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US to spend $50 million on media in Pakistan

Pakistan Headlines Examiner | February 27, 2010

The Obama administration plans to spend nearly $50 million on Pakistani media this year to reverse anti-American sentiments and raise awareness of projects aimed at improving quality of life, confirms a Washington insider.

After the Kerry-Lugar Bill debacle, the Obama administration had struggled with the idea of ‘branding’ aid and many within the State department and the USAID had argued that identifying projects may backfire.

“By announcing that a school was built and is being maintained – partly because of the aid received from America – you can alienate people,” said someone who had proposed not ‘branding’ the aid.

The US Special Representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke believes that a substantial amount of monies spent on media- especially private TV channels will reduce tension and may even bring Pakistan-US relations back on the right path.

Senator John Kerry, the main architect of Kerry-Lugar bill also supports the idea of claiming credit for all “the good work being done to improve infrastructure, energy and education,” said a source in Senator’s office.

Reuters today reported that the Obama administration has sent lawmakers a plan for funding water, energy and other projects. Report said the US intends to spend $1.45 billion of [funds] earmarked for the Kerry-Lugar bill in fiscal 2010.

The trust deficit had surged after a well intended aid package focused to uplift Pakistan’s civilian society was trashed by a section of Pakistani media. Interviews with diplomatic sources in Washington, D.C. and media coverage of the KLB debacle had demonstrated growing frustration of the Obama administration.

Although American officials publicly praise military operations in South Waziristan, in private they sing a different tune; their assessment of ”alignment” is rather pessimistic. Stories leaked to media consistently allege that al-Qaeda leadership is still enjoying safe haven in Pakistan.

Pakistan-U.S. relations have not been this tenuous before, and the Obama administration is frustrated with the outcome of the Kerry-Lugar bill. “No one had anticipated such negativity,” said an American official who did not want to be identified. “We thought Pakistanis [would] celebrate the passage of this bill. This is what we were told by representatives of the Pakistani government.”

Pakistani government representatives from President Zardari to Foreign Minister Qureshi and Ambassador Hussain Haqqani further down the chain had assured the Americans that Pakistanis would be jubilant; KLB was supposed to heal all wounds, rectify all wrongs and erase memories of the past from the consciousness of the masses.

The Obama administration has shared their plan to sponsor high impact projects and communicate the value of these projects using local media.

Voice of America, a radio and TV platform that speaks for the government of the US already has a tie-up with Geo TV and now they have aligned with Express TV as well.

The Obama administration plans to help Pakistan’s democratic government meet budget shortfalls and deliver services to a population increasingly angry about economic and security troubles. As the funding builds the capacity of the government to provide basic services, the US sponsored Pakistani media will raise awareness and build a brand for America, our sources have confirmed.

February 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

IRAN HAS BEEN CAPABLE OF HAVING A ‘NUCLEAR WEAPON WITHIN SIX MONTHS’ FOR YEARS NOW – BUT, LIKE ‘TOMORROW’, IT NEVER COMES.

By Damian Lataan | February 28, 2010

Other periods of time have been mentioned over the three decades since the Iranian people kicked out the Shah as to how long it would take the Iranians to build a nuclear weapon, but six months seems to a very popular nominal figure. Never mind, of course, that there has not been a skerrick of evidence to even suggest that the Iranians are doing anything more than building nuclear reactors for generating electricity or creating medical isotopes for medical purposes. But that hasn’t stopped the propagandists who seem to insist that Iran is still only six months away from having a nuclear weapon.

If I started the list of claims that Iran would have a weapon within six months from back in 1980 when the Shah went, you’d still be reading it in, well… six months time! So, I’ll cut short the list and start it off with some of the earlier claims of this century.

Back in August 2003, the LA Times reported that Iran could have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. More than two years later in September 2005, Israel claimed Iran would have ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. Then, nearly three years later in June 2008 we were told again that Iran would have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. A year later, in July 2009, Ha’aretz reported that ‘Germany believes Iran could have a nuclear bomb in six months’.

Now, in the very latest statement dated 23 February 2010, made by so-called ‘Iran weapons expert’, David Albright, Iran, in his expert opinion, is now only… wait for it; six months away from having a nuclear weapon. This is the very same David Albright that was telling us more than a year ago in February 2009; “In as quickly as a few months, Iran would be able to have enough weapons-grade uranium for nuclear weapons”. It’s also the very same David Albright who told the CBS ’60 Minutes’ show way, way back in January 1999 that Saddam Hussein was “within a few months to a year of having a nuclear weapon”.

Albright? Not very! He’s the original boy that cried ‘Wolf!’ Unfortunately, the media will continue to echo his and similar cries and there will be those that believe them. Eventually the West, led by Israel and the US, will attack Iran based on these lies, but the worst of it is; hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dead later, the rest of world will go along with it without a murmur.

February 28, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

DiFi and Blum: a Marriage Marinated in Money

Family Business

By WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM | February 26, 2010

On April 17, 2009, with the edifice of the global economy rotting under an architecture of monumental greed, war deficits, and official hubris, the University of California, Berkeley conducted a groundbreaking ceremony for its Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies.  Before a throng of students, faculty, staff, and  PR specialists affiliated with the Center’s new multi-UC campus “Global Poverty & Practice” program, the Blum Center’s namesake was joined on stage by one of the many political heavyweights he counts among his business partners, Al Gore.  The former Vice President praised Blum as a long-time friend and cited the new institute as a key to solving the interlocking problems of global poverty and global climate change, two of the many vexing boogeymen threatening to destabilize the profit-making order.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, who published a book on the general subject in 1923, some of the greatest sociopaths in this country’s history have affixed their names to university buildings in an effort to burnish their reputations.

