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Disappearing sunspots may signal end to global warming

By Kirk Myers | Seminole County Environmental News Examiner | December 16, 2009
Sunspot numbers are now at a 100-year low, a possible sign of a cooler climate ahead.
Sunspot numbers are now at a 100-year low, a possible sign of a cooler climate ahead.
SOLARCYCLE24.com

Oh, where, oh where have all the sunspots gone?

The fiery orange ball overhead has quieted during the past three years. Quiet in the sense that there have been very few sunspots – those black blotches on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity.

But just how quiet is quiet? Well, so far during the recent solar minimum (a period of low activity during the sun’s typical 11-year solar cycle), we’ve seen 183 sun-spotless days in 2007, 266 in 2008 and 259 in 2009 (as of Dec. 16 2009). Earth hasn’t witnessed a similar three-year stretch (1911, 1912, 1913) of sun-spotless days since the early 1900s.

The blank sun has not gone unnoticed by the experts. “We’re experiencing a very deep solar minimum,” says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

“This is the quietest sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

So why are sunspots under the spotlight? Because, according to solar scientists, their declining numbers, significant even by solar-minimum standards, could be the harbinger of colder temperatures ahead.

If so, it won’t be the first time the earth shivered as sunspots numbers declined. In the 17th century, the sun experienced a sunspot drought, dubbed the Maunder Minimum, which lasted 70 years – from 1645 until 1715. Astronomers at the time counted only a few dozen sunspots per year, thousands fewer than usual.

As sunspots vanished temperatures fell. The River Thames in London froze, sea ice was reported along the coasts of southeast England, and ice floes blocked many harbors. Agricultural production nose-dived as growing seasons grew shorter, leading to lower crop yields, food shortages and famine.

Canadian author and National Post environmental columnist Lawrence Solomon describes the period:

“Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland’s population fell by one-third, Iceland’s by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland [yes, it was once green, with forests and pastureland] were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.”

Is mankind headed for another cool-down or big freeze? Based on recent scientific findings, it might be a possibility. A Danish research team led by Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, has discovered a strong correlation between sunspot activity, galactic cosmic rays and variations in the earth’s climate, a theory (supported by experiments) that challenges the prevailing concept of human-induced climate change, popularly known as anthropogenic global warming.

Henrik and his team have discovered that increased solar activity in the form of sunspots, flares and other disturbances generate solar winds that strengthen the magnetic fields surrounding earth, creating a bubble that suppresses cosmic ray penetration, inhibiting cloud formation and causing warming.

Conversely, when solar activity diminishes, the protective magnetic bubble weakens and more cosmic rays penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. The high-energy particles serve as host nuclei around which water vapor can condense and form droplets, resulting in more cloud cover and precipitation. Temperatures begin to fall as the clouds reflect more sunlight back into space.

“Galactic cosmic rays carry with them radiation from other parts of our galaxy,” says Ed Smith, NASA’s Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere [earth’s protective bubble] will diminish in size and strength. If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system.”

If Svensmark and other climate scientists are correct, the decline in solar activity may be responsible for the recent fall in global temperatures. In 1998, global temperatures at the earth’s surface began leveling off and have actually declined slightly since 2001, despite an increase in CO2 levels, calling into question the accuracy of climate models that predict catastrophic global warming.

The decade-long cool-down is clearly visible in satellite temperature measurements, which are widely viewed as more accurate than land-based temperatures readings, according to Dr. David Evans, who was a researcher with the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1995 to 2005. Such readings, he says, are often skewed by what is called the “urban heat island” effect, which articially elevates temperatures.

“NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling,” says Evans. “The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.”

As Svensmark observes:

“In fact, global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the [global warming] projections of future climate are unreliable.”

If what Svensmark and other researchers say is true, it is very likely that when the heated debate between global warmers and global-warming skeptics finally ends, cooler heads may ultimately prevail.

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December 18, 2009 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | 1 Comment

Is Robert Fisk suffering from the Bernard Lewis syndrome?

