 (Co-60) and plutonium 239 (Pu-239). All of these negatively affect the human body and all of these have been released in nuclear power ‘accidents’, during venting of radioactive steam or flushing of radioactive water, and other ‘events’. Another deadly isotope which seems to consistently ‘escape’ from nuclear power sites is cobalt 60 (Co-60), half-life 5.2 years. Co-60 accumulates and migrates through steam generator tubes and other secondary coolant processes, in core shrouds and reactor pressure vessels, and many of the other components of nuclear reactors whose histories of failures are thoroughly documented.

Is radiation leaking in Japan? Yes and no. The term ‘leak’ suggests air squeaking out of a balloon. In Japan we have leaks, here and there, but we also have explosions, fires and other phenomena that create massive radioactive emissions. To say ‘leak’ is to downplay what is happening. The balloons in Japan have burst: primary containment has been breached at Reactor No. 3 and at least one spent fuel pool is burning up. With the walls blown out and roof blown off, it seems at least one other spent fuel pool is gone or going.

Nuclear advocates deride and dismiss public ignorance about radionuclides like, for example, the noble gases. Nuclear advocates frequently state that both xenon and krypton decay and disappear in a matter of seconds or minutes. What they don’t tell us is that these isotopes decay into daughter isotopes that are extremely deadly emitters. Many credible physicians, scientists and other nuclear experts — free of the self-interests of nuclear profits, academic sponsorship or career advancement — have outlined the absence of epidemiological studies of certain radionuclides emitted or flushed at nuclear reactors. Dr. Helen Caldicott has elaborated the detrimental health effects of the noble gases xenon (Xe) and krypton (Kr), and she notes that these have appearance hundreds of miles from reactors believed to have emitted them.: • Xenon 137, with a half-life of 3.9 minutes, converts almost immediately to the notoriously dangerous cesium 137 with a half-life of thirty years.
• Krypton 90, half-life of 33 seconds, decays to rubidium 90, half-life of 2.9 minutes, then to the medically toxic strontium 90, half-life of twenty-eight years.
• Xenon 135 decays to cesium 135 with an incredibly long half-life of 3 million years.
• Large amounts of xenon 133 are released at operating reactors, and although it has a relatively short half-life of 5.3 days, it remains radioactive for 106 days.
• Krypton 85, which has a half-life of 10.4 years, is a powerful gamma radiation emitter.
• Argon 39 has a 265-year half-life.

“Other dangerous noble gases include xenon 141,143 and 144, which decay to cerium 141,143 and 144,” Dr. Helen Caldicott reports in Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. “According to the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP Report No. 60) these three cerium isotopes,which are beta emitters,are abundant products of nuclear fission reactions and have moderately long half-lives. They bio-concentrate in the food chain, and they irradiate the lung, liver, skeleton, and gastrointestinal tract, where they act as potent carcinogens.”

On March 14, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) outlined the risks from Japan. Iodine 131 migrates in air and is known for causing thyroid cancers, especially in children. Strontium 90 causes different cancers. Cesium 137 concentrates in bone and causes leukemia. Microscopic particles of plutonium 239 cause lung cancer if inhaled and Pu-239 kills instantly in any sizable dose. Areas contaminated by plutonium will have to be abandoned — as happened at Chernobyl.

“Since 2010, Fukushima Daiichi Unit-3 reactor had been using mixed-oxide fuel (also called plutonium fuel or MOX),” PSR reported, in Japan’s Nuclear Crises Worsens, “which is even more dangerous to the public than a severe accident with uranium fuel. Plutonium fuel contains plutonium and other very toxic actinides that would increase the number of resulting cancers. Current reports say that this fuel has been exposed to air.”

“Pressure in at least two of the reactors have reported to be well above normal levels,” continued PSR, “and the reactor operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, released some of the pressure by venting radioactive vapor from the containment structure. In addition, the radionuclide cesium has been reportedly found outside the reactor, which indicates that there has been fuel damage.”

The proponents of nuclear power have used all kinds of disinformation and tactics to protect the industry — compelling the nuclear complex to arm guards to ‘protect’ these secrets and to ‘protect’ civilian reactors. It is not only ‘terrorists’ that the nuclear establishment seeks to protect us from: the armed guards and classified documents are to prevent the public from learning the truth about the destruction of documents, the disappearing of evidence, the falsification of reports and records, the calculated fudging of risk and safety assessments. There have been countless exposes, such as Daniel Ford’s 1982 book The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission.

False Statements and Premature Assurances

The original New York Times story, “Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief Efforts Intensify” (retitled by Business Insider, commented on by Dr. Joseph Oehmen), follows the patterns of the media and government begun on DAY ONE, wherein authorities offered false assurances, premature evaluations, and outright lies. These officials — and the media that quoted them — repeatedly reiterated that there was no cause to worry. At first, no radiation was released, we were told, over and over, even though, admittedly, there were some slight reactor problems here and there. Then there were explosions, but still the radiation levels were normal, or, well, maybe there was a puff of steam, which we were told was a hydrogen blast, but radiation monitors showed nothing, and there was no threat to the public health or safety.

The Japanese Government soon dispatched health and rescue teams dressed in white moon suits and breathing through respirators and hauling around geiger counters to measure radiation levels in frightened children, but still, no radiation was released, they chanted, no cause for alarm, the media reported. A handful of citizens reported to the hospital showing signs of radiation poising, but still there were ‘no serious radiation concerns’, officials were everywhere quoted, or else what little radiation was released was compared to what you might get riding on a school bus in the sunshine. While evacuating thousands of people in the 20 kilometer zone (12 miles) around Fukushima, on the one hand, the government continued to tell people that the public was not at risk, on the other, and the media continued to report the lie, as they have always done, and still do, with radiation emergencies in the United States.

For example, on November 23, 2009, a radioactive contamination at Three Mile Island led to a Reuters news report titled Federal Officials: Radiation Leak At Three Mile Island No Threat to Public Safety. Like the ‘news reportage’ coming out of Japan, the Three Mile Island leak story was bereft of any discussion, analysis, counterpoint or critique from anyone. Journalists who collaborate with the western English-language news-consuming media have no comprehension of the technological issues, the industry cover-ups, the deceptions, the bureaucratic inertia or the radiological poisons produced and the concomitant epidemics of disease clustered around nukes. They have swallowed the industry slogans and green-washing for so long that their capacity to provide comprehensive, informed, investigative reportage is less than zero. Hence we find innocent [sic] people like CNN’s Anderson Cooper (360) reporting from 100 kilometers north of Fukushima and then freaking out and running for their lives from the invisible killer: radiation. Meanwhile, CNN cuts back-and-forth from Cooper to Jim Walsh — ‘our nuclear expert and CNN contributor’ — who arrogantly reassures the increasingly anxious Anderson Cooper that everything is under control and the blasts and white smoke are of no concern.

“We had an explosion,” MIT’s Dr. Jim Walsh reports, the Boston, Massachusetts skyline and the Prudential Center skyscrapers glimmering brightly behind him. “It turned out that explosion did not compromise the [nuclear] core facility,” he guesses (minute 29). Walsh immediately betrays his speculation a few minutes later (minute 59).

“Hopefully [emphasis added], it’s just the outer structure, and has left unaffected the reactor, and unaffected the containment vessel. Because if it were to affect those things…uh… that would be bad news…”

“The subtext here is Should I Get Out of Here?” interrupts the alarmed Anderson Cooper, in the live on-the-air broadcast. Of course, from this point on the western press increasingly focuses the public’s attention on the trials and tribulations and death-defying escape of the courageous [white] investigative reporter, Anderson Cooper.

“I hear you Anderson,” responds expert Jim Walsh, chuckling. “I want to err on the side of caution for you here, Anderson.” Walsh is barely able to contain his laughter as he sells Cooper out. “Uh, ah, my guess is that you are O.K. But I don’t want you to sue me if I am wrong. But, uh, I’m inclined that you’re O.K.”

“There have been release of..uh..uh…I guess a gas,” Cooper continues, “and correct me, I flunked science… There have been releases out over the ocean…why were they doing these controlled releases?”

Dr. Jim Walsh then pontificates that radiation releases that ostensibly drift out over the ocean — releases questioned by the ill-prepared and uneducated Cooper — are ‘mildly radioactive’, unwanted but not dangerous, in any case, that they are being screened for dangerous radonuclides by the Japanese reactor experts, and “it’s not going to be a major health threat.”

Nonsense! Here is a simultaneous catastrophe beyond human comprehension: At least six nuclear reactors in various states of collapse, out-of-control, and in partial meltdown, and at least one even more deadly spent fuel pool overheating and burning, amidst the apocalypse from the original Richter 9.0 earthquake, the Richter 5.0 and 6.0 aftershocks, the Tsunami, the massive death toll, the lack of emergency vehicles and spreading radioactivity, the fires, the melting Spent Fuel Pools — they are not “screening” radioactive releases which, in any case, are now uncontrolled.

Of course, according to his own biography, CNN’s nuclear consultant, Dr. Jim Walsh, an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP) — which also shares U.S. special forces as ‘research fellows’. He is published and selected as the chosen expert by the major U.S. and European media. Dr. Jim Walsh is the former Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — one of our Department of Energy SUPERFUND sites, deep down the dark [nuclear] rabbit hole. Dr. Jim Walsh is another government spook.

For another example, “[T]he most urgent worries concerned the failures at two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,” the New York Times wrote, in Death Toll Estimate in Japan Soars as Relief Efforts Intensify, “where engineers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had already leaked. An explosion at one of the reactors on Monday did not appear to have harmed it, Japanese officials said.”

In one sentence we are told that a nuclear meltdown may be imminent, and in the next sentence, same paragraph, Japanese officials assured the public (the New York Times backed them up) that an explosion occurred but the reactor was not harmed. Is this believable? When the Japanese nuke experts took the drastic measure of pumping seawater into the reactors they knew that the reactors would be ruined forever. Given the economics of such a choice — billions upon billions of Japanese yen destroyed forever — we can infer that the situation is beyond grave: the Fukushima area is now a permanent sacrifice zone: people, wildlife, land has been sacrificed to the Gods of nuclear technology.

“We have no evidence of harmful radiation,” deputy Cabinet secretary Noriyuki Shikata told reporters after one of the recent reactor building explosions.

Environmental activists in the area of the Fukushima reactors began to cry foul after finding that radiation monitoring stations were not operating. At the top of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Monitoring Website it said “monitoring goes on around the clock year round” and at the bottom it said “THIS SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY SHUTDOWN.” Activists believed that TEPCO was downplaying radioactive releases. At the same time, TEPCO was announcing that it planned to vent the containment [vessel] to relieve the pressure, which caused releases of radioactivity into the air.

On Wednesday March 16, National Public Radio reported that “the chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that all the water is gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan’s most troubled nuclear plant, but Japanese officials denied it.” Of course, National Public Radio has been heavily subsidized by the nuclear power industry and has consistently advanced the nuclear industry agenda.

More nonsense: Radiation from Japan’s troubled nuclear reactors has virtually no chance of reaching the U.S. — the West Coast, Alaska or other locations — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday March 15. (Note that they don’t want to disturb the tourist industry, so they say nothing about Hawaii.) The statement from the NRC said that “the ‘small’ radiation releases so far [sic] from the Japanese reactors has been blown out to sea, away from populated areas.”

On Wednesday March 16, the United Nations Comprehensive Test Ban treaty Organization reported that a radiation plume from Japan nukes would hit Southern California late Friday. Of course, health and NRC officials say it poses very little risk.

Distancing U.S. Nuke Industry from Japan

NBC News on Wednesday evening (March 16) ran several short ‘news’ clips about Japan’s nuclear crises. One of these was clearly intended to distance General Electric and the nuclear Regulatory Commission from Japan, a sort of betrayal of the culture of secrecy and their historically incestuous relationship. Why? To perform damage control, improve investor confidence, assuage public fears of a similar catastrophe at one of the 110 reactors in the U.S.

The NBC broadcast began by pointing out that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has advised U.S. citizens who are within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate or stay indoors. The U.S. set a higher standard, and the news went on to promote the idea that Japanese officialdom cannot be trusted, but U.S. officialdom can.

Then the NBC News reporter, Lester Holt, was shown being scanned for radiation after returning from the Sendai area: no contamination on his body, but his “shoe bottoms [soles] contained slightly elevated amounts of radiation, but of no danger to us,” he said. Again, the standard tactic of reporting that contamination has occurred — this time it is on his shoes — but that it is of no danger. Furthering the myths about radioactivity and its deadly means of spreading disease, the shoe bottom problem was nothing a little soap and elbow grease couldn’t fix. And so, later in the hour, they showed the shoes being scrubbed and everything being returned to [business as] normal.

NBC followed the news tidbits about radioactive shoes with pictures of Fukushima reactors — buildings with their roofs blown apart — accompanied with assertions that there is a POSSIBLE breach of containment at the Fukushima Reactor No. 2, and that a breach of Reactor No. 3 containment vessel is CONFIRMED.

Cut to the U.S. Congress, where NBC brings us a very, very short clip from a special Senate hearing held on Wednesday March 16. Suddenly the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is awake, and they care, and they are telling an equally awake and suddenly concerned U.S. Congress that they believe that Japan has covered up the extent of the nuclear disaster.

“Radiation levels are extremely high,” proclaims NRC chief Dr. Gregory B. Jaczko. The spent fuel pools are dry. Secondary containment at the reactor [No. 3] has been breached, but Tokyo is denying this.”

Finally, NBC informs its viewers, in passing, that General Electric — the designer and salesmen of the GE Mark I Boiling Water reactors that General Electric dumped on Fukushima back in the 1970s — is a part owner of MSNBC. Full disclosure, of course.

Suddenly the ‘news’ shifted to big bold banners flashed across the TV screen in big blue fonts. These banners remind good, tax-paying and law-abiding citizens — good people watching the evening news after a hard day’s work — that GE has reviewed the safety concerns that were previously raised about GE BWR reactors, and so reactors in the U.S. are safe. It was no longer news: it was a public relations ploy, a photo op for GE to improve its image, right out of George Orwell’s 1984.

The latest psychological operation underway is to convince and reassure the U.S. public and English-language speaking world that General Electric is not responsible for what is happening in Japan; that U.S.-based G.E.-designed reactors elsewhere, being of the same age and design, are not going to have the same problems as reactors in Japan. The message is also that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission runs a tight ship, that oversight is comprehensive and thorough, people are doing their jobs, and that the nuclear industry in the U.S. is nothing like the secretive and bungling industry in Japan.

While the message is racist at its [nuclear] core, nothing could be further from the truth. It can happen here. San Onofre. Diablo Canyon. Vermont Yankee. There have been all kinds of warning signs. It won’t be a tsunami, on the back of an earthquake, or maybe it will. It will be a BLACKOUT scenario of some kind, as it is in Japan.

In the Congressional Hearing, Senator Barbara Boxer was suddenly awake, and suddenly concerned, and suddenly the U.S. Congress is going to straighten this all out and protect us. The U.S. Senate Hearings began with some grandstanding by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), whose jabs were directed at Republicans, but in the end she asked a few questions.

The next speaker, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla) reads a garbage speech about how wonderful the NRC is and how safe are U.S. reactors. Our first and foremost concern is safety, he says, and we must continue to develop and site and license and operate new reactors world wide. “We’ve delayed for 30 years now. So I think that we certainly don’t want to slow down, let’s keep going.”