Richard Blum is a San Francisco-based finance capitalist presiding over a business empire that is, to say the least, expansive.  Hedge funds? Blum owns one outright and wields a significant share of various others.  Real estate? His primary investment vehicle, the $7.8 billion Blum Capital Partners, owns the largest real estate brokerage firm on the planet, CB Richard Ellis, of which Blum is chairman of the board. Construction? Until public scandal prompted him to sell off his holdings, Blum was a majority partner in a construction and engineering company that did billions in business with the US military, among other government clients.  Education? Try being the resident Alpha Regent of the largest public university system in the world, the University of California, while also being a primary owner of the world’s second-largest for-profit education firm, Career Education Corporation.

Large land-holding firms? Digital media company of which Al Gore serves as frontman? Health industry corporation fighting to undermine the expansion of public health care? Border-town maquiladora that build weapons components for the Department of Defense? Check, check, check, and check.

deans_message.jpg
Richard Blum (center) with Al Gore – Photo credit UCB

The greatest investment of Blum’s career was undoubtedly his marriage, roughly 30 years ago, to the politically Joe Lieberman-esque US Senate Democrat, Dianne Feinstein.  At the time of this meshing of Blum’s financial interests with Feinstein’s formidable political ambitions, Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco and Blum — already one of her main financial backers — had much of his fortune staked to various development projects in the City.

Blum’s preferred means of personal enrichment rely on strong nation-state interventions in markets and societies to promote unfettered corporate dominance of national economies and distant lands.  It should come as no surprise, then, that he and “DiFi” are among the leading proponents of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/US Treasury nexus’ notion of how economies ought best be developed.  This form of economic “improvement” (deriving from the Anglo-French “emprouwer,” meaning “to clear for profit”) involves burying Third World economies under mountains of debt backed by usurious interest rates, facilitating the greatest level of investment possible by rapacious multi-national corporate entities, privatizing government functions, and gutting social services.  Ironically, this agenda of neoliberal “structural adjustment” has decimated and impoverished communities across the planet, causing suffering among the hundreds of millions of people Blum’s heart now bleeds for: poor folks.

The economic and political policies promoted by Richard C. Blum and associates, including Senator Feinstein and other leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, have locked nations and peoples across the planet into a system of de facto colonial bondage whereby their lands and destines are controlled by distant, debt-holding banks and hedge funds – among them, Blum Capital Partners, LLC, and Newbridge Capital, LLC, of which Blum was chairman of the Asia investment division for five years.  The result has been what author and UC Irvine sociologist Mike Davis calls a “planet of slums,” where .23 percent of the world population privately owns more than 50 percent of the land, and 85 percent of urban dwellers in the Third World are consigned to living on illegal squats in hellish shanty towns under conditions of grinding poverty.

Just ask the people of Haiti, whose capital city now greatly resembles a war zone reduced to rubble ala Fallujah, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, not by virtue of a natural disaster per se, but because the IMF-WTO-US Treasury specialists in immiseration have forced them off their land into desperately sub-standard slum housing, often perched tenuously on the side of deforested hills and ravines.  This “urban geography of mass vulnerability,” as the academic field of disaster sociology refers to it, was created by the destruction of the country’s rural agrarian economy that provided for subsistence, in an economic transformation imposed by international creditors with the constant backing of the US military.

Yet, at UC Berkeley, we have Dick Blum hoisting up “sustainable solutions to the toughest poverty challenges” as his new line of work.

Charles Hurwitz

Blum’s name is a familiar one to those acquainted with the details of the corporate plundering of California north coast forests and communities throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.  The year was 1995, and Texas corporate raider Charles Hurwitz — whose company, Maxxam, had laid waste to as much ancient forestland as possible, as quickly as possible, for nearly a decade — was looking to cash out of his ownership of the Headwaters forest in central Humboldt County.  Headwaters was the flashpoint of the largest direct action protests in the history of the earth defense movement, as well as lawsuits and legislative initiatives aimed at preserving what little was left of old-growth redwood ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest.  It so happened Hurwitz was an investment partner of Blum from way back.  Blum also happened to be a major donor, fundraiser, and political booster of US President Bill Clinton.

Clinton and the State of California dutifully discharged their duties as proxies of the super-wealthy in general – and, in this case, Blum in particular — by appointing the inviolable “DiFi” to chair a legislative team to negotiate the purchase of Headwaters from Hurwitz.  Feinstein and Hurwitz agreed on a final deal in 1996, hailed by Feinstein’s web site as one of her 10 greatest career accomplishments. Hurwitz gave up very little of real economic value — Maxxam had clear-cut most of the forest in question — in exchange for a $380 million taxpayer-funded payout, or more than four times the market value of the trees at the time.  Much of the money went directly into Hurwitz’s personal bank accounts.  That’s in spite of the fact that all the government really needed to do to protect the acreage in question was enforce the Endangered Species Act.  Regardless of the fact that Headwaters became officially “protected,” the vast majority of California’s remaining old growth and other mature stands of redwood were pillaged by the end of the decade.  Hurwitz’s empire cashed out, like other timber conglomerates, by liquidating the forests and the livelihoods of the North Coast.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair later revealed that Blum and another Hurwitz pal, the Houston-based Continental Airlines chairman David Bonderman, had personally met with Clinton at the White House in a “coffee klatsch” fundraiser on December 15, 1995, likely to discuss the details of the Headwaters buy-out, which occurred six months later.  Bonderman and Blum were both directors of the Wilderness Society, the only national environmental organization that praised the buy-out.

For all the fanfare that emerged in the Clinton era about how corporate globalization had rendered the nation-state a bit player in the larger drama of the new, “free trade”-dominated corporate economic order, the nation-state’s role in propping up the global capitalist system has never been more central.  That role is being laid bare as never before with each multi-billion dollar subsidy the federal government passes onto the financial industry — an estimated $5 trillion in total taxpayer money since the bail-out program commenced in fall 2008 (an exact figure is hard to determine).  What is known in academic-speak as “neo-liberalism” represents little more than the sophisticated apex of a governing system refined and perfected over the course of several decades (nay, centuries), which is principally designed to socialize the risks of rapacious capitalism while privatizing public goods to create unprecedented levels of profit for the super-wealthy.

