On Tuesday, the US Air Force successfully intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile target over the Pacific Ocean during a test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said in a press release. US officials, however, will continue to evaluate the GMD’s performance based upon telemetry and other data acquired during the test, the release added.
“We have been told repeatedly since the 1950s that a successful missile defense is just around the corner,” Professor of neuroscience and political commentator John Walsh told Sputnik. “And it was true each time, because each time Raytheon and others made a bundle from it.”
However, that was the only kind of “success” that was ever achieved, Walsh recalled.
“Since no ‘missile defense’ will ever be perfect, how many cities is a president willing to give up if he starts a nuclear war?” he asked.
Even a relatively small and marginally effective nuclear armed missile was too risky to attack in any attempt at any preemptive strike, Walsh observed.
“But even if our presidents sensibly restrain themselves, something that I doubt… there can be accidents and our hubris may yet wipe us out,” he cautioned.
University of Pittsburgh Professor of International Relations Michael Brenner told Sputnik that no ballistic missile defense system anywhere could guarantee certain defense against even a handful of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear or thermonuclear warheads.
“Ever since Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) first was thought about seriously in the 1960s, it could not counter one cardinal truth. No one will ever launch nuclear weapons in the uncertain belief/hope that they have come up with a way to defend themselves 100 percent against retaliation,” Brenner claimed.
However, as a corollary, no one would cavalierly do something that could lead to nuclear exchanges, Brenner acknowledged.
The US armed forces announced that its interceptor rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California struck the warhead which was fired from a US site in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The latest test comes at a time of increasing tension between the United States and North Korea, which US defense officials say is making rapid progress toward developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given an interview with France’s Le Figaro in which he said that Russia had “no special expectations” about the election of US President Donald Trump.
Putin then described how a US President can often have his ideals totally crushed by what is known as the deep state upon entering the White House. Putin likened Trump’s inability to implement his desire to change US policy towards Russia with Barack Obama’s failure to shut down the still operational Guantanamo Bay prison camp in spite of campaigning on the pledge to shut it down.
Putin stated,
“When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits… These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes”.
Putin told the French media outlet that the situation of a President being constrained by the existing deep state power structure is uniquely American stating,
“Can you imagine France or Russia acting this way? This would have been a disaster. But it is possible in the United States and continues to this day”.
Of course, France doesn’t need a domestic deep state to constrain its elected leaders, that’s what NATO and the EU is for, something Putin implied during his press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.
President Putin did however express continued signs of optimism when it comes to Trump the man, as opposed to Trump the leader compromised by the US deep state. Putin said that he appreciated Trump’s “pragmatic and understandable approach” to NATO and also stated that, “… I am cautiously optimistic, and I think that we can and should be able to reach agreements on key issues”.
Putin then turned to the continued Russiagate fiasco saying
“As President Trump once said, and I think that he was totally right when he said it could have been someone sitting on their bed or somebody intentionally inserted a flash drive with the name of a Russian national, or something like that”.
Putin then turned to Trump’s opponents, echoing Trump’s words that the entire ‘Russian hacking’ allegations stem from the Democrats’ inability to admit that they ran a disastrous campaign,
“They are absolutely reluctant to admit this, and prefer deluding themselves and others into thinking it was not their fault, that their policy was correct, they did all the right things, but someone from the outside thwarted them. But it was not so. They just lost and they have to admit it”.
Putin said the simple fact is that Trump was “closer to the people and better understood what ordinary voters want”, something Putin ought to understand as he has won many more elections than Hillary Clinton ever has done.
Putin lamented the fact that the Russiagate domestic scandal in the US has created a harmful international relations environment but ended on a more circumspect note, saying,
“But it will pass, everything passes and this will pass as well”.
Ironically, this year’s Left Forum is called “The Resistance.” But it seems that what America’s largest leftist conference is resistant to is free speech. And integrity.
This article was going to be about three “Deep State” panels, focusing in particular on 9/11 and false flag terrorism, being banned earlier this month because of just two letters of “complaint” that targeted individual speakers with ad hominem attacks, alleging the speakers to be “anti-Semitic,” “Holocaust deniers,” and (the real kiss of death) “conspiracy theorists.”
But just as I was about to post the article, and just four days before the event is to start (it runs June 2-4 at John Jay College in New York City), the Left Forum informed these same organizers that a fourth of their panels, ironically the one on the topic of “thought crimes,” has also been given the boot based on a threat by an unidentified German organization to pull out of the conference if Professor Anthony Hall of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada is allowed to speak. (Hall was the subject of a previous post on Truth and Shadowshere, which also addresses other examples of Zionist attacks on academic freedom and free speech.)
Others who are scheduled to be part of the panel include Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition who was fired from Oberlin College in Ohio for posts she made on Facebook charging that Israel and Zionists were behind 9/11 and the Charlie Hebdo event; and activist Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, who was arrested at an event in Kansas City after attempting to ask a second question to author and diplomat Dennis Ross about the use of state-sponsored terrorism by the U.S. and Israel.
The organizers of the four banned panels, and a fifth that was accepted by the Forum, have decided to create their own event, appropriately called the “Left Out Forum” that will allow them to go ahead with their panels on Sunday, June 4 at an as yet undisclosed location (organizers are afraid that pressure will be brought to bear on the owners of the alternative venue to cancel that event if the location is released too early). To find out where the venue is in New York, check http://noliesradio.org/archives/130703 on June 2. These panels will be live streamed by No Lies Radio.
The Left Forum is offering the wrong kind of “resistance”
Left Forum co-director Marcus Graetsch informed the organizers of the banned panels that the German organization is accusing Hall of being a Holocaust denier. (These organizers have asked that their names not be included in this article to avoid the harassment by Zionist “activists” that others have been subjected to.) Hall, who is currently fighting his suspension by the University of Lethbridge, is not a Holocaust denier. He believes, quite correctly, that any historical subject should be open for discussion and debate.
Graetsch wrote: “a big german [sic] organization Left Forum has worked together with many years said they will withdraw panels etc. when Anthony Hall speaks at Left Forum, he is a Holocaust denier. The board and the staff of Left Forum will act now and cancel the panel ‘Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police’”
The other co-director, Ashley Abbott, followed this email with one of her own:
“And to elaborate, hundreds of people contacted us. This prompted us to do further research and upon doing so, we (the board and staff) agree that a panel featuring Anthony Hall should not occur at Left Forum.”
