Full Core Meltdown in Japan?
By Stephen Lendman | March 18, 2011
Possibly it’s ongoing and concealed. All along, Japanese and Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) officials downplayed or lied about the severity of the crisis. Virtually nothing they say can be believed.
Nor from the Obama administration, budgeting loan guarantees for new reactor construction instead of decommissioning all 104 nuclear plants because operating them risks full core meltdowns.
Partial or full ones gravely harm earth, air, water and food. Three hazardous Fukushima radioactive isotopes are especially problematic. University of Rochester Professor Jacqueline Williams, a radiation expert, says ingesting radioactive iodine-131 causes thyroid and other cancers. So does hazardous beta and gamma radiation from Cesium-137. Released Strontium 90 also causes leukemia and other cancers. Large amounts of all three are spewing daily.
Under a worst case scenario, millions of Japanese, Pacific rim and northern hemisphere people will be harmed, many gravely. Millions of deaths may result. The dangers of nuclear power can’t be overstated. Potentially, all planetary life is threatened. What better reason to end all commercial and military use now.
Wikipedia calls a nuclear meltdown “an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating.” Partial or full meltdowns result, releasing toxic atmospheric radiation.
Through nuclear fission, reactors generate high heat to produce electricity – essentially boiling water to create steam, used to run turbines and generate power. Unless controlled, dangerously high heat results.
Core meltdowns occur when heat generated exceeds what cooling systems remove, causing uranium and plutonium fuel to melt. At fault may be coolant problems, including accidents, fires, loss of coolant pressure, low coolant flow, or none at all from high heat causing evaporation. In other words, insufficient cooling elevates temperatures high enough to trigger melting and toxic atmospheric radiation releases.
Measured in rems (roentgen equivalent in man or mammal), it represents the amount needed to damage living tissue. All radiation is harmful, cumulative, permanent, and unforgiving. The more gotten, the greater the danger, especially doses over 100 rems, producing radiation sickness, including nausea, vomiting, headaches, white blood cell loss, and susceptibility to infection.
Doses above 200 rems cause hair loss and other harm. Above 300, significant internal harm, including damaged nerve cells, others lining the digestive track, the reproductive system, DNA and RNA. Severe white blood cell loss also results, the body’s main defense against infection, causing vulnerability to cancer and other diseases.
Moreover, radiation reduces blood platelets production, making hemorrhaging more likely. Doses above 450 rems kill half of those exposed. Above 800 assures death in days, weeks, or longer-term after painful illnesses, including leukemia and other cancers.
High atmospheric radiation levels threaten life over the short or longer-term. The more ingested, absorbed or inhaled, the greater the risk. Fukushima is spreading large amounts. If unstoppable, all bets are off.
On March 17, New York Times writers Norimitsu Onishi, David Sanger and Matthew Wald headlined, “High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant,” saying:
“Amid widening (global alarm), military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on (Fukushima’s) spent fuel rods.” Earlier, high radiation levels forced back police water cannon trucks. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces dumped tons of seawater on Unit 3, saying later it was ineffective. Unknown is whether anything can work. In day six, everything tried failed, raising grave doubts, a frightening prospect if true.
Panic throughout Japan is increasing. Some Toyko residents are fleeing. Everyone is scared. Radiation levels are spreading and rising. People are jamming airports to leave. Some embassies and companies are evacuating their personnel. Inbound flights are being canceled.
An anonymous nuclear industry official told The Times of India that TEPCO management is “in a full-scale panic, (not) know(ing) what to do.” On March 16, European Union Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told an EU parliamentary committee:
Fukushima “is effectively out of control. In the coming hours, there could be further catastrophic events, which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island,” and beyond.
In fact, global contamination is threatened. Obama said radioactivity wouldn’t reach America. He lied. It will reach California by weekend and spread east across the entire country and North America. The industry-controlled World Nuclear News warned of a “dramatic escalation in Japan.”
Compounding the threat, around 600,000 exposed Fukushima spent fuel rods are stored unprotected near the top of reactors, making them extremely vulnerable to melting. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen said if they catch fire, it “would be like Chernobyl on steroids.”
Several fires, in fact, erupted. Others could ignite any time. If one or more containment vessels ruptures, all bets are off. Fears are it already happened, making a bad situation far worse. Fukushima is an unprecedented disaster, in uncharted territory. Understating the potential catastrophic risk is irresponsible and criminal.
On Wednesday, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman, Gregory Jaczko, told a congressional committee that thousands of Unit 4 spent fuel rods have little or no protective water, meaning they’re exposed, melting, and spreading toxic atmospheric radiation. He added:
“We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”
Fukushima has six reactors. All risk meltdown. Experts believe a full plant evacuation may be necessary, leaving reactor and spent fuel rods to melt down, a potential worst case unstoppable “China syndrome.”
Late Wednesday night, the US State Department announced a “voluntary” evacuation of government personnel dependents and other US citizens from northeastern Japan down to Tokyo and Yokohama. Charter flights will be provided. Numerous other nations are urging their nationals to leave.
Nuclear Power in America: How Safe?
On March 16, New York Times writer Matthew Wald headlined, “Nuclear Agency Tells a Concerned Congress That US Industry Remains Safe,” saying:
NRC chairman Jaczko “told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees:
“We will continue to work to maintain (a high) level of protection.” Reactors are designed to withstand “the most severe natural phenomena historically reported,” perhaps forgetting his comments about Fukushima’s unprecedented disaster and its unpreparedness to cope.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu claimed:
“The American people should have full confidence that the United States has rigorous safety regulations in place to ensure that our nuclear power is generated safely and responsibly. The administration is committed to learning from Japan’s experience as we work to continue to strengthen America’s nuclear industry.”
Chu, in fact, is deeply compromised, a shill for nuclear interests since his days as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), originally called the UC Radiation Lab. Today, the Energy Department runs it, continuing its radiation research, what it’s done since the 1940s with little regard for public safety or environmental concerns, as true under Chu. In fact, he was picked as Energy Secretary for his commitment to military and commercial nuclear power, mindless of the risks.
When asked in 2005 if fission-based plants should be part of the energy-producing portfolio, he responded:
“Absolutely,” displaying a cavalier attitude about its dangers in advocating for “recycling” waste, when independent experts say doing it spreads poisons causing cancer, genetic damage, and premature deaths.
Chu also has longstanding ties to BP and Big Oil that funded UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute he founded a year before becoming Energy Secretary. On matters of oil, nuclear power, and other sources of energy, nothing Chu says is credible.
Obama also has longstanding nuclear industry ties, including with Chicago-based Exelon. On March 14, Bloomberg said it operates “17 reactors at 10 stations in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, provid(ing) 20% of US nuclear capacity,” according to its web site. His former top political aide, David Axelrod, once lobbied for Exelon, and Rahm Emanuel, his former White House chief of staff, profited handsomely as an investment banker arranging mergers that created the company.
In his proposed budget, Obama includes $36 billion in industry loan guarantees for new facilities, free money. He’s committed to jump-start new construction, halted since Three Mile Island in 1979. Already takers are lining up, 20 or more applications pending before the NRC.
He and Chu downplay Fukushima, mindless of industry hazards, including 23 US nuclear plants at 16 locations using the same failed GE-designed Mark 1 containment vessels. Earlier the NRC called it susceptible to explosion and failure because of cost-cutting design failures. Its 1985 study warned that failure within the first few hours after a core meltdown was very likely. Its top safety official at the time said it had a 90% probability of failing if an accident caused overheating and melting. When reactor cooling is compromised, the containment vessel is the last line of defense. However, GE’s design is hazardous and unsafe.
No matter. In January 2011, Obama appointed Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s CEO, head of his outside panel of economic advisers, replacing Paul Volcker. He’ll also provide administration energy policy input. For him, Obama, Chu and other administration officials, public health, safety, and environmental protection are secondary to bottom line priorities. Unless popular outrage resists, America faces an inevitable nuclear nightmare, replicating or exceeding Fukushima.
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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com
UN votes for Libya air strikes
By Richard Seymour | LENIN’S TOMB | March 17, 2011
As if I didn’t see this coming a mile off:
10 in favour, zero against, five abstentions. So the vote went exactly as predicted. “The resolution 1973/2011 is adopted.,” says the chairman.
This could get very ugly. The resolution authorises a whole series of military measures short of ground invasion, including air strikes. The worst case scenarios? Not that air strikes will kill civilians – that is absolutely guaranteed, and thus constitutes an aspect of even the best case. Not that the war will escalate – that is not a dead cert, but a strong probability. However, it’s also unlikely to involve a ground invasion, which I need hardly say would be catastrophic. The worst case scenario seems to be that this will fuel the centrifugal forces tending toward partition between a ‘Western’ allied statelet in the east, and a rump dictatorship in the west. Qadhafi has spent years deliberately ‘underdeveloping’ the east to punish these regions and tribal federations for their tendency toward rebelliousness, leaving towns and cities that should be as rich as those in the Gulf states desperately poor, surrounded by shantytowns and slums – and so he has laid the material basis for such divisions. Imperialism creates divisions where none existed before (look at Iraq). This is how it always operates. So it’s implausible that where there already are such divisions, and where such divisions have a direct bearing on the conflict underway, that imperialist intervention would not exacerbate them. This may be the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the Libyan revolution. That’s a worst-case scenario.
The best-case scenario is that people are killed to little avail, and the former regime elements in the transitional leadership have just diverted energies and initiative down a blind alley. I suppose you might object that the best-case scenario is that the air strikes exclusively kill the bad guys, turning the initiative in favour of the revolutionaries, allowing them to seize power, build a liberal democratic state, and the cavalry heads home. And the band played, ‘Believe it if you like’. Look, I’d like to believe it. I’d also like to believe that Obama is a socialist, Hillary Clinton a feminist, and David Cameron a salesman for unsecured personal loans. But the occasions in which imperialism has directly assisted a revolutionary process are rather infrequent, wouldn’t you say? In fact, I suspect you’d be struggling if I asked you to name one.
I’m also afraid that all the talk about the inaction, delaying, dilly-dallying and procrastination of the ‘international community’, not to mention the demonology about Russia and China obstructing the good guys once again, has played straight into a very familiar war narrative. Just when you’ve uttered your last “but why won’t they DO something?”, just when you’re about to give up and lapse into foul depression, the good guys come to the rescue. It’s like 1941 all over again. There was never any doubt, as far as I’m concerned, that the US would support a no-fly zone if it could be suitably internationalized and involve support from the miserable dictatorships of the Arab League. And no one will be tasteless enough to point out that those very same states are currently butchering their populations with the arms and financial assistance of the imperial powers commanding this coalition of the willing. Because that would just be sour grapes.
Assault on Collective Bargaining Illegal
Wisconsin Violated the Constitution
By JEANNE MIRER and MARJORIE COHN | CounterPunch | March 15, 2011
The International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) sent a notice to the Wisconsin Legislature, explaining that its attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers is illegal.
Anyone who has watched the events unfolding in Wisconsin and other states that are trying to remove collective bargaining rights from public workers has heard people protesting the loss of their “rights.” The ICLR explained to the legislature exactly what these rights are and why trying to take them away is illegal.
The ICLR is a New York based non-governmental organization that coordinates a pro bono network of labor lawyers and experts throughout the world, www.laborcommission.org. It investigates labor rights violations, and issues reports and amicus briefs on issues of labor law.
The ICLR identified the right of “freedom of association” as a fundamental right and affirmed that the right to collective bargaining is an essential element of freedom of association. These rights, which have been recognized worldwide, provide a brake on unchecked corporate or state power.
In 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the NLRA, or the Wagner Act), it recognized the direct relationship between the inequality of bargaining power of workers and corporations and the recurrent business depressions. That is, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners, the economy fell into depression. The law therefore recognized as policy of the United States the encouragement of collective bargaining.
While the NLRA covered U.S. employees in private employment, the law protecting collective bargaining in both the public and private sectors has developed since 1935 to cover all workers “without distinction.”
The opening paragraph of the ICLR statement reads:
“As workers in the thousands and hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio and around the country demonstrate to protect the right of public sector workers to collective bargaining, the political battle has overshadowed any reference to the legal rights to collective bargaining. The political battle to prevent the loss of collective bargaining is reinforced by the fact that stripping any collective bargaining rights is blatantly illegal. Courts and agencies around the world have uniformly held the right of collective bargaining in the public sector is an essential element of the right of Freedom of Association, which is a fundamental right under both International law and the United States Constitution.”
The ICLR statement summarizes the development of this law from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, through the International Labor Organization’s Conventions on Freedom of Association (that is, the right to form and join unions) and on Collective Bargaining. It cites court cases from the United States and around the world. All embrace freedom of association as a fundamental right and the right to collective bargaining as an essential element of freedom of association.
Some anti-union voices argue that since federal employees presently do not have the right to bargain collectively, neither should state workers. In fact, the argument should go the other way. The law cited in the ICLR statement means that denying Federal employees collective bargaining rights – which they have had over the years when presidents have recognized them by executive order – is just as illegal as denying collective bargaining rights to state public employees. President Obama should take this opportunity to reinstate the rights of Federal employees to collective bargaining.
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Jeanne Mirer, who practices labor and employment law in New York, is president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild.
US Media Hide an American Atrocity in Afghanistan Behind ‘NATO’ and Fudge the Victims’ Ages
By Dave Lindorff – This Can’t Be Happening – 03/09/2011
The people of Afghanistan know who was flying the two helicopter gunships that brutally hunted down and slaughtered, one by one, nine boys apparently as young as seven years old, as they gathered firewood on a hillside March 1. In angry demonstrations after the incident, they were shouting “Death to America.”
Americans are still blissfully unaware that their “heroes” in uniform are guilty of this obscene massacre. The ovine US corporate media has been reporting on this story based upon a gutless press release from the Pentagon which attributes the “mistake” to “NATO” helicopters.
The thing is, this terrible incident occurred in the Pech Valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, where US forces have for several years been battling Taliban forces, and from which region they are now in the process of withdrawing. Clearly then, it is US, and not “NATO” helicopters which have been responding to calls to attack “suspected Taliban forces.”
So why can’t the Pentagon say that? And if they won’t say that, why won’t American reporters either demand that they clearly state the nationality of whatever troops commit an atrocity, or exercise due diligence themselves and figure it out?
There is a second issue too. Most publications appear to have followed the lead of the highly compromised New York Times, and are going with the Pentagon line that the boys who were killed were aged 9-15. That’s bad enough. It’s hard to see how helicopter pilots with their high-resolution imaging equipment, cannot tell a 9-year-old boy when they see one, from a bearded Taliban fighter. But at least one news organization, the McClachy chain, is reporting that the ages of the boys who were murdered from the air were 7-13. If that latter range of ages is correct, then it is all the more outrageous that they were picked off one by one by helicopter gunners. No way could they have mistaken a 7-year-old for an adult.
No wonder even the famously corrupt Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused to accept an apology proffered for this killing by Afghan War commander Gen. David Petraeus.
Calls by this reporter to the Pentagon for an accurate report on whose troops were flying those two helicopters, and for an accurate accounting of the ages of the nine victims, have thus far gone unanswered. This, I have discovered, is fairly standard for the Defense Department. If it’s a story about some big victory, or a new eco-friendly plan for a military base’s heating system, you have to beat the Pentagon PR guys off with a stick, but if you call them about something embarrassing or negative, you get passed from Major Perrine to Lt. Col. Robbins to Commander Whozits, and nobody gives you an answer. Finally you’re given someone to email a question to, and that message goes into the Pentagon internet ether and never gets returned.
So let’s give an honest report here: Two US helicopter gunships, allegedly responding to a report of “insurgent” activity on a hillside in Kunar Province, came upon the scene of 10 young Afghan boys who were collecting brush for fuel for their families. The gunships, according to the account of a lone 11-year-old survivor who was hidden by a tree, systematically hunted down the other nine boys, hitting them with machine gun and rocket fire and killing them all–their bodies so badly damaged that their families had to hunt for the pieces in order to bury them.
This atrocity is being described as a “mistake,” but it was no mistake, clearly. The crews of the helicopters were shooting at fleeing human beings who made no attempt to return fire (obviously, because all the boys had were sticks, which they surely dropped when the first shots were fired).
They almost certainly saw that they were dealing with kids, because it would be hard to mistake even a nine year old for an adult, particularly in a country where young kids go around with their heads uncovered, and don’t have beards, while adult males generally wear head coverings, and have full beards. But killing kids is part of the deal in America’s war in Afghanistan. Even in Iraq, 12 year olds were being classified by the US military (in contravention of the Geneva Conventions) as being “combat age,” for example in the assault on the city of Fallujah.
Let’s also be clear that this slaughter of nine Afghan children is the ugly reality behind Gen. Petraeus’s supposed policy of “protecting civilians.” Here’s a number that tells the true story about that policy: since Gen. Petraeus assumed command after the ousting of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, US airstrikes in Afghanistan have gone up by 172%. That’s not counting attacks by remote-controlled, missile-firing drone aircraft, which are also up by a huge amount. Those air-strikes and drone attacks are notoriously deadly for civilians–far more so than ground attacks, but of course they have the advantage for our “heroes” in uniform of reducing the number of US casualties in this hugely one-sided conflict.
There are so many aspects to this story that are disturbing, it’s hard to know what’s worse. Clearly we are deliberately murdering kids in Afghanistan, and this particular incident is just an example we know about. The men who did this will hopefully pay for their crimes by living with their guilt, but hopefully there will be an honest investigation and proper punishment too by military authorities (I’m not holding my breath). Petraeus and his boss, Commander in Chief Obama, should also be called to account and punished for implementing a war plan that calls for this kind of brutal slaughter of civilians.
But the US media are also guilty here. How can Americans reach proper conclusions about this obscene war against one of the poorest peoples in the world if our supposedly “fair and balanced” media simply perform the role of Pentagon propagandist, running Defense Department press releases as if they were news reports?
The blood of these poor Afghan kids is smeared not just on the hands of Obama and the generals, and the soldiers who pull the triggers and push the buttons that unleash death, but on the desks and keyboards of American newsrooms that cover up their crimes.
Blackmailing dissent: you’re either with Obama or you’re with the Tea Party
By Luciana Bohne | Intrepid Report | March 8, 2011
The Manichean heresy in early Christianity (Augustine had been a youthful adherent) divided the world into an earthly battleground of spiritual warfare between Satan and God, who shared power equally over the fate of humanity.
An example of late-Manichean thinking was typified by President Bush’s paranoically inane rallying call to choose between the terrorists and his governing clique in the aftermath of the massacre of civilians on 9/11, perpetrated by an ideological group spawned by the West’s secret services in the 1980s.
Because the United States has only two parties, both championing business interests, Manichaean thinking is second nature to the American electorate. You’re either with educated, enlightened humanitarian Democrats or you’re with the fascistic, racist Republicans, from the liberal point of view. Conversely, from the conservative point of view, you’re either with tradition, custom, and the tested way as a Republican or you’re with the bleeding-hearted, budget-wasting, morally lax, socialist Democrats.
This either/or proposition obviates the need for thought and makes voting a matter of choosing between good and evil. More sophisticated Americans resign themselves to voting for the lesser of two evils—which, in the end, is voting for evil. Thus, American elections have become an exercise in political neurosis. For example, in historically racially scarred America, the blackness of a presidential candidate was an irresistible lure to liberals, suffering from an irritable—and in their view—undeserved sense of guilt and shame. Conversely, the candidate’s blackness served to release the vilest resentments of misled know-nothings who gravitate to the more vermin-infested folds of the increasingly moldy conservative party, rabid with the success of a one-sided, bi-partisan, 30-year-long class war
It doesn’t take genius to figure out who benefits from Manichaeism in America—the business interests. They very cleverly support and fund now the Republican candidate, now the Democrat. Makes no difference to them whether a candidate is a Democrat or a Republican so long as he (or the much-awaited she) transfers the public wealth into private hands, depresses taxes on the wealthy, slashes social services, gives grotesque subsidies and handouts to banks and corporations, and carries out the seizure of markets, cheap labor, and resources abroad through domino-effect imperialist wars that transform America into the economic equivalent of whichever third-world country the elite are militarily devastating.
The promotion of Obama to the presidency of the United States by the financial aristocracy, let’s be honest, was a stroke of genius. Just as Clinton, a poor boy from Arkansas, was launched to wage war on the poor, so Obama, an eager and willing black American with the conveniently or inconveniently Muslim-sounding name, depending on one’s allegiance to identity politics, was installed to continue the imperial wars against the blackish populations of the world, while, of course, sustaining the pauperization of working Americans, black and white, at home, which Clinton, in the manner of Reagan, had done so much to secure.
Now you see why, in my liberal circles, thinking like mine sounds like the ravings of a tea-partier. If you have nothing to fall back on but a Manichean thinking equipment, where do you place a view that dissents from either the Republican or the Democrat cookie-cutter model of neatly dividing the lumpy, malformed dough of American politics into “us” and “them”? Where but against the wall? Garden-variety liberal Democrats I know have taken to calling themselves “progressives,” which leaves me no room from which to argue for ending the wars; demanding respect for international and national law in the matter of torture, rendition, and the closing down of Guantanamo; protesting against the extension of Bush’s tax law, giving breaks to the rich that devastate our communities; pointing out that there is a connection between the war on American workers and the wars abroad that consume masses of public wealth for the greed of the military-industrial-financial complex?
Divided they stand, Democrats and Republicans, united by forces they refuse to identify in the pursuit of self-destruction within the unfolding disaster that is America’s future. What can one do but resign oneself to being called names? It’s the only power either constituency has at present.
Why is Hillary Not Defending the Rights of Saudis to Protest?
By Eric Blair |Activist Post | March 8, 2011
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been exhaustively in front of cameras promoting the right for people to protest in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, and Libya. She’s been touting the freedom to use social networking sites as a way for Arab people to organize against their oppressive regimes. Now, the Administration is even considering arming the opposition in Libya.
Clinton’s perpetual propaganda efforts exposed her blatant hypocrisy when a silent peaceful protester was violently removed from one of her recent speeches on the very subject. However, the hypocrisy now seems to go much deeper in her deafening silence over the prospect for protests in Saudi Arabia.
After Human Rights Watch revealed that a nationwide “Day of Rage” protest had been planned in Saudi Arabia for this week, March 11th, Bloomberg reported that the Saudi government claims that demonstrations and marches are “strictly” prohibited by law. A Saudi Interior Ministry official said protests “contradict Islamic values” and “They harm public interest, infringe on the rights of others, spread chaos and lead to bloodshed.”
This prohibition of popular dissent proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Saudi Arabia is indeed the most tyrannical authoritarian regime in the Arab world. Yet, U.S. Administration officials have been strangely silent about supporting the people’s uprising there. Perhaps they think the protests won’t be large enough to warrant a response. Well, that certainly didn’t stop their best propaganda push to stoke the puny protests in Iran, so the size or ferocity of unrest shouldn’t matter to their exploits of supposedly backing human freedom. And one would think that given what has happened to oil prices due to the unrest in Libya and Egypt, even a minor protest in the largest oil-producing dictatorship in the world would draw more public response from the White House.
Or perhaps the Administration believes that the hastily-crafted $35 billion social aid package ordered by King Abdullah will be enough to tamp down escalating tensions in Saudi Arabia. So far, there have only been reports of small Shiite protests in Saudi Arabia, mostly demanding the release of political prisoners held by the Sunni monarchy.
These protests would seem to be very minor in comparison to the sea of people revolting in Cairo. However, the revolutionary whispers must clearly be getting louder as the Saudi stock market plummeted 11% in just two days of wild trading to its 7-year low on fears of civil unrest. It’s noteworthy that the plunge was reportedly led by large banks and insurers.
If Clinton is to stand by her new-found rhetoric, certainly she’ll call for restraint on the part of the Saudi government should a protest erupt, right? And surely she’ll demand that the kings of Internet censorship in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, will open communication channels so the people can freely unite, right? And if push comes to shove in Saudi Arabia, she’ll definitely support arming the people’s opposition to the royal family, right? Eh hum . . . don’t count on it.
Regardless, many analysts believe the Saudi regime is the next to fall with or without the prodding of the U.S.
Stay out of Libya
“Despite media reports of Libyan aircraft attacking rebel areas, the Pentagon has not confirmed any air attacks.” – Adm. Mike Mullen
By Sheldon Richman | March 4, 2011
It’s good to see that the Pentagon is unenthusiastic about military intervention in Libya. But that hasn’t stopped armchair generals such as Sen. John Kerry from pushing for a no-fly zone over that country.
Kerry thinks he can make his plan more appealing by couching it in internationalist terms, but we know the American people would bear the brunt of the burden. Kerry is joined by Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain, the Senate’s two most obnoxious militarists. Regarding the military’s reluctance to take on another country, McCain said, “[They] always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can.”
Maybe the Pentagon is acknowledging something that McCain, Kerry, and Lieberman seem to ignore: They are calling for war on a country that has not attacked the United States. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates criticized the discussion about a no-fly zone as “loose talk.” He added, “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down.”
Gates’s cautionary language is welcome after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s and President Obama’s press secretary had referred to U.S. action as a live option. In typical Clinton fashion, the secretary said, “We are taking no option off the table so long as the Libyan government continues to turn its guns on its own people.” Really? No option? Does that include a full-scale invasion? How about tactical nuclear weapons? Drones armed with Hellfire missiles have been particularly effective at killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Are they on the table too?
Gates was not alone in his warning. Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and other officials said that taking out Libya’s air and missile defenses would be no small operation; hundreds of airplanes would be needed. Gates said he was advised that a no-fly zone “requires more airplanes than you would find on a single aircraft carrier.” It would be, he said, a “big operation in a big country.”
None of that stopped the Senate from unanimously passing a resolution prodding the UN Security Council to take up the question of a no-fly zone. And two U.S. amphibious warships were headed to Libya through the Suez Canal, supposedly for humanitarian purposes. But they aren’t called “warships” for nothing.
For all the bluster about a no-fly zone, it’s not quite clear what difference it would make. Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi is using ground forces primarily to battle rebels trying to drive him from power. According to the Associated Press, “Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that despite media reports of Libyan aircraft attacking rebel areas, the Pentagon had not confirmed any air attacks.”
So a no-fly zone would be little more than symbolic. But it could be a costly symbol. Mullen cautioned against underestimating Libya’s air defenses. Moreover, establishing a no-fly zone would be an act of war, with consequences no one can foresee. Haven’t we had enough of American politicians, sitting safely in their seats of power, sending young people off to war?
The case against U.S. intervention in Libya, however, goes beyond the prudential. There is no doubt that Qaddafi is a brutal and now desperate dictator willing to send mercenaries to mow down civilians seeking freedom from his iron grip. But that does not justify U.S. intervention, which would require the taxpayers to finance yet another open-ended military operation in the Arab and Muslim world. Regardless of how Obama and Clinton would intend the operation, the rest of the world would see it in the context of the long U.S. imperial record in the Middle East.
American presidents have sought to police the globe for generations. What has it gotten us? Endless war abroad, and big government and economic hardship at home. Instead of being a beacon of liberty, the country is a symbol of militarism and death. Obama, the fraudulent peace advocate, has followed the same interventionist course. He should not be allowed to extend it to Libya.
The Incalculable Cost of War
Shooting Children, One After Another
By KATHY KELLY | CounterPunch | March 4, 2011
Recent polls suggest that while a majority of U.S. people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3% took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war and its cost, though clear to them and clearly related to the economy in their thinking, was a far less pressing concern.
U.S. people, if they do read or hear of it, may be shocked at the apparent unconcern of the crews of two U.S. helicopter gunships, which attacked and killed nine children on a mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kumar province, shooting them “one after another” this past Tuesday March 1st. (“The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting.” (NYT 3/2/11)).
Four of the boys were seven years old; three were eight, one was nine and the oldest was twelve. “The children were gathering wood under a tree in the mountains near a village in the district,” said Noorullah Noori, a member of the local development council in Manogai district. “I myself was involved in the burial,” Noori said. “Yesterday we buried them.” (AP, March 2, 2011) General Petraeus has acknowledged, and apologized for, the tragedy.
He has had many tragedies to apologize for just counting Kunar province alone. Last August 26th, in the Manogai district, Afghan authorities accused international forces of killing six children during an air assault on Taliban positions. Provincial police chief Khalilullah Ziayee said a group of children were collecting scrap metal on the mountain when NATO aircraft dropped bombs to disperse Taliban fighters attacking a nearby base. “In the bombardment six children, aged six to 12, were killed,” the police commander said. “Another child was injured.”
In the Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, Zekirullah, a young Afghan friend of mine, age 15, rises at 2:00 a.m. several mornings each week and rides his donkey for six hours through the pre-dawn to reach a mountainside where he can collect scrub brush and twigs which he loads on the donkey in baskets. Then he heads home and stacks the wood – on top of his family’s home – to be taken down later and burned for heat. They don’t have electrical appliances to heat the home, and even if they did the villagers only get electricity for two hours a day, generally between 1:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m. Families rely on their children to collect fuel for heat during the harsh winters and for cooking year round. Young laborers, wanting to help their families survive, mean no harm to the United States. They’re not surging at us: they’re not insurgents. They’re not doing anything to threaten us. They are children, and children anywhere are like children everywhere: they’re children like our own.
Sadly, more and more of us in America are getting used to the idea of child poverty – and even child labor – as our own economy sinks further under the burden of our latest nine years of war, of two billion dollars per week we spend creating poverty abroad that we can then emulate at home. Things are getting bad here, but in Afghanistan, children are bombed. Their bodies are casually dismembered and strewn by machines already lost in the horizon as the limbs settle. They lie in pools of blood until family members realize, one by one, that their children are not late in returning home but in fact never will.
In October and again in December of 2010, our small delegation of Voices for Creative Nonviolence activists met with a large family living in a wretched refugee camp. They had fled their homes in the San Gin district of the Helmand Province after a drone attack killed a mother there and her five children. The woman’s husband showed us photos of his children’s bloodied corpses. His niece, Juma Gul, age 9, had survived the attack. She and I huddled next to each other inside a hut made of mud on a chilly December morning. Juma Gul’s father stooped in front of us and gently unzipped her jacket, showing me that his daughter’s arm had been amputated by shrapnel when the U.S. missile hit their home in San Gin.
Next to Juma Gul was her brother, whose leg had been mangled in the attack. He apparently has no access to adequate medical care and experiences constant pain. The pilot of the attacking drone, perhaps controlling it from as far away as Creech Air Force Base here in the United States, knows nothing of this family or of the pain that he or she helped inflict. Nor do the commanders, the people who set up the base, the people who pay for it with their taxes, and the people who persist in electing candidates intent on indefinitely prolonging the war.
But sometimes the war is like it was this past Tuesday March 1st. Sometimes the issue is right in front of us – as it was to those helicopter crews – it’s up close so there can be no mistake as to what we are doing. According to the election polls we see the cost of war, dimly, but, as with the helicopter crews, it doesn’t affect – or prevent – our decisions. Afterward we deplore the tragedy; we make a pretense of acknowledging the cost of war, but it is incalculable. We can’t hope to count it. We actually, finally, have to stop making people like the nine children who died on March 1st, pay it.
~
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has worked closely with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. She is the author of Other Lives, Other Dreams published by CounterPunch / AK Press. She can be reached at: Kathy@vcnv.org
Liberals as Latter-Day Neocons
The Change We Still Need
By JAMES ZOGBY | CounterPunch | March 2, 2011
When speaking about the Arab uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond, the language used here in the US is euphoric. Expressions like “nothing will ever be the same again” and “the existing order is being swept away” are common. But when the conversation comes home, the exuberant rhetoric is pushed aside and hard-nosed practicality becomes the order of the day. “The president had no choice,” the pundits said. “He had to veto. Republicans would have pounced on him and the pro-Israel crowd would have made his life miserable.” This is the accepted wisdom.
It is, of course, always easier to discuss what other countries and their leaders must do than it is to face up to the hard realities of what must be done in one’s own backyard. At the same time, though, it is a bit brazen, and even bizarre, that we can be so blind to the stark contradiction between what we advocate for others and what we fail to do for ourselves. But this is what is taking place.
Right now in commentaries the Bush crowd is crowing, “We were right”, finding new justification in their past promotion of democracy — ignoring, of course, the utter hypocrisy of their overall approach to the region. They gave lip-service to democracy, to be sure, but then they led America into two deadly and failed wars (both of which they wrongly projected would usher in democratic change); turned a blind eye as Israel ravaged Palestinians and the Lebanese; and instituted the wide-spread use of profiling, prolonged detentions without due process, and prisoner abuse, all of which they pressured Arab allies to support.
The net result was a roiling of Arab public opinion and a delegitimising of some Arab leaders who had befriended America, making them more vulnerable and less receptive to proceed on the path of reform. Then, after strong electoral performances by hardline religious parties in several countries, the Bush administration, not liking the outcome, shelved their democracy rhetoric.
More disturbing than this irritatingly predictable neo-conservative effort to rewrite history and hijack the Arab uprising is the fact that many liberals can find no more creative response to these Arab uprisings than to become latter-day “neo-cons” themselves.
All this posturing ignores several uncomfortable truths. America’s favourable ratings across the Arab world are back to Bush- era lows and the post-Cairo optimism that America would change its approach to the region has all but evaporated. America, it bears repeating, is not unpopular amongst many Arabs because we have supported their leaders; rather it is some Arab leaders who have become unpopular because they have supported our policies. We were, in a real sense, not in the game, having long ago dealt ourselves out. In their efforts to make change in their own countries, Tunisians and Egyptians weren’t looking to us. This was their movement, not ours.
There is a real danger that in this moment of crisis we will either learn the wrong lessons, or learn no lessons at all. What is required now is to recognise the degree to which our failed policies of the past have alienated Arab public opinion, undercut our stated values, and put at risk those who sought to be our friends.
At a critical moment in the midst of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King delivered his “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam”. In this speech he said “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values … A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of our past and present policies.” This challenge is as true today as it was then.
Unless our political leaders can put aside “politics as usual” and end their callous disregard for the suffering of Palestinians; unless leaders are willing to challenge their political fears and do what is right, instead of what is convenient; unless we can stand up against the Islamophobes who threaten to tear apart the fabric of our nation; unless we can restore our commitment to fundamental freedoms and constitutional protections; and unless we can stop ignoring Arab concerns and truly listen to what Arab voices are telling us about their needs and aspirations, we will continue to operate clumsily, and at times brutally, on the wrong side of history.
As Arabs seek change at home, the challenge we face is to question how we can bring real change to America and to the way America deals with the Arab world and its people. This is what Barack Obama promised when he said that he would lead the effort to “change Washington” and, in the process, “change America and change the world”. This is still the change we need. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet.
James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute.
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From the Archives
A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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