The hearing was completely corporate, one Senate official citing recent New York Times stories that have suddenly awoken them (the Senators) to the many warnings that had previously occurred. My God, we didn’t know. Meanwhile, the NRC Chairman testified that the NRC can not attribute a single death to the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

A few months ago, President Barrack Obama signed some 8.5 billion dollar loan guarantees for a nuclear reactor construction project for U.S. nuclear corporation Southern Company, in partnership with the Tokyo Electric
Power Company (TEPCO).

Of course, the Price Andersen Act, passed in 1957, indemnifies nuclear utilities and reactor operators from all lawsuits, financial liability or related responsibility.

Everything suggests that it will be business as usual. Destabilization, destruction, war and catastrophe have always been turned into a big business for the United States of America. Across the ocean tens of thousands of people are protesting in Germany and France and Briton. Here, even the discussion is off course. The wrong questions are being asked and the wrong people are answering them. Instead of talking about limits to growth, the focus is on expansion, profits, trade and so-called progress. Why would this situation be any different? As Senator Barbara Boxer eventually said: we should be humbled.

Perhaps the worst horror of all is that people trapped in the contaminated zones are now being shunned by outsiders, including aid organizations. Radiation fears, mingled with a sick sense of abandonment, reported the Los Angeles Times, as people are afraid to help them. People in the evacuation zones – elders and those without fuel or transport — are getting no help, and no information. We should be humbled.

Photography Credits: keith harmon snow

Keith Harmon Snow is a war correspondent, photographer and independent investigator, and a four time (2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) Project Censored award winner. He is also the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies. The first UCSB Regent's Lecturer, in 1960, was Aldous Huxley; other recipients include Margaret Mead, Peter Matthiessen and Meredith Monk. Read other articles by Keith, or visit Keith's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 19th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Energy, Environment, Japan, Obama, Propaganda.

Nuclear Crisis -- Report: Diluted Radiation Plumes Will Reach California in Days; Japanese Efforts See Little Reward

2011-03-17T13:52:00.002-04:00

AlterNet.org

Nuclear Crisis -- Report: Diluted Radiation Plumes Will Reach California in Days; Japanese Efforts See Little Reward

Follow the latest news from the disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daichi plant:

Update: Here's the latest report from CNN on cooling efforts by the Japanese military:

Military helicopters began dumping water on the reactor Thursday morning, with police and fire trucks opening up after 7 p.m. (6 a.m. ET). Japan's Defense Ministry said the first effort lasted 40 minutes, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company said the efforts would continue throughout the night in order to keep the reactor and its adjacent spent fuel pool from overheating.

Update: This morning's report in the New York Times is grim indeed, describing the failure of multiple "ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors" to make a significant impacts. Extremely high levels of radiation are preventing some efforts, hindering workers from getting too close to the zone. The Times also describes conflicting messages from American and Japanese officials, as Americans such as Gregory Jaczko, the chair of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, have been much more fatalistic in public than their Japanese counterparts. American officials have recommemded evacuation within a 50-mile radius of the plant, more than the distance recommended by the Japanese.

Another article suggests that non-threatening radiation plumes could reach the West Coast of the U.S. in days. The radiation plumes from the plant "will "churn" across the ocean, "touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday" according to a projection from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, a UN-run organization.

Update: The LA Times has a sad story about what life is like at this moment for people who are trapped near the nuclear plant, and their sense of betrayal and isolation:

Residents describe spooky scenes of municipal cars driving down near-empty streets telling people to stay indoors, but they've seen few other signs of outside help.
Aid agencies are reluctant to get too close to the plant. Shelters set up in the greater Fukushima area for "radiation refugees" have little food, in part because nobody wants to deliver to an area that might be contaminated. And with little or no gasoline available, not everyone who wants to leave can get out.
Radiation fears mingled with a sickening sense of abandonment Wednesday.

The fear of ostracism also brought back memories of the stigma faced by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were often shunned due to their exposure to radiation. The connection between the two disasters isn't all negative: scientific teams from Hiroshima are preparing to visit the stricken area while Hiroshima's hospitals are also getting ready to receive victims of radiation poisoning, according to this excellent report from Democracy Now!

Meanwhile the AP reports on the "bungling" and mismanagement and secrecy of the nuclear industry at large in Japan

Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all. In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died.

TreeHugger adds that WikiLeaks reveals warnings about the specific vulnerability of these plants to earthquakes two years ago.

Update: USA Today -- without information on radioactivity levels in Fukushima, there's no way of predicting how much radiation will hit the US:

"The Japanese government's radiation report for the country's 47 prefectures Wednesday had a notable omission: Fukushima, ground zero in Japan's nuclear crisis. Measurements from Ibaraki, just south of Fukushima, were also blanked out. Radiation experts in the USA say that the lack of information about radioactivity released from the smoldering reactors makes it impossible to gauge the current danger, project how bad a potential meltdown might be or calculate how much fallout might reach the USA."

Update: BBC reports:

Japanese defence minister Toshimi Kitazawa confirms four water drops took place over the Fukushima Daiichi plant. He says 11 "special purpose vehicles" manned by defence forces will conduct water spraying operations from the ground on Thursday afternoon.

Update: NHK English reports that temperatures are rising in the spent fuel cooling pools at Units 5 and 6. The two reactors were offline when the earthquake hit, but the fuel rods remain hot for years. The cooling systems in 5 and 6 are damaged, which poses a risk that the water will boil off, exposing the rods to the environment. In the worst case scenario, the spent fuel could combust in a chemical reaction, releasing radioactive smoke into the environment.

Operators at Fukushima No. 1 are desperately trying to get water into the cooling pools. According to NHK they are now trying to use a heavy water cannon to direct water onto the pools.

Update: An unnamed US official has told ABC news that Washington is not happy with how the Japanese have responded to the crisis:

U.S. officials are alarmed at how the Japanese are handling the escalating nuclear reactor crisis and fear that if they do not get control of the plants within the next 24 to 48 hours they could have a situation that will be "deadly for decades."

"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now," one U.S. official told ABC News.
"We are all-out urging the Japanese to get more people back in there to do emergency operation there, that the next 24 to 48 hours are critical," the official said. "Urgent efforts are needed on the part of the Japanese to restore emergency operations to cool" down the reactors' rods before they trigger a meltdown.
"They need to stop pulling out people—and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the official said.

Update: According to the Washington Post, industry is digging into its deep pockets to buy some influence in the hope of heading off efforts to better regulate nuclear plant operators.

Nuclear power advocates are waging an intense lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill this week in an attempt to limit the political fallout from the reactor crisis in Japan, which threatens to undermine already shaky plans for expanded nuclear capacity in the United States.
Lobbyists with the Nuclear Energy Institute and some of the United States’s largest energy firms, including Exelon of Chicago, are holding meetings with key lawmakers and standing-room-only briefings for staff members in an attempt to tamp down talk of restrictions in response to the Japanese disaster.
The efforts come as lawmakers held hearings Wednesday focused on the impact of the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, where at least three reactor cores are believed to be imperiled following a major earthquake and tsunami last week.

Update: Stars and Stripes reports, "experts are now saying the Fukushima crisis could rival the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union."

Nuclear scientists use the term “core-on-the-floor” to describe radioactive fuel burning through protective containment layers, hitting water and bursting into the atmosphere in a huge steam explosion, spreading clouds of radioactive gas and dust.
It’s never happened before, but experts fear it may soon become reality in one or more reactors at the Fukushima nuclear complex, which was gravely damaged in last Friday’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
“We are right now closer to core-on-the-floor than at any time in the history of nuclear reactors,” said Kenneth Bergeron, a former Sandia National Laboratory researcher who spent his career simulating such meltdowns, including in reactors of the type at the Fukushima plant.

This scenario is sometimes (inaccurately) referred to as the "China Syndrome."

Update: The Daily Telegraph reports: "Japan was warned more than two years ago by the international nuclear watchdog that its nuclear power plants were not capable of withstanding powerful earthquakes."

An official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a "serious problem" for nuclear power stations.

While it responded to the warnings by building an emergency response centre at the Fukushima plant, it was only designed to withstand magnitude 7.0 tremors. Friday's devastating earthquake was a magnitude 9.0 shock.
The news is likely to put further pressure on Japan's Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, who has been criticised for "dithering" over the country's response to the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The Japanese government pledged to upgrade safety at all of its nuclear plants, but will now face inevitable questions over whether it did enough.

Update: The chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that there is no longer water in one of the spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Dai-ichi, according to NPR. Japanese officials deny the report. What does this mean? NPR explains:

If NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko is correct, this would mean there's nothing to stop the fuel rods from getting hotter and ultimately melting down. The outer shell of the rods could also ignite with enough force to propel the radioactive fuel inside over a wide area.

Update: According to Stars and Stripes Magazine, the Pentagon is preparing for a worst case scenario in Japan -- a full-scale meltdown. The military has instituted the following precautions to protect American service personnel and their dependents:

-- 50-mile no-go zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi (much bigger than the Japanese evacuation zone).

-- US Air crews flying rescue missions 80 miles have been told to start taking potassium iodide tablets.

Update: The Tokyo Electric Power company says "a new power line that could solve the nuclear crisis is almost ready." The power line would, in theory, restore the plant's crippled cooling systems. We're a bit skeptical that restoring power would end the crisis, given that multiple containment domes have reportedly been breached, but we'll keep you informed of the latest.

****

Last night here and this morning in Japan, a horrfying drama unfolded. News reports circulated saying that the remaining 50 workers struggling to contain the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had to temporarily leave because of a dangerous spike in radiation levels. They soon returned, but their absence provoked fears.

Furthermore, it appeared that the containment vessel in reactor 3 had ruptured, and plumes of smoke were seen exiting from the roof. Concerns remained about the pool which contained the fuel rods.

The New York Times has several detailed reports this morning:

The vessel that possibly ruptured on Wednesday had been seen as the last fully intact line of defense against large-scale releases of radioactive material from the stricken reactor, but it was not clear how serious the possible breach might be. The implications of overheating in the fuel rod pool, which is also at the No. 3 reactor, seemed equally dire.
The developments were the latest in Japan’s swirling tragedy since an earthquake and tsunami struck the country with unbridled ferocity last Friday. Emperor Akihito told the nation on Wednesday he was “deeply worried” about the nuclear crisis.
The company operating the reactors had withdrawn most of its workers from the plant on Tuesday, leaving only a skeleton crew of 50 struggling to lower temperatures.
When those workers were forced to suspend cooling operations, the spent fuel rod pool began heating up dangerously.

There are many concerns about this growing nuclear threat, not the least of which is that the drama and horror is overshadowing the world's attention from massive humanitarian crisis--the homeless, foodless, hurt and missing--that has taken such an unimaginable, devastating toll already.

And then there is the anger and frustration with persistent claims that nuclear power is safe, and with the UN watchdog group International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which has to rely on member-states cooperation to provide inspection. One Russian expert who had helped with the Chernobyl clean up was particularly biting in his criticism:

"The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin, you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin," former Soviet nuclear expert Iouli Andreev said, according to The Guardian. He had harsh words for the IAEA. "This is only a fake organisation because every organisation which depends on the nuclear industry – and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry – cannot perform properly ... It always will try to hide the reality."

Sourced from 358

Posted at March 16, 2011, 6:41 am

Nuclear Experts: Japan Nuclear Disaster Unprecedented -- No Way to Know About US Impact

2011-03-16T10:02:00.002-04:00

AlterNet.org

WORLD

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Nuclear Experts: Japan Nuclear Disaster Unprecedented -- No Way to Know About US Impact

Events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented and the situation appears to be deteriorating. 

March 15, 2011 |

In the days after a massive earthquake battered Japan – triggering a deadly tsunami, shifting the earth several inches off its axis, and most frighteningly, damaging one of the most powerful nuclear power plants in the world – many nuclear engineers sought to reassure the American public that while the crisis was a serious one for Japan, there was no cause for Americans to be alarmed. But experts interviewed by AlterNet cautioned that the events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented, and noted that the situation appears to be deteriorating. 

On March 13, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a statement confidently assuring the American public that because of “the thousands of miles” separating us from the site of several crippled reactors at the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant, “Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity.”

The announcement was widely reported, but seems to have been premature. “NRC's statement was so absurd,” Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist, told AlterNet. “They made that statement when we certainly didn't know how bad it would get, and it has gotten much worse in the past days.”

That uncertainty lies at the heart of the matter. “We're facing six reactors that can have the worst accident possible in those types of designs,” Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of Green Action, a Japanese environmental group, told AlterNet. “And if the chances are fifty-fifty in six reactors, we know what the math is – that means three will go. So if we have six that look really serious, that's something we've never seen before. And it's just playing out right now – it seems there's no way of stopping it, although there's an attempt to.” On Wednesday, white smoke appeared streaming from Unit 3, and officials said that a breach had likely occurred in the reactor's containment vessel -- the second at the plant in two days.

Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, told AlterNet that so far, as dire as the situation looks for Japan, there's little cause for concern in the U.S. “There a lot of other assumptions you have to build into that, like the winds blowing the fallout towards the United States; they could also blow it over Russia. I think Hawaii would be the first place I'd be concerned about, and the plumes would have traveled a significant distance, so they'd be pretty dilute.”

But, he said the crisis is “not getting better, and it's actually getting worse.” He wouldn't speculate how bad a worst-case scenario might get on the distant shores of the U.S., because he was still “trying to get my head around how much [radioactivity] would be released in terms of multiple reactor meltdowns.”

Kamps agreed that a number of factors would have to play out in order for the catastrophe 5,000 miles away to pose a threat to public health in the U.S. It would “depend on the direction of the wind, the nature of the radioactive clouds, and if they were able to maintain their concentration and not disperse.” But that “has happened,” he warned. “It happened at Chernobyl, with fallout of a very high level of concentration falling hundreds of miles from the disaster.”

There is quite a lot of debate about just how serious Chernobyl's impact on human health was. The World Health Organization says that only a handful of deaths can be attributed to what is widely considered to be the worst nuclear accident in human history. But last year, Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, Belarus, published the findings of an extensive literature review and concluded that almost a million people may have died as a result of the disaster. "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power," the authors said. "No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe... Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Arnie Gunderson, an engineer and former nuclear industry insider, told Democracy Now! that those desperate attempts to avert disaster at Fukushima No. 1 are likely to be hampered by the March 14 evacuation of hundreds of workers who were trying to contain the disaster. “These 750 people that are being evacuated were doing critical work. They weren’t sweeping floors and washing windows,” he said, calling the decision to pull the crews, “an indication that management at the site has thrown in the towel and is going to let this thing run its course without any more human intervention.”

For Japan, the crisis is already very serious, with tens of thousands of nearby residents evacuated from their homes and low but elevated radioactivity readings recorded in Tokyo. “This could be enormously harmful to the whole country,” said Robert Alvarez, adding that aside from any potential harm to human health, “this is the kind of event that will sink the third largest economy in the world.”

Mioko Smith said the Japanese government has been less than forthcoming about the severity of the disaster. “The French government held a press conference [on March 15], and the head of the French nuclear safety agency said that all six of the reactors are close to level 7 on the IMIS scale – that's the international scale for ranking nuclear accidents, and 7 is the highest,” she said. “So, this is the French government giving a press conference in France saying, 'look, all six reactors at Fukushima are close to level 7.' Well, the Japanese government isn't telling people that.”

