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Ronald Reagan’s Torture
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 8, 2009
The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released in August 2009, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”
The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” [HRE] in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
The euphemism aside, the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual,” the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released to the public).
In 1984, the CIA also was hit with a scandal over what became known as an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group sponsored by the Reagan administration with the goal of ousting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
Despite those two problems, the questionable training programs apparently continued for another two years. The 2004 IG report states that “in 1986, the Agency ended the HRE training program because of allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America.”
While the report’s references to this earlier era of torture are brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. … continue
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Aletho News 
The problem can be summed up in a paragraph or two. Spent fuel rods have been immersed in, on site, cooling ponds waiting for a final repository. All the ponds, across the USA, have reached their capacity limit and now, the spent rods must, be moved to final burial. The industry has no option here and the NRC, no say in the matter. We all know the expression, you can’t fit six pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag. By this I mean, the temporary pools are at full capacity, and do indeed overheat at times due to excessive neutron activity (temporarily attenuated) by adding soluble boron into the pools (an industry no-no) but it’s done anyway..
The French have a good deal of know how in this area, and (I believe) have chosen the borosilicate glass encapsulation of highly radioactive material that is then, sealed in five inch thick stainless steel containers. The containers are then placed into solid rock at a location remote from agricultural areas and underground water tables. Rest assured that the French wine growers keeps a scrupulous eye on their nuclear industry!
The bulk transportation of low and medium level wastes cannot be significantly reduced however there are novel ways to reduce the quantity of high level waste destined for permanent storage. The process of nuclear transmutation, although novel and purely experimental, can “kill two birds with one stone” For example; old nuclear weapons, such as the Genie class gravity bombs, once active during the late 1950’s to the 1960’s, can be detonated (underground) and in close proximity to intensely radioactive spent fuel rods. By converting the Genie weapons into neutron bombs, the detonation would change the nuclear chemistry of the rods into much more manageable and less radioactive fission products. This is a practical solution on two fronts; the Genies would not require costly dismantling for plutonium extraction and the HEU fission products from commercial power plants would be, literally by an Alchemy of sorts, be converted to lower level waste and thus have shorter half lives in burial.
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