By YASSINE CHANNOUF

Lebanon, December 16, 2009 (Pal Telegrah) – Twice I met him, and as many times he delighted me. I can credit Robert Fisk with getting me interested in Lebanon. I have always read his books and articles passionately, and those who know me grew weary of my continuous references to him. But no more. The Fisk I admired is no longer the Fisk that the world knows today. His last article in which he equates Hezbollah, the Lebanese Resistance, with a bunch of anti-Semites is the figurative drop. The reason for this outrageous accusation? Hezbollah’s opposition to the teaching of the Anne Frank diary in the schools in the south of Lebanon. Robert Fisk has lived in Lebanon for more than 30 years, and most importantly throughout the savage period of the civil war. It is, nor should it be a secret that Robert Fisk is one of the best western journalists dealing with the Middle East, but that should not impede us from criticizing him on certain critical issues.

Lebanon has more than any other countries suffered from the Israeli aggression. Since the inception of this state in the heart of the Arab world it has attacked Lebanon subsequently in 1948, 1967, 1968 -Israeli raid causes destruction of 13 civilian airlines on the Beirut tarmac-, 1973 -when Ehud Barak killed Kamal Nasser, a famous poet- and has known occupation ever since, presently in the form of the Sheba farms. Another invasion occurred in 1978 resulting in the occupation of more Lebanese territory for 22 subsequent years. It was not until 2000 that the Lebanese Resistance, whose spearhead was Hezbollah, defeated the Israeli occupiers, and regained unconditionally most of the land occupied by Israel and its proxies. And in 2006, Israel launched a full scale invasion on Lebanon but had to withdraw humiliatingly at the hands of a couple of hundred irregular fighters. In all of these events, civilians, and especially children extracted the highest toll of suffering.

Firstly, no one is eligible to teach the children in the south of Lebanon about misery, not even Robert Fisk. For them; it is not a conceptual theory, nor a distant narrative in one of Joseph Conrad’s novels: it is reality.

The children of the south of Lebanon have experienced and continue to experience the daily terror of Israeli jets breaking the sound barrier over Lebanese skies. The children in the south cannot, unlike their counterparts over the world, simply go play in the fields encompassing the beautiful south of Lebanon, because those who claim to represent Anne Frank have refused to -despite repeated ‘promises’- to deliver maps of the mines the Israelis planted during their 22 years occupation of the liberated parts of the south of Lebanon. In addition to that, the self-righteous Zionists have dropped more than 3.000.000 cluster bombs during the last days of their failed invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the bulk of which remain unexploded.

The Holocaust is -rightly so- immersed in European history, but too often wrong conclusions have been drawn from that dramatic set of experiences. It has resulted into a compliance, nay, in shared responsibility for the Zionist war crimes. As some great scholars have convincingly argued, under whom Norman Finkelstein; every time Israel commits or is about to commit another series of atrocities; it lets its proxies publicize reports about increasing anti-Semitism, or the New anti-Semitism. Should we judge Robert Fisk’s chutzpah in this light? It is increasingly clear that Robert Fisk has tightened his faith to the Future Movement camp of Hariri, and does not dare to criticize neither father, nor son Hariri, let alone his eloquent friend Walid Jumblatt -at least not in public, I have heard him criticize Jumblatt during dinner not long after the latter left the Hariri-block-.

In Europe, where it is almost obligatory to teach “the diaries”, racism is one of the most tangible features of the liberal society it takes pride in. Education is an important foundation stone in each society, but those who think that teaching about racism alter society positively should simply be presented the European example. Not only did the Shoa take place in Europe, which automatically leads to a preponderance of guilt, but secondly; the curriculum’s are infused with references to the European perpetrated genocide. Europe’s better world is indeed one without intolerance, racism. Lebanon’s better world, and indeed the entire region, is one without being adjacent to a terrorist state not bound by law nor morality. It is in fact surprising how little anti-Jewish sentiment there actually is in the entire region. Can you image the anti-Islamic outburst in each European capital if an Arab Muslim takes a gun and shoots people in a church because they’re Christians? Well, the people of Lebanon, and the constituency of Hezbollah have been subject to 62 years of harassment, psychological warfare, occupation, carnage, extra judicial killing, maiming, full scale invasions, stealing of water at the hands of the Jewish state, and still, they have not resorted to blatant anti-Jewishness, the cousin of anti-Muslim sentiment that is all too present in Western states that pride themselves with their secular civilization.