“Everyone thinks a meltdown is a quiet thing,” she added, “but it's not. You get massive releases of hydrogen, which causes explosions. Which means the material coming out of the reactor gets dispersed. How much, we don't know.”

Asked what might bring about the worst-case scenario, Kamps said it would be a combination of the containment chambers housing the reactor cores being breached and the highly radioactive spent fuel rods stored in “cooling pools” outside the containment catching fire. “If we were to have three core meltdowns and containment breaches, and six storage pools catching fire, those pools being outside the containment, that radioactivity would be directly released into the environment. That would be the worst-case scenario,” he said.

The cooling pools are where highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored. Explosions in at least two of the reactor buildings blew the roofs off the pools, exposing them to the environment. With cooling system failures and the spent fuel exposed to the atmosphere, the risk of a very difficult to extinguish chemical fire is high, and experts believe that's what happened at Fukushima Unit 4. And when the fuel rods burn, as they can for extended periods, they release highly toxic steam into the environment. “It’s worse than a meltdown,” David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists told the New York Times.

The Times noted that “the good news is that the Japanese have a relatively long time to deal with the problem,” but “the bad news is that if efforts to deal with the emergency fail, the results could be worse.” Arnie Gunderson told Democracy Now! that one of the reasons he was so concerned about the workers being evacuated from the plant was “that a large group of personnel were fighting the fire in the fuel pool on Unit 4.”

Aftershocks continue to batter Japan. According to the government, the island-nation has experienced 250 aftershocks registering 5.0 or higher on the Richter scale since the initial quake. Gunderson noted that the vulnerable plants could face more serious consequences yet. “I’m particularly concerned about another aftershock... on the weak Unit 2 containment, which already apparently has failed, and an aftershock would make it worse,” he said.

While nobody can say what will transpire in Japan in the coming days and weeks, one need not look east to find a threat of nuclear catastrophe for the U.S. Robert Alvarez told AlterNet that a study he had conducted found uncontained cooling pools currently operating at 103 reactors in 65 nuclear power plants spread across 31 states. “It's an unacceptable risk for the American public for these reactors to have their spent fuel densely compacted in these pools,” he said. “We were looking at this in the context of acts of terror, but our analysis suggests that the worst possible event that could start a spent fuel fire would be an earthquake.”

“We warned that this was a problem in the United States in 2003,” he continued, “and a year later the National Academy of Sciences agreed that our analysis was correct about the consequences and said the NRC needs to take this seriously.” But, he added, “the NRC has simply thumbed its noses at everybody because the industry doesn't want to spend the money” required to contain the waste.

This week, German chancellor Angela Merkel ordered seven of her country's power plants shut down pending a review, and the catastrophe in Japan has caused European states to “stress test” all of their reactors. Guenther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner, told reporters, "There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen." He added that the catastrophe "has to raise the question of whether we in Europe, in the foreseeable future, can secure our energy needs without nuclear power.”

Meanwhile, CBS reported that the “Obama administration on Tuesday insisted that nuclear power plants in the United States are safe,” in an attempt to protect the industry from the kind of public backlash that followed the Three Mile Island disaster.

CBS added: “Twenty-three of the nuclear reactors in the United States use the same design as those found at the plant that failed in Japan” and every plant in the U.S. “shares key design traits with the Japanese plant.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Collateral Damage: Self-Inflicted and Otherwise

2011-01-23T14:17:00.004-05:00

counterpunch

Weekend Edition
January 21 - 23, 2011

CounterPunch Diary

Collateral Damage

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It’s too soon to say of course, but it really does look as though though the Tucson shooter has done Sarah Palin serious damage. A Gallup poll run at the end of last week gives her a 53 per cent unfavorable rating, the lowest level she's sunk to in public esteem since she was first lofted to national prominence as John McCain's vice presidential pick in 2008.

Only 38 per cent now have a favorable view of the former Alaska governor.

Palin has only herself to blame. Against accusations that her bulls-eye campaign map targeted Democrats, including Gabrielle Giffords, she could have countered with measured expressions of sympathy for the dead and wounded, and a more in-sorrow-than-in-anger reproof for the over-hasty accusers.

Instead of which she came out with eight minutes of self-defensive whining on Facebook, and caused great annoyance to Jewish groups by filching the "blood libel" charge on which they have had copyright since the Middle Ages. Since then, she's done nothing to improve her performance, complaining that Obama had given a campaign speech at the memorial in Tucson.

Her charge was true, but the trouble is that most Americans liked Obama’s campaign speech. It was essentially the same speech that got him into the White House in the first place. While Palin was plummeting in the polls, approval for the President's Tucson performance was up in the high 70s percentile.

Before the shootings the Republicans were rearing and plunging as they burst out of the starting gate for the new Congressional session. John Boehner (dry eyed when talking about what happened in Tucson) went through a couple of cambric kerchiefs wiping the tears from his eyes in his “maiden” address as Speaker while down on the floor manly Republicans like Steve King of Iowa exulted that the blood-dimmed tides of payback were about to be loosed.

It was King, back in September, who fretted that the Republican leadership might go soft on reforming Obamacare, and that “a blood oath” of fortitude was necessary. It was King too who talked about the necessity of there being “blood on the floor” in the struggle for America’s future. Their first legislative target, Obama's health insurance bill, which passed into law last summer, was rolled out under the title, ‘Repeal of the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act'. They just couldn’t get enough of blood or killing. One columnist did a search on how many bills have had the word "killing" in the title. He found that "almost no legislation in 20 years used the word".

Then real blood splattered across the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway. The sheriff of Pima Country blamed poisonous rhetoric. Panic-stricken Republicans spent the next two weeks embarking on a fairly successful campaign to persuade the press that two years worth of incendiary, para-homicidal rhetoric could by definition have absolutely no measurable effect on any psychotic in America, including Loughner. Liberal pundits like Jonathan Alter obediently clicked their heels and agreed that putting targets on electoral maps was as influential in measurable consequence as sticking a soft toy on the window of a Volvo.

They may have counter-attacked with some effect in this skirmish, but even now about a third of the country still believes that violent political rhetoric helped provoke Loughner's rampage.

The Republicans have lost their ’mo, at least for a while. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

Meanwhile Obama is looking more chipper than he has in the whole of the last year, a unifier at last, acting presidential as he triangulates just as Bill did in 95 and the years thereafter. Clinton and Gore “reinvented government” and Obama vows to do away with irksome regulations (like storing long form birth certificates securely) that hold America back.

Where is Monica Lewinsky now that we need her? Coming off the Tucson memorial service and the performance of the intern who may have saved Giffords’ life Slate compiled a list of Great Contributions by Interns in History. Of course it failed to include Monica Lewinsky and her almost single-handed salvation, exclusively reported here in CounterPunch, of Social Security which Clinton was on the very edge of “reforming” before the scandal forced him to drop his plans.

Fawning Piers

Piers Morgan got whacked by the critics for being too fawning in his first outing as CNN’s replacement for Larry King. He was interviewing Oprah Winfrey. It’s true. He did fawn. It seems to come as naturally to him as to a hungry curate in Trollope buttering up a bishop. But he’s not alone. Here’s Kitty Kelley, the great, most definitely non-fawning, biographer of Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the Bush Family and the British royal family, writing in the December edition of The American Scholar:

“Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: ‘This book is an unauthorized biography.’ The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a burglar alarm. Suddenly I heard the rumble of thousands of Oprah book buyers charging out of Barnes & Noble—empty-handed.

“Days before this exchange, I had felt the chill of media disdain when my publisher began booking my promotion tour. Larry King barred the door to his CNN talk show because, he said, he didn’t want to offend Oprah. Barbara Walters did the same thing, proclaiming on The View that the only reason people wrote unauthorized biographieswas to dig ‘dirt.’

“There was no room for me at Charlie Rose’s roundtable and no comfy seat next to David Letterman. The late-night comic had recently reconciled with Oprah after a 16-year rift and did not want to risk another. On my 10-city tour I made few, if any, appearances on ABC-owned-and-operated stations because most of the stations that broadcast The Oprah Winfrey Show are owned by ABC or its affiliates. No one wanted to displease the diva of daytime television.”

End Torture Now!

In our latest newsletter Joann Wypijewski gives CounterPunchers a very important story, not only about the present elevated status of torture in America, but about the church-led campaign led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) which is striking a match amid the darkness. Five years ago, NRCAT announced its arrival in the form of banners that suddenly festooned churches and other religious institutions, declaring, “Torture Is a Moral Issue.”

“There are reasons for being discouraged, of course,” NRCAT’s Rev. Rich Killmer tells JoAnn, “ but I’ve seen more movement on this issue for a longer time than any other issue I’ve been involved with in all my years of religious social justice work.” That’s 42 years, some of them with the National Council of Churches, working on environmental, peace, justice, anti-nuclear issues.”

NRCAT aims to abolish torture in U.S. prisons as well, meaning eliminating long-term solitary confinement, the internal gulag of 45 SuperMax prisons that hold some 62,500 souls, and other forms of isolation warehousing that hold thousands more in standard prisons.

Subscribe to CounterPunch and read Wypijewski’s very important piece.

Also in this latest newsletter, Diana Johnstone explores the one of the sinister monuments of the Clinton years, when liberal intervention surged to full crest in the onslaughts on Yugoslavia. Her point of departure is the terrifying report to the Council of Europe by Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty.

As Diana begins: “U.S. media have given more attention to hearsay allegations of Julian Assange’s sexual encounters with two talkative Swedish women than to an official report accusing Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, of running a criminal enterprise which, among almost every other crime in the book, has murdered prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market.”

Thaci, now gangster in chief in Kossovo was handpicked back in 1999 by Madeleine Albright and the late Richard Holbrooke. Johnstone paints a searing portrait of Criminal Kosovo: America’s Gift to Europe.

Please, subscribe now! And have this newsletter your inbox, swiftly deliveredas a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Collateral Damage: WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs

2011-01-22T00:17:00.002-05:00

Collateral Damage: WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs

by Media Lens / January 21st, 2011

The horrific killing of six people in Arizona, and the wounding of a dozen more, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, generated a wave of discussion on the impact of violent political rhetoric. A leading article in The Times commented:

American politics has a strain of mean-spiritedness that, when it connects to disturbed individuals, can have terrible consequences.

True enough, although Britain certainly has its own “strain of mean-spiritedness”. It is possible to disagree with others “in a reasonable way”, The Times observed, without giving “unintended succour to those on the fringes who harbour extreme views and even worse methods”. ¹

In August 2002, Times journalist Michael Gove – variously, the paper’s comment, news, Saturday and assistant editor – wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. ²

Gove suffered no ill effects from this expression of “extreme views and even worse methods” – he is now Secretary of State for Education.

In January 2003, also gunning for war, David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian:

If I were an Iraqi, living under probably the most violent and repressive regime in the world, I would desire Saddam’s demise more than anything else. Or do we suppose that some nations and races cannot somehow cope with freedom?

Again, extremism was given no ”unintended succour” – later that year, the judges of the 2003 What the Papers Say awards made Aaronovitch columnist of the year, commenting:

At a time when most left-leaning commentators were opposing the war in Iraq, he took a brave and consistent stand, presenting the case for action in the most coherent and persuasive manner.

Speech that incites violence against individuals at home is unacceptable. Speech that incites mass death and destruction against entire nations is met with indifference, and/or high office and awards!

In Mediaspeak, the word ‘violence’ actually refers to crimes committed by the ‘bad guys’ against the ‘good guys’, ‘us’. ‘We’ do not commit violence, ‘we’ deploy ‘assets’ to ‘neutralise’ ‘targets’. ‘We’ ‘intervene’ to bring ‘security’ and ‘humanitarian relief’.

Because ‘we’ don’t commit violence, it is fine for ‘us’ to non-violently kill ‘our’ enemies. Thus, columnist, Jeffrey T Kuhner, wrote in the Washington Times last month:

We should treat Mr Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.

William Kristol, former chief of staff to vice president Dan Quayle, pleaded:

Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?

The net hosts numerous articles with titles like ’5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange.’

On the BBC website, Matt Frei praised Barack Obama’s mollifying response to the Arizona massacre:

The president kept it personal and poignant. He reined in the attack dogs on all sides and called for a more civil, gentle tone. The tragedy has allowed him to play the role of consoler-in-chief with conviction.

Perhaps not on all sides. The “consoler-in-chief” had nothing to say about the crosshairs hovering over Julian Assange.

Of Wikiblokesphere And Lying Feminist Slags

Responding to the killings in the Independent, Joan Smith lamented the state of political debate, recalling “a concept I’m very keen on but haven’t heard much in recent years: civility”. The abuse is rampant:

Among the online-abuse community, it’s beyond question that Julian Assange’s accusers are lying feminist slags.

There was precious little civility in this ugly distortion. If a minority of bigots do perceive Assange’s accusers this way, they have not been contributing to the rational, awesomely well-informed discussions we have seen.

John Pilger has commented on the playing of what might be called ‘the feminist card’ in the WikiLeaks debate. The gambit has form. In December 2007, we found that, over the previous 12 years, the terms ‘Taliban’ and ‘women’s rights’ had been mentioned in 56 Guardian articles. Of these, 36 had appeared after the September 11, 2001 attacks. As Pilger noted last month in the New Statesman:

The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was supported by leading feminists, especially in the US, where Hillary Clinton and other false tribunes of feminism made the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women the rationale for attacking a stricken country and causing the deaths of at least 20,000 people while giving the Taliban new life.

Something similar is happening now, Pilger writes, “as a group of media feminists joins the assault on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks… From the Times to the New Statesman, apparent feminist credence is given to the chaotic, incompetent and contradictory accusations against Assange in Sweden”.

Some of the worst examples have appeared in the Guardian, one of WikiLeaks’ “media partners”. Libby Brooks identifies an “unlikely alliance between leftwingers and the misogynists of the Wikiblokesphere,” which has seen them “indulge in the basest slut-shaming and misogyny”.

Again, if this is true somewhere, it is not true of serious, left online debate, where words like “slut” are simply abhorred. In a similarly one-sided Guardian report, Amelia Gentleman quoted Swedish tabloid journalist Oisin Cantwell, who argued, quite outrageously, that the “celebrity support for Assange was similar to the support offered by Hollywood stars to Roman Polanski when he was arrested last year, accused of raping a 13-year-old…”

Nick Davies, the leading Guardian reporter who originally organised the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership with Assange, before the two sides fell out, wrote a piece titled: ’10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange.’

This included salacious tidbits such as:

Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had ‘the worst sex ever’ with Assange: ‘Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent’.

And:

Police spoke to Miss W’s ex-boyfriend, who told them that in two and a half years they had never had sex without a condom because it was ‘unthinkable’ for her.

Bianca Jagger noted in Huffington Post that Davies had published “selective passages from the Swedish police report, whilst omitting exculpatory evidence contained in the document”.

Assange was, Jagger wrote, being “subjected to a ‘trial by newspapers,’ in an effort to discredit him”.

Assange’s former barrister James Catlin commented:

The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.

With “media partners” like these, WikiLeaks hardly needs enemies.

Blood On The Guardian’s Hands?

Worse was to come from the Guardian. On December 27, Africa correspondent David Smith reported:

Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges against the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other individuals over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks.