Blum is not only a representative of this system, but one of its most skillful promoters and practitioners.  Throughout his career, and particularly in recent years, he has siphoned off taxpayer money into the coffers of his various personal holdings with a calculated brazenness that would make the most swaggering Cosa Nostra blush.  The Headwaters Forest scam was indicative of exactly how these people have done business for nigh on three decades.  To pull only a handful of examples from the very recent past:

  • In early-2007, investigative reporter Peter Byrne published a groundbreaking series in the North Bay Bohemian, the “Feinstein Files.”  Byrne revealed that as chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee from 2001 through 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of more than $1.5 billion for two defense contractors, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation, in which Blum owned a controlling interest.  In the series’ smoking gun, long-time Blum business partner Michael R. Klein told Byrne he regularly took the highly unusual step of supplying Feinstein’s office with lists of Perini’s current and upcoming contractual interests in federal legislation, ostensibly so the senator would abstain from voting on these matters for ethical reasons (which she never did).  “Earmarks, you know, set asides, you name it, there was a system in place which on a regular basis I got notified, I notified her office, and her office notified her,” said Klein, Perini’s vice chairman at the time. Blum later sold his holdings in URS to the tune of more than $100 million in personal profit.
  • In January 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in federal funding to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to forestall home foreclosures by expediting loan workouts and expanding federal loan guarantees.  On the surface, Feinstein’s legislation was a straightforward intervention on behalf of troubled homeowners nationwide. But less than two months prior, the FDIC had also awarded Blum’s real estate company, CB Richard Ellis, a multimillion dollar contract to sell homes the agency had inherited from failed banks.  This move was also highly unusual, since Feinstein is not a member of the Senate committee that oversees the FDIC.
  • This past November, the University of California Board of Regents imposed an “emergency” 32 percent fee increase on undergraduate students, effective in the 2009-10 academic year.  The increase stems not only from severe state-mandated budget cuts, but also a series of decisions by the university’s board of regents – of which Richard Blum is the resident alpha member (although no longer chair of the board), having been appointed to that post by Gray Davis – that have effectively pledged student fee increases to the capital bond market, thereby creating a financial incentive for the Regents to continually raise fees, in a pyramid scheme that raises money for campus construction projects.  It should come as no surprise that URS Corporation, the same company that made $1.5 billion on contracts awarded by Feinstein’s Senate military construction committee, has been the main contractor for the largest university capital projects in recent years: UCLA’s $150 million reconstruction of Santa Monica Hospital, UC Berkeley’s $48 million nanotechnology laboratory, and Berkeley’s $200 million Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and an expansion of the Haas School of Business — home of the Blum Center for Developing Economies.  More on this in next week’s AVA.

Blum-Feinstein, Inc. has accomplished these immense transfers of public wealth absent of almost any serious media scrutiny.  But in recent years, the media deep freeze has slowly begun to thaw, beginning with a pair of front-page stories in the San Francisco Chronicle in May 2005.  Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson’s fine reporting was spurred on by a public outing at a UC Regents meeting when students revealed Blum’s conflict of interest as a member of the committee overseeing the two nuclear weapons labs the UC runs on behalf of the US government.  Blum’s URS Corporation had a $125 million, five-year construction and engineering services contract with the UC’s Los Alamos, NM nuclear weapons development compound at the time.  Less than two years later, Peter Byrne’s series regarding Blum’s war profiteering appeared in the North Bay Bohemian.

This past semester, UC Berkeley Visiting Scholar of Geography Gray Brechin co-taught a course on investigative journalism.  Brechin is best known as the author of a superb historical work on Northern California’s ruling elite, Imperial San Francisco.  He has been an observer of Blum-DiFi, Inc. for years.

“I’m very impressed by the reluctance of most journalists to follow a story that has been screaming to be done for years while they have been covering their ears and eyes,” Brechin told us.  “You guys and Peter [Byrne] are about the only ones who understand that behind the billowing smoke appears to be a roaring bonfire.”

Blum-Feinstein’s concentration of power is greatest in their home state, of course, and it stands to reason in any case that Blum’s CB Richard Ellis would be making a killing off the ongoing fire sale of State of California assets.  In October, CBRE secured a contract from the California Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office buildings the state intends to privatize.

Blum’s fortunes aren’t entirely a function of Feinstein’s legislative exploits.  Nor are Feinstein’s political powers entirely a result of her Daddy Warbucks.  And the State of California’s economic plight stems not only from the avarice of a small handful of individuals, but from an economic system that is inherently self-destructive and crisis-prone.  Blum and Feinstein, however, have worked hand-in-glove with other members of the state’s banking, real estate, agribusiness, and military-industrial interests to buffer regressive tax and spending policies, helping to devise the very austerity measures currently being hoisted upon the people of California across all public sectors, not just within the University of California.

Therein lies much of the reason Blum is now so quick to tout his anti-poverty bona fides.  Blum, you see, has a public relations problem.  It’s built into the way he does business.  It’s built into the political economy he straddles as one of the US empire’s most connected and wealthy power elites.

Gray Brechin notes that Blum seems to have hired a public relations firm to bolster his personal brand.  “Blum has gotten an extraordinary amount of fawning publicity in a very short time, including a front page feature in the Haas Business School magazine about what a whiz he is. I believe that this coincided with the black tie event at the Palace Hotel where Haas celebrated him as Global Citizen of the Year and I joined others from Cal to protest his actions as Alpha Regent.”

“Then there were the two treacly profiles of him in the San Francisco Chronicle recently. I can’t believe this is all coincidental.”

It isn’t.  Nor is it coincidental that, as Peter Byrne revealed, longtime Blum business partner Michael Klein has founded a nonprofit foundation that makes grants to media organizations that watchdog the federal government.  The organization started after Wikipedia instituted a policy blocking congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries pertaining to their bosses.  Employees from Dianne Feinstein’s office had just been caught editing entries in the online encyclopedia that cast Blum and Feinstein in an unfavorable light.  Thus does one of Blum’s closest business associates now control a significant portion of the budgets of several ostensibly independent organizations that monitor political
corruption.

Blum is also now strongly affiliated with a multi-campus academic program at the UC, centered on an institute at UC Berkeley that Blum founded with $15 million in seed money, designed to put band-aids on the symptoms of global poverty he and his wife have had an instrumental role in creating.  Beyond this exercise in mystifying the causes of poverty in distant lands, the state’s economic elite — with Blum and Feinstein helping to lead the charge — have long been in the process of turning their philosophy of neoliberal privatization, fiscal austerity, and personal enrichment on the State of California itself.  Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, indeed.

Blum is a self-professed Buddhist and friend of the XVIth Dalai Lama.  Many of his anti-poverty efforts are geared toward slum dwellers in Tibet and Nepal.  “Would an actual Buddhist provide the bulk of the funding for a multi-million dollar institute, only to attach his own name to it?” Brechin mused.

The populist anger seething below the surface of the American body politic has not yet boiled over into any sort of coherent rebellion against the elites who have wrought the greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s.  There is little indication that it will any time soon.  Blum’s own financial empire, however, is now quietly under assault by the hundreds of University of California students who have learned to loathe the man who has done more than any other to structurally adjust their university and price many of the state’s youth out of higher education.  These cognizant students, supported by campus workers paid poverty wages by university leaders like Blum, are now organizing building take-overs and some of the largest student protests on those campuses of the past four decades.

In the next part of this series, we will focus on Blum’s role in gutting the University of California, where the tuition increases extracted in the last four years from Mendocino County residents alone would be large enough to close roughly half the county’s $7 million budget gap.

Readers can contact Will Parrish at wparrish(a)riseup.net and Darwin
Bond-Graham at darwin(a)riseup.net. They originally prepared this series for the Anderson Valley Advertiser (http://theava.com/), one of the very few real newspapers in America and probably soon the last one left standing.

February 26, 2010 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Environmentalism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

Radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production sites are being dumped into regular landfills, and are available for recycling and resale. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has tracked the Department of Energy’s (DOE) release of radioactive scrap, concrete, equipment, asphalt, chemicals, soil, and more, to unaware and unprepared recipients such as landfills, commercial businesses, and recreation areas. Under the current system, the DOE releases contaminated materials directly, sells them at auctions or through exchanges, or sends the materials to processors who can release them from radioactive controls. The recycling of these materials—for reuse in the production of everyday household and personal items such as zippers, toys, furniture, and automobiles, or to build roads, schools, and playgrounds—is increasingly common.

The NIRS report, “Out of Control on Purpose: DOE’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste into Landfills and Consumer Products,” tracks the laws, methods, and justifications used by the DOE to expedite the mandatory cleanup of the environmental legacy being created by the nation’s nuclear weapons program and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. One of the largest and most technically complex environmental cleanup programs in the world, the effort includes cleanup of 114 sites across the country to be completed by the end of 2008.

The DOE has unilaterally chosen allowable radioactive contamination and public exposure levels to facilitate “clean-up” of these sites. Pressure is increasing to allow clearing radioactivity from control in order to legalize the dispensing and disbursing of nuclear waste.

In 2000, the Secretary of Energy banned the commercial recycling of potentially radioactive metal. However, the ban does not apply to the disposal, reuse, or recycling of metal equipment, components, and pipes, or of other materials.

Seven sites of importance were investigated for the NIRS report: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Mound and Fernald, Ohio; West Valley, New York; and Paducah, Kentucky. Of these, Tennessee is said to be the main funnel that pours nuclear weapon and power waste from around the country into landfills and recycling facilities without public knowledge. “People around regular trash landfills will be shocked to learn that radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons production is ending up there, either directly released by DOE or via brokers and processors,” says author Diane D’Arrigo, NIRS’s Radioactive Waste Project director.

EnergySolutions, the company that operates the only private low-level radioactive waste disposal business in the US, disposes of more than 90 percent of the low-level radioactive waste generated in the US. It operates waste processing and disposition facilities in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Utah. The company also operates low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities, vaults, and landfills on the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.

Amazingly, as the DOE struggles through desperate and irresponsible measures to “disappear” this nation’s nuclear waste by the end of 2008, EnergySolutions has applied for a license in Tennessee to process nuclear waste from Italy.

This application marks the first time in the history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a company has asked to dispose of large amounts of foreign-generated low-level radioactive waste in the United States.

In February 2008, Bart Gordon, the Tennessee Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, asked the Northwest Interstate Compact of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management to withhold licensing that he says would put the US on a path to becoming “the world’s nuclear garbage waste dump.”

In an understatement, Gordon argued, “The US already faces capacity issues and other challenges in treating and disposing of radioactive waste produced domestically. We should be working on solving this problem at home before taking dangerous waste from around the world.”

UPDATE BY DIANE D’ARRIGO

The nuclear power and weapons industry and the government agencies that promote, oversee, and regulate nuclear activities are trying to save money by allowing large amounts of man-made, radioactively contaminated materials and property to be redefined as not radioactive. They don’t want to pay to try to isolate nuclear waste, including metal, concrete, asphalt, plastic, soil, equipment, and buildings, so they have developed ways to send the waste to regular landfills or even into commercial recycling that could end up in daily-use items the public makes contact with regularly.

This story is increasingly important as old nuclear weapons sites and power reactors close and the companies seek relief from responsibility and liability for the long-lasting nuclear waste they generated. It is especially dangerous as new nuclear power and weapons facilities are proposed, which will dramatically increase the amount of waste generated that could get into the public realm.

Although the US federal agencies have not generally allowed nuclear waste to be released from controls, they are still working on it. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have proposed rules in the wings, likely to emerge at any time. NRC is encouraging case by case releases of nuclear waste. The DOE has procedures to allow some radioactive waste out of controls but claims to be preventing radioactive metal from getting into the commercial metal market. A programmatic environmental review could overturn that prohibition, and internally DOE has many loopholes to let nuclear wastes out.

The story wasn’t covered much in the mainstream news. One notable exception was the investigative team led by Demetria Kalodimos on Channel 4 WSMV, Nashville’s NBC affiliate, who reported on the story and did over twenty follow-ups in the Nashville area (see http://www.nirs.org for links). Public awareness led to legislative attention and a commitment by the landfill operator who was taking nuclear waste to stop taking it. Kalodimos received three journalism awards for reporting and following up on the story herself.

The community is not satisfied with this voluntary commitment, because the Tennessee State Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) still allows nuclear waste to be released from controls. TDEC licenses companies to import nuclear waste from around the country and world for “processing,” including incineration and metal melting and reuse.

The report identified TDEC and Tennessee as leaders in releasing nuclear waste out of control.

The situation has worsened since last year. One of the processors is proposing to import a huge portion of Italy’s nuclear power waste to burn, process, melt and dump in the US (Tennessee and Utah).

Action against this can be taken by contacting your state governors to oppose it and by supporting federal legislation that would prohibit the US from importing foreign nuclear waste.

Citizens can also contact their state officials to find out if their state is allowing nuclear waste into the solid waste streams in their communities.

###

Sources:
Nuclear Information and Resource Service, May 14, 2007
Title: “Nuclear Waste in Landfills”
Author: Diane D’Arrigo

Environment News Service, May 14, 2007
Title: “US Allows Radioactive Materials in Ordinary Landfills”
Author: Sunny Lewis

Environment News Service, February 4, 2008
Title: “US Company Seeks Permit to Import Nuclear Waste”
Author: Sunny Lewis

Student Researchers: Derek Harms and Cedric Therene

Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, PhD

dianed@nirs.org for more information.

February 24, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment

Washington Post’s Dishonesty On Iran Gas Sanctions

By Matt Duss | February 13th, 2010

A Washington Post editorial today calling on President Obama to implement gas sanctions against Iran contains this falsehood:

[F]or every expert who argues that a shortage of gasoline would somehow help Mr. Ahmadinejad, there is one who believes it will deepen popular rejection of the regime.

That’s simply untrue. There’s actually a very substantial agreement among experts that gas sanctions will be an ineffective and potentially counterproductive tool against Iran, and that any anti-government sentiment they generated would likely be overwhelmed by nationalist solidarity in the face of outside pressure.

In December, at a hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, the four Iran experts testifying were unanimous in recommending against gas sanctions, citing the recent history of such measures helping the Iranian government consolidate power.

At a recent event at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, two leading Iran experts, WINEP’s Patrick Clawson and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, came out against gas sanctions. Citing the difficulty of enforcing them, Clawson said the U.S. should “not adopt a sanction on gasoline imports into Iran unless we are prepared to sink Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline… because it’s going to make [the U.S.] look impotent.”

The number of experts who believe that gas sanctions will deepen popular rejection of the Iranian regime is vanishingly small. The only two I can think of are Mark Dubowitz of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Michael Rubin of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. There are probably a few others, but not nearly enough to constitute a serious disagreement among “experts.” Rubin’s view has even been contradicted by a report from his own think tank, as well as by AEI’s director of foreign policy studies, Danielle Pletka, who has said that the Iranian regime “will likely be impervious” to such sanctions.

The main support for gas sanctions comes not from actual Iran analysts, but from pundits and politicians looking for an easy way to “get tough” on Iran. Now they’ll get to cite this editorial as “evidence” for their views.

The analytical consensus can be a hard thing to define, but with gas sanctions it’s not a tough call. The Washington Post obviously has the right to support aggressive and counterproductive measures against other countries. But it also has a responsibility to its readers to honestly and accurately portray the evidence behind its claims, and it has egregiously failed to do so in regard to gas sanctions.

Source

February 22, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Israel: Sanctions must target Iran energy sector

Press TV – February 22, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues on his campaign for international sanctions to be imposed against Iran’s energy sector.

“We must prohibit Iranian oil exports and imports to Iran of refined oil products. No other sanctions will be effective,” Netanyahu said in Jerusalem (Al-Quds) at a meeting of delegates from the Jewish Agency, an organization that encourages Jewish immigration to Israel.

Netanyahu went so far as to say the UN Security Council should be sidestepped if it cannot agree on the move.

“We have arrived at a point where the international community has to decide if it seriously plans to stop Iran’s nuclear program,” he added.

Netanyahu’s effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program — which Tehran says is peaceful — comes while Israel is reportedly the sole possessor of nuclear arsenals in the Middle East with 200 nuclear warheads.

On a visit to Russia last week, Netanyahu insisted on the need for “biting sanctions that have the power to influence the regime, bitter sanctions that have to hit, in a convincing way, the oil industry, imports, exports and refining.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry, however, rebuffed the call and announced that Moscow is against imposing sanctions on Iran, noting that Russia has always favored a diplomatic solution with regards to Iran’s nuclear program.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was against imposing “crippling sanctions” on Iran.

The US, Israel and some Western countries accuse Iran of seeking atomic weapons under the guise of its nuclear energy program.

Iran denies that it seeks to build an atomic bomb and says it only wants to enrich uranium for civilian purposes such as generating electricity and producing medical isotopes.

Source

February 22, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

‘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.

Source

February 22, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

IAEA Letter Fuels CNN Alarmism Over Iran

Rick Sanchez Speculates About Non-Existent Iranian ‘Nuclear Missile’

By Jason Ditz | February 18, 2010

Fueled by an unfortunately worded letter by the IAEA about a “technical violation” allegedly made by Iran last week in its civilian nuclear program, CNN’s Rick Sanchez is now speculating about the possibility of Iran “building some kind of nuclear weapon,” even though one of his guests from MIT made it clear this threat was totally illusory.

Rick Sanchez

The IAEA statement, related to Iran’s refusal to indefinitely delay alterations to its civilian enrichment program, included claims that Iran’s attitude “raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

The letter seems to have been an effort to chastise Iran for a technical violation, but did not make any specific allegations that Iran was actually making such missiles, or even had the capability to do so. IAEA Chief Yukiya Amano, responsible for today’s letter, has previously confirmed that the IAEA has absolutely no evidence that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons.

But “technical violations” aren’t a sensational story, and the IAEA letter’s wording gave enough wiggle room for the television media to leap on the story and spin it into an alarmist “breaking story” about a non-existent nuclear payload being mounted into a non-existent warhead. Even after a guest made it clear that Iran did not have any weapons-grade uranium, Sanchez speculated about what we, “as Americans” should expect the government to “do” about it.

Not that the CNN was alone in its alarmism, as George Jahn at the Associated Press was at it again, who ran an article called “UN nuke agency worried Iran may be working on arms,” even though the content of his own article made it clear this was at best a speculative claim.

A burning building that has absolutely nothing to do with Iran

In reality, the vast majority of Iran’s uranium is enriched to only 3.5 percent, with a much smaller amount, described as “modest” by the IAEA, enriched to 20 percent for a medical reactor. A nuclear weapon would require uranium enriched above 90 percent, and as the IAEA continues to closely monitor the enrichment process, it is clear that the nation is simply not making weapons grade uranium, nor could it without immediately alerting the international community. The technical violation, one must remember was related to the changeover of some centrifuges from 3.5 percent to 20 percent, totally unrelated to anything theoretically weapons-related.

Not that any of this was made clear in CNN’s coverage of the story. Rather Mr. Sanchez lept dexterously between speculating about Iran’s missiles and discussing the “anti-government terrorist” attack in Austin, Texas, complete with footage of a burning IRS building. Pictures of burning US government buildings and speculation about a rival’s non-existent nuclear weapons combined nicely to fuel panic, but they did nothing to clarify the actual meaning behind the IAEA’s Iran statement.

Source

February 18, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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.

February 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Some Straight Thinking About Iran

By Philip Giraldi | February 18, 2010

The Annual Threat Assessment overview was released by the office of the Director of National Intelligence on February 2nd.  A forty-seven page unclassified version includes a page and a half on Iran’s proliferation threat.  It raises legitimate concerns about Iran’s doubling of its number of operating centrifuges (while conceding that as many as half might not be working) and regarding what it describes as the secret nuclear facility near Qom.  Apart from that, it supports the conclusions of the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program and had not made the political decision to start it up again.

One would think it would be good news that the Iranian nuclear program has not really advanced since 2007, but something strange is happening.  The Obama Administration has intensified pressure on Iran with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denouncing what she sees as the Iranian government’s increased militarization.  The mainstream media, meanwhile, has not reported the conclusions of the Annual Threat Assessment while there has been instead considerable commentary about how Iran is moving closer to having a nuclear weapon together with calls for harsh sanctions.  The Washington Times and Newsweek are also reporting that the US intelligence community will soon finish a second NIE on Iran that will revise the conclusions of the December 2007 document.  If their information is correct, the forthcoming NIE will emphasize that Iran is moving towards the point where it will have all the technical requirements in place to put together a nuclear weapon if the country’s political leadership decides to proceed.  This is a spin that is somewhat different than the Annual Threat Assessment, which is presumably written by the same analysts using the same information.  Admittedly, as the political go-ahead might never be given, all the intelligence really suggests is that Iran could soon join a large number of other countries that have the technical capability to make a nuclear weapon.  Of those countries there are some – mostly in Europe — that clearly have no interest in nuclear weapons development while others could move rapidly into a weapon program if their circumstances seem to demand it.  Iran is far from unique.  Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all have the technological resources to develop nuclear weapons on an expedited basis if they found themselves threatened.

So the Annual Threat Assessment and the possibly forthcoming NIE would really only confirm the 2007 NIE’s judgment that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, does not appear to have an in-place weapons program, and is still several years away from having a nuclear device even if the political decision is made to proceed.  If there is a new NIE it will not really change anything, but there is clearly a political agenda playing out that is driving the process.  One might even suggest that the timing is somewhat reminiscent of the infamous 2002 “slam dunk” Iraq NIE that falsely made the case for war by hyping phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction.  In this case, the conclusions are not as important as the report’s appearance at a crucial time when negotiations between Tehran and the West have broken down and Washington is pushing hard to pressure Iran.  The surfacing of a new assessment that is already being spun to heighten the threat will inevitably increase concerns about a possible Iranian weapons program and provide ammunition to those who are seeking a more assertive US policy.  By its very existence, the new NIE will also provide a measure of credibility for the Obama administration, which has relentlessly been making the case that Iran is intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, a conclusion that is not supported by the available intelligence.