Robert Fisk surely knows this all, but in case he suffers from the Bernard Lewis syndrome -the neo-conservative orientalist whose scholarly credibility deteriorated with his age- that the Arabs have their own history; rich and varied. And this history does not only entail the scholarly outputs of an Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Sina, but Arabs have their own tragedies and sufferings. The pogroms of Lebanon and Palestine are-Qana, Shatila, Deyr Yassin, Sabra, Jabalya, Jenin-, their Anne Franks – Huda Ghaliya- their Auswitch -Khiam-, their Dresden -Quneitra in the Syrian Golan-, and their Warshaw Ghetto -Gaza-. The Arabs have their own ethnic cleansing, and the Palestinians are living it.

Now what did Robert Fisk really mean when he said that Hezbollah is anti-Semite? Did he forget that Nasrallah had a meeting with Noam Chomsky: a Jew! And with Neturei Karta: a Jewish organization. How anti-Semitic? Norman Finkelstein, another Jew met representatives of the anti-Semetic Hezbollah, Mr. Fisk! And only two weeks ago did Nasrallah present Hezbollah the new political document, and in the speech in which he presented the new politics of Hezbollah, Nasrallah reiterated that his strife was with Zionism and the Zionist state, not with the Jews. Does Fisk not know Arabic? Cannot he decipher the simple truth that in all speeches Nasrallah refers to Zionism and not Judaism or Jewry. In fact Nasrallah’s most recurrent quote is one in which he attacks Jews, which is the only recorded anti-Semite statement of the Secretary General. When did he utter these words? In the aftermath of Israel killing his 18 years old son Hadi. Yes Fisk, even the ‘anti-Semite’ Hezbollah people become emotional when their sons get killed by an occupying army.

And Fisk, this region really does not need another paternalistic White Man telling the people here what to do. If you want to do the people of the Arab world a small favor then talk about the massacre of Setif which occurred on the 8th of May 1945, the day the Nazis unconditionally surrendered. The people in Algeria were still being massacred at the hands of the victorious free Allied forces led by their hero Charles De Gaulle. Let him talk about the secret -but unsurprising- dealings of Nazism with Zionism, both were allies until well into 1942… Hat David Ben Gurion es nicht gewusst? Zionism, just like Nazism is a true racist ideology. While the whole world has left the ideal of racially homogenized nations behind, Israel still wants to be a Jewish state. Is Hezbollah talking openly about transfer of its internal adversaries or is it Israel openly talking euphemistically transferring the Palestinians to Jordan? It is Israel that occupies other peoples lands, and those Brooklyn Jews that have become die-hard Zionist such as Alan Dershowitz after the June War in 1967 didn’t care one bit about the Shoa, until it became politically and economically expedient to play the victim.

Fisk is wrong when he attacks Hezbollah. He realizes that they are too clean, too embedded in Lebanese society and that no army in the world can defeat a people’s resistance. So he looks to a minor incident and capitalizes on it, instead of reporting objectively for the European press which has demonized and continues to demonize the Resistance in both Occupied Palestine and Lebanon, and to present them the true image of those who are considered the heroes of the Arab and Islamic world. Fisk, sadly resorts to the blatant populism which we grew wary of but which apparently still sells in Europe and North-America. He, out of all people, should know better.

Source

December 18, 2009 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 8 Comments

Even in cases the U.S. wins, Guantanamo evidence is suspect

By Carol Rosenberg | Miami Herald | December 16, 2009

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the United States is unlawfully imprisoning at Guantanamo a Yemeni once accused of training at an al Qaeda camp, just days after a different U.S. judge upheld the detention of another Guantanamo detainee who trained at the same camp.

But even in that order, the judge found the U.S. evidence was the result of coercion and abuse and should not be used “in any fashion, in any court.” The judge ruled that while the detention may have been legal, the government’s own records “do not give any evidence for his continued detention.”