Treason charges could mean the death penalty, which, one would guess from this article, could mean blood on WikiLeaks’ hands.

One week later, on January 3, James Richardson, an “account services director for Hynes Communications”, wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian claiming: “now, with the recent release of sensitive diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier…”

WikiLeaks, Richardson argued, should just shut up:

Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled – in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump – WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.

Political analyst Glenn Greenwald commented on Salon:

There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that.

In fact the Guardian decided to publish the cable about Tsvangirai, not WikiLeaks, which only published the leak after the Guardian had done so.

The reaction in the US press was predictable enough. An article in the Wall Street Journal was titled, ‘Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.’ Who was to blame? “Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” A piece in the Atlantic observed: “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and so “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy”. ³

Responding to criticism, the Guardian amended Richardson’s opinion piece, noting:

This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks.

The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, worked hard to explain why David Smith had reported that WikiLeaks, rather than the Guardian, had published the Tsvangirai cable. Katz wrote: “it would be fair to describe us as joint publishers of any cables we have selected, with joint responsibility for any consequences of their release”. Using the WikiLeaks name was “a piece of widely understood journalistic shorthand. The material was routinely referred to as a ‘WikiLeaks revelation’”.

If the term “WikiLeaks revelation” is “shorthand” that is “widely understood” to refer to the Guardian’s status as joint publishers with WikiLeaks, why did David Smith not turn to his own editor for comment on the Guardian’s shared responsibility in the news piece reporting that Morgan Tsvangirai faced a treason inquiry? Has any Guardian journalist ever turned to the Guardian editor for comment on allegations that the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership had endangered life? We asked Ian Katz on Twitter but he failed to reply. It seems clear that the Guardian has not rushed to advertise its shared responsibility – we suspect it will be news to many people.

The crucial point, in light of the Guardian’s amendments, is that mainstream media outlets have shown flat zero interest in accusing the Guardian of having blood on its hands for publishing the Tsvangirai cable. But why? There is only one explanation: the earlier media outrage was motivated, not by a desire to protect life in Zimbabwe, but by a desire to demonise and destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

A related propaganda theme is that WikiLeaks has recklessly “dumped” a “flood” of diplomatic cables on the web, so endangering lives. Arch-war monger John Bolton wrote in the Guardian:

WikiLeaks has yet again flooded the internet with thousands of classified American documents, this time state department cables” which was the “third document dump.

The Daily Mail reported: “Then this week he [Assange] disclosed around 250,000 cables from U.S. embassies, many containing sensitive information.”

This, also, is nonsense. In reality, WikiLeaks has, so far, slowly and carefully released only about 2,000 documents in close cooperation with its media partners.

Greenwald explains the rationale behind the selective outrage and false claims:

To justify this assault, the U.S. Government needs to claim that WikiLeaks is somehow distinct from what other press outlets do. So it invents outright falsehoods to do so: unlike newspapers, WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumps diplomatic cables without editorial judgment; unlike newspapers, they refuse to be transparent about their methods (nobody is less transparent about what they do than large newspapers); and now, WikiLeaks endangers people’s lives by recklessly publishing a cable which leaves democratic leaders in Zimbabwe vulnerable to attack, even though it wasn’t published by them at all, but by The Guardian.”

Once again, the mainstream media has distorted and deceived to manufacture, isolate and target a ‘threat’ for destruction. Certainly WikiLeaks is embarrassing the powers that be much more effectively than mainstream journalism. But mainstream outlets also publish government leaks, including ‘Top Secret’ information, which the diplomatic cables are not. Assange is a journalist and he is engaging in journalistic activity. The “collateral damage” of his destruction might well involve the freedoms enjoyed by the very journalists currently seeking that outcome.

Leading article, ‘A Mean Spirit,’ The Times, January 10, 2011 [↩]
Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002 [↩]
Ibid [↩]

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The second Media Lens book, NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

This article was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 7:01am and is filed under Disinformation, Media, Obama, Sweden, Wikileaks, Zimbabwe.

Why Are the Feds Cultivating Their Own "Homegrown Terrorists"?

2010-12-13T16:23:00.002-05:00

AlterNet

CIVIL LIBERTIES

ColorLines / By Seth Freed Wessler

Why Are the Feds Cultivating Their Own "Homegrown Terrorists"?

High profile domestic terrorism plots appear to have increased in recent months, but they’ve been largely concocted.

December 12, 2010 |

The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the government’s implementation of it’s ongoing war on terror.

The recent case involves 21-year-old from Baltimore named Antonio Martinez, who’d reportedly converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Hussain and planned to blow up a bomb outside a military recruitment center in Baltimore. None of the plot, however, existed before the FBI instigated it and Martinez had no contact with any real terrorist organization.

The FBI deployed an informant to pose as an accomplice by adding Martinez as a friend on Facebook and communicate with him through Facebook messages. Martinez reportedly updated his status with comments about his devotion to Jihad. Once the young man had been identified as a target, the FBI informant helped imagine and orchestrate the plot, and supplied Martinez with a fake bomb and a vehicle to transport it. After he attempted to detonate the explosive remotely, the FBI arrested Martinez. If convicted of charges, he could face life in prison.

The case is the second since Thanksgiving and one of many more over the past decade, in which the federal government has deployed informants to “catch” terrorists inside the country. It’s all part of the FBI’s wider practice of targeting American Muslims—largely, according to some reports, Muslim converts as well as American born black Muslims. But far from stopping ongoing plots and interrupting “radicalization,” the FBI is fabricating plans, providing the tools to carry out attacks and inciting suspects to do so.

As U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told the AFP, “There was no actual danger,” because the people posing as accomplices were FBI employees.

Nonetheless, the FBI claims that Martinez posed a real threat because, according to Richard McFeely, an FBI special agent, the young man was “absolutely committed to carrying out an attack which would have cost lives.”

“The case,” reports the AFP:

bore a striking resemblance to that of a Somali-American arrested in Portland, Oregon, last month after trying to set off what he thought was an explosives-laden van parked near a Christmas tree ceremony.

The device was actually a dummy bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents who had contacted him months before and pretended to be accomplices, and the would-be attacker, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was charged with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.”

The informant program targeting American Muslims is part of a larger and developing FBI policy. As I wrote in October:

An extensive investigation, Anjali Kamat reports that the FBI has repeatedly used secret informants to gather questionable information and even entrap groups of people into supporting acts of terrorism. These informants are often Muslim men found guilty of non-terrorism related crimes and who face deportation or jail time.

In numerous cases, documented at length by the DN investigation, there are serious questions as to whether the tactic is creating crimes out of thin air. In one case, an FBI informant befriended a Muslim business owner. When that business started failing, the informant, who was himself facing deportation, offered the other man a loan that was allegedly laundered for weapons buying. The exchange led to terrorism convictions.

Karen Greenberg of the NYU Center for Law and Security explains, “the conviction rate for cases that involve informants is almost 100 percent.” But according to James Wedick, a former FBI agent, “90 percent of the cases that you see that have occurred in the last 10 years are garbage.”

Wedick also says that economic strains are often the way that informants entrap others. In Newburgh, NY, an FBI informant allegedly entrapped four black Muslim men from a poor neighborhood, pushing them to participate in an attempted attack on a synagogue in the area

High profile domestic terrorism plots appear to have increased in recent months, but they’ve been largely concocted. As the 10th anniversary of September 11th approaches, the government appears to be one of the key players in the maintenance of a believable terrorist threat.

Amna Akbar, fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of New York University School of Law, says, “What’s really interesting is that there’s been a significant increase in high profile so-called homegrown terrorism cases recently where the the actual threat is constructed by the government. There does not seem to be very much actual threat to justify the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and there are serious questions about why the government is going to such lengths in these cases.”

An archive of writer Seth Freed Wessler's articles for RaceWire's Colorlines Blog is available here.

Moral hazards - and consequences: Just Look at the GOP!

2009-12-13T13:35:00.002-05:00

SF Gate

David Sirota

Moral hazards - and consequences

David Sirota, 2009 Creators.com

Washington's favorite term these days is "moral hazard." Though this buzzphrase may seem like an intimidating idea, most of us understand the principle.

Applaud your kid for punching another kid - rather than grounding him - and you've created a moral hazard that means he'll probably punch other kids in the future. In short, without consequences - or worse, with rewards - for wrongdoing, there is an incentive to do wrong. That's moral hazard.

To date, the national discussion about this concept has revolved specifically around financial moral hazard. And, as evidenced by trillions of dollars in public loans, guarantees and subsidies given to speculators to cover their massive losses, leaders in both political parties have no interest in preventing financial moral hazard - despite stern press releases insisting the contrary.

But financial moral hazard is only half the story. The other half is political moral hazard - the mother of all other moral hazards.

Consider, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He's the top regulator who not only sowed financial moral hazard with the Fed's post-meltdown bailouts, but openly admits that as the crisis developed, his Federal Reserve "should have done more - we should have required more capital, more liquidity (and) we should have required tougher risk management controls."

Firing Bernanke would tell other regulators that there are consequences for negligence. Instead, President Obama rewarded Bernanke with renomination and thus manufactured a pernicious problem. As economist Dean Baker says, just as bailouts create a financial moral hazard giving speculators no incentive to avoid excessive risk, Bernanke's renomination creates a political moral hazard whereby regulators "will not have an incentive to do their jobs properly (because) there are no consequences" for failure.

The Democratic Congress, of course, could reject Bernanke's nomination. But that seems unlikely.

When Senate Democrats ratified Obama's nomination of New York Fed chief Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary, they rewarded yet another shill who also fell down on the regulatory job. When those same Senate Democrats considered the nomination of Gary Gensler to head the agency regulating derivatives, they could have rejected him for championing derivatives deregulation as a Clinton official and then cashing in as a Goldman Sachs executive. Instead, Democrats backed his nomination.

And let's be fair - it's not just Democratic politicians who are creating political moral hazard. Many Democratic pundits, activists and voters continued cheering on President Obama while he stuffed his administration full of Wall Streeters.

Come election day, if there are no consequences at the ballot box for the politicians who legislated bailouts, supported these appointments and are now working to undermine proposed Wall Street reforms, then America will have created the biggest moral hazard of all.

David Sirota is the author of "The Uprising." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A - 124 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Profiles of Intentional Collateral Damage: Obama's Afghanistan Decision

2009-11-25T14:08:00.001-05:00

Published on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama's Afghanistan Decision

by Kathleen Barry

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for being an empathetic model of manhood and further, for bringing that quality into the American Presidency. But how do you explain those dead Afghani and Pakistani daughters, mothers, sons and fathers, killed by US forces since you took office, to your own daughters who you want to develop the kind of empathy you have. You are teaching them how to understand the suffering of others. In Ghana you took them to the slave port and said that you wanted them to "engage in the imaginative act of what it would be like if they were snatched away from Mom and Dad and sent to some place they had never seen before." You want them to identify with the suffering of others, "And get them to - to make sure that they are constantly asking themselves questions about whether they are treating people fairly and - and whether they are examining their own behavior and how it affects others."

You have shown how empathy does not conflict with strength, how it enhances rather than diminishes leadership. In this country, you have faced down the health insurance industry from the memory of how your mother suffered at their hands. At the same time, you bring your empathy together with the power of your leadership when a woman at one of your health care forums tells you through her tears of how her insurance company is denying her life-saving treatment. We saw you go to her as you asked her to come forward to you, and watched you embrace her telling her that she was not alone.

As you are making your decision on the fate of Afghanistan and Pakistan, I ask you, are the people there any less deserving of your empathy? When you took office you escalated the U.S. war in Afghanistan and allowed it to expand in Pakistan. By the end of June, over a 1,000 Afghani civilians were killed, 261 alone in the month of May. In other words, more than one-third of the number of people killed in the Al Qaeda attack on the US in 9-11-2001 are dead since January of this year in order to keep America safe, even though they had nothing to do with fighting then or when they died. And with the increase our bombings have caused in recruits to the Taliban, America is not more safe.

While you were telling Americans that you wake up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking of how to keep America safe, you were denying that safety to the families of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. President, you know that the empathy that you so highly value cannot be selective. When you engage it for some, say Americans, and refuse it to others, like Afghanis and Pakistanis, you are telling the world that only Americans lives are of value and that everyone else's lives can be put at risk to protect American lives.

Still you have not lost your empathy or respect for the lives of people in countries the US bombs and attacks. On May 9, in a rare gesture of an American President, you apologized to President Karzai when he met with you in Washington a few days after the US military killed an estimated 140 Afghanis in Farah, 94 of them girls under the age of 18 who had gathered in a compound to take shelter from the fighting. Some villagers said the strikes hit an area which the Taliban had already left and where there was no fighting. You apologized but you did not stop the bombing. In fact, drone strikes on Pakistani villages three days later in South Waziristan killed 8 people. Four days after that, US forces killed 25 civilians in a village in North Waziristan. None were Taliban, none were Al Qaeda. And the drone attacks continue, weekly, daily sometimes.

How will your decision on troop levels and military plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan reflect what you are teaching your daughters about the value of human life? Will you show them the petitions from the women of Afghanistan brought to you by Medea Benjamin from Code Pink? Will you explain to them that Afghan women have asked that you disarm the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the Northern Alliance, none of whom have the support of the people?

In your April speech in Islamabad you said that you "have no sympathy and no patience for people who go around blowing up innocent people." If you engage the same kind of empathy you are teaching your daughters with the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, you will see that in their daily experiences of US bombings and drone attacks they see the US attacks in the same light that you see the terrorists who attacked the US.

Against a US force of 68,000 troops in Afghanistan before you make your announcement in a few days, Senator John Kerry, when he returned from Iraq last month, told us that there were not more than a thousand hard-core Taliban in Afghanistan. Women in Afghanistan estimate that there are not more than 100. The rest are boys and men who cannot find work, who are angry over the US bombing and occupation of their country, who are driven to fight back against the US military who killed their parents or their children.

How difficult would it be to announce a plan to disarm those "reconcilables" as General Patraeus calls them? To disarm not rearm! Rather than negotiating with the Taliban to sell out women's rights as Hammid Karzai has done, why not pay those fighters who are not hardcore terrorists to go home and restock their shops or rebuild their farms. Then withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan allowing them to protect their people and their country from the small number of hardcore terrorists remaining?

You have expressed your pain and sorrow in phone calls to families of American soldiers who have lost a son or daughter, a husband or wife. But what about the soldiers still there in combat? If you are truly pained by the loss of American soldiers in this war, bring those who are still there in combat home and give them the support to put their lives back together.

Mr. President, it is frightening to look at your advisors and see mostly hawks who are proponents of unending war. From your Vice President to your Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you have surrounded yourself with people who dismiss the cost of human life in war in favor of war. They have left us with the blood of over a million Iraqis on our hands. We do not expect empathy from your Generals whom came to their prestigious ranks through the military whose job it is to kill and destroy. They coldly speak of killing civilians as "collateral damage" as if it is not killing, as if human life outside of the United States is as significant as paper clips.

You have shown us that we can expect empathy from you, except in war. Will you close that gap? If you have not turned over the Executive Authority of this country to the Generals as your predecessor had, as it appears that you did when you took office in January, we will expect your decision on troops in Afghanistan to be reflected in your empathy for Afghanis and Pakistani as well as for American soldiers.

