Interview with legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg following his 89th arrest for resisting nuclear weapons, nuclear war and government secrecy — Rise Up Times
Still today, hardly any people know just how much falsehood was fed to them to justify what we did. By Dennis Bernstein Covert Action Magazine September 24, 2019 The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California, designs new nuclear weapons and conducts plutonium research. [Credit: worldatlas.com] [Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant to the White House in 1961, drafted […]
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon’s Massive Carbon Bootprint — Rise Up Times
US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet
via Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon’s Massive Carbon Bootprint — Rise Up Times
Prominent Australians, including politicians, call on their government to save Julian Assange from extradition to USA
Growing calls for Australian government to defend Julian 
Assange https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/19/assa-o19.html?fbclid=IwAR2smK6ChQzsIB7Ndld4N_No68RpVViDz5V-RH7qTiYfWmFWFdqkThOA-DQ
By Oscar Grenfell, 19 October 2019 Over the past week, several prominent public figures, including federal members of parliament, have called on the Australian government to fulfil its obligations to defend WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, including by taking steps to prevent his extradition from Britain to the US.
The statements come in the lead-up to British extradition hearings in February, that will decide whether Assange is dispatched to the US. He faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in an American prison for exposing US war crimes and diplomatic intrigues.
There are concerns within the Australian political and media establishment that the refusal of successive governments to defend Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist, has generated widespread anger and opposition. The fear in ruling circles is that if Assange is extradited, or if his parlous health continues to deteriorate, the latent support for him will coalesce into a political movement against the entire official set-up.
In a statement to the House of Representatives on Wednesday, independent MP Andrew Wilkie declared that Assange is “an Australian citizen and must be treated like any other Australian. He was not in the US when he provided evidence of US war crimes in Iraq. He can’t possibly have broken their laws.”
Wilkie said that if Assange is extradited to the US, he “faces serious human rights violations including exposure to torture and a dodgy trial. And this has serious implications for freedom of speech and freedom of the press here in Australia, because if we allow a foreign country to charge an Australian citizen for revealing war crimes, then no Australian journalist or publisher can ever be confident that the same thing won’t happen to them.”
He concluded by stating: “Put simply, he must be allowed to return to Australia.”
Wilkie, a former intelligence agent who resigned to speak out against “weapons of mass destruction” lies used to justify the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, has previously condemned the assault on democratic rights. In 2010 and 2011, he made statements and spoke at public events in defence of Assange. Alongside the Greens and a host of civil liberties organisations, however, Wilkie has largely remained silent about the WikiLeaks founder’s plight for a number of years and has boycotted all actions taken in his defence.
Wilkie said that if Assange is extradited to the US, he “faces serious human rights violations including exposure to torture and a dodgy trial. And this has serious implications for freedom of speech and freedom of the press here in Australia, because if we allow a foreign country to charge an Australian citizen for revealing war crimes, then no Australian journalist or publisher can ever be confident that the same thing won’t happen to them.”
He concluded by stating: “Put simply, he must be allowed to return to Australia.”
Wilkie, a former intelligence agent who resigned to speak out against “weapons of mass destruction” lies used to justify the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, has previously condemned the assault on democratic rights. In 2010 and 2011, he made statements and spoke at public events in defence of Assange. Alongside the Greens and a host of civil liberties organisations, however, Wilkie has largely remained silent about the WikiLeaks founder’s plight for a number of years and has boycotted all actions taken in his defence.
Joyce, a populist who has sought to build a base of support in rural areas, was well aware of the sentiments in favour of Hicks among workers in regional centres and country towns. He played a role in the sordid agreement brokered by Howard, which saw Hicks returned to Australia in 2007. Hicks was forced to serve out a bogus prison sentence in Australia and was banned for a year from speaking to the media.
In comments to the media on Monday, former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr hinted at the concerns animating the comments in defence of Assange by such figures from within the political establishment.