Judge Ricardo Urbina’s ruling on Wednesday, still sealed at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., brought the so-called habeas corpus scorecard to 32 losses and nine victories for the Pentagon in its defense against challenges from detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Because the order was sealed, lawyers declined to explain Urbina’s order to free Saeed Hatim, 33, who had been held at Guantanamo since June 2002.

“We are reviewing the decision and considering options,” said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd.

Long-time Guantanamo defense attorney David Remes, who argued for release in August based on the Pentagon record, and called no witnesses, said the ruling “once more demonstrates the thinness of the government’s evidence against these men.”

Of the Guantanamo detainees, Remes said, “That’s why they’ve won four out of five cases that have been decided so far.”

Defense Department documents alleged that Hatim left his native Yemen before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was inspired to join Muslims waging a jihad in Chechnya and trained at the al Farouq paramilitary camp in Afghanistan.

The ruling followed by two days Judge Thomas F. Hogan’s finding that another Yemeni, Musa’ab al Madhwani, 29, was lawfully detained as “part of a member of al Qaeda or related terrorist groups.”

Hogan ruled in favor of the Pentagon, but sounded reluctant to do so. He said Madhwani was no longer a threat to the United States and that some of the evidence against him came from triple hearsay and coerced confessions.

He said the government built its case on documents it discovered only at the last minute.

“As the law’s written I have no choice” but to uphold Madhwani’s continued detention, Hogan said. But Hogan quickly pointed out that that doesn’t mean he thinks Madhwani should continue to be detained. In fact, he said, the government’s records “do not give any basis for his continued detention.”

“I see nothing in the record that the petitioner poses any greater threat than the dozens of detainees . . . who have been transferred or cleared for transfer. In fact, his record is a lot less threatening,” he said in a ruling from the bench, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Hogan said he heard four days of testimony this fall, including Madhwani himself, who testified by a closed-circuit television feed in a closed-door hearing.

The judge admitted 260 exhibits to the record to conclude that the captive traveled to train and have “some association to alleged al Qaeda operatives.”

He called Madhwani a young, under-educated religiously vulnerable “hapless individual” but said the grounds for continued detention amount to this: “[He] voluntarily trained with al Qaeda for 25 days, and then traveled, associated and lived with members of al Qaeda for an entire year.”

Hogan also recited, for the record, what has become a familiar narrative of physical and mental abuse, solitary confinement and sensory deprivation in U.S. detention, notably at the Dark Prison in Afghanistan, adding that Justice Department attorneys did not refute the claims.

Madhwani was captured Sept. 11, 2002 in Pakistan, the judge said, noting his interrogations in Pakistan and Afghanistan “were coerced and should not be admitted — in any fashion in any court.”

December 18, 2009 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Chavez to Obama: Give back Nobel Prize

Press TV – December 18, 2009 05:35:58 GMT

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says his American counterpart Barack Obama should give his Nobel Peace Prize back as he is sending more soldiers to war-weary Afghanistan.

“He [Obama] got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people in Afghanistan,” he said during a speech at a climate change conference in Denmark.

“Obama should give back the prize,” Chavez added on Thursday.

The Venezuelan president also suggested that Bolivian President Evo Morales would have been a better choice for the award.

Obama collected the prize earlier this month following his decision to send 30,000 additional US forces to the war-torn country after eight years of conflict.

According to an opinion poll after the event, up to 60 percent of the respondents said that it was wrong for Obama to collect the prize.

Meanwhile, Chavez accused the Netherlands and the US of plotting to attack Venezuela as Washington sent military equipment to three Dutch islands off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire.

“They are three islands in Venezuela’s territorial waters, but they are still under an imperial regime: the Netherlands,” the president noted.

“Europe should know that the North American empire is filling these islands with weapons, assassins, American intelligence units, and spy planes and war ships.”

In response, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly denied that US military personnel in the Caribbean are planning to attack Venezuela.

“These allegations are baseless. These are routine exercises. We seek cooperation with the region,” Kelly said.

Chavez, however, described the cooperation as part of a broader plan for weakening leftist governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, including Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba.

“It’s a threat to all the people of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said.

December 18, 2009 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | 8 Comments

Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports | December 17, 2009

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan.  During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.”

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are “administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations.” According to one USAID official, the agency is “sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent.” As a result, the agency does not “know … where the money is going.”

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects.  According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects.  USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: “The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan.” Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite | 3 Comments

Kristol Clear: The Source of America’s Wars

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | Sabbah Report | December 17, 2009

“One reason neocons have been able to sow so much mischief is that they feed into deeply embedded American beliefs about democratism and ‘chosenness.'” – Paul Gottfried

Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.” It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars.

For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.”

But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?”

Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool.

In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”

“Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States … American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”

American Greatness

Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1970s and wield its authority unabashedly.

“The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and authoritarian regimes.”

In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein.

In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.

Kristol’s War

Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric – which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months – was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.”

The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.”

The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception.

In “Irving Kristol RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.”

Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer living in Japan.

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Radioactive Longer Than Expected

SAN FRANCISCO — Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created an inadvertent laboratory to study the impacts of radiation — and more than twenty years later, the site still holds surprises.

Reinhabiting the large dead zone around the accident site may have to wait longer than expected. Radioactive cesium isn’t disappearing from the environment as quickly as predicted, according to new research presented here Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Cesium 137’s half-life — the time it takes for half of a given amount of material to decay — is 30 years, but the amount of cesium in soil near Chernobyl isn’t decreasing nearly that fast. And scientists don’t know why.

It stands to reason that at some point the Ukrainian government would like to be able to use that land again, but the scientists have calculated that what they call cesium’s “ecological half-life” — the time for half the cesium to disappear from the local environment — is between 180 and 320 years.

“Normally you’d say that every 30 years, it’s half as bad as it was. But it’s not,” said Tim Jannick, nuclear scientist at Savannah River National Laboratory and a collaborator on the work. “It’s going to be longer before they repopulate the area.”

In 1986, after the Chernobyl accident, a series of test sites were established along paths that scientists expected the fallout to take. Soil samples were taken at different depths to gauge how the radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium and plutonium migrated in the ground. They’ve been taking these measurements for more than 20 years, providing a unique experiment in the long-term environmental repercussions of a near worst-case nuclear accident.

In some ways, Chernobyl is easier to understand than DOE sites like Hanford, which have been contaminated by long-term processes. With Chernobyl, said Boris Faybishenko, a nuclear remediation expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we have a definite date at which the contamination began and a series of measurements carried out from that time to today.

“I have been involved in Chernobyl studies for many years and this particular study could be of great importance to many [Department of Energy] researchers,” said Faybishenko.

The results of this study came as a surprise. Scientists expected the ecological half-lives of radioactive isotopes to be shorter than their physical half-life as natural dispersion helped reduce the amount of material in any given soil sample. For strontium, that idea has held up. But for cesium the the opposite appears to be true.

The physical properties of cesium haven’t changed, so scientists think there must be an environmental explanation. It could be that new cesium is blowing over the soil sites from closer to the Chernobyl site. Or perhaps cesium is migrating up through the soil from deeper in the ground. Jannik hopes more research will uncover the truth.

“There are a lot of unknowns that are probably causing this phenomenon,” he said.

Beyond the societal impacts of the study, the work also emphasizes the uncertainties associated with radioactive contamination. Thankfully, Chernobyl-scale accidents have been rare, but that also means there is a paucity of places to study how radioactive contamination really behaves in the wild.

“The data from Chernobyl can be used for validating models,” said Faybishenko. “This is the most value that we can gain from it.”

Image: flickr/StuckinCustoms

Citation: “Long-Term Dynamics of Radionuclides Vertical Migration in Soils of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone” by Yu.A. Ivanov, V.A. Kashparov, S.E. Levchuk, Yu.V. Khomutinin, M.D. Bondarkov, A.M. Maximenko, E.B. Farfan, G.T. Jannik, and J.C. Marra. AGU 2009 poster session.

Source

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power | 1 Comment

IDF raids Naalin photographer’s home

Ali Waked | YNet News | 16 December 2009

Family members of a girl who shot a video showing an Israel Defense Forces soldier firing a rubber bullet at a bound Palestinian in the West Bank village of Naalin last year say the army has been harassing them ever since.

The relatives told Ynet that a massive IDF force raided their house on Wednesday night and left behind a lot of damage. The girl’s father and brother were then summoned for investigation.

An IDF official claimed, however, that the soldiers arrived to arrest a man suspected of rioting and that the incident had nothing to do with the videotape.

The girl’s family members said that soldiers arrived at their house at around 3:30 am. “They broke the windows of our car, which was parked outside, and did not leave one whole glass inside the house. They destroyed and ruined everything,” said the girl’s brother, Arafat Canaan.

“They used a loudspeaker and shouted, ‘We are the IDF, we are the IDF,’ without giving any warning, without telling us what they want.”

'They did not leave one whole glass (Photo: Activestills)

‘They did not leave one whole glass (Photo: Activestills)

According to the brother, his mother fainted during the raid, the soldiers attacked his father, forcibly removed two of his brothers from the house and cuffed them in the yard. He said a third brother, who was outside the house, was detained for six hours until the end of the raid.

Arafat added that dogs were brought into the house and caused destruction. He said he believes this was another attempt by the army to avenge the tape. “If they wanted to arrest, they would come and arrest. But to destroy an entire house only to leave behind a letter summoning me and my brother to meet with a Shin Bet officer? This proves they are driven by feelings of vengefulness over that affair.”

‘Soldiers were following orders’
The brother said that his sister documented the destruction caused by the soldiers and their entry into the house, and that the soldiers had threatened her not to film the incident. Arafat himself documents the anti-fence demonstrations in Naalin and says the soldiers’ arrival in the night was meant to also terrify him and make him stop filming the demonstrations and the army’s activity in the village.

IDF sources confirmed that a special force arrived at the house in Naalin in the night in order to arrest one of the family members on suspicion of causing repeated disturbances. A commotion broke out in the area during the detention.

The sources clarified, however, that the soldiers were following orders and were trying not to disrupt the other family members’ lives. The sources also clarified that the arrest had nothing to do with the video shot by one of the family members about a year and a half ago during an ant-fence rally.

It should be noted that the girl’s father was arrested several days after the video’s publication. He was accused of causing disturbances in the area, taking part in a demonstration, violating a closed military zone order and assaulting a soldier with a stick. He was released several days later, after a military judge accused the prosecution of acting unprofessionally.

Source

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | 2 Comments

On the approaching anniversary of Gaza massacre, help us recruit more endorsers to our BDS campaign

From USACBI

Dear Friends,

First, welcome to our new US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel endorsers. You have helped us pass the 400 mark of US academic endorsers. With well known author Barbara Ehrenreich adding her name to our list of authors, artists, musicians, and others, we now also have 110 cultural workers of conscience who have endorsed our campaign. Among organizational endorsements are Code Pink, the U.S. Green Party, and just recently the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation.

Nevertheless, the suffering of Palestinians continues unabated because of Israeli policies, including the continuing blockade of supplies to the civilian population of Gaza, and the ongoing repression in the West Bank.

As we approach the anniversary of the murderous assault on Gaza, we ask you to join us in demonstrating our solidarity with the people of Gaza and throughout Palestine by helping to build our BDS movement here in the US. Please ask your colleagues and friends — academics, artists, writers, journalists, musicians, etc. — to join you in endorsing our Mission Statement by going to http://usacbi.org

Think of what a statement we could make if we reached a goal of 500 US academic endorsers by December 31st, the day of the Gaza Freedom March. What a response that would be to Bar-Ilan University political science professor Gerald Steinberg, who snidely remarked in February 2009: “It [USACBI] is a festering wound and it needs to be countered, not ignored. The danger is not these 15 [founders of USACBI]; the danger is if it becomes 500.” http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a14790/News/New_York.html#

When you write to colleagues and friends, you may wish to mention some of our illustrious Advisory Board members: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Hamid Dabashi, Lawrence Davidson, Bill Fletcher Jr., Glen Ford, Mark Gonzales, Marilyn Hacker, Edward Herman, Annemarie Jacir, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Robin Kelly, Ilan Pappe, James Petras, Vjay Prashad, Andrenne Rich, Michel Shehadeh, and Lisa Taraki.