We are awaiting your decision on troop levels for Afghanistan. More precisely, we are waiting to see if you or the Generals are running this country as they have been since 2001.

In closing, Mr. President, before announcing your decision, please think hard and long from that place of empathy within you of what it would feel like to receive that call telling you the fate of one of your daughters, the kind of call that far too many Afghanis have received about their boys and girls who are with them no longer.

With respect,

Kathleen Barry, Ph.D.

Kathleen Barry is Professor Emerita of Penn State University, a feminist and sociologist and the author of Unmaking War, Remaking Men forthcoming Spring, 2010.

unintended or unanticipated consequences

2009-09-10T12:50:00.003-04:00

unintended or unanticipated consequences

unintended or unanticipated consequences

It is an old saying that things do not always turn out as we expect. The theme of the unintended consequences of action therefore has an understandably long pedigree in the social sciences. Many sociological observers have distinguished between the stated purpose or intent of social actions, and their generally unrecognized, but objective functional consequences. William Isaac Thomas noted how the co-operative institutions of Polish peasants served not just their specific objectives but also functioned to forge cohesion. More recently, Lewis Coser has argued that conflicts are not always destructive for an organization, but may, by their adaptive or safety-valve function, play a part in maintaining organizational stability (see The Functions of Social Conflict, 1965 ).

The classic sociological example of unanticipated consequences is found in Max Weber's thesis about the connection between the protestant ethic and the spirit of modern capitalism. The Calvinist doctrines of predestination and this-worldly asceticism had the unintended consequence of creating a climate suitable for the growth of capitalism by encouraging the accumulation of capital as a duty or end in itself. More recent illustrations are given by Jon Elster in Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989). One example deals with the way in which opinion polls can affect election outcomes. The publication of pre-election polls may actually alter the outcome of the election, either because they cause people to switch and support the leading candidate, or because people cast a sympathy vote for the apparent underdog. Of course, if everyone opted for the underdog, this would have the strange result of awarding victory to the less popular candidate. A somewhat similar example of the unintended is provided by the Hawthorne Studies, where the presence of the researchers inadvertently changed the behaviour of the workers they were studying, a phenomenon since designated the ‘Hawthorne effect’.

According to Robert Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949) the unintended consequences of actions are of three types: those which are functional for a designated system and therefore comprise latent functions; those which are dysfunctional for a designated system and are latently dysfunctional; and those which are irrelevant to the system since they have no functional consequences. As soon as these types are applied to a specific situation there are problems. Obvious questions include ‘Dysfunctional for whom?’ and ‘Performing a latent function for what?’ Moreover, it makes no sense to use unanticipated consequences to explain the function, because the consequences were not known at the time. An unanticipated consequence could, however, influence future actions. Think of a child throwing a tantrum in order to get an ice-cream. If the tantrum has the unintended consequence of attracting adult attention, then attention-seeking rather than ice-cream may motivate future tantrums.

Unanticipated consequences are important at the micro-level as social actors are often mistaken in their interpretation of the situation and can, by their action, bring unanticipated results. A special case of this is the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the pronouncement of an erroneous belief may evoke behaviour that (apparently) vindicates that belief, thus making the prophecy come true. The labelling theory of deviance postulates precisely such a mechanism. Thus, to quote the early formulation by Frank Tannenbaum in Crime and the Community (1938), ‘the very process of making the criminal is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing the very traits that are complained of …’ Unanticipated consequences are also important at the macro-level because so many events occur unintentionally. As Adam Ferguson observed, ‘History is the result of human action, not of human design.’ See also SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

Another Wave of Foreclosures Looms

2009-09-09T17:54:00.001-04:00

Published on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 by The Washington Post

Another Wave of Foreclosures Looms

Ballooning Payments Put Mortgages at Risk, Posing New Setback to Market

by Dina ElBoghdady

The housing market faces the prospect of a new round of foreclosures as hundreds of thousands of risky home loans known as option adjustable-rate mortgages reset to significantly higher payments that could force borrowers to fall behind, according to a report released Tuesday by Fitch Ratings.

A bank owned for sale sign is posted in front of a foreclosed home seen here in Antioch, California in 2009. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Justin Sullivan)

About 70 percent of the $189 billion in outstanding option ARMs will reset by 2011, the report said, which would be another setback to a teetering housing market still struggling to recover from the mortgage meltdown that precipitated the financial crisis.

Option ARMs make up only 1.3 percent of percent of outstanding mortgages and were used by a far smaller segment of the population than subprime mortgages, according to First American CoreLogic, so the fallout from the resets should not be as devastating. But the unraveling of the option ARMs could be felt for years.

"It does tell you there's going to be continued front-page news about high levels of foreclosures as these loans continue to struggle," said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

Option ARMs, also called pick-a-pay loans, allow borrowers to choose how much to pay each month. Nearly all the borrowers who took out this type of loan from 2004 to 2007 chose to pay less than the interest due. Sometimes they paid as little as 1 percent interest. But the loans eventually require the borrowers to start paying the principal and full interest rate, so the payments shoot up.

"It's a ticking time bomb for some people," said Brian Bethune, an economist at IHS Global Insight, who said banks have already written off about $500 billion of these loans and other risky mortgages. Consequently, foreclosures have substantially reduced the number of outstanding option arms.

In its report, Fitch estimates that $134 billion in option ARMs will reset in the next two years. It expects monthly payments to jump 63 percent on average, or $1,053 a month, for loans adjusting this year and next, prompting a rise in defaults and foreclosures.

One surprise is that many option ARMs have gone bad even before adjusting, suggesting that some of these borrowers didn't stand a chance, said Sam Khater, a senior economist at First American CoreLogic. As of April, more than 35 percent of option ARMs were at least two months late even though they had not reset.

"These people were having trouble making the minimum payment, let alone dealing with the payment shock once the loan adjusted," Khater said.

At the root of the problem is that many who took out option ARMs were betting that home prices would rise. The loans helped people buy homes at a time when prices surged to unprecedented highs. As long as home prices kept climbing, these borrowers could refinance before their loans adjusted. But once prices tumbled, that option vanished. Now many people cannot refinance because they owe more than their homes were worth.

The most severe problems have surfaced in states with the steepest price drops. About 75 percent of option ARMs financed homes in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, where prices have plunged on average 48 percent from the second quarter of 2006 to the first quarter of this year, according to Fitch.

But for people struggling to make the lower payment before the loan adjusts, refinancing probably won't help, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "Just about anything they refinance into is going to give them higher payments than they have now."

The Fitch Report covers only those mortgages that were securitized, meaning packaged into securities and resold. Fitch does not analyze that mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or lenders, hold in their portfolios.

Recognizing the troubles ahead, some of the nation's largest lenders have tried to limit losses by modifying or working with borrowers refinance the option ARMs remaining in the portfolios, Cecala said.

Among the most aggressive have been Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Each of these has recently acquired another major lender specializing in option ARMs: Countrywide, Washington Mutual and Wachovia, respectively.

As for the loans that were securitized, only 3.5 percent of the 1 million loans made in 2004 through 2007 and covered in the Fitch report have been modified.

Europe’s Complicity in U.S. Imperialism

2009-09-09T17:43:00.003-04:00

Europe’s Complicity in Evil

By Paul Craig Roberts

Address to Mut zur Ethik Conference, “Sovereignty or Imperialism,” Feldkirch, Austria, September 5, 2009

September 09, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- There is a widespread supposition that Obama, being black and a member of an oppressed race, will imbue US foreign policy with a higher morality than the world experienced from Bush and Clinton. This is a delusion.

Obama represents the same ideology of American “exceptionalism” as other recent presidents. This ideology designates the United States as The Virtuous Nation and supplies the basis for the belief that America has the right, indeed the responsibility, to impose its hegemony upon the world by bribery or by force. The claim of American exceptionalism produces a form of patriotism that blinds the US population to the immorality of America’s wars of aggression.

Nothing is any different under Obama. Obama has escalated war in Afghanistan; started a new war in Pakistan; tolerated or supported a military coup that overthrew the elected president of Honduras; is constructing 7 new US military bases in Colombia, South America; is going forward with various military projects designed to secure US global military hegemony, such as the Prompt Global Strike initiative that intends to provide the US with the capability to strike anywhere on earth within 60 minutes; is working to destabilize the government in Iran, with military attack still on the table as an option; supports America’s new military African Command; intends to encircle Russia with US bases in former constituent parts of the Soviet Union; has suborned NATO troops as mercenaries in US wars of aggression.

How should Europe react? Europe should disassociate from the United States and go into active opposition to US foreign policy. Europeans should demand that their governments withdraw from NATO as it serves no European interest. The two aggressive militarist powers, the US and Israel, should be sanctioned by the UN and embargoed. Instead, Europe is complicit in US and Israeli war crimes.

Because of the cold war, Europe is accustomed to following US leadership. The financial convenience of the shelter provided by US military power negated independent European foreign policies. In effect, Western European countries became US puppet states.

How does Europe escape from a subservient relationship of many decades? Not easily. The US is accustomed to calling the shots and reacts harshly when it meets opposition. For example, French opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq brought about instant demonization of France by the US media and members of Congress.

The US government uses financial sanctions and threatened leaks of sensitive personal information gathered by its worldwide spy networks to discipline any independent-minded European leader.

Europe is essentially captive and forced to put US interests ahead of its own. Consequently, unless Europeans find their courage and discard their servile status, Europe will be badgered into more wars and eventually led into a devastating war with Russia. One European country can do little, but concerted action would be effective. For example, why do not Europeans protest that the war criminal Tony Blair was given a post in the EU?

The Obama administration’s attitude towards self-determination and the sovereignty of the people is that these grand-sounding concepts are useful platitudes with which to mask the hegemonic interests of the US government. US money and propaganda foment “velvet” or “color” revolutions that turn more countries into American puppet states.

The platitudes are useful also to disguise the overthrow of US civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, due process, and prohibitions against torture and preemptive arrest.

During the cold war era, one of the mainstays of US propaganda against the Soviet Union was the inability of Soviet citizens to travel within their country without the government’s permission. This indignity has now been inflicted upon US citizens. As of September, 2009, US citizens can no longer travel within their country by air without the permission of the Transport Security Administration.

The Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration’s search procedures. Under these rules travelers’ computers, cell phones, and other devices can be seized for searches that can take up to 30 days. If you are on your way to a meeting and your presentation is on your computer and your contacts’ numbers are on your cell phone, you are out of luck.

“Terrorist threat” is the excuse for these Gestapo practices. However, there have been no domestic acts of terrorism in 8 years. The few “plots” that led to arrests were all instigated by FBI agents in order to keep the nonexistent threat alive in the public’s mind. Yet, despite any real terrorist threat the police state continues to gain ground. Considering the extent of America’s oppression of peoples abroad, one would expect much more blowback than has occurred, assuming that 9/11 was not itself an inside job designed to provide an excuse for America’s wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Europe must look beyond the empty American political rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” and recognize the emerging Brownshirt American State. Democracy is slipping away from America. Its place is being taken by an oligarchy of powerful interest groups, such as the financial sector, the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned, and AIPAC. Political campaign contributions from interest groups determine the content of US domestic and foreign policy. A country in which political elites are above the law and can violate with impunity both laws against torture and constitutional protections of civil liberties is not a free country.

American political leaders and the American people need Europe’s help in order to avoid the degeneration of the American political entity. American freedom, as well as sovereign independence elsewhere in the world, require criticisms of US foreign and domestic policies. The US media, which was concentrated into a few hands during the Clinton administration, functions as a Ministry of Propaganda for the government. It was the New York Times that gave credibility to the neoconservative propaganda and forged documents that were used to sell the invasion of Iraq to the public. It was the New York Times that sat for one year on the evidence that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was not until after Bush was re-elected that the reporter was able to force his story through editorial opposition. Americans need criticism from Europe to compensate for the absence of an independent American media. Americans need outside help in order to reach an understanding of the immorality of their government’s policies, because they receive no such help from their own media. Without Europe’s help, Americans cannot regain the spirit of liberty and tolerance bequeathed to them by their Founding Fathers. America herself is a victim of the neoconservative and liberal internationalist pursuit of US hegemony.

We in America need to hear many voices telling us that it is self-defeating to become like an enemy in order to defeat an enemy. As Germans learned under Hitler and Russians learned under Stalin, it is the internal enemy--the unaccountable elite that controls a country’s government--that is the worst and most dangerous enemy.

If America has enemies who are against “freedom and democracy,” then America herself must make certain not to sacrifice her own civil liberties, and the sovereignty of other peoples, to a “war on terror.” Acts of terror are a small cost compared to the cost of the erosion of civil liberties that took centuries to achieve. Far more people died to achieve liberty than have died in terrorist attacks.

The United States cannot pretend to be a guarantor of liberty when the US government takes away liberty from its own citizens.

The United States cannot pretend to be a guarantor of peace and democracy when the US government uses deception to attack other lands on false pretenses.

Europe, whose culture was wrecked by 20th century wars, Europe, which has experienced tyranny from the left-wing and from the right-wing, has a right to its own voice.

America needs to hear this voice.

Paul Craig Roberts

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College. Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments, including Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Dr. Roberts served in the Congressional Staff in the House and Senate and was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury by President Ronald Reagan. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1987. Dr. Roberts is author of 'Alienation and the Soviet Economy' and 'The Supply-Side Revolution'. He is coauthor with Matthew Stephenson of 'Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis'. He is coauthor with Karen LaFollette Araujo of 'Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy and ‘The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America'. He is coauthor with Lawrence Stratton of 'The New Color Line’ and ‘The Tyranny of Good Intentions'. His latest book, 'How The Economy Was Lost', will be published by CounterPunch in October 2009. Dr. Roberts is a columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.

Blackwater Still Illegally Operating Armed in Iraq

2009-09-09T17:33:00.003-04:00

Blackwater Still Armed in Iraq

By Jeremy Scahill

Despite the Iraqi government's announcement earlier this year that it had canceled Blackwater's operating license, the US State Department continues to allow Blackwater operatives in Iraq to remain armed. A State Department official told The Nation that Blackwater (which recently renamed itself Xe Services) is now operating in Iraq under the name "US Training Center" and will continue its armed presence in the country until at least September 3. That means Blackwater will have been in Iraq nearly two years after its operatives killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

"Authorized personnel under that task order are permitted to continue carrying weapons until that time," said a State Department diplomatic security official who spoke on condition that his name not be used. He added: "The purpose and mission of the Department of State's private security contractors is limited to protection of US diplomats and diplomatic facilities only and is defensive in nature."

That last point will come as little comfort to Iraqis. The Blackwater operatives involved with the Nisour Square killings on September 16, 2007, were operating under that very description. "The public perception in Iraq is that Blackwater is no longer operating in the country; that they were kicked out and their license revoked," says Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant at the American Friends Service Committee. "The public perception is that they are gone already. This is very disturbing."

The State Department's confirmation of Blackwater's continued armed presence in Iraq comes a week after a former Blackwater employee alleged in a sworn statement that the company's owner, Erik Prince, views his company's role as fighting a Christian crusade to "eliminate" Muslims and Islam globally, alleging that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

According to the State Department, Blackwater's sole remaining contract for diplomatic security in Iraq is an aviation contract. As The Nation recently reported, the Obama administration extended that contract on July 31, increasing Blackwater's payment by $20 million and bringing the total paid by the State Department to Blackwater for its "aviation services" in Iraq to $187 million. Blackwater has also been paid over $1 billion by the State Department for "diplomatic security." The large, publicly traded company DynCorp is scheduled to take over Blackwater's aviation contract in September, while Triple Canopy will get the lion's share of the protective security work in Iraq.