It took just two letters to get three panels banned initially, but the fourth resulted from “hundreds” of complaints about Hall. Of course we only have their word for this. I find it virtually impossible to believe that “hundreds” of complaints could be received unless all were co-ordinated by the same organization. Interestingly, it is the panel that has been banned, not the speaker. So, organizers don’t even have the option of bringing in a different speaker.
Both Graetsch and Abbott did not respond to interview requests. Neither did five members of the Left Forum board of directors who I contacted by email.
Here are the four panels being censored:
“9/11 Truth: Ground Zero for a Resistance Movement,” with speakers Kevin Barrett, Richard Gage, and Barbara Honegger. Moderated by Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards.
“Terrorism”: Fake Enemies, Fraudulent Wars,” with speakers Michael Springmann, Anthony Hall, and Patrick Henningsen. Moderated by Tom Kiely.
“False Flags: Staged, Scripted, Mass Psy-Op Events,” with speakers Kevin Barrett, Dave Lindorff, and Ole Dammegard. Moderated by Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards.
“Political Correctness: The Dangers of Thought Crime Police,” with speakers Anthony Hall, Joy Karega, and Jeremy Rothe-Kushel. Moderated by Cheryl Curtiss.
This is the only one of the five panels that has been approved:
“Co-Opting the Left: Infiltration by the Corporate State to Neutralize Resistance,” with speakers Kevin Zeese and Glen Ford. Moderated by Cheryl Curtiss. (June 4 from 12-1:50 p.m. in room 1.91)
The issue arose initially when someone named Stewart Sunshine wrote to the Left Forum on April 3, claiming to be writing “on behalf of a group of New York activists,” although he provided no names other than his own. In his letter he leveled accusations that speakers involved in some of the panels are anti-Semites. He provided a list of profiles of individuals who he objected to in the 2016 conference, although just one was actually among the speakers that had been invited to participate in any of the five panels this year. Sunshine wrote:
“I am writing to you, on behalf of a group of NYC activists, to express our objection to a number of antisemitic conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers who appeared on the ‘Deep State track’ last year. The most well-known of these speakers, Kevin Barrett, bragged on the Far Right website Veterans Today that they had tricked the Left Forum into hosting their speakers…”
Barrett, who hosts the weekly podcast False Flag Weekly News with Anthony Hall, actually called Sunshine to confront him about his accusations, and you can listen to that very entertaining call here. You can also read Barrett’s detailed refutation of Sunshine’s accusations here.
One of the panel organizers responded to the Sunshine letter, writing this:
“Sunshine and his anonymous group target an ever-expanding kitchen sink of activists who challenge their orthodox dogma. Their most radioactive tactic is to smear dissenters with unfair and unaccountable hateful epithets such as ‘neo-Nazi,’ ‘anti-Semite,’ ‘Jew hater’ — gross inflammatory trigger words.”
A second letter of complaint to the Left Forum followed on April 11 from Kai Kieferle of Calgary, Alberta, who wrote this: “I am writing to suggest Kevin Barrett, Anthony Hall, and others of their ilk should not be allowed to participate in the ‘Left Forum’ this year. Hall and Barrett are well understood to be conspiracy theorists relying on deeply anti-Semitic material. Their intellectual credibility is suspect given their nonsensical writings about 9/11, what they call the ‘Zio-American Empire’, and many other topics where they consistently find Jewish people to be responsible for it all.”
Barrett responded in writing to the Left Forum after having the letters forwarded to him: “Kai Kieferle has been stalking and harassing me for years using many false names. He has repeatedly refused to stop contacting me despite my repeated requests. He made a brief, creepy, aggressive, threatening appearance at my talk in Calgary in summer 2015 — spent a few minutes unsuccessfully trying to intimidate me, identifying himself as “Count One,” then fled. I didn’t learn his real name until much later.”
Regrettably, none of this is new for people like Barrett and Hall. In recent years, we have seen many examples of universities—where freedom of speech and critical thinking are supposed to be in great supply — being successfully pressured by Zionists and ardent supporters of Israel. So, we should not be surprised that this conference of “progressive” thinkers would be just as timid and weak-willed that it would ban and censor academics and intellectuals based on intimidation and baseless attacks.
It confirms for us once again that you might get away with discussing 9/11 and false flag operations at a conference like the Left Forum, but if you dare to criticize Zionism and the State of Israel in the process, you’ll find yourself on the outside looking in.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani says the “aggressive and racist” nature of the Israeli regime has always been and will remain a source of threat to the nations in the Middle East and humanity in general.
In a message on Monday, Larijani offered his congratulations to Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, on the 17th anniversary of the liberation of southern Lebanon from the Israeli occupation.
He said resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine from the Israeli occupation.
“The multiple victories of the Islamic resistance [movement] against the Zionist regime (Israel) clearly demonstrate that the lofty aspirations of the Muslim Ummah for the liberation of the occupied Palestinian territories can be achieved only through harmony, solidarity and resistance,” Larijani added.
The top Iranian parliamentarian expressed confidence that unity and solidarity among different Lebanese groups would shape a “bright future” for people in Lebanon and the Islamic resistance movement.
The Israeli regime first invaded Lebanon in 1978 and later escalated the military operation into a full-scale offensive in 1982.
During the 22-year entanglement with Lebanon, the Israeli military took heavy blows from Lebanese resistance fighters and reportedly lost some 900 of its soldiers.
Following the 1982 offensive, known as the First Lebanon War, Tel Aviv refused to leave southern Lebanon and kept its military presence there in defiance of the UN Security Council Resolution 425 that called on the regime to immediately withdraw.
However, the Zionist enemy eventually buckled under the resistance put up by Hezbollah fighters and pulled out its forces from the occupied areas overnight on May 24, 2000, in what observers call a humiliating defeat for the regime in Tel Aviv and a glorious victory for Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s victory also served as a source of inspiration for the Palestinians, who launched their second anti-Israel uprising, known as al-Aqsa Intifada, in the occupied territories only four months after Tel Aviv’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
Addressing the Lebanese nation from the southern city of Hermel on Thursday, Nasrallah said when southern Lebanon was occupied by Israel, no country in the world except Iran and Syria helped end the occupation.
He added that the resistance has grown strong enough not to wait for support from the rest of the world or from inside or outside the country.
For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” John F. Kennedy – Commencement Address at American University, June 10, 1963
If the bullets hadn’t flown, John Fitzgerald Kennedy might have been one hundred years old today. Granted, it’s not likely, put definitely possible. If the parade route hadn’t been changed, and the roof taken off the limousine, and the secret service ordered to stand down, the world would likely be a very different place. If the man had safely negotiated the last 54 years, and was still breathing today, what would he make of this mess?
A war on heroes
The American conscience died with Robert, Martin and John” Perry White, Batman vs. Superman
America, a country on the rise in 1963, is now an Empire in decline. Not just a decline in prestige and power, but a decline in intelligence and quality. Even the thin patina of pretend values has tarnished, as America’s ruling class now lack the imagination to even play-act morality. Even their dreams are limited by their own smallness of mind.
Nixon, for all his paranoia and corruption, at least understood the world he lived in whilst Hillary Clinton was, and is, dangerously out-of-touch with reality. Ronald Reagan was a senile fool, a glorified advertising mascot for mega-corporations, but Trump makes even him seem a polished and educated statesman.
Is this decline deliberate? The acting out of a policy, by unspoken powers, to limit public intelligence, education and discourse? Are we deprived of political heroes to engender apathy? Maybe.
Or maybe it’s a simple byproduct of a corrupt system that encourages stupidity and stamps out individual thought. Where the worst among us are artificially raised above the level of their ability, character and intelligence.
The decline is not just in the people or character of politicians, but understanding and conversation. Political debates are now little more than slanging matches. Morality broken down from a societal set of concrete values, to a relative abstract. Acts are right or wrong depending on who does them, and how, rather than the act itself. Wars of words are fought across the internet, by volunteer forces armed with little more than labels.
The very nature of truth is under threat. The scientific method as a pursuit of truth is abandoned, as science is converted into a quasi-religion. A broad set of consensus truths, the public understanding of which is limited and flawed, but adherence to which is mandatory. Enforced under penalty of banishment.
An empire is falling, and under the weight of a collapsing tyrant, words themselves crumble. College campuses ban speakers in the name of freedom. We are lectured by paid propagandists on the “tyranny” of Free Speech, the “unfairness” of direct democracy. Fascist. Sexist. Racist. Words deprived of meaning and impact by overuse, while true fascism – the unimpeded cooperation of business and state – goes unchecked in practically every corner of the Western world.
This can all be traced back to the systematic removal of our heroes. That war is still carried out in attacks against every man, woman, party or group that tries to speak up for high-mindedness, encourage societal cooperation, or place people higher in priority than profit.
Empires Eat Themselves
I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Martin Scorsese
In a sane world, a just world, psychopathic non-entities like Theresa May would never sniff high-office, and would be condemned to live out their days in middle-management positions at insurance companies. As severe and sadistic deputy head-teachers at private schools. Being traffic wardens. Venting their self-limiting malignity on any unfortunate people who happen into their tiny spheres of influence.
Sadly, this world is never sane and only rarely just.
I have written before about the temptation to view great power, and great evil, as a monolith. There is an assumption that direction and movement require cooperation, and that the corridors of power in Langley and the Pentagon hum with the activity of an ants’ nest. A million minds with one thought and one goal, working with unspoken bonds of purpose.
A less flattering, but more accurate, metaphor might be a swarm of rats in a sewer. Yes, they’re all headed in roughly the same direction, and yes they’re all making the same noises, but there’s no organization, no long-term thinking. Temporarily aligned self-interest is not the same as working together. Ruthless opportunism is not the same as a plan. To us it seems a collective, but to the rats it’s a race.
Psychopaths rise to the top of every power structure eventually. In a game with no rules, those with no morals will always have an edge. A man who will do anything to win has a decided advantage over a man with limitations. That is sadly true, and it’s been used to argue that psychopathy could be the next step in human evolution.
This glamorization of psychopathy is, ironically, a general symptom the degradation of society. We are encouraged to think of morality as “old-fashioned”, a vestigial remnant of the religion we’ve left behind and are likewise supposed to despise. That a free thinking man has no need for the false gods of good and evil.
But Psychopathy is more than a simple disregard for morality. Its lack of recognition of other people’s feelings carries with it a lack of understanding of their experience – meaning psychopaths expect to tell, and get away with, absurd lies. Their inherent narcissism makes them furious when people don’t believe their lies, but unable to learn from the experience. A pathological need to deceive translates into telling lies, when the truth might be more beneficial. They lack impulse control, cannot plan in the long-term and tend toward self-destructive behaviour (drinking, gambling, financial recklessness). They can be superficially charming, but give themselves away with inappropriate emotional reactions.
Think about that list. These are the kind of people in power positions. Barely-there souls driven by goals that aren’t even confinable to simple self-interest, pushed forward by a deranged internal drive toward chaos. Sociopaths and narcissists run the Western world, and have since the US deep-state took a rifle sight to the men that embodied the American conscience, if not before.
Put into this context, the decline of American Empire – both intellectually and morally – makes perfect sense.
When we think about terrorism we most often think about the horrors of a Manchester-like attack, where a radicalized suicide bomber went into a concert hall and killed dozens of innocent civilians. It was an inexcusable act of savagery and it certainly did terrorize the population.
What is less considered are attacks that leave far more civilians dead, happen nearly daily instead of rarely, and produce a constant feeling of terror and dread. These are the civilians on the receiving end of US and allied bombs in places like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Last week alone, US and “coalition” attacks on Syria left more than 200 civilians dead and many hundreds more injured. In fact, even though US intervention in Syria was supposed to protect the population from government attacks, US-led air strikes have killed more civilians over the past month than air strikes of the Assad government. That is like a doctor killing his patient to save him.
Do we really believe we are fighting terrorism by terrorizing innocent civilians overseas? How long until we accept that “collateral damage” is just another word for “murder”?
The one so-called success of the recent G7 summit in Sicily was a general agreement to join together to “fight terrorism.” Have we not been in a “war on terrorism” for the past 16 years? What this really means is more surveillance of innocent civilians, a crackdown on free speech and the Internet, and many more bombs dropped overseas. Will doing more of what we have been doing do the trick? Hardly! After 16 years fighting terrorism, it is even worse than before we started. This can hardly be considered success.
