NRC confirms 2005 tritium leak at Vermont Yankee
By Susan Smallheer | Rutland Herald | February 23, 2010
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Monday that a whistleblower told the truth last week when he told a member of the Vermont Legislative Oversight Panel there was an earlier radioactive leak of tritium at the Vermont Yankee plant in the same area that is the focus of the current leak.
The confirmation by Donald Jackson, branch chief of reactor projects for NRC’s Region One, again raised the question of why Entergy Nuclear executives repeatedly told Vermont regulators last year there were no underground pipes at the Vernon reactor carrying radionuclides. Jackson said the leak was in 2005, not two years ago, as the whistleblower had originally told Arnie Gundersen, a member of the oversight panel and a consultant to the Vermont Legislature.
Entergy Nuclear spokesman Larry Smith said late Monday he could not discuss the 2005 tritium leak, saying he was still waiting for a letter from Entergy attorneys before talking about the issue.
Entergy Nuclear is excavating the area near the advanced off-gas building, in particular an underground pipe tunnel connected to the building, which is the same area the whistleblower pointed to. The whistleblower said the area in question was in a “high-radiation” area and involved a “radioactive steam leak” which drained into a drain pit.
Jackson said that the exact location of the current leak is still not known, although the advanced off-gas pipe tunnel is of strong interest, so it was impossible to say the two tritium leaks came from the same spot.
Jackson said that the NRC makes no distinction between “underground” and “buried” pipes, something that Entergy has made several times in the past couple of weeks. In Entergy’s words, buried pipes are in direct contact with dirt, while underground pipes are in tunnels or vaults, carrying pipes.
Jackson said the 2005 leak was under investigation, but he said it was a steam leak and the steam contained tritium and potentially other radionuclides.
He said Entergy did list the problem in the advanced off-gas pipe tunnel or vault as one of several corrective actions in 2005.
According to the whistleblower, whom Gundersen said seemed credible and well-informed about the inner workings at Vermont Yankee, the company used a temporary plug to fix the leak, rather than shut down the plant and make a permanent fix.
The whistleblower even went so far as to list the type of material, Furmanite, that Entergy used to temporarily plug the leak.
The whistleblower said that a tent and HEPA filter was set up to catch any radioactive gas during the 2005 case, and that workers used protective clothing.
Gundersen on Monday refused to say whether he had heard again from the whistleblower. Gundersen had turned the information from the whistleblower over to the Department of Public Service and the Vermont Attorney General’s office last week, both of which are investigating the case.
Jackson’s disclosure confirming the whistleblower came during a conference call with reporters, giving an update on the current leak. Neil Sheehan, NRC spokesman, said that Entergy would be issuing a press release about the 2005 leak later in the day.
Entergy Nuclear only started monitoring for tritium leaks in 2007, after an industry-wide suggestion from the NRC. Entergy drilled three monitoring wells on the banks of the Connecticut River, with one revealing elevated levels of tritium in November, which was reconfirmed in January.
Entergy revealed the current tritium leak on Jan. 7, and has been working since then to find the source of the leak.
Entergy, in its daily update about the search for the leak, said it was taking one of its own drinking water wells, which is near the leak’s plume, out of service as a precautionary measure.
That well, the construction office building well, is one of several wells that provide drinking water to the company, and is more than 350 feet deep in bedrock, the company said. The contaminated monitoring wells are relatively shallow, about 35 feet.
Sheehan said that the NRC was able to talk about the whistleblower allegations in 2005 because the whistleblower did not file a report with the NRC. Usually, the NRC won’t discuss whistleblower issues.
Jackson said that it was unknown whether the 2005 tritium leak, which was found in the underground pipe tunnel, had “transmitted” to the ground.
He said that there is a possibility that the tritium-laden steam did escape to the outside environment. “We’re still determining that,” he said. Jackson said the 2005 leak was inside a part of the reactor complex, and should have been maintained in the concrete pipe vault.
Most of the conference call with the reporters dealt with the NRC emphasizing that the current tritium leak currently posed no health risk to Vermonters, since it had not reached any private wells and that while it was reaching the Connecticut River, it was in very low levels, between 200 to 600 picocuries per liter.
While the plant is licensed to release some amounts of radioactivity into the environment, according to Steven Garry, a senior health physicist, they are well within NRC limits.
Garry said that there had been “essentially zero dose” to the general public from the current tritium leak, and he said that any tritiated water that did reach the Connecticut River would be diluted substantially to eliminate any health threat.
Tritium, which is a form of radioactive hydrogen, can cause cancer, but only when ingested in large, concentrated doses. One well at Vermont Yankee has tested for 2.6 million picocuries per liter, although that concentration has dropped to 1.8 million picocuries. Other wells show various other levels of tritium, with the next highest close to 1 million, according to the Vermont Department of Health.
susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com
© 2010 Rutland Herald – Source
Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs
By Richard Teitelbaum | Bloomberg | February 23, 2010
When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got the most attention.
Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.
A potentially more important development slipped by with less notice, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue. Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG.
These were the deals that pushed the insurer to the brink of insolvency — and were eventually paid in full at taxpayer expense. The New York Fed, which secretly engineered the bailout, prevented the full publication of the document for more than a year, even when AIG wanted it released.
That lack of disclosure shows how the government has obstructed a proper accounting of what went wrong in the financial crisis, author and former investment banker William Cohan says. “This secrecy is one more example of how the whole bailout has been done in such a slithering manner,” says Cohan, who wrote “House of Cards” (Doubleday, 2009), about the unraveling of Bear Stearns Cos. “There’s been no accountability.”
CDOs Identified
The document Issa made public cuts to the heart of the controversy over the September 2008 AIG rescue by identifying specific securities, known as collateralized-debt obligations, that had been insured with the company. The banks holding the credit-default swaps, a type of derivative, collected collateral as the insurer was downgraded and the CDOs tumbled in value.
The public can now see for the first time how poorly the securities performed, with losses exceeding 75 percent of their notional value in some cases. Compounding this, the document and Bloomberg data demonstrate that the banks that bought the swaps from AIG are mostly the same firms that underwrote the CDOs in the first place.
The banks should have to explain how they managed to buy protection from AIG primarily on securities that fell so sharply in value, says Daniel Calacci, a former swaps trader and marketer who’s now a structured-finance consultant in Warren, New Jersey. In some cases, banks also owned mortgage lenders, and they should be challenged to explain whether they gained any insider knowledge about the quality of the loans bundled into the CDOs, he says.
‘Too Uncanny’
“It’s almost too uncanny,” Calacci says. “If these banks had insight into the underlying loans because they had relationships with banks, originators or servicers, that’s at the least unethical.”
The identification of securities in the document, known as Schedule A, and data compiled by Bloomberg show that Goldman Sachs underwrote $17.2 billion of the $62.1 billion in CDOs that AIG insured — more than any other investment bank. Merrill Lynch & Co., now part of Bank of America Corp., created $13.2 billion of the CDOs, and Deutsche Bank AG underwrote $9.5 billion.
These tallies suggest a possible reason why the New York Fed kept so much under wraps, Professor James Cox of Duke University School of Law says: “They may have been trying to shield Goldman — for Goldman’s sake or out of macro concerns that another investment bank would be at risk.”
Poor Performers
Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment.
Schedule A also makes possible a more complete examination of why AIG collapsed. Joseph Cassano, the former president of the AIG Financial Products unit that sold the swaps, said on a December 2007 conference call that his firm pulled back from selling swaps on U.S. subprime residential CDOs in late 2005. The list shows that the $21.2 billion in CDOs minted after 2005, mostly based on prime and commercial mortgages, performed as badly as or worse than the earlier subprime vintages.
A lawyer for Cassano declined to comment.
As details of the coverup emerge, so does anger at the perceived conflicts. Philip Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, at a hearing held by his panel on Jan. 13, questioned how banks could underwrite poisonous securities and then bet against them. “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars,” he said.
‘Part of the Coverup’
Janet Tavakoli, founder of Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc., a Chicago-based consulting firm, says the New York Fed’s secrecy has helped hide who’s responsible for the worst of the disaster. “The suppression of the details in the list of counterparties was part of the coverup,” she says.
E-mails between Fed and AIG officials that Issa released in January show that the efforts to keep Schedule A under wraps came from the New York Fed. Revelation of the messages contributed to the heated atmosphere at the House hearing.
“What date did you know there was a coverup?” Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray of California demanded of Geithner. Lawmakers used the word coverup more than a dozen times as they peppered Geithner with questions.
Geithner said that he wasn’t involved in matters of disclosure and that his former colleagues did the best they could. In a Jan. 19 statement, the New York Fed said, “AIG at all times remained responsible for complying with its disclosure requirements under the securities laws.”
The government has committed more than $182 billion to AIG and owns almost 80 percent of the company.
Document Withheld
In late November 2008, the insurer was planning to include Schedule A in a regulatory filing — until a lawyer for the Fed said it wasn’t necessary, according to the e-mails. The document was an attachment to the agreement between AIG and Maiden Lane III, the fund that the Fed established in November 2008 to hold the CDOs after the swap contracts were settled.
AIG paid its counterparties — the banks — the full value of the contracts, after accounting for any collateral that had been posted, and took the devalued CDOs in exchange. As requested by the New York Fed, AIG kept the bank names out of the Dec. 24 filing and edited out a sentence that said they got full payment.
The New York Fed’s January 2010 statement said the sentence was deleted because AIG technically paid slightly less than 100 cents on the dollar.
Paid in Full
Before the New York Fed ordered AIG to pay the banks in full, the company was trying to negotiate to pay off the credit- default swaps at a discount or “haircut.”
By March 2009, responding to a request from Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, AIG released the names of the counterparty banks. In a filing later that month, AIG included Schedule A, showing bank names while withholding all identification of the underlying CDOs and the amounts of collateral each bank had collected. The document had more than 800 redactions.
In May 2009, AIG again filed Schedule A, this time with about 400 redactions. It revealed that Paris-based Societe Generale got the biggest payout from AIG, or $16.5 billion, followed by Goldman Sachs, which got $14 billion, and then Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch. It still kept secret the CDOs’ identification and information that would show performance.
‘Right to Know’
“This is something that belongs in the public domain because it was done with public money,” Issa says. “The public has the right to know what was done with their money and who benefited from it.” Now, thanks to Issa, the list is out, and specific information about AIG’s unraveling can be learned from it.
At the Jan. 27 hearing, the New York Fed was still arguing that the contents of Schedule A shouldn’t be fully disclosed. Thomas Baxter, the New York Fed’s general counsel, testified that divulging the names of the CDOs could erode their value: “We will be hurt because traders in the market will know what we’re holding.”
Tavakoli calls that wrong. With many CDOs, providing more information to the market will give the manager a greater chance of fetching a realistic price, she says.
Jack Gutt, a spokesman for the New York Fed, declined to comment, as did AIG’s Mark Herr.
Bad to Worse
Tavakoli also says that the poor performance of the underlying securities (which are actually specific slices or tranches of CDOs) shows they were toxic in the first place and were probably replenished with bundles of mortgages that were particularly troubled. Managers who oversee CDOs after they are created have discretion in choosing the mortgage bonds used to replenish them.
“The original CDO deals were bad enough,” Tavakoli says. “For some that allow reinvesting or substitution, any reasonable professional would ask why these assets were being traded into the portfolio. The Schedule A shows that we should be investigating these deals.”
Among the CDOs on Schedule A with notional values of more than $1 billion, the worst performer was a tranche identified as Davis Square Funding Ltd.’s DVSQ 2006-6A CP. It was held by Societe Generale, underwritten by Goldman Sachs and managed by TCW Group Inc., a Los Angeles-based unit of SocGen, according to Bloomberg data. It lost 77.7 percent of its value — though it isn’t in default and continues to pay.
SocGen spokesman James Galvin and TCW spokeswoman Erin Freeman declined to comment.
Documentation Needed
Ed Grebeck, CEO of Tempus Advisors, a global debt market strategy firm in Stamford, Connecticut, agrees that more digging is necessary. “You need all the documentation and more than that, all the e-mails,” he says. “That would allow us to understand what went wrong and how to fix it going forward.”
Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, who delivered a report on the AIG bailout in November, says he’s not finished. He has begun a probe of why his office wasn’t provided all of the 250,000 pages of documents, including e-mails and phone logs, that Issa’s committee received from the New York Fed.
Schedule A provides some answers — and raises questions that need to be tackled to avoid the next expensive bailout.
To contact the reporter on this story: Richard Teitelbaum in New York at rteitelbaum1@bloomberg.net
Israel refuses to help Britain with inquiry into fake passports
‘No proof’ of Israeli part in killing of a Hamas leader, says foreign minister
By Ben Lynfield | The Independent | February 23, 2010
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday flatly rebuffed David Miliband’s request for cooperation with an investigation into the use of forged British passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader.
The request for assistance came as the total number of fake British passports believed to have been used in last month’s assassination rose from six to eight. But private discussions on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Brussels – and an identical request from Irish foreign minister Micheál Martin – yielded no concessions on the Israeli side.
A statement from Mr Lieberman’s office reiterated that there was “no proof” of Israeli involvement in the affair. “If someone would present information beyond articles in the media, we would relate to it,” he is said to have told Mr Miliband. “But since there is no such information, there is no need to deal with the matter.”
Mr Miliband, meanwhile, said simply that he had “set out for the foreign minister the seriousness of the issue”. Israel also came under pressure from a joint statement by the EU foreign ministers that “strongly condemned” the use of forged passports, although it did not mention Israel by name.
Israel’s position forces the UK to decide whether tensions over the passport use will escalate into a crisis that could affect bilateral relations. The Israeli assumption is that Britain has no such intention. Mr Miliband’s references to “the profound concern that exists not just in Britain but all over Europe about this incident” were not matched by any concrete steps.
The British inquiry into the use of passports belonging to dual British-Israeli nationals was announced by Gordon Brown last week after authorities released details of suspects in the killing of a Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai. Police there believe the hit squad were from Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.
Mr Lieberman suggested to Mr Miliband and Mr Martin that the killing may have been the result of inter-Arab feuding. “There is an Arab tendency to blame Israel for everything. In the Middle East there are many internal struggles within states and bodies that aren’t democratic like Israel,” he said, according to the spokesman.
The EU’s statement said that the assassination raised “profoundly disturbing” issues. But Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri criticised its wording. “Condemning the use of passports was insufficient,” he said. “The statement did not indicate any condemnation of the crime, Mabhouh’s assassination.”
In the House of Commons, Europe minister Chris Bryant said that Dubai authorities yesterday forwarded the details of two additional fraudulent documents. The names on the documents were not immediately available. All six of the names released by Dubai police belong to dual UK-Israeli nationals living in Israel. The Dubai police have named 11 of what they say was an 18-member assassination squad.
Pfizer’s ghostwritten journal articles are still standing, still bogus
By Martha Rosenberg | Online Journal | February 23, 2010
Plagiarism, “unethical research” and unreliable findings from “fabricated data” are grounds for retraction of medical journal articles says the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
But one look at the US National Library of Medicine database shows the bogus, ghostwritten papers Wyeth (now Pfizer) planted in medical journals in a ghostwriting scandal that reached Congress last year still stand unretracted.
“Is there an association between hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer?” asks an unretracted article in the Journal of Women’s Health, 1998 Dec;7(10):1231-46 — a question a fourth grader could answer.
The “author,” William T. Creasman, MD, neither wrote nor initiated the article but was suggested by Jeff Solomon of Wyeth, according to documents posted on the University of California, San Francisco’s Drug Industry Document Archive (Dida).
The article which finds — surprise — no “definitive evidence” of a cancer link was written by an operative of DesignWrite, Wyeth’s marketing firm, named Karen Mittleman.
How about Wyeth’s “The role of hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of postmenopausal heart disease,” in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 2000 Aug;14-28;160(15):2263-72 — a role experts and the FDA agree should be none at all since hormone therapy (HT) increases cardio risks?
Lori Mosca, MD, PhD, agreed to be “author” 11 months after the outline was completed by freelance writer E. Wesselcouch.
And “The role of hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of Alzheimer disease,” in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 2002 Sep 23;162(17):1934-42?
“Attached is the outline for your review in the hope you will agree to author,” wrote Alice Conti, another Wyeth operative, to “author” of record Howard M. Fillit, MD. The outline was written by freelancer Stella Elkabes for $2,300 — see: nice work if you can get it — and HT actually doubles the risk of Alzheimer’s. Oops.
And don’t forget the unretracted, “Mild cognitive impairment: potential pharmacological treatment options,” in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2000 Apr;48(4):431-41, by Barbara Sherwin, Ph.D. Minutes from a Wyeth meeting three months after the article was written by freelance writer F. Karo, a DesignWrite executive asks, “Has initial contact been made with Dr. Barbara Sherwin for Memory paper?” Have we reached the party to whom we are speaking?
It’s a no-brainer that journal editors prefer concealing a suspect article to angering their bosses and authors, and jeopardizing ad and article reprint $ales from drug companies with a this-statement-is-inoperable admission.
And it’s a no-brainer that prestige hungry academic institutions don’t relish scientific egg on their faces or admitting they harbor industry compliant doctors like New York University whose Lila Nachtigall, MD, collaborated with Wyeth on many ghostwritten papers, according to Dida documents.
Eight months after Sen. Charles E. Grassley broke the scientific con, NYU Vice President for Public Affairs Deborah Bohren told the New York Times the university had not investigated because, “we have not received a complaint.” A probe from the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee isn’t a complaint?
So, even though hormone therapy increases the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent and heart attacks by 29 percent, Dr. Creasman’s article which finds no “definitive evidence” of cancer and Dr. Mosca’s “cardioprotective” article stand to misinform a new generation of healers.
And even though hormone therapy doubles the risk of dementia and actually “decreases brain volumes,” according to the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study, Drs. Fillit and Sherwin’s papers stand, the latter having been cited 50 times.
Wyeth and DesignWrite did not hide their scheme from doctors.
“We are working on a review paper on diabetes and HRT,” writes Mittleman to William Cefalu, MD, in one memo. Would you “be interested in working with us as the author of this paper?”
They didn’t hide it from journal editors who accept DesignWrite’s role as doctor talent brokers unblinkingly.
Hormone therapy represents one of the largest swaths of preventable injuries to healthy citizens in recent history. But Wyeth/Pizer maintains it doesn’t know how the idea that HT prevented heart disease and dementia got started.
One look at Dida archives shows how the “idea” got started. And the bogus, unretracted papers show how the idea persists.
Martha Rosenberg is a Chicago columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. She may be reached at martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net.
Turkey arrests 40 linked with coup plot
Press TV – February 22, 2010
Turkey has arrested more than 40 people, including high ranking officers, in connection with an alleged military plot against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“This morning our security forces began a detention process,” the prime minister told a news conference during an official visit to Spain. “As of now, more than 40 people have been detained,” he added.
According to Turkish media, former air force chief Ibrahim Firtina, former navy chief Ozden Ornek and other high-ranking officers both retired and on active service in Ankara, Istanbul, the western city of Izmir and the northwestern city of Bursa, were among the detainees. They also included at least five other retired top officials, among them Ergin Saygun, the former First Army commander and retired admirals Ahmet Feyyaz Ogutcu and Lutfi Sancar, the reports said.
Those held were brought to Istanbul for questioning by anti-terror police, AFP reported. The detainees arrested over alleged links to a purported 2003 plot, which was revealed by the liberal Taraf daily in January.
The daily published what it described as a document drafted in April by a navy colonel on blocking efforts by Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party from “destroying Turkey’s secular order and replacing it with an Islamist state.”
Turkish military chief, Gen. Ilker Basburg, however, dismissed the allegations saying as far as the military investigators were concerned the document was fake.
Latest collapse in Jerusalem blamed on Israeli excavations
Ma’an – 22/02/2010
Jerusalem – A street collapse near the entrance of the Bab Khan Az-Zeit market in the Old City of Jerusalem occurred on Sunday, as a result of Israeli excavations in the area, witnesses reported.
“A two by one meter deep hole was left following the collapse,” Ma’an’s Jerusalem correspondent said.
The latest collapse is reportedly related to ongoing Israeli archeological digs around the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which have caused a series of cave-ins around the Old City and in East Jerusalem neighborhoods.
The cave-in follows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to include two sites in the occupied Palestinian territories on an Israeli heritage list, The Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem.
In January, the Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage reported a street collapse on the main road in the area of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, causing a hole in similar dimensions to the most recent cave-in.
According to the foundation, the collapse was related to ongoing excavations by Israeli authorities in the vicinity, apparently on tunnels extending underneath the neighborhood about 700 meters from the mosque compound. Authorities recently removed quantities of dirt and rocks from under Silwan to undisclosed locations, the statement said.
A second collapse was further reported in Silwan in January, by the Wadi Hilwah Information Centre, south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound which creating a 12 meter square hole in the middle of Wadi Hilwah street.
Jawad Siam, head of the information centre, said that the latest collapse in Wadi Hilwah took place over a 10 meter deep tunnel and is was few meters from the previous cave-in in January.
A child was injured and a vehicle fell ithrough the site, Siam said, adding that the local Al-Ein mosque, where Israeli excavation has intensified, was flooded as rainwater seeped into the collapsed site.
The Al-Quds Centre for Economic and Social rights said that this incident follows a number of similar collapses in Silwan recently, pointing out that last year, a collapse occurred in a girls’ school, injuring 17 students.
Clinton avoided nuke question – student
AFP | February 22, 2010
A SAUDI student blasted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for skirting her question on Israel’s nuclear arsenal during a “town hall” meeting at a Jeddah college.
“I did not get a straight answer,” Mariyam Alavi said in a letter published in Arab News on her question to the top US diplomat last Tuesday. “My question was simple and direct enough,” she wrote, but Ms Clinton’s response “was very unsatisfying.”
Alavi, a 12th grader at the International Indian School in Jeddah, attended the meeting at the elite Dar al-Hekma College with six classmates. She had asked Ms Clinton about Washington’s stance on the existence of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
If the Americans “so vehemently oppose Iran’s nuclear programme,” she had asked, “then why isn’t the US asking Israel to give up their nuclear weapons?”
Ms Clinton gave a lengthy answer detailing the US case against Iran, but did not mention Israel. She did, however, say that “we want not only a world free of nuclear weapons, we want a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, including everyone.”
Alavi’s Arab News letter assailed US “hypocrisy” over the issue, reflecting a widely held sentiment in in the region.
“Clinton said that the United States, under the able leadership of President Barack Obama, was trying to repair and strengthen its ties with the Muslim world.
“It is high time she realised it couldn’t be done without answering the questions uppermost in the minds of the Middle East people.”
Alavi said she had been nervous about asking such a “politically provocative question” but was then encouraged by strong applause from the audience when she addressed Ms Clinton.
Ms Clinton had been on a three-day trip to Qatar and Saudi Arabia to discuss, among other things, how to confront Iran’s alleged programme to develop nuclear weapons.
‘Ecuador being punished for befriending Iran’
Press TV – February 22, 2010
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa says his country was added to a list of states accused of lagging in the campaign against money laundering to punish it for its ties with Iran.
“This decision has nothing to do with the fight against money laundering, or the fight against the funding of terrorism… It has to do with that we have an embassy in Iran,” Correa said in the highland town of Sangolqui outside Quito on Saturday.
“So because we have misbehaved. They are giving us a smack so we don’t misbehave,” he added, describing the move as a “hypocritical punishment.”
“Instead of revising themselves, they condemn us. There is no money laundering here my friends. There is no terrorism, and no funding of terrorism. Imagine if he had money to fund terrorism, I wish I had money to build all the schools that I want to build,” he said.
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, named Ecuador and Iran on a list of states that it says are failing to comply with international regulations against money laundering and financing terrorism.
However, Correa said that Ecuador’s two dozen banks had perfectly adequate legislation to protect against laundering and terrorism financing and dismissed the report as “a huge lie.”
Under Correa’s administration, Ecuador has strengthened diplomatic and commercial ties with Iran, which has opened an embassy in Quito.
In recent years, Iran has looked to increase its cooperation with Latin American states such as Ecuador, to the chagrin of Washington.
Citing a 2009 agreement between Ecuador’s Central Bank and some Iranian financial institutions, Ecuador’s private bank association said on Friday that it believed the Iran factor was behind the country’s inclusion on the FATF list.
Hamas to Dubai police: Prove collaborator claim
Ma’an – 22/02/2010
Gaza – Hamas said Monday that Dubai Chief of Police Dahi Khalfan Tamim had yet to provide evidence that a collaborator from within the movement had supplied Mossad with information on Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, who was killed in his Dubai hotel room in January.
“Who is this person he speaks of, why haven’t they disclosed his name and why wasn’t he arrested like the two other Palestinians?” read a statement from a party official.
UAE media outlets reported that Tamim accused a member of Hamas of providing information to the Israeli intelligence agency on Al-Mabhouh’s movements and locations in Dubai to facilitate the hit.
Sources said that the movement had not been informed of the Dubai police’s investigations into the murder. “It is illogical to see Hamas learn of case through the media,” adding that it was unclear if Tamim’s claims were based on evidence or mere speculation.
Hamas spokesman Salah Al-Bardawil said Saturday that Al-Mabhouh’s pursuers could have learned of his whereabouts from a telephone call he made to his family before leaving for Dubai, informing them of his hotel details and the online booking he made when purchasing airline tickets.
On Sunday, the British weekly The Sunday Times reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the final authorization to carry out the assassination Al-Mabhouh in Dubai, and that he met with members of the 11-person hit squad, traveling on a host of European passports.
Members of the hit squad had visited Dubai on previous occasions to follow up on Al-Mabhouh’s movements and trained in a Tel Aviv hotel to prepare for the hit, the weekly wrote.
The GOP’s “small government” tea party fraud
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com | February 21, 2010
There’s a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the “tea party” movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be — recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America’s conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism — yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, “small government” political movement.
The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul’s son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter “felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy — a statement met with cheers.” Glenn Beck — who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush’s endlessly expanding surveillance state — now parades around as though he shares the libertarians’ contempt for them. Red State’s Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative “manifesto,” touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws — from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life state court proceeding — nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.
This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their “small government principles.” The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton’s Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted — both before they were empowered and again now — that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.
What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement — the tea partiers — that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP’s actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed — to explode — as the modern GOP establishment and the actual “small-government” libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they’re eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. That’s the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its “increasing libertarianism.”
These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of “War on Terror” domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin’s own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the “tea party movement” can’t possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter’s manipulative claim that she “agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy” is laughable; aside from the fact that “foreign policy” is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.
Part of why this fraud has been sustainable thus far is that libertarians — like everyone who doesn’t view all politics through the mandated, distorting, suffocating Democrat v. GOP prism — are typically dismissed as loons and nuts, and are thus eager for any means of achieving mainstream acceptance. Having the GOP embrace them is one way to achieve that (Karl Rove: some “see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul’s next presidential bid . . . . The Republican Party and the tea party movement have many common interests”). Additionally, just as the Paul-faction of libertarians is in basic harmony with many progressives on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties, they do subscribe to the standard GOP rhetoric on domestic spending, social programs and the like.
But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party’s conduct, especially when they wield power. The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of “limited government” is absurd on its face. There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party’s claim to believe in restrained government power. For that reason, it’s only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the “tea party movement” and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.
Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do
By Paul Craig Roberts | February 18, 2010
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.
Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.
As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”
Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.
Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social Security retirees to other uses.
We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford; an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.
Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.
Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.
Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.
Years ago with stagflation defeated and a rising stock market, I favored privatizing Social Security as a way of creating a funded retirement system and producing greater savings and larger incomes for retirees. At that time Wall Street was interested, not for my reasons, but in order to collect the fees from managing the funds.
Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.
After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyone’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make.
Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the elderly’s old age security.
Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now “unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables–a pre-1929 unregulated financial system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror–are the new untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.
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Why chuckles greeted Hillary’s Gulf tour
By Rami G. Khouri | February 17, 2010
American secretaries of state have been coming to the Middle East to create all sorts of complex alliances against Iran for most of my recent happy life, but every time this show passes through our region I learn again the meaning of the phrase “lack of credibility.” Hillary Clinton is the latest to undertake this mission, and like her predecessors her comments are often difficult to take seriously.
We are told that her trip to the region has two main aims: to strengthen Arab resolve to join the United States and others in imposing harsh new sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear development program; and to harness Arab support for resumed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In both of these critical diplomatic initiatives the US has taken the lead and achieved zero results. Either the actors involved – Arabs, Israelis, Iranians – are all chronically, even chromosomally, dysfunctional (for which there is some evidence) or the US is particularly inept when assuming leadership.
The weakness in both cases, I suspect, has to do with the US trying to define diplomatic outcomes that suit its own strategic objectives and political biases (especially pro-Israel domestic sentiments). So Washington pushes, pulls, cajoles and threatens all the players with various diplomatic instruments, except the one that will work most efficiently in both the Iranian and Arab-Israeli cases: serious negotiations with the principal parties, based on applying the letter of the law, and responding equally to the rights, concerns and demands of all sides.
Two Clinton statements during her Gulf trip this week were particularly revealing of why Washington continues to fail in its missions in our region. The first was her expression of concern that Iran is turning into a military dictatorship: “We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted, and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship,” Clinton said.
Half a century of American foreign policy flatly contradicts this sentiment (which is why Clinton heard soft chuckles and a few muffled guffaws as she spoke). The US has adored military dictatorships in the Arab world, and has long supported states dominated by the shadowy world of intelligence services. This became even more obvious after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Washington intensified cooperation with Arab intelligence services in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.
Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East are military and police states where men with guns rule, and where citizens are confined to shopping, buying cellular telephones, and watching soap operas on satellite television. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, as well as the entire Gulf region and other states are devoted first and foremost to maintaining domestic order and regime incumbency through efficient, multiple security agencies, for which they earn American friendship and cooperation. When citizens in these and other countries agitate for more democratic and human rights, the US is peculiarly inactive and quiet.
If Iran is indeed becoming a military dictatorship, this probably qualifies it for American hugs and aid rather than sanctions and threats. Clinton badly needs some more credible talking points than opposing military dictatorships. (Extra credit question for hard-core foreign policy analysts: Why is it that when Turkey slipped out of military rule into civilian democratic governance, it became more critical of the US and Israel?)
The second intriguing statement during Clinton’s Gulf visit was about Iran’s neighbors having three options for dealing with the “threat” from Iran: “They can just give in to the threat; or they can seek their own capabilities, including nuclear; or they ally themselves with a country like the United States that is willing to help defend them. I think the third is by far the preferable option.”
This sounds reasonable, but it is not an accurate description of the actual options that the Arab Gulf states have. It is mostly a description of how American and Israeli strategic concerns and slightly hysterical biases are projected onto the Gulf states’ worldviews. These states in fact have a fourth option, which is to negotiate seriously a modus vivendi with Iran that removes the “threat” from their perceptions of Iran by affirming the core rights and strategic needs of both sides, thus removing mutual threat perceptions.
This is exactly the same option the US used when it negotiated détente and the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union (and whose results ultimately brought about the collapse of Communism). Why the US does not use the same sensible approach to the perceived threat from Iran is hard to explain. Perhaps two reasons explain it: Washington would have to deal with Iran (and other defiant Middle Easterners) through negotiations rather than haughty neo-colonialism; and, Israel would have to submit to nuclear inspections and end its aggressive behavior.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.
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Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
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