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Mysterious IPCC Expertise

The IPCC publishes the citizenship and gender of its authors – but says nothing about their scientific expertise

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 17, 2018

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims to be a scientific organization. But it’s really a political one.

An obvious tell is how it describes its personnel. In the old days, IPCC reports listed people according to their role and their country. Matters have improved since then.

Today, the IPCC gives us six data points about its personnel rather than three. A webpage associated with its latest report tells us each individual’s:

  1. name
  2. IPCC role (coordinating lead author, lead author, review editor)
  3. gender
  4. country of residence
  5. citizenship
  6. institutional affiliation

But this only looks like progress. In the real world, the additional info is irrelevant. Science doesn’t care where someone lives or what citizenship they hold. Science doesn’t care if they’re a man or a woman.

If the IPCC is a panel of experts, the critical issue is: What is each of these people an expert in? More than 30 years after its founding, the IPCC still thinks it doesn’t need to talk about this.

For the UN bureaucrats who run the show, some things are important. Some are not. The nature of an author’s scientific expertise clearly isn’t a burning issue. But lots of attention is being paid to checking diversity boxes.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | 6 Comments

Radioactive, but… ‘safe’? Japan to dump Fukushima wastewater in Pacific despite objections

RT | October 17, 2018

Running out of space to store water contaminated by fuel that escaped during the Fukushima meltdown, the Japanese government is preparing to release it into the Pacific Ocean – despite the presence of radioactive elements.

Currently, 1.09 million tons of contaminated water is stored in 900 tanks near the Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, which suffered a catastrophic release of fuel following an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The government claims that radioactive material is being reduced to non-detectable levels through the Advanced Liquid Processing System procedure, but there is evidence that this process does not remove many radioactive elements, including antimony, cobalt, iodine, rhodium, ruthenium, strontium, and tellurium. Tepco, which operates the plant, admits the water contains tritium, but insist the levels are “safe.”

The UK Telegraph has obtained documents from Japanese government sources indicating that authorities are aware ALPS, developed by Hitachi, is not actually eliminating radioactive elements to non-detectable levels. Tepco was forced last month to admit that 80 percent of the water still contains radioactive substances after local residents and fishermen protested plans to dispose of it in the ocean.

Tepco admits that 65,000 tons of ALPS-cleansed water retain more than 100 times the amount of strontium-90 legally permitted. Strontium-90 accumulates in teeth and bones and can cause leukemia and bone cancer.

Tritium, too, is not harmless, despite Tepco’s assurances. According to nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie, beta particles of the element are more harmful than X-rays and gamma rays.

The government initially planned to release the contaminated water in 2016, but was surprised by the strength of local opposition. In March 2016, Tepco executives were charged with contributing to deaths and injuries in relation to the Fukushima meltdown after a judicial panel said they had ignored a 2008 internal report warning the plant could be struck by 15-meter waves in the event of a tsunami.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | | 5 Comments

How the FBI Silences Whistleblowers

By John Kiriakou – Consortium News – October 16, 2018

The idea of “whistleblowing” has been in the news a great deal.

Is the anonymous author of a recent New York Times op-ed eviscerating the president a whistleblower?

Is the victim of an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh a whistleblower?

I’m fortunate to have access to the media to talk about torture after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s program. I think Ed Snowden, Tom Drake and others would say the same thing about the aftermath of their own whistleblowing.

Cost of Doing the Right Thing

The problem is that we are the exception to the rule. Most whistleblowers either suffer in anonymity or are personally, professionally, socially and financially ruined for speaking truth to power. Darin Jones is one of those people. He’s one of the people silenced in Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers. And he continues to suffer under Donald Trump.

Jones was an FBI supervisory contract specialist who in 2012 reported evidence of serious procurement improprieties to his superior. Jones maintained that Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) had been awarded a $40 million contract improperly because a former FBI official with responsibility for granting the contract then was hired as a consultant at CSC. Jones said, rightly, that this was a violation of the Procurement Integrity Act. He made seven other disclosures alleging financial improprieties in the FBI, and he was promptly fired for his troubles.

Remember, the United States has a Whistleblower Protection Act.  Any federal employee who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety is protected under federal statute.

The FBI didn’t care, though. Jones was a troublemaker. He was talking about his fellow FBI agents. And he had to be silenced.

Immediately upon his firing, Jones appealed. He was not reinstated, however, because he had made his revelation to his supervisor and not to one of the nine people on the FBI leadership-approved list of who could hear a whistleblower complaint. Jones appealed again, beginning a more than four-year odyssey.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is the champion of whistleblowers on Capitol Hill, whether you like his politics or not. Jones contacted Grassley and asked for help. His dismissal was clearly retaliation for his revelations and was illegal, according to the whistleblower protection law. Grassley agreed and wrote three separate letters to then-FBI director James Comey and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. None were answered.