You might also want to remind them that progressive Israeli academics have joined our call, including Emmanuel Farjoun, Hebrew University; Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv University; Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University; Kobi Snitz, Technion; and Ilan Pappe now at Exeter.

For those who are concerned about academic freedom, you might point them to the FAQ on our website, noting, in particular:

This boycott aims at the practice of institutions and their representatives, not at the individual scholar, student or artist. Indeed, PACBI’s call is principled in this respect: it affirms the absolute right of individuals to academic freedom and holds institutions responsible to protecting those rights irrespective of nationality, race or religion. It targets institutional behavior rather than the individual right to opinion. In doing so, it sets an important and consistent standard for institutional protection of academic freedom as a universal, not a nationally or ethnically determined right.

Remember, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu noted, “The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure – in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s.” With your help, we can increase our contribution to the worldwide BDS movement to pressure the Israeli government to respect the human rights of Palestinians.

Please ask as many colleagues as you can to support the non-violent call for academic boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions. Go to usacbi.org for the Call/Mission Statement; and contact us at uscom4acbi@gmail.com

Many thanks from the Organizing Committee for USACBI

Source

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

“Change you can believe in” had enough?

By JOHN R. MacARTHUR
NEW YORK
December 16, 2009

Following President Obama’s war speeches at West Point and Oslo —- two breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic liberal reform — I’ve got only one question: Have the liberals who worshiped at the altar of “change you can believe in” had enough?

There was already ample evidence of Obama’s feeble commitment to peace, progress and justice. Ever since he started fund-raising for his presidential campaign, it’s been clear that the principal change in the offing was skin tone and slogans. One only needed to read “The Audacity of Hope” to see how thoroughly Obama was enmeshed in the neo-liberal orthodoxies of the Robert Rubin-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Obama’s impeccably establishment party credentials — that is, his fealty to the Democratic leadership of Chicago and Capitol Hill — practically guaranteed that he would hew to the status quo when forced to choose.

Even before he announced his candidacy for president, Obama endorsed the Iraq hawk Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate; then, when Lieberman lost the primary to the antiwar Ned Lamont, Obama made sure that he was never seen with the official nominee of the Connecticut Democratic Party, a bald act of realpolitik that helped Lieberman win as an “independent.” In the U.S. Senate, meanwhile, Obama’s voting record on Iraq war funding was identical to Hillary Clinton’s.

Liberals, exhausted by President Bush and heartened by Obama’s challenge to the pro-invasion Hillary, ignored their new hero’s record and fixated on his one major anti-Iraq speech, delivered when he was a state senator. Ironically, it was Clinton who best characterized Obama’s candidacy when she said that she and John McCain would “put forth” a “lifetime of experience” while “Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”

Indeed, apart from extraordinary ambition, there wasn’t much more to Obama than that one speech.

So what’s left of the liberal adoration of Obama? The first major defector among the camp followers was Gary Wills, who denounced the Afghanistan escalation as a “betrayal.” As Wills astutely noted in a New York Review of Books blog, “If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.”

[…]

Then there’s Tom Hayden, the former radical and author of the Students for A Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement, who was a belligerent booster of Obama during last year’s campaign. Hayden, too, is upset about Afghanistan, but not enough to cast aside his self-delusion about Obama. Claiming to speak for “the antiwar movement,” he laments that the “costs in human lives and tax dollars are simply unsustainable” and, worse, that “Obama is squandering any hope for his progressive domestic agenda by this tragic escalation of the war.”

Unsustainable? Tragic? There’s no evidence that Obama and his chief of staff see any limit to their ability to print dollars, sell Treasury bonds and send working-class kids to die in distant lands. And what “progressive” agenda is Hayden talking about? So far, Obama’s big domestic goals have been compulsory, government-subsidized insurance policies that will further enrich the private health-care business, huge increases in Pentagon spending and purely symbolic regulation of Wall Street.

While Obama was speaking to the unfortunate cadets, I couldn’t help thinking of Richard Nixon and his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, a plan that entailed a long and pointless continuation of the fighting. Most liberals would agree that Nixon was a terrible president. Yet, for all his vicious mendacity, I think the sage of San Clemente had a bad conscience about the harm he did, about all he caused to die and be crippled.

Instead of shoring up Obama’s image of goodness, liberals really should be asking, “Does the president have a conscience?” Because if he does, he’s really no better than Nixon.

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine.
Source

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | 10 Comments

Steal this Film

THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW DOCUMENTARIES BY ‘OLD MEDIA’ CREWS WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND THE NET AND SEE PEER-TO-PEER ORGANISATION AS A THREAT TO THEIR LIVELIHOODS. THEY HAVE NO REASON TO REPRESENT THE FILESHARING MOVEMENT POSITIVELY, AND NO CAPACITY TO REPRESENT IT LUCIDLY. WE WANTED TO MAKE A FILM THAT WOULD EXPLORE THIS HUGE POPULAR MOVEMENT IN A WAY THAT EXCITED US, ENGAGED US, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, FOCUSSED ON WHAT WE KNOW TO BE THE POSITIVE AND OPTIMISTIC VISION MANY FILESHARERS AND ARTISTS (THEY ARE OFTEN ONE) HAVE FOR THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY.

From stealthisfilm.com

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Aletho News, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism, Video | Leave a comment

Israeli Forces Shut Down Jerusalem Culture Event

Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli forces arrested several and scuffled with Palestinians while shutting down a cultural festival meant to proclaim attachment to Jerusalem on Thursday.

Organizers, including Prisoners’ Club President Nasser Kaws, were hustled out of the Damascus Gate area of the Old City of Jerusalem and detained by Israeli border police, prompting scuffles at the main entrance into the ancient streets. Also among those arrested was the secretary-general of Jerusalem’s Fatah movement Omar Ash-Shabi.

Crowds gathered at the site and groups sang traditional wedding songs, gathering in clusters around television cameras stationed on the stairs leading to the gate.

One participant in the event, meant to mark Al-Quds Capital of Arab Culture 2009 which comes to an end at the close of this month, told reporters, “Israel used to say they detain everyone who threatens it with weapons, but look, are these people threatening it? They are just celebrating.”

A performer at the Jerusalem event noted, “Israel is an occupation so it is its job to marginalize Palestinian culture, but we will resist with our willpower. No one can suppress the Palestinian people.”

Intended to be a yearlong event sponsored by the Arab League, Al-Quds Capital of Arab Culture was officially banned by Israel. The festival was marred by arrests and police raids.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem along with the West Bank in 1967 in a move not accepted by the international community.

Israeli forces also broke up a march planned by Palestinian scout troops and closed schools where cultural events were taking place.

Soldiers also surrounded the French Cultural Center and the British Council, where two simultaneous events were planned as the finale of Al-Quds Capital of Arab Culture. The two events were headed by Rafiq Al-Husseni the head of the Palestinian president’s office and the other by the Ahmad Ar-Ruwedi, the head of the Jerusalem unit in the president’s office.

Israeli officers handed out a written order from the Israeli minister of internal security stating that the cultural activities were prohibited. Ar-Ruwedi listed the schools that were shut down by Israel: St. George’s School, Freres, At-Tefl Al-Arabi, Az-Zuhour Kindergarten, Dar Al-Awlad, and the Refugees Girls School.

In Nablus, thousands also attended a celebration of Jerusalem as the Capital of Arab Culture, apparently organized by the local branch of Fatah. President Mahmoud Abbas gave opening remarks at the celebration in the northern West Bank city. Abbas told the demonstration that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Palestine. “Jerusalem is ours and it will remain ours,” he added. Also attending the event in Nablus was Sheikh Abdallah Bin Zayid Al-Nahyan, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, and a number of Palestinian Authority officials.

December 17, 2009 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | 2 Comments

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