On January 28, the Iraqi government announced that it was not issuing Blackwater a license to operate in Iraq, saying the company needed to leave once private security companies were officially placed under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, as outlined in the Status of Forces Agreement. "Those companies that don't have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately," declared Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf. Despite these declarations, Blackwater remained. "Why were they allowed to stay for seven months without any operating license?" asks Jarrar.

The language of the Status of Forces Agreement that took effect January 1, 2009, technically places Defense Department contractors under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, but it appears to exempt State Department contractors such as Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp from Iraqi jurisdiction. Whether that has played a role in Blackwater's continued presence in Iraq is unclear. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and other officials "gave a lot of lip service after the Nisour Square massacre, promising to prosecute Blackwater and ban them from Iraq, but they've done nothing," says Jarrar. "It seems they were deliberately deceiving the public without actually holding the State Department or Blackwater accountable."

A week after Nisour Square, Maliki's government said it would ban the company. "The Iraqi government is responsible for its citizens, and it cannot be accepted for a security company to carry out a killing," Maliki said on September 23, 2007. "There are serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq." (The Iraqi government did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Blackwater continues to have a substantial presence in Afghanistan as well. There it also operates under the banner of US Training Center on a diplomatic security contract for the State Department's Worldwide Personal Protection Program. It also works for the Department of Defense under the banner of Paravant LLC, another Prince-owned company. Four Paravant operatives are under investigation by the US military over the shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians in May.

Blackwater is bidding on more contracts in Afghanistan, which is increasingly becoming the new gold mine for the war industry. Nearly 70,000 contractors are now deployed in Afghanistan on the US government payroll, meaning there are now more contractors than US soldiers (48,000) in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Interior Ministry has licensed nearly forty private security companies who collectively employ 23,000 people in Afghanistan. These companies also control 17,000 weapons there. In addition to those hired by the State Department, the US Department of Defense has about 4,300 security contractors in Afghanistan, and these numbers are steadily increasing. In the second quarter of 2009, the Obama administration increased the number of armed private contractors in Afghanistan by 29 percent.

"I'm not surprised that this transition is happening," says Sonali Kolhatkar, author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence. "We were warned before the election of Obama that Afghanistan was going to be the top war priority, so it is not surprising that Washington would dedicate much of its war machinery to Afghanistan." As for Blackwater, she says: "If they build the same record of killing civilians in Afghanistan that they had in Iraq, it will cement the Afghan resistance even further against the US occupation."

On August 6, Representative Jan Schakowsky wrote letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates citing Blackwater's "history of abuse" and called on Clinton and Gates "not to award further contracts to Xe and its affiliates and to review all existing contracts with this company." Neither department has responded to Schakowsky.

About Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. more...

Blackwater: Bush and Cheney's private hit men?

2009-09-09T17:24:00.003-04:00

Blackwater: CIA Assassins?

By Jeremy Scahill

In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the country. A month later, Erik Prince, the company's owner and a former Navy SEAL, flew to Afghanistan as part of the original twenty-man Blackwater contingent. Blackwater worked for the CIA at its station in Kabul as well as in Shkin, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they operated out of a mud fortress known as the Alamo. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Blackwater, Prince and the CIA.

Now the New York Times is reporting that in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater "as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda." According to the Times, "it is unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance."

The Times reports that "the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune." A retired intelligence officer "intimately familiar with the assassination program" told the Washington Post, "Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong." The Post reported that Blackwater "was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted."

"What the agency was doing with Blackwater scares the hell out of me," said Jack Rice, a former CIA field operator who worked for the directorate of operations, which runs covert paramilitary activities for the CIA. "When the agency actually cedes all oversight and power to a private organization, an organization like Blackwater, most importantly they lose control and don't understand what's going on," Rice told The Nation. "What makes it even worse is that you then can turn around and have deniability. They can say, 'It wasn't us, we weren't the ones making the decisions.' That's the best of both worlds. It's analogous to what we hear about torture that was being done in the name of Americans, when we simply handed somebody over to the Syrians or the Egyptians or others and then we turn around and say, 'We're not torturing people.'"

Reached by telephone, Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that because of her oath of secrecy on sensitive intelligence issues, she could neither confirm nor deny that Congress was aware of Blackwater's involvement in this program before the Times report. Schakowsky also declined to comment on whether Blackwater came up at a June briefing by CIA director Leon Panetta, which she attended. That briefing sparked calls for an investigation into whether Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to conceal an assassination program from Congress.

"What we know now, if this is true, is that Blackwater was part of the highest level, the innermost circle strategizing and exercising strategy within the Bush administration," Schakowsky told The Nation. "Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater."

As The Nation has reported, Blackwater continues to operate on the US government payroll in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where it works for the State Department and the Defense Department. The CIA will not confirm whether Blackwater continues to work for the agency (or, for that matter, if it ever has).

Blackwater's work for the CIA was the result of meetings in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 between Prince and Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, then-executive director of the CIA, the agency's number-three man. Krongard and Prince, according to a former Blackwater executive interviewed by The Nation, "were good buddies." In a 2006 interview for my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Krongard said that the company was hired to provide security for the CIA in Afghanistan. "Blackwater got a contract because they were the first people that could get people on the ground," Krongard said. "The only concern we had was getting the best security for our people. If we thought Martians could provide it, I guess we would have gone after them."

The relationship between Krongard and Prince apparently got chummier after the contract was signed. One former Blackwater executive said in 2006, "Krongard came down and visited Blackwater [at company headquarters in North Carolina], and I had to take his kids around and let them shoot on the firing range a number of times." That visit took place after the CIA contract was signed, according to the former executive, and Krongard "may have come down just to see the company that he had just hired."

The relationship between Blackwater and the CIA quickly evolved. Shortly after Prince arrived in Afghanistan in May 2002, according to a former Blackwater executive who was with Prince, the Blackwater owner focused on winning more business with government agencies, providing private soldiers for hire. In 2002 Prince, along with former CIA operative Jamie Smith, created Blackwater Security Consulting, which would put former Navy SEALs and other special ops on the market.

Prince subsequently tried to join the CIA but was reportedly denied when his polygraph test came back inconclusive. Still, he maintained close ties with the agency. He reportedly was given a "green badge" that permitted him access to most CIA stations. "He's over there [at CIA headquarters] regularly, probably once a month or so," a CIA source told Harper's journalist Ken Silverstein in 2006. "He meets with senior people, especially in the [directorate of operations]."

Prince would also go on to hire many senior Bush-era CIA officials to work at Blackwater. In July 2007 Buzzy Krongard joined the company's board; Prince offered him a $3,500 honorarium per meeting attended plus all expenses paid. "Your experience and insight would be ideal to help our team determine where we are and where we are going," Prince wrote in a letter to Krongard. At the time his brother, Howard "Cookie" Krongard, was the State Department inspector general responsible for overseeing Blackwater's work for the State Department. In September 2007 California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman accused Cookie Krongard of impeding a Justice Department investigation into Blackwater over allegations the company was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq.

Prince hired several other former CIA officials to run what amounted to his own private CIA. Most notable among these was J. Cofer Black, who was running the CIA's counterterrorism operations and leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden when Blackwater was initially hired by the CIA in 2002. Black left the government in 2005 and took a job at Blackwater running Prince's private intelligence company, Total Intelligence Solutions.

While at the CIA, Black ran the "extraordinary rendition" program and coordinated the CIA "Jawbreaker" team sent into Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leaders. In the days immediately after 9/11, he told Bush that his men would aim to kill Al Qaeda operatives. "When we're through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," Black promised Bush. When Black told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the president reportedly said, "Let's go. That's war. That's what we're here to win."

Before the CIA Jawbreaker team deployed on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions: "I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead.... They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the president. I promised him I would do that." According to CIA operative Gary Schroen, a member of the Jawbreaker team, it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempt a capture.

In September 2002, five months after Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA in Afghanistan, Black testified to Congress about the new "operational flexibility" employed in the "war on terror." "There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11 the gloves come off." Black outlined a "no-limits, aggressive, relentless, worldwide pursuit of any terrorist who threatens us," saying it "is the only way to go and is the bottom line." Black would later brag, in 2004, that "over 70 percent" of Al Qaeda's leadership had been arrested, detained or killed, and that "more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action." The Times reports that the Blackwater-CIA assassination program "did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects."

In addition to Black, Total Intelligence's executives include CEO Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Operations and second-ranking official in charge of clandestine operations. From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA's Near East and South Asia Division, where he ran covert operations in the Middle East and South Asia. As part of his duties, he was the CIA liaison with Jordan's King Abdullah, a key US ally and Blackwater client, and briefed George W. Bush on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance in its early stages.

Total Intelligence's chief operating officer is Enrique "Ric" Prado, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran and former senior executive officer in the Directorate of Operations. He spent more than a decade working in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and ten years with the CIA's "paramilitary" Special Operations Group.

Total Intelligence is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia. Its Global Fusion Center, complete with large-screen TVs broadcasting international news channels and computer stations staffed by analysts surfing the web, "operates around the clock every day of the year" and is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorist center, once run by Black. The firm employs at least sixty-five full-time staff--some estimates say it's closer to 100. "Total Intel brings the...skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room," Black said when the company launched.

Representative Schakowsky says the House Intelligence Committee is investigating the CIA assassination program and will probe alleged links to Blackwater. "The presidential memos (often referred to as 'findings') authorizing covert action like the lethal activities of the CIA and Blackwater have not yet surfaced," says Ray McGovern, a retired twenty-seven-year CIA analyst who once served as George H.W. Bush's national security briefer. "They will, in due course, if knowledgeable sources continue to put the Constitution and courage above secrecy oaths."

Blackwater Strikes Back

The Times report comes as Prince and his Blackwater empire are facing the prospect of a potentially explosive civil trial over the killing of Iraqi civilians. Attorney Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who are suing Prince and his companies on behalf of their Iraqi victims, have alleged that Prince is "equivalent to a top mafia boss who is responsible for all the day-to-day crimes committed at his direction and behest." If the case proceeds, the process of discovery could blow the lid off some of the darkest secrets of the powerful security contractor and its secretive owner. Burke and CCR are suing Prince and his companies directly rather than his individual employees because they say Prince "wholly owns and personally controls all Defendants." Burke also alleges that Prince has committed "violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a federal statute permitting private parties to seek redress from criminal enterprises who damage their property." Among the allegations are war crimes, extra-judicial killings and assault and battery of Iraqis.

Since the first case was filed by Iraqi civilians against Prince and Blackwater over the killing of seventeen Iraqis at Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, 2007, the company's high-powered lawyers have fought feverishly to have that and four other cases dismissed. Now, facing a crucial August 28 hearing in federal court in Virginia, they are putting forward a new argument: instead of Prince and Blackwater standing trial, the US government should be the defendant.

In a motion filed August 12, Blackwater's lawyers asked federal Judge T.S. Ellis III to order "that the United States 'be substituted as the party defendant,' in place of all of the current Defendants." In his motion, Blackwater lawyer Peter White of the powerhouse firm Mayer Brown argued that the company was working for the State Department in Iraq and therefore was on official business when the alleged killings and injuries of Iraqis took place. White cites the 1988 Westfall Act, which prohibits suits against government employees for their actions on behalf of the government and states that the government will assume liability for any lawsuits against employees.

Federal tort law defines "employees" in this context as "persons acting on behalf of a federal agency in an official capacity, temporarily or permanently in the service of the United States, whether with or without compensation." The fact that the defendants are "corporate entities" in this instance, White claims, "does not alter that conclusion." In the motion, Blackwater's attorneys note that the company, which recently renamed itself Xe Services, now does business with the government under the name US Training Center (USTC).

"The idea that the United States government should accept liability for the unprovoked criminal manslaughter of seventeen innocent Iraqis by Blackwater mercenaries, and place it on the back of taxpayers, is corporate animism run amok," says Ralph Nader, who has spent his entire career fighting against corporate personhood. "If Blackwater wants to be treated like a person, then its latest mutation, USTC, should be prosecuted, convicted and given the equivalent penalty of corporate capital punishment by revoking its charter and terminating its corporate operations."

The Westfall Act was passed in 1988 as an amendment to the Federal Torts Claim Act "to protect federal employees from personal liability for common law torts committed within the scope of their employment, while providing persons injured by the common law torts of federal employees with an appropriate remedy against the United States." After Westfall, the government assumed legal responsibility for suits filed against federal employees and made the sole remedy for victims suits against the government.

Blackwater has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene in the case and to assume liability for the allegations against Blackwater. If that were to happen, legal experts say, the case would be dead in the water. "It's clear that if they win this motion and the government is substituted, since the wrongs occurred in a foreign country, the government is absolutely immune and the case will be dismissed," says Alan Morrison, a former federal prosecutor who is now the associate dean for public interest at George Washington Law School. "This is an effort [by Blackwater and Prince] to absolve themselves...of any liability for the alleged wrongs to the plaintiffs." He adds: "A gigantic, for-profit corporation is seeking to use this statute, designed to protect government employees, to shield themselves from any responsibility for the deaths and injuries" of Iraqis.

"When Blackwater chooses to interpose itself in the middle and to make profit off these individual employees in the relationship with the government, the notion that Blackwater itself, a corporation, could be an employee is unusual to say the least," says Morrison. "Why would Congress want to, in effect, transfer liability from a large, well-heeled corporation like Blackwater to the United States taxpayers for this kind of conduct? What they'd be saying [if Blackwater's interpretation of the Westfall Act is accepted] is they would have wanted to assume liability for that which they didn't have any liability in the first place."

The Justice Department has not yet issued a position in this case. "Unfortunately, there's nothing we can provide in regard to your inquiry at this time," an official wrote in an e-mail. Earlier, in response to questions from The Nation, a Justice Department spokesperson sent a memo filed by the department earlier this year in a similar case against Blackwater in federal court in Florida, in which the department had rejected the company's attempt to make the government responsible. "Defendants' request for Westfall Act certification should be denied because only natural persons can be considered 'employee[s] of the government,'" Assistant Attorney General Tony West wrote on June 8 in a thirty-five-page filing opposing Blackwater's motion.

Several legal experts interviewed by The Nation said they could not foresee the Justice Department intervening on Blackwater's behalf. But the Westfall Act has been used by attorneys general in both the Bush and Obama administrations to attempt to absolve senior Bush officials of liability for their alleged role in crimes and to make the government liable. On June 26 Holder's office intervened in a lawsuit filed by CCR against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and twenty-three other military and medical officials "for their role in the illegal detention, torture, inhumane conditions and ultimate deaths" of two Guantánamo prisoners.

Citing the Westfall Act, Tony West wrote that "the type of activities alleged against the individual defendants were 'foreseeable' and were 'a direct outgrowth' of their responsibility to detain and gather intelligence from suspected enemy combatants." In defending the government's position, West cited case law stating that "genocide, torture, forced relocation, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by individual defendants employed by Department of Defense and State Department were within scope of employment" and similar cases justifying CIA torture as part of official duty.

"It is essentially saying torture is all in a day's work when it comes to holding people in military detention," says Shane Kadidal, who heads the Guantánamo project at CCR. In that case, the issue was not whether Rumsfeld and the others were "employees" but whether they were doing official business. Blackwater's argument is a tougher sell, says Morrison. "Does it hold water?" he asks. "It holds Blackwater."

Meanwhile, in another development, Prince's lawyers have responded to explosive allegations made against Prince by two former employees. In sworn affidavits submitted by lawyers representing the Iraqis suing Blackwater, the two alleged that Prince may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. One of the former employees alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." They also charge that Prince was profiting from illegal weapons smuggling. In a motion filed August 10, Prince's lawyers asked Judge Ellis to strike from the record the sworn statements of the two former employees, saying that "the conclusory allegations they contain are inadmissible on multiple grounds, including lack of foundation, hearsay, irrelevance, and unfair prejudice." They charge that the lawyers suing Blackwater are attempting to "use this litigation as a 'megaphone' to increase their ability to influence the public's perceptions regarding the use of contractors in military battlefield situations, the Iraq War, and most particularly about Erik Prince and the other defendants. Unsubstantiated statements made in filings in this Court become 'newsworthy' simply because they appear in those filings." The lawyers characterize the allegations as "scandalous, baseless, inadmissible, and highly prejudicial." Interestingly, nowhere do Prince's lawyers say flatly that the allegations are untrue.

As the cases against Prince move forward, the company continues to do a robust business with the federal government, particularly in Afghanistan. Schakowsky has called for a review of all of the companies' current contracts, and she has called on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stop awarding the company contracts. The "Obama administration should at the very least cancel and debar [Blackwater's] present and pending government contracts," says Nader. "Otherwise corporate crimes, privileges and immunities continue to pay and pay and pay."

About Jeremy Scahill

BOZOS ON THE BUS

2009-09-02T13:13:00.003-04:00

BOZOS ON THE BUS

Excerpted with permission from Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser

We're all bozos on the bus,
so we might as well sit back
and enjoy the ride.
-Wavy Gravy
One of my heroes is the clown-activist, Wavy Gravy. He is best known for a role that he played in 1969, when he was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival. Since then, he's been a social activist, a major "fun-d" raiser for good causes, a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, an unofficial hospital chaplain, and the founder of a children's camp for inner city kids. Every four years he campaigns as a candidate for president of the United States, under the pseudonym of Nobody, making speeches all over the country, with slogans like "Nobody for President," "Nobody's Perfect," and "Nobody Should Have That Much Power." He's a seriously funny person, and a person who is serious about helping others. "Like the best of clowns," wrote a reporter in The Village Voice, "Wavy Gravy makes a big fool of himself as is necessary to make a wiser man of you. He is one of the better people on earth."
Wavy (I'm on a first-name basis with him from clown workshops he's offered at Omega) is a master of one-liners, like the famous one he delivered on the Woodstock stage: "What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000;" and this one, on why he became a clown: "You don't hear a bunch of bullies get together and say 'Hey, let's go kill a few clowns.'"
But my all-time favorite Wavy-ism is the line above about Bozos on the bus, one he repeats whenever he speaks to groups, whether at a clown workshop or in a children's hospital. I have co-opted the phrase and I use it to begin my workshops, because I believe that we are all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments-mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect behavior: We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we've been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money to kids to terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we're all bozos on the bus.
This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we're all bozos, then for God's sakes, we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-type beings without the usual embarrassment and resistance. It is so much more effective to work on our rough edges with a light and forgiving heart. Imagine how freeing it would be to take a more compassionate and comedic view of the human condition - not as a way to deny our defects-but as a way of welcoming them as part of the standard human operating system. Every single person on this bus called Earth hurts; it's when we have shame about our failings that hurt turns into suffering. In our shame, we feel an outcast, as if there is another bus somewhere, rolling along on a smooth road. Its passengers are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that never bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things, or goofy things like forget where they parked their car, lose their wallet, or say something totally inappropriate. We long to be on that bus with the other normal people.
But we are on the bus that says BOZO on the front, and we worry that we may be the only passenger on board. This is the illusion that so many of us labor under- that we're all alone in our weirdness and our uncertainty; that we may be the most lost person on the highway. Of course we don't always feel like this. Sometimes a wave of self-forgiveness washes over us, and suddenly we're connected to our fellow humans; suddenly we belong.
It is wonderful to take your place on the bus with the other bozos. It may be the first step to enlightenment to understand with all of your brain cells that the other bus - that sleek bus with the cool people who know where they are going - is also filled with bozos - bozos in drag; bozos with a secret. When we see clearly that every single human being, regardless of fame or fortune or age or brains or beauty, shares the same ordinary foibles, a strange thing happens. We begin to cheer up, to loosen up, and we become as buoyant as those people we imagined on the other bus. As we rumble along the potholed path.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Lesser is the co-founder and senior advisor of Omega Institute, this country's largest adult education center focusing on health, wellness, spirituality, and creativity. She is the author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide (published in paperback with the title The Seeker's Guide.) For 30 years she has studied and worked with leading figures in the field of healing-healing self and healing society. She attended Barnard College and San Francisco State University. Previous to her work at Omega, she was a midwife and birth educator. The mother of three sons, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband.

ABOUT OMEGA INSTITUTE
Omega Institute is a holistic education center at the forefront of personal and professional development, dedicated to "awakening the best in the human spirit." More that 20,000 participants attend workshops and conferences each year on its 140-acre campus in Rhinebeck, New York, as well as at sites throughout the United States, including it's new center, The Crossings in Austin, Texas, and through travel programs in St. John, Virgin Islands, and Costa Rica. Founded in 1977, Omega is recognized worldwide for its broad-based curriculum and its unique community spirit. Its course work includes holistic health trainings for medical professionals and lay people, spiritual retreats, sports clinics, cross-cultural arts workshops, and a wide variety of classes in human development. www.eomega.org

Duty vs. Conscience at Gitmo

2009-09-02T12:32:00.001-04:00

Week of 9.4.09

Duty vs. Conscience at Gitmo

Learn how Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a government prosecutor set on convicting alleged 9/11 conspirator Mohamedou Ould Slahi, changed his mind after getting access to details of Slahi's treatment at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. Couch, who was friends with a co-pilot of one of the jets hijacked on September 11, 2001, says Slahi was tortured.

"I felt like what had been done to Slahi just reprehensible," Couch tells David Brancaccio. " For that reason alone, I refused to have any further participation in this case."

In this web-exclusive video, Couch shares what he saw and heard at Guantanamo, and talks about his controversial decision.

Early and Current Fears about Vaccine Dangers

2009-08-29T17:40:00.001-04:00

Early and Current Fears about Vaccine Dangers

by Stephen Lendman / August 29th, 2009 / Dissident Voice

Given today’s hysteria over a non-existent Swine Flu threat and possible mandating of experimental, untested, toxic, and likely bioengineered vaccines, it’s appropriate to review early fears about their dangers — when evidence first surfaced and concerns were raised.

In 1920, Charles Michael Higgins’ Horrors of Vaccination Exposed and Illustrated: Petition to the President to Abolish Compulsory Vaccination in Army and Navy (now available in a new 2008 edition) issued a “Public Challenge to Health Departments” in citing “Deaths from Vaccination Denied and Concealed – More Deaths from Vaccination than from Smallpox,” then continued:

“In order that there shall be no misunderstanding about the serious charge which I bring against vaccination, as being now actually more dangerous to public health and human life than natural smallpox, and the equally serious charge which I make against vaccinating doctors – who now control our Departments of Health and Vital Statistics – of denying and concealing these facts from the people, I now issue this special challenge” to the New York city and state authorities that “I will….prove from their death certificates and vital records, now concealed and withheld from the public, that there have been more deaths from vaccination than from smallpox in every year for the past fifteen years in the City and State of New York.”

Calling compulsory vaccinations “medical barbarism,” Higgins petitioned President Woodrow Wilson to stop mandating them for army and navy personnel. He cited facts he called shocking, including death certificates of primary school aged children “all killed in one week in September, 1915, from vaccination resulting in lockjaw and septicemia” and numerous others dead from “vaccine infection.” Yet throughout 1915, only three people died from smallpox.

Higgins bluntly stated that:

“Compulsory disease as a condition for public schooling or for service in army and navy is medically barbarous and legally unconstitutional, and should be abolished.” They violate the “right to life, health, and education…”

He asked Wilson to pardon court-martialed soldiers who refused non-consensual vaccinations, then imprisoned at “hard labor for twenty-five years!….for asserting (their) right to the medical sanctity of (their) own bod(ies)….”

He said that in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, typhoid vaccinations weren’t used. Instead, for almost the first time, modern, effective sanitation and hygiene practices were employed, and few soldiers experienced typhoid fever. But in the WW I Gallipoli campaign, English soldiers got typhoid vaccinations. Unsanitary conditions prevailed, and many succumbed to typhoid and other infectious diseases. In 1918 under conditions of poor sanitation for US forces, vaccinations proved ineffective in preventing “a high death-rate among the well vaccinated men.”

On March 28, 1919, an official report from the Chief Surgeon of the AEF in the US Public Health was titled, “Typhoid Vaccination no Substitute for Sanitary Precautions.”

Higgins quoted medical authorities admitting vaccination dangers and condemning their mandatory use. The 1913 edition of Osler’s Modern Medicine, Volume I stated:

“With the greatest care, however, certain (vaccination) risks are present and so it is unwise for the physician to force the operation upon those who are unwilling, or to give assurance of absolute harmlessness.”

In 1889, the English Commission on Vaccination exhaustively studied the issue, published its findings in 1896, concluded that vaccinations were dangerous, and said laws making them compulsory should be repealed or modified. An enacted “conscientious clause” subsequently let parents exempt their children. Yet, contrary to fears at the time, smallpox greatly declined because of improved sanitation and good hygiene practices.

As early as the mid-19th century, books about vaccine dangers included Dr. Charles Schieferdecker’s Dr. CGG Nittinger’s evils of vaccination (1856), William Tebb’s Sanitation, not Vaccination the True Protection against Small-Pox (1881), William White’s The Story of a Great Delusion (1885), Alfred Russel Wallace’s Vaccination Proved Useless & Dangerous (1889), Dr. Tenison Deane’s The Crime of Vaccination (1913), and many others.

In his book, Higgins referred to vaccinations as the cause of “great epidemics of deadly disease in animals and mankind….” and cited government reports he called “notorious public facts.”

“In October, November, and December, 1901, (a tetanus epidemic occurred) after vaccination(s were administered) in Camden, Philadelphia, and to a certain extent in near-by towns.” Higgins wrote the Secretary of War citing proof “that there was a distinct medical and logical relation between influenza and vaccination, and that many serious diseases, including smallpox and cowpox, commence like influenza….”

The “wholesale and repeated vaccinations in the military camps throughout the world (suggested) that this vaccine infection had escaped…and was running wild as a world-wide epidemic infection,” and to check it required all vaccinations be halted. He stressed what he called “no mere hypothesis or theory, but rather a hard fact” borne out by “foot and mouth disease” epidemics in cattle and other animals, “some of which originated from two of the largest vaccine factories in this country,” at the time in Philadelphia and Detroit.

He cited US Bureau of Animal Industry and US Department of Agriculture reports that clearly showed vaccine infection as the cause of the 1902 and 1908 epidemics, and the “strong suspicion” that later ones in 1914 and 1915 were as well.

He called for the abolition of “dangerous medical domination and monopoly which now controls our Departments,” which had long abused public power, that denied “Medical Truth, Freedom and Progress (and) which should no longer be tolerated.” He urged that compulsory army and navy personnel vaccinations be abolished, replaced solely by voluntary ones.

He said “the practice of inflicting on the human body a compulsory medical disease, which is dangerous to the health and life and causes many deaths every year, is obviously illegal and a medical crime on the people which must be suppressed.” On September 17, 1919, he asked President Wilson to put a stop to “vaccination horrors and medical mendacities.”

Vaccinations Given US Military Forces During Major Military Conflicts since 1775

From at least the 1770s to the present, inoculations were routinely used. From the American Revolution through the Spanish-American War, smallpox vaccinations were administered. In WW I, typhoid was added, and in WW II, shots were given for smallpox, typhoid, typhus, tetanus, cholera, diphtheria influenza, scarlet fever, plague, paratyphoid A and B, and yellow fever. The Korean War adopted the same regimen. Vietnam added immunizations for polio, tetanus-diphteria toxoids, measles and meningococcal.

For the Gulf War, still more were added for anthrax, botulinum, adenovirus types 4 and 7, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), and rabies — a virtual toxic stew besides depleted uranium exposure that combined caused Gulf War syndrome, its devastating effects on many thousands of troops, yet the Pentagon denied it existed.

The Afghan and Iraq wars added varicella (chicken pox), hepatitis A, influenza, yellow fever, pneumococcal, plus the upcoming Swine Flu vaccine. In combination, US military forces now get a greater than ever toxic brew of up to 20 dangerous inoculations plus booster shots (including for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis DTaP) that assure damage to (or destruction of) their immune systems followed by serious health problems later on.

In 1919, Higgins called smallpox and typhoid inoculations “medical barbarism.” Today it’s at an intolerable level.

Confessions of a Medical Heretic

On April 16, 1988, a portion of a brief New York Times obituary read:

On April 5, “Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn, a physician, author and critic of the medical establishment, died after a brief illness….He was 61 years old.” Besides teaching at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, he was best known as “The People’s Doctor” and for his 1979 bestseller, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, in which he cautioned against “the harmful impact upon your life of doctors, drugs and hospitals.”

In a November 1984 East West Journal article, he called immunizations a “medical time bomb,” and (as a paediatrician) said the “greatest threat to childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them.” He referred to deceptive marketing practices and called paediatricians objecting to their “bread and butter” the equivalent of a priest denying the infallibility of the Pope.

He urged parents to reject all inoculations for their children, but explained that in many states they’re mandatory. He administered them early in his practice, but later stopped “because of the myriad hazards they present.” He summarized his concerns as follows:

no evidence confirms that vaccinations eliminate childhood diseases;
the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines don’t work and cited Jonas Salk later admitting that mass inoculations caused an epidemic after 1961;
smallpox vaccinations are “the only source of smallpox-related deaths for three decades after the disease had disappeared;”
significant inoculation risks are real; parents should avoid them when possible;
doctors are derelict for not explaining their hazards and for “defend(ing) them to the death;”
a “myriad (of known) short-term hazards (exist but) no one knows the long-term consequences of injecting foreign (substances) into the bod(ies) of your child(ren);”
even more shocking is that “no one is making any structured effort to find out,” yet
suspicions now confirm that mass-inoculations dramatically increase autoimmune and neurological diseases, including leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and numerous others ranging from annoying to lethal;
he asked: “Have we traded mumps and measles for cancer and leukemia,” and blamed vaccinations for their destructive harm, including thousands of annual SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) deaths; and
he said the best way to protect children is make sure they’re not vaccinated.

Doctors Speak Out on Vaccine Dangers

The Merck Manual (first published in 1899, now available in a Home Edition) warns individuals with B and/or T cell immunodeficiencies to avoid live-virus vaccines (the main ingredient in ones produced by Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, and perhaps others) due to the risk of severe or fatal infections. Immunodeficiencies include common food allergies, inhalant ones, eczema, dermatitis, neurological deterioration and heart disease. Vaccines may be lethal for people with these conditions because their immune systems can’t produce a healthy reaction to the viral assault on them. Getting it may induce illnesses they’re intended to prevent and many other potentially deadly ones.

It’s no surprise that many doctors, earlier and now, share Mendelsohn’s concerns and state them.

On April 2, 2002 in the London Telegraph, autism specialist Dr. Kenneth Aitken said: “When I was in training, one in 2,500 (children were autistic). Now it is one in 250. At the moment, the only logical explanation for this is MMR” immunizations.

On April 27, 1979, at the American Society of Microbiology meeting, a paper by Drs. Anthony Morris, John Chriss, and BG Young titled, “Occurrence of Measles in Previously Vaccinated Individuals” concluded that “By the (US) government’s own admission, there has been a 41% failure rate in persons who were previously vaccinated against the (measles) virus.”

A 1993 British Medical Journal article stated: “In 1993 a high court judge in the UK decided that it was impossible to know the exact contents of vaccines and that science had no idea what the cocktails of chemicals, contaminants and heavy metals contained in vaccines could do to the human body, or why they would work to prevent disease.”

Dr. J. Anthony Morris, former FDA Vaccine Control head said: “There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good.” He concluded that “There is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza. The producers of these vaccines know that they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”

Professor LC Vincent, Bioelectronics founder, said “Vaccines DO predispose to cancer and leukemia.”

In December 1985, Dr. Albert Sabin, discoverer of the oral polio vaccine, admitted that “Official data have shown that the large-scale vaccinations undertaken in the US have failed to obtain any significant improvement of the diseases against which they were supposed to provide protection.”

The National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Dr. James A. Shannon said that “The only wholly safe vaccine is a vaccine that is never used.”

Professor Ari Zukerman of the World Health Organization (WHO) stated: “Immunization against smallpox is more hazardous than the disease itself.”

Dr. Paul Frame in the Journal of Family Practice believes “There is insufficient evidence to support routine vaccination of healthy persons of any age.”

Dr. John B. Classen stated that his “data proves that the studies used to support immunization are so flawed that it is impossible to say if immunization provides a net benefit to anyone or to society in general.”

Dr. Gerhard Buchwald concluded from the results of 150 trials that “Vaccination is not necessary, not useful, (and) does not protect. There are twice as many casualties from vaccination as from AIDS.”

The Association of American Physicians & Surgeons stated that “Public policy regarding vaccines is fundamentally flawed. It is permeated by conflicts of interest. It is based on poor scientific methodology (and it’s) insulated from independent criticism.”

In his book, Health and Nutrition Secrets, Dr. Russell L. Blaylock wrote: “Multiple vaccinations, especially in newborns, are another major source of childhood mercury exposure because of the mercury-containing thimerosal preservative. Over twenty-two vaccinations are now recommended for children before the age of two! Effects of exposure can vary from subtle to major malformations but even minor degrees of maldevelopment can have unacceptable consequences.”

Blaylock called flu vaccinations, especially for the elderly, “criminal” because of known substance dangers in them, including methylmercury, phenylmercury, ethylmercury, and aluminum that remain in the nervous system for decades and damage it.

According to the WHO, “The best vaccine against common infectious diseases (is) and adequate diet” along with good sanitation and hygiene practices.

Dr. Rebecca Carley calls vaccinations “The True Weapons of Mass Destruction Causing VIDS, Vaccine Induced Diseases.”

Immunogeneticist Dr. Hugh Fudenberg concluded that individuals getting five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the time of his study) were 10 times more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease than others receiving two or fewer shots. He cited dangerous mercury and aluminum ingredients that accumulate in the brain causing cognitive dysfunction.

Flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury. One microgram is considered toxic. By age two, most US children have received around 237 micrograms of mercury through vaccines alone.

Vaccines contain the following toxic and others substances:

thimerosal (mercury);
aluminum hydroxide and phosphate;
ammonium sulfate;
amphotericin B,
animal tissues and fluids, including horse blood, rabbit brain, dog kidney, monkey kidney, chick embryo, chicken egg, duck egg, pig blood, and porcine (pig) protein/tissue;
calf serum and fetal bovine serum;
betapropiolactone;
macerated cancer cells;
formaldehyde;
formalin;
synthetic phenol;
gelatin and hydrolyzed gelatin;
glycerol;
human diploid cells (from aborted human fetal tissue);
MSG;
the anti-biotics neomycin and neomycin sulfate;
phenol red indicator disinfectant dye;
phenoxyethanol (antifreeze);
potassium monophosphate;
polymyxin B;
polysorbate 20 and 80;
residual MRC5 proteins;
sorbitol;
sucrose;
tri(n)butylphosphate;
VERO cells, a continuous line of monkey kidney cells linked to the SV-40 virus known to cause leukemia; and
washed sheep red blood cells.

One or a combinations of theses substances can play havoc with the human immune and neurological systems and cause deadly autoimmune and other diseases.

On August 15, a UK Mail Online article linked Swine Flu vaccines to a deadly nerve disorder called Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). It cited a leaked letter from Britain’s Health Protection Agency ahead of planned mass-vaccinations in the country. Sent to about 600 neurologists on July 29, it referred to America’s 1976 killer virus Swine Flu scare, the urging then that everyone be vaccinated, and the millions who did with these results:

people died from the vaccine (from respiratory failure after severe paralysis), not Swine Flu;
500 GBS cases were detected;
experts said the vaccine increased the GBS risk level eight-fold;
once the link was established, vaccinations were halted, but the damage was done after about 10 weeks of inoculations; and
the US government paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle damage claims from thousands of victims.

UK press coverage currently describes concern over the government releasing a vaccine “of unknown safety,” yet plans remain to proceed. According to Jackie Fletcher, founder of the vaccine support group Jabs: “The (UK) Government would not be anticipating (trouble) if they didn’t think there was a (GBS) connection. What we’ve got is a massive guinea-pig trial.”

In a July 26 rense.com article titled, “Startling New Evidence That The ‘Swine Flu’ Pandemic Is Man-Made,” Dr. A. True Ott cited evidence showing that Novartis Pharmaceuticals “conspired with corrupt ’scientists’ at the US Army Institute of Pathology, Ft. Detrick, Maryland, to create a ‘novel’ strain of weaponized ‘influenza’ virus by…’reverse engineering’ the deadly 1918 killer strain (then) maliciously and surreptitiously releas(ing it globally) in March and April 2009 for the primary purpose of creating a panic-stricken world-wide demand for Novartis vaccine material.”

Ott claims the vaccine will unleash “lethal waves of increasingly virulent and deadly disease, rather than to curtail and limit the existing outbreak” — for huge profits and “a massive and sudden (worldwide) depopulation” agenda.

He called the scheme much greater than Henry Kissinger’s 1974 NSSM-200 diabolical plan for “the immediate reduction of world population” in the hundreds of millions.

In 1987, Dr. Maurice Hillerman, prominent vaccine expert and head of Merck’s vaccine division admitted that mass inoculations in the 1950s and 1960s likely caused thousands of annual cancer deaths because the SV40 virus (from dead monkeys) contaminated the first polio vaccine. “According to Hillerman, MERCK KNEW THE VACCINES WERE INFECTED WITH SV40, but distributed them anyway.”

Many other examples show that “live viruses in vaccines SPREAD…disease very effectively. When combined with SQUALENE ADJUVANT the virus becomes many times more potent and lethal.”

Ott claims Novartis’ patent application reveals “smoking gun” evidence. The company admitted that “their ‘invented’ vaccine will be effective because of ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING THE ORIGINS OF THE PANDEMIC FLU STRAIN THAT WAS ‘REVERSE ENGINEERED’…. Clearly the pandemic virus was not an act of nature. (It’s) a conspiracy to commit mass murder” for profit.

Writing for Citizens for Legitimate Government (CLG), Dr. Andrew Bosworth sounded the alarm about “The Swine Flu Hoax,” admitted its mysterious origins, expressed concern that it might be lethal, and suggested that it was either accidently or deliberately released by corporate or government sources to cause a global epidemic for profit and power.

He cited suspicions of doctors and scientists that Swine Flu was man-made because of its unique combination of viruses from different parts of the world. He mentioned spurious media and official reports of Swine Flu deaths, perhaps from conventional flu, another cause, or an unrelated medical condition. He called the US government’s pandemic policy “ridiculous” and “repugnant,” leaving people terrified and uninformed enough to react adversely to their own well-being.

Current News from Jane Burgermeister’s theflucase.com

Burgermeister is the journalist who filed criminal charges against Baxter AG, Baxter International, and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology AG “for producing and distributing contaminated bird flu material this winter, alleging that this was a deliberate act to cause a pandemic, and also to profit” from it. In addition, she accused Austrian Health and other Ministry officials of knowledge and support of this practice, then later named Baxter, Novartis, Sanofi Aventis, world agencies (including the WHO, UN, and CDC), and high-level officials in Austria, other European countries, and America of conspiratorial involvement.

Her web site features the following recent reports:

– on August 25, the UK Daily Mail said “Up to half of (British) family doctors do not want to be vaccinated against swine flu,” and one-third of them said the vaccine was inadequately tested;

– in Australia, “Leading infectious disease experts have called on the Federal Government to abandon its mass swine-flu vaccination plan because of fears the vaccine is a contamination risk that could spread blood-borne diseases;”

– in Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1905), the US Supreme Court ruled that the state could require people to be vaccinated for the common good; in April 2009, NECN.com reported that a possible new Massachusetts law (Bill 2028) will require compulsory vaccinations; those refusing face $1,000 a day fines or 30 days in prison; after the state senate unanimously passed it, Catherine Austin Fitts concluded that Boston’s money men must be “very scared about something,” given that the city is “the capital of equity investment;”

– on August 25, Health Minister Ulla Schmidt admitted on German TV that the Swine Flu vaccination campaign was a hoax and the largest ever inoculation experiment in history; and

– on August 22, Dr. Wolfgang Wogarg, chairman of the health committee in the German parliament and European Council, warned about potential Swine Flu vaccine safety. He said Novartis’ vaccine contained cancerous animal cells, and emphasized peoples’ fears over the disease from being inoculated. “It is a great business for the pharmaceutical industry,” he told Neuen Presse. Swine flu is not very different from conventional flu, but the vaccine can have dangerous side effects.

Lessons from the 1976 Swine Flu Outbreak

Soldiers at Fort Dix, NJ were affected. About 240 became ill. One death was reported, but the illness never spread beyond the base, so it’s curious why not. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t explain why the disease was contained or how it was introduced.

More curious is the current hype over person-to-person transmission when it didn’t happen in 1976. Northwestern University’s Immunology Professor Robert Lamb explains that isolated swine flu cases in humans aren’t uncommon. “Every year, you will find some pig farmer somewhere who gets swine flu. But it usually doesn’t transmit to his family,” let alone to the surrounding area or beyond.

Several years ago, Texas A & M’s head of microbial and molecular pathogenesis, John Quarles, isolated a swine flu virus in a student on campus. He took samples from him and about 100 others close to him. Not a single one of them was affected, and according to Quarles: “That’s pretty classic for swine flu.”

In research conducted by Dr. Pascal James Imperato, dean at SUNY’s School of Public Health, he reported that “the 2009 H1N1 virus was less efficiently transmitted by droplet infection (inhalation of respiratory pathogens exhaled by someone infected) in ferrets compared to the seasonal human H1N1 virus. This is a significant finding as it indicates that the 2009 swine flu virus might not be as easily transmitted between humans as its seasonal counterpart” — unless it’s bioengineered to make it contagious and deadly.

Conclusion

Swine Flu is a virus-induced respiratory illness in pigs. Few succumb and die, and humans are rarely infected, except occasionally among people having direct contact with infected animals. For most who do, symptoms are generally mild. Medications and other treatments aren’t essential. The illness usually lasts from two to seven days, and most patients recover well on their own.

Currently, no global pandemic or public health emergency exists, nor does forensic evidence link H1N1 to reported deaths. Yet fear-mongering persists to convince people globally to submit voluntarily to dangerous, possibly deadly bioengineered, vaccines.

If large numbers of confirmed Swine Flu deaths occur, contrary to compelling scientific reasons why they should not, then serious investigation is called for to determine if inoculations, not H1N1, caused them, and whether corporate greed and government complicity are behind a sinister plot to distract world attention from a deepening global depression and enrichment of drug companies.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. Contact him at: lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM-1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening. Read other articles by Stephen, or visit Stephen's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 8:58am and is filed under Capitalism, Corruption, Health/Medical, Military/Militarism.

Naomi Klein Disowns Winterbottom Adaptation of Shock Doctrine

2009-08-29T00:52:00.001-04:00

Published on Friday, August 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

Naomi Klein Disowns Winterbottom Adaptation of Shock Doctrine

Author and activist disagrees with documentary's take on her critique of 'disaster capitalism', to be screened on Channel 4

by Sam Jones

Naomi Klein has disowned Michael Winterbottom's forthcoming screen adaptation of her bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine, by asking to be removed from the credits of the documentary after serious differences arose between her and the British director.

Naomi Klein has asked to be removed from the credits of Michael Winterbottom's documentary. Photograph: Pawe Kula/EPA

The Canadian journalist, activist and author of No Logo had originally been slated to narrate the film and act as a consultant.

But it is thought Klein became unhappy with Winterbottom's take on her critique of "disaster capitalism" and western economic cynicism after seeing early cuts of the film. She is understood to have felt the documentary - which accuses the US and other countries of exploiting natural and man-made catastrophes in developing countries to push through free-market reforms from which they stand to gain - would have benefited from more interviews and less narration.

Klein was not present for the film's premiere at the Berlin film festival and makes no mention of it on her website.

She told the Independent that serious differences in opinion had emerged between her, Winterbottom, and the film's co-director, Mat Whitecross.

"I can confirm that the original idea was for me to write and narrate the film," she told the newspaper. "For that to have worked out, however, there would have needed to be complete agreement between the directors and myself about the content, tone and structure of the film."

She added: "As often happens, we had different ideas about how to tell this story and build the argument. This is Michael's adaptation of my book, and I didn't want there to be any confusion about that. I wish the film success."

A spokeswoman for Channel 4, which will broadcast the film on 1 September, said the documentary "was always intended to be Michael Winterbottom's interpretation of Naomi Klein's thesis and she was closely consulted throughout the film-making process". She added that the broadcaster was "very happy with the final result".

Although an early review of the film by the Hollywood Reporter described it as "a rough, disjointed doc that fails to get across Naomi Klein's arguments against disaster capitalism", Variety found it superior to many contemporary musings on the same subject.

"Judged against the many other recent docus that also critique the machinations of modern capitalism, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's [film] looks eminently sober, polished and persuasive," it said.

The Shock Doctrine argues that big corporations in search of new markets benefit when governments import the neoliberal economic system, often as a result of pressure from the US, but that this often has catastrophic consequences for ordinary people. Political leaders have turned to "brutality and repression", it contends, to crush protests against their ideologically inspired programmes of privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts.

The Shock Doctrine was commissioned by More4 from Revolution Films/Renegade Pictures. Winterbottom's previous work includes 24 Hour Party People and Welcome to Sarajevo.

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Naomi Klein Disowns Winterbottom Adaptation of Shock Doctrine

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Author and activist disagrees with documentary's take on her critique of 'disaster capitalism', to be screened on Channel 4

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