Grassley urged the Justice Department to reinstate Jones, saying that his dismissal was a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2016, which strengthened the original whistleblower protection law. He added that when Yates appeared before his Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearings earlier in the year, she promised “to improve the process for adjudicating claims of retaliation, including expanding the list of persons to whom a protected disclosure may be made.”

She never did that. In fact, Yates ordered the director of the Justice Department’s “Professional Misconduct Review Unit” to write to Jones and to tell him, “The Deputy Attorney General’s review is complete and her decision is final. Your case is no longer pending. You should not expect to receive any future communications that you or any other organization or individuals may submit with regard to your whistleblower reprisal case.” In other words, the official policy of the Justice Department was to ignore the law and to give the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and the whistleblower himself the middle finger.

The FBI’s response was equally bad, albeit predictable. The FBI’s Office of the General Counsel wrote to Jones, “The FBI has advised you that it will not conduct further investigation into your allegations that the FBI removed you from employment because you reported a compliance concern and retaliated against you in violation of applicable whistleblower retaliation protection regulations. The FBI has met its legal obligations and considers this matter closed without any basis for further review or reopening. Please be advised that the FBI will not respond to any additional correspondence or emails related to or arising from the termination of your employment.”

That’s another middle finger.

Note also that the FBI refers to “whistleblower regulations.” It’s not a regulation. It’s a law. And the FBI, too, has to respect and follow the law even when they don’t want to.

End Victimization of Whistleblowers

The bottom line here, though, is that Darin Jones did the right thing.  He did the honorable thing. He did the ethical, legal, and moral thing. And he paid for it with his career.  Like other federal whistleblowers, he’s ruined financially. Friends and family members have walked away from him. He can’t find a job. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the psychological weight of the fallout from whistleblowing is sometimes too much to handle.

Jones’ friends and supporters are creating a GoFundMe campaign to help him through this horrible period.

We also need to keep up the heat on the FBI, the CIA, NSA, TSA, and every other governmental organization that victimizes whistleblowers.

We have to support Chuck Grassley and others on Capitol Hill who are trying to protect whistleblowers.

We have to force our own elected officials to do the same. After all, they work for us.

Our goal should be a simple one. Work hard to ensure that Darin Jones is the last federal whistleblower to be treated this way.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , | 4 Comments

Why is Holocaust Education Failing?

By Gilad Atzmon | October 17, 2018

Despite the vast amount invested in Holocaust education and in spite of the fact that the Holocaust is the only compulsory subject in the British national history curriculum, British pupils seem not to follow the message of the rigid topic. For some reason, they struggle to buy into the primacy of Jewish suffering. They show little interest and learn mostly nothing. Yesterday’s Tablet Magazine article, “The Failure of Holocaust Education in Britain”, produced a clumsy attempt to grasp the reason for the failures of Holocaust education.

UCL’s  Centre for Holocaust Education has recently conducted  the ‘world’s largest ever study of its kind, it interviewed over 8,000 pupils aged 11-18 in England. Andy Pearce who work as a researcher at the centre told the Tablet that apparently  25-30 years of Holocaust education “is failing to make an impact.”

Pearce reports that when students were asked who was responsible for the Holocaust, “Hitler dominated the answer.” This is presumably a ‘wrong answer.’ Pearce continues, “Incredibly when we asked them to tell us who the Nazis were, students responded by saying they were ‘Hitler’s minions’ and ‘Hitler’s paratroopers.’” Pearce wasn’t happy with this answer either. “There was no reference to the Nazi Party as a political movement. Students also told the researchers that most Jews were killed in Germany. There was no understanding of collaborating regimes and many believed that mass killing began in 1933.”

Pearce inadvertently provided some crucial insights into the systematic failure of ‘holocaust education.’ While Heidegger taught us that to educate is to teach others how to learn, indoctrination is a very different exercise. It teaches how to produce the ‘right’ answers. The Holocaust, as taught and preached, falls into the domain of indoctrination. It is not a subject matter that is open to discussion or revision. The Holocaust as a subject does not accommodate dilemma or confusion. It is treated like a religious text with a rigid structure that doesn’t allow deviation.

For history to be relevant it must contain a dynamic discourse with present day, historical and contextual connotations. If the Holocaust is to be a vibrant topic that is engaging and enlightening for young enthusiastic minds, then the Holocaust must be placed into a context, such as comparing Auschwitz to Gaza. Nuremberg laws must be juxtaposed with the Israeli National Bill and the Israeli Law of Return. For the Holocaust to win our kids’ attention they must try to address the most difficult of questions: How and why was it that just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the newly born Jewish State ethnically cleansed the vast majority of the indigenous Palestinians? For the Holocaust to garner universal interest, it must carry a universal message!