They claim that more government surveillance will keep us safe. But the UK is already the most intrusive surveillance state in the western world. The Manchester bomber was surely on the radar screen. According to press reports, he was known to the British intelligence services, he had traveled and possibly trained in bomb-making in Libya and Syria, his family members warned the authorities that he was dangerous, and he even flew terrorist flags over his house. What more did he need to do to signal that he may be a problem? Yet somehow even in Orwellian UK, the authorities missed all the clues.
But it is even worse than that. The British government actually granted permission for its citizens of Libyan background to travel to Libya and fight alongside al-Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi. After months of battle and indoctrination, it then welcomed these radicalized citizens back to the UK. And we are supposed to be surprised and shocked that they attack?
The real problem is that both Washington and London are more interested in regime change overseas than any blowback that might come to the rest of us back home. They just do not care about the price we pay for their foreign policy actions. No grand announcement of new resolve to “fight terrorism” can be successful unless we understand what really causes terrorism. They do not hate us because we are rich and free. They hate us because we are over there, bombing them.
The US media has been paying increasing attention to the unfolding crisis in the South American nation of Venezuela. As the US media has done elsewhere, it is attempting to portray the unfolding crisis as a result of a corrupt dictatorship fighting against a “pro-democracy” opposition.
In reality, it is simply a repeat of US-driven regime change aimed at toppling Venezuela’s independent state institutions and replacing them with institutions created by and for US special interests.
The “opposition” is comprised of US-backed political parties and US-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) many of which are listed on the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) website.
… observers of the region point out that the US has a long history of seeking to interfere in the politics of Venezuela, as well as elsewhere in Latin America.
In addition to supporting those who ousted Mr Chavez in 2002, the US poured hundreds of thousands of dollars to his opponents via the so-called National Endowment for Democracy.
To understand America’s actual role amid Venezuela’s unfolding crisis, one must read policy papers produced by organizations called “think tanks” which devise and promote US policy.
The Brookings Institution is a Fortune 500-funded policy think tank. It is populated by policymakers who represent the collective ambitions of some of the world’s most powerful corporate-financier interests including big-oil, defense, agricultural monopolies, pharmaceutical corporations, media interests, and more.
Some of the Brookings Institution’s corporate-financier sponsors
Brookings and think tanks similar to it, have regularly produced policy and media guidelines later disseminated across the Western media and Western legislatures through public relations firms and lobbyists. Think tanks are where the real agenda of the West is agreed upon and promoted from.
A recent piece featured upon the Brookings Institution’s website titled, “Venezuela: A path out of crisis,” lays out a 5-point plan toward escalating Venezuela’s already precarious situation (emphasis added):
1. The United States could expand its assistance to countries that until now have been dependent on Venezuelan oil, as a means to decrease regional support for and dependence on the Maduro government.
2. The United States could increase monetary assistance to credible civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations able to deliver food and medicines to Venezuelans. By doing so, the United States should make clear that international pressure aims to support democracy, not punish the Venezuelan people.
3. The United States could support efforts by the opposition in Venezuela to build an “off-ramp” that would split moderate elements of the government away from hardliners, encouraging the former to acquiesce to a transition to democracy by lowering their costs of exiting government.
4. The United States could coordinate with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to offer financial incentives for holding free and fair elections in 2018, and for the opposition to unify and compete in those elections. Such coordination would also involve developing and publicizing a credible plan to restart Venezuela’s economy.
5. As a last resort, the United States could consider raising economic costs to the government through an expanded sanctions regime that aims to limit Venezuelan earnings from oil exports and block further financing.This policy is risky, given that the Maduro government would be able to more credibly shift blame for the economic crisis onto the United States, and should be accompanied by well-publicized efforts to deliver humanitarian aid through credible civil society and nongovernmental organizations.
It is a prescription for further economic isolation, US-funded political subversion, and with its reference to “a transition to democracy,” an oblique call for regime change.
The US media – particularly organizations operating from under right cover – have portrayed Venezuela’s economic crisis as primarily related to “socialism” and corruption. In reality, factors that would have only impeded the full realization of Venezuela’s economic progress have been intentionally compounded through US sanctions, economic sabotage, and political subversion to precipitate the currently unfolding socioeconomic and humanitarian crisis.
Venezuela would not be the first nation the US targeted for economic implosion in South America.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its own online archives available to the public under a section titled, “CIA Activities in Chile,” would admit (emphasis added):
According to the Church Committee report, in their meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell on 15 September 1970 President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, directed the CIA to prevent Allende from taking power. They were “not concerned [about the] risks involved,” according to Helms’ notes. In addition to political action, Nixon and Kissinger, according to Helms’s notes, ordered steps to “make the economy scream.”
These Cold War attitudes persisted into the Pinochet era. After Pinochet came to power, senior policymakers appeared reluctant to criticize human rights violations, taking to task US diplomats urging greater attention to the problem. US military assistance and sales grew significantly during the years of greatest human rights abuses. According to a previously released Memorandum of Conversation, Kissinger in June 1976 indicated to Pinochet that the US Government was sympathetic to his regime, although Kissinger advised some progress on human rights in order to improve Chile’s image in the US Congress.
With violence increasing in the streets of Venezuela and many of the rhetorical tactics used to set the stage for violent regime change and humanitarian catastrophe in Libya and Syria are now being used to topple the government in Caracas – the world must get ahead of the propaganda and begin exposing this open conspiracy against yet another sovereign nation.
Venezuela’s political system is for the Venezuelan people themselves to decide – without US interference. A government dominated by US-backed opposition members will leave Venezuela as an extension of US corporate-financier special interests, not an alternative or check against them. This only serves in inviting further abuse by these interests not only in South America, but all around the world – Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine for example – where America’s unwarranted wealth and influence is sowing instability, conflict, and catastrophe.
Partially in response to the polarizing presidency of Mr. Trump, and also, I think, in response to a desire to reach the “right” results, there has been an increasing tendency in the United States to try and limit free speech. In earlier generations, the left was more in favour of free speech and the right was more willing to suppress it (eg, the flag burning and pornography cases).
Now this seems to be a tactic favoured by many without regard to political affiliation, although of course, the speech they would choose to suppress may be quite different. Two recent examples come to mind, the treatment of demonstrators at Trump rallies and the treatment of Charles Murray at Middlebury College. Why listen and engage when you can simply attribute words to the other side and then oppose them?
The edges of free speech have always been difficult, that is, commercial speech limitations (for instance commercial false advertising or ‘news’ articles that are really advertisements) or free speech that includes or directly incites prohibited actions (throwing a bottle at a policeman conveys speech, but is still prohibited). But the opposition to free expression I’m trying to get at here is not a within such difficult categories.
My brilliant young friend, who has a PhD in physics, challenged me, “I am outcome driven,” she said. “I don’t want people to preach against vaccines when the outcome may be that children die.” I tend to agree with her about vaccines, but I would not attempt to silence those who disagree.
First. I would have no idea what would be a reasonable way to prohibit speech I don’t like. Should the police track down these people and arrest them? Do our jails need more prisoners who have committed a nonviolent crime? Should we hold internet sites responsible for all speech? This seems to lead inevitably into a discussion of anonymity and government intrusion.
Second. Who should determine what is ok speech? The government? Trump? Obama? The FBI? The NSA? Scientists? Or only scientists who opposed using their gifts to create nuclear weapons?
Third. The outliers are sometimes right. Dr Kevorkian forced this country to consider assisted suicide. He earned the name ‘Dr Death’ from his campaign to use death row prisoners as voluntary experiments for various medical procedures. By any standard he was an odd and unappealing character. But he managed to force us to confront a difficult issue and think about how we wanted to handle it.
The anti vaccine people funded scientific research into vaccines and potential causes of autism and those studies disproved the link. Just because autism manifests itself around the time children are vaccinated does not mean vaccines cause autism, but it was not an unreasonable hypothesis. And the autism studies partially so-provoked found a surprising link to paternal and maternal age that proved more promising. So even if you disagree with them, they ultimately may have helped push us to forward.
Fourth. No reasonable person likes the idea of name calling or so-called hate speech.The problem is that hate speech is difficult to define, even if we knew how to enforce prohibitions. Can a pink person claim to hate all pink people? In a private conversation? In an e mail? On a sign at a demonstration? On the pink people’s website? On his own website? What if the pink person is criticizing other pink people in an attempt to improve them? Do the same rules apply when a purple person criticizes pink people? Does it matter whether purple or pink people constitute the dominant culture?
This is not purely theoretical. The US government and New York State (among others) have, at various times, tried to prohibit speech against Israel as anti Semitic. (They did this by prohibiting state funding or business with any group thatadvocated boycotting Israel saying that such advocacy was “abusing Jewish students.”) Like many, but perhaps not most Americans, I do not see the two as the same. Israel is a foreign country and Jews are an ethnic group in the United States and elsewhere. In this case, by trying to prohibit constitutionally protected hate speech, New York is clearly denouncing political speech as well. And it does prompt the question, do we now attempt to stop ‘hate’ speech against all groups? Why this group?
In the Netherlands, a country that attempts to limit ‘hate’ speech, Siegfried Verbeke was convicted for simply publishing Robert Faurisson’s 1978 work questioning the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank. The court stated that, “By raising doubts as to the authenticity of the diary within the context of REVISIONISM …the brochure far exceeds the limits of what is acceptable within the framework of freedom of expression.” The court did not dispute the truth of the research, the legal problem was the context of hate.
And how can it be otherwise? Speech occurs within a context, and often that context includes advocating a political position. This is different than a clerk who insists she is exercising her freedom by refusing to grant marriage licenses to gay people or election officials who try to make it difficult for Blacks to vote. The clerk and the election officials are free to say what they want (so long as what they say does not impede the ability of others trying to exercise their rights), but they are obliged to obey the laws whether they like them or not, as we all are.
I would hope that ‘the marketplace of ideas’ would ultimately serve to help us discard ideas that are dangerous or wrong. If not, to the extent that we are a democracy, we have agreed to live with the decisions of the majority BUT with the most important of protections, the bill of rights. It is worth reminding ourselves that the bill of rights was specifically designed to protect minorities from the will of majorities. There is a reason freedom of speech appears in the first amendment. There are limits to the extent we are allowed to police each other.
Americans are blessed that we have a first amendment. Although it has been imperfectly and sporadically protected, it is there at least as an aspiration.
“But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell, in his brilliant proposed preface to Animal Farm. Sadly, usually omitted from the book.
With astounding precision, Donald Trump zeroed in on the worst possible Middle East policy option in his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and made it his own. He rebuffed the efforts of Iran’s newly elected moderate government to open up communications with the West and instead deepened America’s alliances with decrepit autocratic regimes across the Persian Gulf.
Turning up his nose at Iran — a rising young power — he embraced Saudi Arabia, which is plainly on its last legs. It was a remarkable display — rather like visiting a butcher shop and passing up a fresh steak for one that’s rancid and smelly and buzzing with flies.
Saudi Arabia is not just any tired dictatorship with an abysmal human-rights record but one of the most spectacularly dysfunctional societies in history. It takes in half a billion dollars a day in oil revenue, yet is so profligate that it could run out of money in half a decade. It sits atop 18 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, yet is so wasteful that, at current rates, it will become a net importer by the year 2030.
Its king travels with a thousand-person retinue wherever he goes while his son, Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, plunked down $550 million not long ago when a 440-foot yacht caught his eye in the south of France. Yet this pair of royal kleptocrats dares preach austerity at a time when as much as 25 percent of the population lives on less than $17 a day in trash-strewn Third World slums.
The kingdom accuses Iran of sectarianism yet bans all religions other than Islam, arrests Christians for the “crime” of praying and possessing Bibles, equates atheism with terrorism, and has imposed a state of siege on Shi‘ite Muslims in its own Eastern Province. Although a bit restrained of late, its religious police are notorious for roaming the shopping malls and striking out with canes at anyone violating shari‘a law.
As the English novelist Hilary Mantel (of Wolf Hall fame) recalled of the four years she spent in the kingdom with her geologist husband, it was impossible to know what might arouse their ire: “it might be the flashing denim legs of a Filipina girl revealed for a second beneath an abaya gone adrift, or it might be the plate-glass shop front of a business that, as the evening prayer call spiraled through the damp air-conditioned halls, had failed to slam down its metal shutters fast enough. What were the rules? No one knew.”
Saudi Arabia also denounces terrorism at every turn even though its funding groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS (also known as ISIL and Islamic State) is an open secret. In 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained in a diplomatic memo made public by Wikileaks that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” In September 2014, she observed that “Qatar and Saudi Arabia … are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
A few days later, Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard audience that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” (Quote starts at 53:30.)
Arming the Saudis
Rather than fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, the Saudis give them money so that they can wage jihad on religious minorities. Yet this is the country that Trump now calls upon to “drive out the terrorists and extremists,” which is as ludicrous as relying on the KKK to drive out racism. It’s also the country that he hopes will serve as the cornerstone of an “Arab NATO” so that he can sell it more jet fighters and Blackhawk helicopters.
But the Saudi military is already top-heavy with such gear while at the same time so short of infantry that it relies on ill-trained Sudanese mercenaries, scores of whom were reportedly killed in a recent battle in the Red Sea province of Midi in Yemen’s north. This is not surprising since no Saudi in his right mind wants to serve as a foot soldier so that the deputy crown prince can buy another yacht. But more such purchases will only add to the military imbalance while adding more fuel to the broader Middle East conflagration.
So how did this god-awful marriage come about? Is it all Trump’s fault? Or have others contributed to the mess? The answer, of course, is the latter.
Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has contributed to the catastrophe. Roosevelt declared Saudi Arabia a U.S. protectorate while Dwight Eisenhower got it into his head that a corrupt desert monarchy would somehow be useful in the fight against Communism. Worried that it might come under Soviet influence, Jimmy Carter commenced a military buildup in the Persian Gulf that, according to a 2009 Princeton University study, has now surpassed the $10-trillion mark.
Ronald Reagan relied on the Saudis to finance arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and to Jonas Savimbi’s pro-apartheid guerrillas in Angola. George H.W. Bush launched a major war to save the Saudis from the evil Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush and Barack Obama covered up the Saudi role in 9/11, while Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton encouraged them and other Gulf monarchies to fund anti-government rebels in Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. Both Libya and Syria fell to ruin as a consequence as hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to pro-Al Qaeda forces and the flames of Wahhabist terrorism spread ever wider.
Indeed, Donald Trump for a while seemed to augur something different. Rather than praising the kingdom, he denounced it in 2011 as “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism” and asserted, not inaccurately, that it was using “our petro dollars – our very own money – to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people while the Saudis rely on us to protect them.” Once on the campaign trail, he upped the ante by declaring that the Saudis “blew up the World Trade Center” and threatened to block their oil if they didn’t do more to fight ISIS.
Even more disconcertingly – at least to Washington’s endlessly bellicose foreign-policy establishment – Trump dismissed the cherished U.S.-Saudi-neoconservative goal of overthrowing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, arguing that the U.S. should concentrate on fighting ISIS instead.
“I don’t like Assad at all,” Trump declared in his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. “But Assad is killing ISIS, Russia is killing ISIS, and Iran is killing ISIS.” If killing ISIS was the main goal, then it followed that checking the power of the other three could be safely put off to another day.
Prioritizing in this way made a modicum of sense. But it went counter to Official Washington’s self-serving orthodoxy that Assad was somehow in league with the terrorists and that weakening one would undermine the other. Trump’s “Assad is killing ISIS” line thus triggered a firestorm of protest from those “in the know.” Clinton shook her head sadly at Trump’s naiveté while the mainstream U.S. media agreed that Trump didn’t know what he was talking about.
CNN, a division of Time Warner, said the claim was false because “there has been no visible effort by Assad regime forces to go after ISIS.” The Huffington Post, owned by Verizon Communications, wrote that Syria’s “primary focus” was not to go after ISIS, but “to wipe out less radical Syrian rebel groups that pose a larger challenge to Assad because they could be a popular, internationally acceptable alternative to him.”
Another Groupthink
In other words, although it might look to an objective observer that Assad was fighting ISIS, the Washington groupthink held that he really wasn’t; he was somehow on ISIS’s side. Or so such mainstream outlets assured us.
But it was nonsense as IHS Markit, a London analytics firm with extensive aerospace and defense experience, made clear in a subsequent report. Beginning in April 2016, its study of actual field conditions in Syria found that government forces engaged Islamic State in battle two and a half times as often as U.S.-backed forces did. Damascus, for all its faults, was the one doing the heavy lifting, not the United States and its allies.
“Any further reduction in the capability of Syria’s already overstretched forces,” IHS Markit observed, “would reduce their ability to prevent the Islamic State from pushing out of the desert into the more heavily populated western Syria, threatening cities like Homs and Damascus.”
Added a Middle East analyst named Columb Strack: “It is an inconvenient reality that any US action taken to weaken the Syrian government will inadvertently benefit the Islamic State and other jihadist groups.”
Overthrowing Assad, in other words, means clearing a path for ISIS straight through to the presidential palace. This reality is obvious. Yet it is a reality that Official Washington prefers to ignore so it can continue selling Saudi Arabia more military goods.
As a result, Democrats, neocons and the liberal media opened up with a rhetorical artillery barrage when it became apparent that America had someone in the White House who might think differently. Trump, they cried, was a “Siberian candidate”! He was a Kremlin stooge!
The fact that Trump questioned whether overthrowing Assad should be the first priority of the U.S. strategy in Syria was proof that he was in league with Vladimir Putin! Reeling from the onslaught, Trump began to realize that he was in a no-win situation, just as Obama had eight years earlier when he gave Hillary Clinton and her neocon allies control of the State Department.
Bucking Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, a.k.a. “The Blob,” was a losing proposition. The neocons were too powerful. Resistance was pointless. So Trump surrendered to the “truisms” of Official Washington’s foreign-policy elite regarding the Middle East conflicts: Saudi Arabia and its allies: good; Russia, Syria, and Iran: baaaad.
Shoring up his right flank, Trump brought on board standard-issue hawks like Secretary of Defense James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. He launched a raid inside Yemen and bombed a Syrian military air base, earning rave reviews from the press. He invited Saudi Defense Minister Muhammad bin Salman to a lavish White House lunch and then flew to Riyadh to cozy up with his dad, King Salman. Washington Officialdom was pleased. So was Israel.
Trump’s discordant comments on the campaign trail were forgotten as U.S.-Saudi relations settled back into their well-worn groove. The upshot was a record $110-billion arms deal, a sword dance, ritualistic denunciations of terrorists – Saudi-speak for anyone opposed to the royal family – and a good deal of incendiary rhetoric aimed at Tehran.
Where to Now?
The big question now is whether all this tough talk leads to something more substantial. If so, two flashpoints bear watching. One is the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s chief entry point for humanitarian aid and, according to the Saudis, for Iranian military aid to the Houthis. For months, the kingdom has been pushing for an all-out effort to wrest the port away from Houthi control, and the great danger now is that Trump, swept along by his own rhetoric, will go along.
But a frontal assault on a city of more than 300,000 is no easy matter. To the contrary, it would be a major undertaking requiring not only U.S. air and naval support but probably U.S. ground troops as well.
As the rightwing Jamestown Foundation noted: “Even with US assistance, the invasion will be costly and ineffective. The terrain to the east of Hodeidah is comprised of some of the most forbidding mountainous terrain in the world. The mountains, caves, and deep canyons are ideal for guerrilla warfare that would wear down even the finest and best disciplined military. The most capable units of what was the Yemeni Army and the Houthis themselves will inflict heavy losses on those forces that try to take Hodeidah and then, if necessary, move up into the mountains.”
It’s hard to imagine even Trump blundering into such a trap. This is why the second flashpoint is even more worrisome. Located some 1,800 miles to the north near the desert town of Al-Tanf, it is where the Baghdad-Damascus highway, a crucial supply route, crosses into Syria from Iraq. It is also where U.S. jets struck a pro-Syrian government convoy on May 18 as it neared a U.S.-British military outpost. It is an area where all sides – the Syrian army, Iraqi Shi‘ite militias, Iranian-backed forces plus U.S., U.K., and even Norwegian troops – are now beefing up their forces. With Trump’s “Arab NATO” vowing to contribute 34,000 troops to the struggle against both ISIS and Iran, the question is whether the U.S. and Saudis will push matters to the brink by attempting to sever a key Syrian supply link to the outside world.
If so, the upshot could well be a firefight that triggers a wider war. That will make the neocons and their Saudi allies very happy and no doubt please Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well. But it will scare the hell out of everybody else.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died Friday, Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright have been three foreign-born scholars who significantly influenced American policies and impacted global affairs through the past half century. For better or worse, Brzezinski and Kissinger were grand strategists too. Both left a trail of influence through their protégés.
Brzezinski was an indefatigable ‘Cold Warrior’ and was in danger of becoming an anachronism. The leitmotif of his “doctrine” was his virulent anti-Russian outlook, which could have been due to his Polish origin. (Albright, another hardliner on Russia, was Czech.) He and Albright – apart from Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy state secretary in Bill Clinton administration – were instrumental in burying whatever prospects existed for a historic rapprochement between the West and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia (which the latter was keenly seeking).
Clinton’s decision to expand NATO to the former Warsaw Pact territory was the turning point. (George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War, was prophetic in warning Clinton that such a move would be a catastrophic blunder and shut the door on any prospect of friendly ties with Russia.) Plainly put, Brzezinski and Albright ensured that Cold War flames were kept burning in the post-cold war era – although Ronald Reagan or George HW Bush were open to accommodating Russia.
Kissinger, who advocated détente, once described Brzezinski “a total whore”, someone who could be on every side of every argument. (Two years earlier, Brzezinski too gave a terse summary of Kissinger’s approach as Richard Nixon’s security advisor: “fascination with enemies and ennui with friends” – that is, supposedly Chinese and Russian enemies and Western European friends.) It has been said that for every book about international politics authored by Brzezinski, there is a corresponding book about Kissinger. Brzezinski published close to 20 books, but didn’t attempt any memoirs, and no one seems to have written his biography either. The two personalities were poles apart. Kissinger was terrific at self-promotion, while Brzezinski’s razor-sharp intellect that could be intimidating, provocative and combative (albeit unfailingly stimulating) created an aura of aloofness. As a thinker, he outstrips Kissinger.
On the other hand, his track record as a diplomatist in Jimmy Carter’s White House remains hugely controversial on two templates – during the tumultuous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1978-1980) and the aftermath of the historic Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). Simply put, Brzezinski scripted the “Afghan jihad” – unabashedly deploying jihadi forces as geopolitical instrument to bleed the Red Army. (That was how the al-Qaeda – and later the ISIS – was born.) Brzezinski’s stunning memos to Carter, exulting over the tantalizing prospect of creating a “Soviet Vietnam”, are the stuff of throbbing history.
Brzezinski later admitted that the US set up a bear trap for the Russians in Afghanistan. In a frank interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, he said, “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” There is a riveting essay in the nature of a book review on that momentous slice of international politics written by an American historian entitled Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect.
Brzezinski was a cold-blooded strategist rooted in Halford Mackinder’s famous Heartland Theory regarding the Pivot Area of Central Eurasia. In his complex thought process, “The key point to bear in mind is that Russia cannot be in Europe without Ukraine also being in Europe, whereas Ukraine can be in Europe without Russia being in Europe.”
Where Brzezinski and Kissinger would agree and disagree is when it comes to China. Both advocated the need for a stable, strong, predictable Sino-American partnership as an imperative of our times and, of course, in the US’ core interests. However, whereas Kissinger envisions the desirability of a trilateral US-Russian-Chinese “balance” in the interests of global stability, Brzezinski differs. Although Brzezinski grudgingly came to accept US-Russia détente, he saw it nonetheless as a paradigm where the US must keep the upper hand. (He saw no future for Russia.) Brzezinski argued that US should focus on building up ties with China, leaving Russia out in the cold, which would inevitably pressure Moscow to compromise lest it got “isolated” in big-power politics.
The problem with Brzezinski’s logic is that it blithely assumes that China would gang up with the US to isolate Russia – or would relegate its ties with Russia to the back burner. This is delusional thinking. The Sino-Russian strategic understanding gives the partnership a raison d-etre of its own, creating more space for both to negotiate effectively with the US.
Brzezinski’s departure can be compared to the exit of a rook from the chessboard. No doubt, the rook is a “heavy piece” on a chessboard, especially in the “endgame”. Like a rook, Brzezinski also moved horizontally or vertically, but never diagonally. But then, Brzezinski’s “heaviness” can also be taken very far. Good diplomacy needs plodders.
A case in point will be Brzezinski’s disastrous advice to Carter to mount a rescue mission – code named Eagle Claw – in April 1980 to bring home the 52 American diplomats held hostage in Iran. It was a reckless move. Eagle Claw never got near the American prisoners. Helicopters that were the mainstay of the mission were disabled in an unanticipated sandstorm in the Iranian desert. Eight American servicemen died and eight aircraft were lost.
Imam Khomeini later said in a memorable message titled “The mistake of Carter and its consequences” that the Iranian nation got the ultimate confirmation from Carter’s “foolish mischief” that the big Satan should never be trusted. The Imam warned,
I admonish Carter if he repeats again such a foolish act it will be difficult for us and the government to control the Muslim fighters and youths who are guarding the (American) spies.
That tragic folly probably cost Carter his kingdom in the November 1980 election. Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had advised against Eagle Claw. Vance was by no means a pacifist; nor had he any liking for the revolutionary government in Iran. Vance’s rival for Carter’s ear was Brzezinski who was brash, clever, ambitious and held Vance in contempt as a relic of the once-dominant WASPs. Vance was indeed a WASP, born to a prosperous family in West Virginia and expensively educated. He had a successful career as a lawyer and seemingly was without political ambition.
But Vance’s plodder’s advice was spot on: Give the revolution, like for any revolution, the time to settle down, while patiently negotiating the release of hostages. Vance eventually resigned in protest over Eagle Claw – indeed, the only American state secretary to do so over policy differences, after being outmaneuvered by Brzezinski.
On a recent two-week trip to Russia with a delegation of 30 Americans organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives, we had the opportunity to have informative meetings with numerous people, including the following military leader.
Vladimir Kozin is an arms control specialist and a member of the Russian Academy of Military Science who has worked on arms control issues since the 1970s. Kozin said that Russians see themselves being encircled by NATO. Of the 16 countries bordering Russia, eight have anti-Russia sentiments. He noted that the U.S. military budget is 12 times greater than that of Russia and increasing.
Kozin said that it is a “fairy tale” that Russia interfered in the U.S. election. What is NOT a fairy tale is that the U.S. spent a huge amount of money to influence Russian elections in the past and funded 400 Non-Governmental Organizations which were part of the destabilization campaign in Ukraine leading to the 2014 coup
Regarding key conflict points, Kozin said that Crimea was part of Russia since 1783. He noted that despite the presence of 16,000 Russian troops and 18,000 Ukrainian troops, the Crimea plebiscite to reunify with Russia was handled without violence, with a huge turnout and overwhelming vote in favor.
Regarding hostilities in eastern Ukraine, Kozin questioned why this has happened. If Scotland can consider secession from the U.K. and Catalonia from Spain, what’s wrong with Donbass (eastern Ukraine) wanting more autonomy within Ukraine? Why has Ukrainian President Poroshenko turned to military conflict instead of negotiating with the forces in eastern Ukraine? he asked.
Kozin believes it is vital to have an arms control summit meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. He thinks we should work toward the complete elimination of nuclear weapons by 2045. In the meantime, the easiest way to reduce tension and the risk of war would be an agreement on “No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” he concluded.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The US has underestimated the risks to its nuclear safety as a single nuclear fuel fire could lead to fallout “much greater than Fukushima,” according to a new study. Researches slammed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for ignoring the potential danger.
If spent fuel at one of the dozens of US nuclear sites sets alight, it “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident [in Japan],” researchers from Princeton University and the Union of Concerned Scientists warned in their study published in the May 26 issue of Science magazine.
The disaster would lead to “trillion-dollar consequences,” as the hypothetical fire would result in contamination of an area larger than New Jersey and force mass relocations.
The scientists simulated a nightmare scenario in their ‘Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era’ article. Supposing that an imagined fuel fire broke out at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania at the beginning of 2015, and taking into account the weather conditions at that time, they showed the devastating extent of potential contamination in the area. The accident would have led to the relocation of around 8 million people and would have cost $2 trillion in damages, according to Science Daily, citing the article.
At first, it would mostly have affected a small part of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, also touching on New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. However, within three months almost all the East Coast from South Carolina to Maine would have become contaminated to a varying extent, the scientists said, with radiation going deeper into the land later on.
The researchers say that this frightening scenario can be avoided if spent fuel is not housed in the pools which are used at almost all US nuclear plants to store and cool used radioactive material. Instead, it would be safer to transfer it to dry storage casks after it is cooled in pools for around five years, they say. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) previously considered such measures, but decided they would be too costly.
The study blames the NRC for downplaying the potential consequences and risking millions of Americans’ lives to favor nuclear industries.
“The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” one of the authors of the study, Frank von Hippel, is quoted as saying by Science Daily.
“Unfortunately, if there is no public outcry about this dangerous situation, the NRC will continue to bend to the industry’s wishes.”
The researches also stressed that a nuclear disaster could be brought about by a large earthquake or terrorist attack, the possibility of which was excluded by the NRC.
They have called on the agency to take action to reduce the potential danger by enhancing the monitoring of the pools and increasing water levels in case of a breakdown. If the NRC does not act, the researchers say Congress should step up.
The NRC previously said the transfer of spent fuel, which could reduce the threat of radioactive releases by 99 percent, would require additional spending of $50 million per pool. An accident would result in $125 billion in damages and radioactive contamination would not go beyond 50 miles of the site, according to the NRC, in sharp contrast to the researchers’ estimates. The NRC also said that the consequences would be dealt with within a year, while the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents have shown much worse effects, with the areas still deserted.
“In far too many instances, the NRC has used flawed analysis to justify inaction, leaving millions of Americans at risk of a radiological release that could contaminate their homes and destroy their livelihoods,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the article. “It is time for the NRC to employ sound science and common-sense policy judgments in its decision-making process,” he said.
NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell has promised to study the scientists’ proposal and report to agency commissioners, Science Daily reports.
In early May, an emergency was declared at a nuclear waste site in Hanford, Washington, after a portion of a tunnel near the plutonium-uranium extraction plant collapsed. The same site leaked gallons of toxic waste last April, affecting a number of workers.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary reveals a “mind-numbing” contradiction between what the former top U.S. infectious disease official knew about COVID-19 and what he told the public, senior White House adviser Peter Navarro, Ph.D., said last week on “American Thought Leaders.”
“I show, actually, how a prosecution can and should happen … at the state level, most likely,” Navarro said. “He should wind up in prison, and we’ve got the receipts in this book to put him there.”
Navarro said Fauci repeatedly acknowledged important facts in private, then publicly pursued policies that contradicted those facts — with devastating consequences.
“What he says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements that it’s mind-numbing,” Navarro said.
Navarro examines the lasting damage caused by lockdowns and other pandemic policies, and the ongoing toll of long COVID.
His book also addresses questions about vaccine safety, including why healthy young people faced COVID-19 vaccination mandates despite concerns about myocarditis, and why women were not warned about miscarriage risks linked to the shots. … continue
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