Carr told the Sydney Morning Herald that ordinary people would be “deeply uneasy” about the prospect of an Australian citizen being handed over to the “living hell of a lifetime sentence in an American penitentiary.” He criticised current Foreign Minister Marise Payne over her claim that she made “friendly” representations on behalf of Assange to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo has denounced Assange as a “demon” who is not entitled to any democratic rights and labelled WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
Carr stated: “I think the issue will gather pace, and in the ultimate trial there will be a high level of Australian public concern, among conservative voters as much as any others.”
In his strongest comments in defence of Assange yet, Carr declared: “We have an absolute right to know about American war crimes in a conflict that the Australian government of the day strongly supported. We wouldn’t know about them except for Assange.”
Carr is no political innocent. During his decades in the Labor Party, he functioned as a secret informant for the US embassy, beginning in the 1970s. He was a leading minister in the Gillard Labor government which refused to defend the WikiLeaks founder and instead pledged to assist the US campaign against him.
That Carr has spoken out now is a measure of the fears within the ruling elite that the defence of Assange will animate millions of workers, students and young people in the coming period.
In keeping with the central role of Labor in the US-led pursuit of Assange, no prominent current figure in the party has joined the calls for him to be defended. When the WikiLeaks’ founder was illegally expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested by the British police in April, Labor MP Tanya Plibersek shared a Tweet denouncing his supporters as “cultists.”
Julian Hill, a little-known federal backbencher representing a working-class electorate in outer Melbourne, is the only Labor MP to have spoken out. He told the Guardian on Thursday that Assange is “an Australian and, at the very least, we must be vigorously consistent in opposing extradition to countries where he might face the death penalty.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded this week by blandly declaring that Assange must “face the music” in the US. Senior government ministers have previously maligned Assange, repeating the lies concocted by the US intelligence agencies to discredit him.
Liberal Senator James Paterson attempted to provide a more sophisticated argument for the government’s refusal to defend Assange, telling the Sydney Morning Herald last week that both Britain and the US were “rule-of-law countries.”
Paterson piously stated: “This is not the case in many other countries in the world. Sadly, we know there are Australian citizens detained right now in China and Iran who are not facing free and fair legal systems … and the Australian government does have a greater obligation to assist those citizens.”
The suggestion that the Australian government has a responsibility to defend its citizens in some jurisdictions, but not in others, is a legal fiction that has no basis in Australian or international legislation.
Paterson’s statements, moreover, fly in the face of repeated warnings by United Nations officials and human rights organisations that Assange’s legal and democratic rights have been trampled upon by the British and US authorities.
Paterson’s comments point to the real reason why successive Australian governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have joined the US-led vendetta against Assange. Their participation in the attacks against him has gone hand in hand with unconditional backing for the US alliance and support for Washington’s military build-up in the Asia-Pacific region, in preparation for war against China.
The record demonstrates that no faith can be placed in any section of the political or media establishment to defend Assange or any democratic rights. All the official parties and institutions in Australia are implicated in the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder. They will take action only to the extent that they fear the political consequences if they do not.
Workers, students and young people must be mobilised as part of an international movement demanding the immediate freedom of Assange and all class war prisoners. This is the only way that an Australian government will be forced to uphold its responsibility to prevent Assange’s extradition to the US and allow him to unconditionally return to Australia.
High levels of uranium in some Navajo women and infants near old uranium mining sites
US official: Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies, https://apnews.com/334124280ace4b36beb6b8d58c328ae3?fbclid=IwAR2UqarRiUTIPwnRCA_DGkjKuahfFO4T_l9iFrXxb1P8qL5AnmrTc1m61W8By MARY HUDETZ, October 8, 2019, ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — About a quarter of Navajo women and some infants who were part of a federally funded study on uranium exposure had high levels of the radioactive metal in their systems, decades after mining for Cold War weaponry ended on their reservation, a U.S. health official Monday.
The early findings from the University of New Mexico study were shared during a congressional field hearing in Albuquerque. Dr. Loretta Christensen — the chief medical officer on the Navajo Nation for Indian Health Service, a partner in the research — said 781 women were screened during an initial phase of the study that ended last year.
Among them, 26% had concentrations of uranium that exceeded levels found in the highest 5% of the U.S. population, and newborns with equally high concentrations continued to be exposed to uranium during their first year, she said.
The research is continuing as authorities work to clear uranium mining sites across the Navajo Nation.
“It forces us to own up to the known detriments associated with a nuclear-forward society,” said U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, who is an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, a tribe whose jurisdiction lies west of Albuquerque.
The hearing held in Albuquerque by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, Haaland and U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, all Democrats from New Mexico, sought to underscore the atomic age’s impact on Native American communities.
The three are pushing for legislation that would expand radiation compensation to residents in their state, including post-1971 uranium workers and residents who lived downwind from the Trinity Test site in southern New Mexico.
The state’s history has long been intertwined with the development of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, from uranium mining and the first atomic blast to the Manhattan project conducted through work in the once-secret city of Los Alamos. The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, however, only covers parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah that are downwind from a different nuclear test site.
During the hearing, Haaland said one of her own family members had lost his hearing because of radiation exposure. At Laguna Pueblo, home to her tribe, the Jackpile-Paguate Mine was once among the world’s largest open-pit uranium mines. It closed several decades ago, but cleanup has yet to be completed.
“They need funds,” Haaland said. “They job was not completed.”
David Gray, a deputy regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said the mine illustrates uranium mining and milling’s lingering effects on Indian Country.
On the Navajo Nation, he said, the EPA has identified more than 200 abandoned uranium mines where it wants to complete investigation and clean up under an upcoming five-year plan, using settlements and other agreements to pay for the work that has taken decades.
Udall, who chaired the hearing, acknowledged federal officials had shown progress but that the pace of cleanup has proven frustrating for some community members.
“They feel an urgency,” Udall said. “They feel that things need to happen today.”
In her testimony, Christensen described how Navajo residents in the past had used milling waste in home construction, resulting in contaminated walls and floors.
From the end of World War II to the mid-1980s, millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted from the Navajo Nation, leaving gray streaks across the desert landscape, as well as a legacy of disease and death.
While no large-scale studies have connected cancer to radiation exposure from uranium waste, many have been blamed it for cancer and other illnesses.
By the late 1970s, when the mines began closing around the reservation, miners were dying of lung cancer, emphysema or other radiation-related ailments.
“The government is so unjust with us,” said Leslie Begay, a former uranium miner who lives in Window Rock, an Arizona town that sits near the New Mexico border and serves as the Navajo Nation capital. “The government doesn’t recognize that we built their freedom.”
Begay, who said he has lung problems, attended the hearing with an oxygen tank in tow. The hearing held in the Southwest was especially meaningful for him after traveling in the past to Washington to advocate for himself and others, he said.
Associated Press reporter Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, contributed to this report.
USA campaign in Count the Nuclear Weapons Money global movement
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Four New Mexico Count the Nuclear Weapons Money Events, http://nuclearactive.org/ October 17th, 2019 In less than seven days, CCNS will join with other peace, disarmament, climate and social justice activists across New Mexico to count out one trillion dollars in one million dollar bills at four planned events in Taos, Santa Fe, Socorro, and Los Alamos as part of the global Count the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign. One trillion dollars is the amount proposed for the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over ten years.
 The campaign’s goal is to demonstrate the scale of a one trillion dollar investment and how it could be devoted to peace and humanitarian needs, rather than the threat of nuclear annihilation. The scale will be profound in terms of time, the number of bills, the number of people counting the money by hand, and the impact of seeing people around the world counting the money. The events will be live-streamed so people can learn what benefits this money could bring if re-directed to climate protection, just transitions, and sustainable development goals.
The campaign will begin on Thursday, October 24th and continue through Wednesday October 30th, during the United Nations’ Disarmament Week. Volunteers are needed! To sign up, contact CCNS at ccns@nuclearactive.org or by phone at 505 986-1973. On Thursday, October 24th, New Mexico’s Opening Ceremony will take place in Taos from 3 to 5 pm. It will coincide with the Opening Ceremony in New York City. For more information and to volunteer, please contact Suzie at (575) 770-2629. On Friday, October 25th, we will gather at the State Capitol to bring attention to two existential threats – the climate crisis and nuclear weapons. There will be a counting event and an opportunity to present a letter to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. On Saturday, October 26th, we will gather in the Socorro Plaza Gazebo from 2 to 4 pm to count 2.4 billion dollars – the amount provided to Downwinders and Uranium Workers under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act since 2000. Despite being overexposed to radiation from the first atomic test at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945, the Trinity Downwinders have never been included in the compensation program. https://www.trinitydownwinders.com/home On Monday, October 28th, we will gather in Los Alamos from 2:30 to 4:30 pm to count 13 billion dollars, the amount proposed to modernize the nuclear weapons complex at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The event will coincide with colleagues counting outside of major banking institutions invested in nuclear weapons work. Participants will urge divestment. For more information and to volunteer to count the money, please contact CCNS at (505) 986-1973. To learn more about the Campaign, go to http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/count-the-money/ |
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Determined opposition to nuclear expansion in India’s iconic tiger reserve
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Karnataka activists may approach court to oppose Kaiga nuclear plant expansion
Earlier, a Tata Memorial Trust report had said the nuclear plant, was responsible for increasing cancer cases in the region. The News Minute, Soumya Chatterjee, Saturday, October 19, 2019 Environmental activists are determined to oppose the expansion of the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in the buffer zone of the Kali Tiger Reserve in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. Currently, the plant has four units. The Nuclear Power Corporation Ltd. has proposed a fifth and a sixth unit, the proposal for which has cleared all environmental regulatory hurdles from both the state and union governments recently. Activists argue that expanding the Kaiga plant will result in the loss of 54 hectares of pristine forests in the fragile Western Ghats near the Kali Tiger Reserve. They also question the practicality of setting up more nuclear power plant units or replacing it with other safer and cheaper power generating options like solar and wind energy. Incidentally, the Karnataka High Court also recently ordered an interim stay on further felling of trees by the National Highway Authority of India for the expansion of NH4A (Belagavi-Goa), after it learnt that the authorities had violated the Forest Protection Act. Encouraged by this, activists opposing the new units in the Kaiga plant are planning to approach the court, if other means of protest do not work. A threat to eco-sensitive area “When the whole world is shifting away from nuclear power and looking for eco-friendly sources like solar and water, why do we want to create problems like Fukushima (Japan) with already four dams created in the upper course of the Kali river? Why do we want to destruct forests further when climate change is already impacting us?” asks Joseph Hoover, a former member of State Wildlife Board and founder of United Conservation Movement. “It is not necessary as the state is power surplus and will primarily help other states. There is also the issue of increased cancer cases in the area because of the plant,” he added. A Tata Memorial Centre report in 2010 had said there was a spurt in cases of cancer over the past two decades in Kaiga. Experts insist that this is because of radioactive pollution caused by the nuclear power plant. Advocate Prince Isaac, who represented the United Conservation Movement, which was one of the petitioners in the NH4A case, said, “This area is classified as eco-sensitive area-1, according to a specific order from November 2013 under Section 5 of the Environmental Protection Act by the Union Ministry of Forest, Environment and Climate Change. By the same order, no developmental work (construction involving space more than 20,000 sq metres) can take place in this zone.” Pointing out that the government is breaking its own law, he added, “Other than this, for projects in sensitive areas, there is a legal mandate to carry a biological impact assessment as there are rare species that are endemic to the area. That has not been undertaken here.”…… https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/karnataka-activists-may-approach-court-oppose-kaiga-nuclear-plant-expansion-110831 |
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India keeps increasing its nuclear weaponry – aimed at Pakistan and China
“India is estimated to have produced enough military plutonium for 150 to 200 nuclear warheads, but has likely produced only 130 to 140,” according to Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Nonetheless, additional plutonium will be required to produce warheads for missiles now under development, and India is reportedly building several new plutonium production facilities.”
In addition, “India continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal, with at least five new weapon systems now under development to complement or replace existing nuclear-capable aircraft, land-based delivery systems, and sea-based systems.”……https://news.yahoo.com/indias-nuclear-weapons-arsenal-keeps-183000277.html
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