Apparently ‘Holocaust education’ in Britain and in the West in general is dependent on Holocaust survivors. Elli Olmer is an outreach teacher for the Holocaust Education Trust. She told the Tablet, “I love what I do and hope to do it for many years but it all depends on what happens after we lose our survivors.” Despite Israel’s scientific gains in life extending technologies, it seems survivors aren’t going to live forever. Moreover, many survivors complain that their ability to reach young audiences is fading for the obvious reasons. However, their approach that engagement with a chapter in the past can only be reached through personal experience with people who lived through that chapter shows that the Holocaust is understood by these so called ‘educators’ as an a-historical narrative.

Historians revisit Napoleonic wars without depending on ‘meetings’ with survivors of those wars. We believe that we can learn about  the Roman empire without expecting veteran Roman generals to visit our classes. Why then does the Holocaust need its survivors? Why can’t the Holocaust be taught as a proper historical chapter through analysing texts and documents and encountering some opposing views? Because Holocaust education is driven by political interests and laws requiring such education are passed by means of emotional manipulation. It is there, of course, to serve Israeli and Jewish politics — the Holocaust is the raison d’être behind the Jewish state. But the Holocaust is also used to serve other global political trends such as (im)moral interventionism, pro immigration, anti racism, pro liberalism and so on.

The use of the Holocaust for political ends suggests that British youngsters may actually be more sophisticated than the banal minds that attempt to crudely indoctrinate them into submission. They sense that something about the holocaust education is not ‘straight forward,’ so to say. It is not taught as an open discourse, it is somehow different than other chapters in the past. It isn’t really open to discussion.

As could have been expected, Corbyn and the Labour party are dealt some of the blame. “The current debate over anti-Semitism in Britain’s opposition Labour Party and the views of its leader Jeremy Corbyn have also had a negative impact on Holocaust education in the classroom and made better teacher training even more imperative.”  Apparently, British youngsters do not live in a bubble. “Students now ask about Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism… Two to three years ago I would not have had pupils who would have heard the terms,” a teacher said.

The UCL team also examined what teachers hope to achieve by teaching the Holocaust. “There is a belief that if we study the Holocaust it will stop it happening again.” The truth of the matter is that  there is more than one  holocaust happening at the moment: Palestine, Libya, Syria just to mention a few. The Holocaust will become a meaningful lesson when it is finally emancipated from the primacy of Jewish suffering and  when we return to empathy and compassion as a basic tenet of our culture. Unfortunately I do not see the Holocaust Education Trust leading us in such a direction.

Surprisingly enough, Mike Levy, a Holocaust educator based in Cambridge, admitted to the Jewish outlet  that there is “an atmosphere of fatigue in the air when it comes to talking about the Holocaust and that students and teachers want to learn more about other genocides and contextualize the Holocaust.” I  agree with Mr. Levy. Let’s expose our kids to Aleppo, Tripoli  and Gaza and show them the crimes that are committed by our own democratically elected governments.  Let them figure out for themselves who are the Nazis of our time.  I believe that this would be the first step in preventing the next Holocaust.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | 7 Comments

US Will Walk Out of Nuke Treaty Again if Iran Agrees to New Deal – Scholar

Sputnik – 17.10.2018

Six months after Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Washington is proposing to sign a new agreement with Tehran.

The US is ready to give “a whole lot” to sign a new treaty with Iran that would take into account all of Washington’s concerns, including Tehran’s missile program, the US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said.

It is not the first time that Washington has invited Iran to conclude a new treaty since it walked out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

Tehran insists that it won’t ink a new agreement with the US after Washington’s mistake of withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In his address to the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly in September, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Tehran would agree to negotiate with the US but only if Washington changed its attitude towards the Islamic Republic.

In an interview with Sputnik Persian, Iranian political observer Ali Reza Rezakhah and a Tehran University expert in US affairs, Mohammad Marandi, spoke about the terms on which Tehran would be ready to sign a new accord with Washington.

According to Dr. Rezakhah, signing a new a new agreement with the US made no sense as Washington’s departure from the JCPOA showed everyone that it can’t be trusted.

“Statements alone are not enough, because the US has repeatedly declared its intention of concluding a new treaty with Iran. Singing a new treaty with the United States makes no sense. This is logical too because one can conclude a new agreement only with someone who fulfills his obligations. This means that we need to be confident about what the United States is saying,” Reza Rezakhah said.

He added that there weren’t any guarantees that the US would fulfill its obligations under a new treaty.

“It unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA treaty, violating all its international obligations. Neither Iran nor any other country can agree to sign a treaty with the United States, since they (the United States) do not honor their obligations. When speaking at the UN General Assembly, President Hassan Rouhani stated that Iran is ready to negotiate, provided that the United States takes the first step by adhering to the JCPOA.”

Mohammad Marandi flatly ruled out any new agreement with the US.