That the drive to punish Iran has been supported in Congress and the media is perhaps no coincidence, suggesting that the effort is being coordinated by those who want war.  At the end of January, by an overwhelming voice vote, the US Senate joined the House of Representatives in passing a resolution demanding sanctions on Iran’s energy imports.  A joint resolution that will go to President Obama is currently being crafted and is expected soon.  The resolution could well give Obama the political cover he needs to advocate even more draconian measures against Iran and its rulers.  From the Iranian viewpoint, it is pretty much a declaration of war.

Why is Iran the target of so much rage even though it has not threatened the United States or any vital American interest?  Influence over Congress and the media from Israel and its friends is surely a large part of the answer.  How else can one explain the different treatment afforded Iran and North Korea given Pyongyang’s open development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles?  Unlike North Korea, Iran continues to be a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear sites are inspected by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.  Iran is a developing country with a small economy and tiny defense budget and it has not invaded a neighbor since the eighteenth century.  It does not even have the resources to refine its own oil for home consumption and must import the gasoline it uses.  If the proposed Congressional sanctions are fully implemented the country’s economy will grind to a halt, but the damage does not stop there.  Iran deals with many European and Asian companies in its energy industry, all of which would be sanctioned by the US if they do not break off relations.  They might not like that and might well take commensurate steps against the United States.  Ultimately, the United States Navy might have to enforce the sanctions.  What would happen when a Chinese or Russian ship is stopped on the high seas?  Did the US Congress really think about what it was doing and what the consequences of sanctions might be?

And the irony is that the United States has a problem with Iran that has largely been manufactured in Washington and in Tel Aviv.  Even though Tehran does not actually threaten the US, Washington has been supporting terrorists and separatists who have killed hundreds of people inside Iran.  Israel, which has its own secret nuclear arsenal, claims to be threatened if Iran develops even the ability to concentrate its uranium referred to as “mastering the enrichment cycle,” a point of view that has also been adopted by Washington.  The White House has made repeated threats that the military option for dealing with Tehran is “on the table” while Israel has been even more explicit in its threats to attack.  Meanwhile, the US mainstream media is united in its desire to come to grips with the Mullahs.

It is no wonder that Iran feels threatened, because it is.  To be sure, Iran is no role model for good governance but a desire to deal with the country fairly and realistically is not an endorsement of the regime in power.  Iran is engaged diplomatically and through surrogates in the entire Persian Gulf region and central Asia, supporting its friends and seeking to undermine its enemies.  But that does not make it different than any of its neighbors and the United States, all of which play the same game.  The bottom line is that the US has been interfering in Iran since 1978 and even before if one goes back to the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq by the CIA in 1953.  The interference has accomplished nothing and has only created a poisonous relationship that Barack Obama has done little to improve.  Indeed, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s harsh rhetoric suggests that when it comes to Iran the Democrats are more hardline than George W. Bush.

Imagine for a moment what might happen if Washington were to adopt a serious foreign policy based on the US national interest.  That would mean strict non-interventionism in troubled regions like the Middle East where the US has everything to lose and little to gain.  It would be the real change promised by Obama if Washington were to admit that it is not threatened by Tehran and were to declare that it will not interfere in Iran’s politics. It could further announce that it no longer has a military option on the table, and that it will not permit Israeli overflight of Iraq to attack Iran.  Iran’s leaders just might decide that they don’t really need their own “option on the table” which has been the threat that they might seek to develop a nuclear weapon.  And an Iran that feels more secure might well be willing to take some risks itself to defuse tension with its neighbors and Washington.  In 2003 Iran offered to negotiate all outstanding differences with the United States, an offer that was turned down by the Bush White House.

So the big question about Iran is not whether or not it has the knowledge and resources to build an atom bomb.  It does or will soon.  The real issue is whether the United States is actually threatened by that knowledge and what should be done in terms of positive policies to discourage an expanded nuclear program.  The United States should first of all recognize that, as the world’s only superpower, it controls the playing field.  It is up to Washington to take the first steps to defuse the crisis that is building by offering Tehran the security guarantees that might undercut the influence of those in its government who seek a nuclear weapon deterrent.  Punishing Iran is no solution.  It will not work, closes the door to diplomacy, and will only make the worst case scenario that much more likely.  Opening the door to a rapprochement by eliminating the threatening language coming out of Washington and creating incentives for cooperation is a far better course of action.

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February 18, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

NYT Sees UN-Syria Conspiracy Theory

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | February 15, 2010

The New York Times simply refuses to deal with “enemy” Muslim states with any sense of objectivity or fairness, reaffirming its deep-seated bias again on Sunday with the publication of a one-sided article about the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on its fifth anniversary.

The article entitled “A U.N. Betrayal in Beirut” by op-ed contributor Michael Young argues that the original United Nations-authorized Hariri investigation, which pointed the finger of guilt at the Syrian government and its Lebanese allies, was correct but was then undercut by U.N. officials for political reasons.

The hero of the Times op-ed is German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who headed the initial U.N. inquiry and was subsequently replaced by Belgian investigator Serge Brammertz, who is portrayed as an incompetent who squandered Mehlis’s supposedly courageous work. Young wrote:

“Mr. Mehlis had few doubts about Syria’s involvement, and said so in his first report. He asked for President Assad’s testimony (over Syrian protests), interviewed Syrian intelligence officers in Vienna and arrested suspects. When Mr. Mehlis stepped down from his position in December, 2005, he felt he had enough to arrest at least one of the intelligence officers.

“However, the investigation wilted under his successor. … Mr. Brammertz issued uninformative reports and displayed a lack of transparency that discouraged potential witnesses, unsure of whether he had solid evidence in hand, from coming forward; … he failed to follow through on the interviews with the Syrian officers; and though he met with President Assad, he apparently did not formally take down his testimony.”

Young’s narrative fits with the Times’ previous hostility toward the Syrians regarding the Hariri case and other issues, much as the Times regularly tilted its coverage against Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and currently slants its reporting against the government of Iran.

On the Hariri case, the Times would have its readers believe that U.N. leaders lost their nerve and dumped a brilliant prosecutor in favor of an incompetent to sabotage the case.

But what Young and the Times failed to disclose on Sunday was that Mehlis’s initial investigation amounted to a rush to judgment that relied heavily on two witnesses whose testimony was later discredited or retracted. His successor, Brammertz, had no choice but to retrace Mehlis’s steps because there had been so many slip-ups.

The murder mystery began on Feb. 14, 2005, when an explosion destroyed a car carrying Hariri through the streets of Beirut.

Because Syria was then on President George W. Bush’s hit list for “regime change” – and Syria was considered a front-line enemy of Israel – speculative evidence of Syrian guilt was an easy sell to the U.S. news media. When Mehlis’s preliminary report was issued, there was little U.S. media skepticism about its assertions of guilt regarding Syrian leaders and their Lebanese allies.

“There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” declared Mehlis’s report on Oct. 20, 2005.

Despite the curiously vague wording – “probable cause to believe” the killing “could not have been taken without the approval” and “without the collusion” – Bush immediately termed the findings “very disturbing” and called for the U.N. Security Council to take action against Syria.

The U.S. press joined the stampede in assuming Syrian guilt. On Oct. 25, 2005, a New York Times editorial said the U.N. investigation had been “tough and meticulous” in establishing “some deeply troubling facts” about Hariri’s murderers. The Times demanded punishment of top Syrian officials and their Lebanese allies.

But Mehlis’s investigative report was anything but “meticulous.” Indeed, it read more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the truth.

As a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi monarchy, Hariri had many enemies who might have wanted him dead for his business or political dealings. The Syrians were not alone in having a motive to eliminate Hariri.

Indeed, after the assassination, a videotape was delivered to al-Jazeera television on which a Lebanese youth, Ahmad Abu Adass, claimed to have carried out the suicide bombing on behalf of Islamic militants angered by Hariri’s work for “the agent of the infidels” in Saudi Arabia.

However, Mehlis relied on two witnesses – Zuhair Ibn Muhammad Said Saddik and Hussam Taher Hussam – to dismiss the videotape as part of a disinformation campaign designed to deflect suspicion from Syria.

Mehlis then spun a narrative of a Syrian conspiracy to kill Hariri. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese security officials were jailed on suspicion of involvement in Hariri’s murder. Everything was falling neatly into place.

As a new U.S. press hysteria built over another case of pure evil traced to the doorstep of an American adversary in the Muslim world, holes in the U.N. report were mostly ignored. At Consortiumnews.com, we produced one of the few critical examinations of what had the looks of a rush to judgment. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report.”]

A Case Crumbles

Much like the Bush administration’s Iraqi WMD claims – which the Times also touted uncritically – Mehlis’s Hariri case against the Syrians soon began to crumble.

One witness, Saddik, was identified by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel as a swindler who boasted about becoming “a millionaire” from his Hariri testimony. The other one, Hussam, recanted his testimony about Syrian involvement, saying he lied to the Mehlis investigation after being kidnapped, tortured and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese officials.

Mehlis soon stepped down, as even the New York Times acknowledged that the conflicting accusations had given the investigation the feel of “a fictional spy thriller.” [NYT, Dec. 7, 2005]

Mehlis’s subsequent replacements backed away from his Syrian accusations. Brammertz began entertaining other investigative leads, examining a variety of possible motives and a number of potential perpetrators.

“Given the many different positions occupied by Mr. Hariri, and his wide range of public and private-sector activities, the [U.N.] commission was investigating a number of different motives, including political motivations, personal vendettas, financial circumstances and extremist ideologies, or any combination of those motivations,” Brammertz’s own interim report said, according to a U.N. statement on June 14, 2006.

In other words, Brammertz had dumped Mehlis’s single-minded theory that had pinned the blame on senior Syrian security officials. Though Syria’s freewheeling intelligence services and their Lebanese cohorts remained on everyone’s suspect list, Brammertz adopted a far less confrontational and accusatory tone toward Syria.

Still, the U.S. news media, which had played the initial Mehlis accusations against Syria as front-page news, barely mentioned the shift in the U.N. probe.
Virtually nothing appeared in the U.S. news media that would alert the American people to the fact that the distinct impression they got in 2005 – that the Syrian government had engineered a terrorist bombing in Beirut – was now a whole lot fuzzier.

Instead, it remained common practice for the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media to continue citing the Mehlis report and referring to “Syrian officials implicated in Mr. Hariri’s killing” without providing more context.

That pattern continued Sunday in Young’s article, with the online version linking to a 2005 story that trumpeted Mehlis’s initial report. Young and the Times cite no articles describing the subsequent collapse of Mehlis’s case.

Last year, the U.N. tribunal examining Hariri’s murder and other terrorist acts in Lebanon acknowledged that it lacked the evidence to indict the four Lebanese security officials who had been held without formal charges since 2005. Finally, Judge Daniel Fransen of a special international tribunal ordered the four imprisoned security officials released.

In a similar situation – say, one that involved a U.S. ally – the release would have been viewed as proof of innocence or at least the absence of significant evidence of guilt.

In this case, however, the New York Times refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that the case against Syrian complicity was weak. Instead, the Times framed the development as underscoring “the legal pitfalls of a divisive international trial.” [NYT, April 30, 2009]

That stubbornly one-sided approach has now extended to the fifth anniversary of the Hariri slaying. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in Mehlis’s initial findings – or recognizing how recklessly premature those accusations were – the Times is now promoting a conspiracy theory that U.N. officials willfully tanked the investigation.

Yet the only conspiracy that Young’s article seems to corroborate is the one in which the Times and its editors relentlessly portray Muslim governments that are out of Washington’s favor as the “bad guys.”

Source

February 16, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

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