“It will not happen. Iran will not sign a new agreement with the United States or re-negotiate with it. With the JCPOA in place, what new agreement can we talk about? If the Americans do not understand this, then they know the Iranians even worse than we could have imagined.”

According to him, by violating the JCPOA the US proved that it can’t live up to its commitments.

“Tomorrow we will conclude an agreement with the United States, and they will walk out of it again. This defies logic,” Dr. Marandi argued.

“Even if Iran agrees to negotiate (a new agreement), the United States will take this as a sign of its pressure having worked and will ramp it up even more,” Marandi continued.

Iran would agree to negotiate with the US only if Washington returns to the JCPOA and negotiates within its framework,” Mohammad Marandi concluded.

In May, President Donald Trump said he was withdrawing the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran and promised to impose the “highest level” of sanctions on the country’s energy petrochemical and financial sectors despite objections from Europe as well as Russia and China — the other parties to the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Washington has also warned countries to stop buying Iranian oil starting from November 4 and threatened to use sanctions against those who do not.

The first wave of US sanctions on Iran took effect on August 6, targeting the country’s automotive sector, trade in gold, and other vital metals.

The remaining sanctions will come into effect on November 4, targeting Tehran’s energy sector, petroleum-based transactions, and transactions with Iran’s Central Bank.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Deception | , , | 2 Comments

American mercenary boasts of role in ‘targeted assassination program’ in Yemen

RT | October 17, 2018

A Hungarian-Israeli security contractor based in the US, Abraham Golan, has claimed he ran a targeted assassination program in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition currently waging a proxy war against Iran-backed Houthis.

The US is supplying weapons, intelligence, and other support to the coalition, but Golan’s account, as told to BuzzFeed, reads like something out of a spy thriller.

Golan claims the United Arab Emirates (UAE), part of the coalition, hired his mercenary company, Spear Operations Group, to kill specific enemies, including Anssaf Ali Mayo, leader of the Yemeni political party Al-Islah, which the UAE considers a terrorist group. The Mayo assassination was ultimately unsuccessful – Mayo disappeared from Yemeni politics for a while, and the Spear crew even thought he was dead, but he is currently serving in the Yemeni government, alive and well.

The botched assassination of December 29, 2015 is seen by observers from both sides as the opening salvo in a “targeted campaign,” which former UN investigator Gregory Johnsen says eventually took out 25 to 30 members of Al-Islah and other clerics.

Golan claims responsibility for several of the high-profile assassinations in Yemen, though he refuses to share which ones. Not because of remorse – he’s a mercenary, after all – but because his business inhabits a legal gray area, and perhaps because he doesn’t want his professional secrets getting out. Golan is trying to sell his business model to the US military.

Experts have cast doubt on the idea that the US, which essentially armed and trained the UAE’s military from the ground up, didn’t know the UAE had hired Americans to conduct assassinations in a war in which the US is deeply involved. The CIA claimed ignorance of the matter, but one agency official – after categorically denying the government would allow such a thing – confirmed the story, himself shocked that American mercenaries had been allowed to operate “almost like a murder squad.”

The US does enjoy a privileged place within UAE military circles, having sold the Arab nation $27 billion in arms and defense services since 2009. While the US theoretically bars mercenaries from participating in combat, it hires them to do everything else in the military, and one man’s security detail is another man’s firefight.

Private contractors are supposed to be regulated by the State Department, which claims it has never permitted mercenaries to work for another government, and US law forbids any who would “conspire to kill, kidnap, [or] maim” a foreign citizen. But the publication cites multiple sources who claim Spear mercenaries were given military rank by the UAE, providing them legal cover for their actions (US citizens are allowed to serve in foreign militaries, with some exceptions).

BuzzFeed was admittedly unable to verify much of Golan’s biography, which allegedly includes a stint in the French Foreign Legion and friendships with notorious figures like former Mossad head Danny Yatom and Serbian militant Arkan. A CIA acquaintance calls him “prone to exaggeration.” The details of his story – “target cards” handed out with names, photographs, even phone numbers; a Jolly-Roger-esque company flag – are Hollywoodesque.

Golan supposedly offered the UAE his company’s services as targeted assassins, explicitly tasked to “disrupt and destruct” Al-Islah. On top of $1.5 million a month, they would receive kill bonuses and train UAE soldiers. He claims to have declined missions targeting individuals outside the party, but those claims are unverified, and his partner admits that some targets may have simply been enemies of the UAE’s ruling family.

However much truth there may be to Golan’s tale, it illuminates the consequences of War on Terror mission creep – an overabundance of highly-trained special forces, lax oversight regarding war crimes and international law, an increasingly privatized fighting force, and the notion that enemy combatants are anyone a government deems them to be mean Spear’s business model could strike US commanders’ fancy after all.

October 17, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment