My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.
If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.
When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.
When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.
We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.
Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.
And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.
We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.
It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.
When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.
So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.
In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.
In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.
Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.
When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.
This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.
Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:
“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”
Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.
In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.
In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.
In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.
The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.
Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.
Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?
Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.
At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.
The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.
But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.
These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:
“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”
Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.
Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.
The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.
France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.
Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.
The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?
And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.
Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.
“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:
Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.
And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.
In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.
And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.
The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits the organization’s news site, Beyond Nuclear International. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.
As a journalist I have listened to countless stories of Nakba survivors. They would always say, “we thought we would return.” I never imagined that in my lifetime I would be witnessing another Nakba, and saying the same thing.
Everything was fine a few days before this genocide began. The difficult conditions and suffering experienced by the Palestinians in Gaza created new opportunities and challenges. The Palestinians always invented unique ways to survive. Despite all these difficulties, a short trip to the sea helped people regain their balance and continue with the challenging life imposed by the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip. However, there were no Israeli soldiers and forces in Gaza’s lands. There was some room for life inside the Strip. Now, after the Israeli army’s invasion of Gaza, there is nothing left there except death and the loss of dreams and hopes.
When I was displaced for the first time out of Gaza City, taking my family with me to the city of Khan Younis, none of us imagined that returning to Gaza City would become impossible. Even though we did not carry all our luggage and belongings with us, we thought it would always be possible to return.
This is indeed what we thought.
These exact words – “we thought we would return” – are all too familiar to me, a journalist who has conducted dozens of interviews with Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba in 1948. Nakba survivors would always say this exact phrase, even after living out the rest of their lives in refugee camps, never able to return to their homes.
Despite being filled with stories of the Nakba, I never imagined that those same scenes would be repeated in my lifetime. I thought the Nakba would not be repeated. I thought the world had changed since 1948. I never thought it had become worse – that the world would see, and hear annihilation as it is happening, and still be unable to stop it.
At the beginning of the war, I was in Gaza City, and I would leave my family for several hours during the day and go to a place near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. This hospital was the largest source of information for journalists, and most journalists rented places close to the hospital to ensure quick access to those sources. I used to go back and forth one way, and when I came back, I would find buildings and houses that had just been bombed and on fire.
Everything was, and is still changing, in the Gaza Strip from one moment to the next. If you look closely, you will find that it is more than a war, but rather a complete geographical and demographic change, and the annihilation of the population. This is not the first time that we saw places, and the memories we had in those places, destroyed by Israel. But it becomes difficult when every place we lived in, and everything we have memories of, is destroyed.
When we left, the entire city of Gaza was under the threat of constant killing and bombing. We began to see all these places that we knew and lived in, and spent the most beautiful moments of our lives with our friends and families, and studied for many years in, being destroyed one place after another. Ordinary pictures of our families in the streets and neighborhoods, and on the shore of Gaza’s beaches, suddenly became not just memories, but pictures that carried our nostalgia. They became unrecognizable places, places we could no longer return to. Places we longed for.
Al-Shifa Hospital, which I walked through countless times to conduct interviews with doctors, families, and patients, was later transformed into mass graves and swamps of blood.
After al-Shifa Hospital, all the places I used to go to in Gaza, whether for work or to spend time with my family, I could see how the Israeli army was destroying them. All the pictures I kept of my family in those places suddenly became too difficult to look at.
I keep pictures of my son in different places in Gaza, such as the Bianco Resort on the Gaza seashore. This was one of the first places that the Israeli army invaded. We spent the most beautiful times with the family on those wooden chairs painted white and blue on the seashore. In the same place, next to those wooden chairs, we saw a video of an Israeli soldier standing in that place and saying that they would invade the entire Gaza Strip, and that this was just the beginning. That was at the start of the war.
As the days of the long, non-stop war pass, everything we knew in Gaza has been destroyed by Israel, and the destruction is still continuing. Not only our homes, our loved ones, our universities, our schools, and the sea, but even our memories are being destroyed.
I had already learned enough about the power and influence of the nuclear industry to know that I would be fighting a losing battle if I kept my research at UNB
Once during my 13 years at the NRC I was asked to work on a military technology project, and I refused. I had a visceral negative reaction to doing research that could potentially be implicated in mass killing.
On Thursday this week, two very different emails landed in my inbox minutes apart. The juxtaposition jolted me, and I thought: it’s time to share my story about my departure from the University of New Brunswick.
The first email, from the NB Media Co-op, informed me that my commentary written with Gordon Edwards was just published. Our article marked the 50th anniversary of an event that had shocked the world: India’s test nuclear explosion made with plutonium extracted from a ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactor, a gift from Canada. We questioned if Canada was making the same mistake by backing the Moltex project to extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick.
A UNB professor friend sent the second email. He wrote: ‘This will be aggravating to read, but I thought you’d want to see it. I’m attaching the announcement about Arthur Irving’s death coming from UNB’s President. Arthur Irving is celebrated for his commitment and dedication to the environment. Meanwhile, people who are actually committed to the environment (e.g., you) are blacklisted.’
The two emails had this connection: My research and writing about plutonium and Moltex is the main reason why in 2023 I moved my research program from the University of New Brunswick, the largest university in the province, over to St. Thomas University, a small liberal arts undergraduate institution that shares the campus with UNB in Fredericton.
My journey from UNB to STU began in 2020. At that point, I had been with the UNB Sociology department for almost 16 years as an adjunct professor, on faculty but not on staff and so not in the faculty union. During those years, I brought considerable federal research funding into UNB and hired and trained more than a dozen UNB graduate students. My research expertise includes technology adoption: analyzing the social, political, environmental and economic contexts in which people deploy technologies. I joined UNB in 2004 while employed at the National Research Council of Canada on the Fredericton UNB campus, as a senior researcher and vice-chair of the NRC’s research ethics board. Once during my 13 years at the NRC I was asked to work on a military technology project, and I refused. I had a visceral negative reaction to doing research that could potentially be implicated in mass killing.
At the start of 2020, I could not have imagined a connection between NB Power’s Point Lepreau nuclear reactor and weapons of mass destruction. That February, my UNB research project RAVEN was invited to partner with local groups to bring nuclear expert Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, to New Brunswick to give public talks in Saint John and Fredericton. I readily agreed. Several months previously, I had read Gordon’s article in the NB Media Co-op about ‘small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs)’ and wanted to learn more. I put up posters around the UNB campus promoting Gordon’s upcoming talk. I asked the UNB communications office to help me promote Gordon’s visit, but they never came through, and I assumed they were too busy to help.
Gordon Edward’s talk, moved online when the pandemic hit in March 2020, sparked my research interest in the adoption of nuclear technology. I began looking into the two small nuclear reactor projects planned for New Brunswick, Moltex and ARC. In July that year, I co-wrote my first commentary with Gordon that mentioned our concerns about the Moltex project and plutonium extraction from used nuclear fuel. The same day that our piece was published in The Hill Times, the newspaper on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the CEO of Moltex emailed, asking to meet with me. I agreed, and during a break in the pandemic that month, we met outside at Picaroons Roundhouse along with Janice Harvey, the coordinator of the Environment & Society program at St. Thomas University and a co-investigator on my RAVEN project. At the meeting, Janice and I disagreed with the Moltex CEO about the wisdom of his project to extract plutonium from the used nuclear fuel at Point Lepreau.
I continued my research into small nuclear reactors and plutonium extraction by reading research articles and consulting with Gordon and other experts across Canada and internationally. In May 2021, the federal government gave Moltex a $50.5 million grant to develop its technology that could be exported globally. Shortly after, nine U.S. non-proliferation experts wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau expressing concern about the Moltex project, writing that by ‘backing spent-fuel reprocessing and plutonium extraction, the Government of Canada will undermine the global nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime that Canada has done so much to strengthen.’ The Globe and Mailpublished an article about the nuclear weapons proliferation concerns with the Moltex project, and Gordon and I published commentaries in The Hill Times, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the NB Media Co-op.
During this time, I co-founded a public interest group with local activists, the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB), to advocate for a nuclear-free renewable energy future. Janice Harvey invited me to join her in the STU Environment & Society program as an adjunct research professor, and in June 2021 I was appointed to the STU faculty in addition to my UNB faculty appointment.
In August 2021, I received a phone call that augured the end of my research program at UNB. On the phone, a friend told me about overhearing the UNB president say: ‘Susan O’Donnell is spreading misinformation about nuclear energy.’ That shocked me for several reasons. First, I would never knowingly spread misinformation. Second, I’d never met the UNB president and didn’t know he knew I existed. Third, why the heck would he say such a thing? To find out, I filed a Right to Information request with UNB, asking for all communications received by the UNB President and the Vice-President Research that mentioned me or my research project RAVEN.
UNB released the information to me in November 2021. The release package, HERE, is dozens of pages, almost all of it redacted. Just enough information was left for me to know that the UNB senior administration’s concern about me began in February 2020, while I was putting up posters around UNB for Gordon Edwards’ talk about small nuclear reactors. Over the weeks leading up to Gordon’s event, a flurry of emails – involving the UNB president, his chief of staff, several vice-presidents, the UNB secretary, two UNB professors I’ve never met, numerous people in UNB communications, and the Atlantica Centre for Energy, a lobby group funded by the energy industry – fretted about the upcoming ‘anti-nuclear event,’ imagining that it was linked to the Green Party and would jeopardize funding for nuclear research at UNB. I finally realized why the UNB communications office had not responded to my request to help publicize Gordon’s talk.
Most interesting to me in the package was an email from the CEO of Moltex to the UNB vice-president research on July 6, 2020, the same day the CEO wrote to me requesting a meeting. To the VP research, the CEO wrote:
‘You may have seen the article recently written by Dr Susan O’Donnell and her group in NB media coop. It was today issued in the Hill Times which gives it significant exposure and credibility. I understand she is a lecturer at UNB. I have emailed her to request a meeting… I do have concerns that her group RAVEN is supported by SSHRC and yet it is being used as an advocacy group and she is using her Academic Freedom to express views without scientific credibility and in conjunction with political parties but I don’t plan on bringing that up with her. I greatly appreciate debate around nuclear and clean energy (I used to be anti nuclear) but it is hard to compete with misinformation backed by a university.’
There it was: the accusation that I was spreading ‘misinformation’ – the same accusation repeated later by the UNB president that my friend had overheard. Finally, I understood why the heck the president had said that: Moltex had stated it as a fact. I knew that Moltex was collaborating with UNB’s Centre for Nuclear Energy Research, and that in addition to the federal grant to Moltex of $50.5 million, UNB received more than $560,000. The Right to Information request showed me that half a million bucks buys a lot at UNB.
To learn more, I filed a complaint in December 2021 with the New Brunswick Ombuds office, asking UNB to release the redacted information. In April 2022, my complaint was dismissed, and I decided to drop it there.
I had already learned enough about the power and influence of the nuclear industry to know that I would be fighting a losing battle if I kept my research at UNB. I was due to write another application for federal research funding. My main concern was that the UNB VP research – who had written many emails about me (that had been redacted) and who would need to sign off on my future requests for federal research funding – was also on the advisory board of the UNB Centre for Nuclear Energy Research. An application for federal research funding takes months of work, and I was not willing to take the risk that after preparing the application, it could be vetoed at the final stage. I asked my UNB Sociology chair not to renew my faculty appointment when it expired in 2023, and I submitted my funding application via the research office at St. Thomas University.
When my UNB appointment ended, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded me a five-year research grant at STU for the CEDAR project – Contesting Energy Discourses through Action Research. CEDAR has excellent co-investigators, collaborators and research assistants. We research the energy transition – focusing on nuclear energy – with the support of my new university administration.
As a bonus, my experience with the Right to Information system raised my awareness of how access to information requests could be useful for research. I’ve since filed more than two dozen requests with different federal and provincial government departments and agencies to learn what goes on behind the scenes between the nuclear industry and governments related to plutonium extraction from used nuclear fuel. As the release packages arrive, many heavily redacted, I’m making them available to other researchers, journalists, and anyone interested, via a page on the CEDAR project website, HERE. Using that information, The Globe and Mail published an article last September, and Gordon Edwards and I published another in March this year in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the collusion between the nuclear industry and the federal government to develop a policy on nuclear fuel reprocessing. My research continues.
Susan O’Donnell is the primary investigator of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University.
Gender and Radiation Impact Project 1 May 24,The Vow from Hiroshima film is coming on PBS, this month—You can use this tool, to network, teach and lobby about the nuclear ban treaty (TPNW) that brings HOPE when hope is so needed…
Following the introduction on this video, you will hear Setsuko telling her own story
Setsuko Thurlow survived the atomic bomb attack on her city of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 and on that day vowed to rid the world of nuclear weapons that killed her friends and family. The Vow from Hiroshima is her story.
Thurlow gave her adult life, to this day, campaigning for the end of nuclear weapons. This film is a biography of a great woman, a civil rights leader, and also the story of the Treaty she helped imagine and bring into the world, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. You are invited to join Thurlow in this quest by letting others know they can see this film on PBS, starting this month. The biggest reason anyone should watch this film is if they need to have hope renewed.
The VOW FROM HIROSHIMA tells these intertwined stories of the woman and the world in beautiful detail. It was made by two women who have had significant personal connections with Thurlow. Producer, Mitchie Takeuchi and Director, Susan Strickler did a masterful job creating a 55 minute version of their original feature film for the PBS audience.
This film is an amazing tool to educate yourself, and then share that with others—we all need hope—and Setsuko’s story and the story of the Treaty are brimming with it.
Calls for Assange’s freedom are renewed as the WikiLeaks founder marks five years in Belmarsh prison.
At the behest of the United States government, the British government has detained WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh for five years.
Assange is one of the only journalists to be jailed by a Western country, making the treatment that he has endured extraordinary. He has spent more time in prison than most individuals charged with similar acts.
Since December 2010, Assange has lived under some form of arbitrary detention.
He was expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy on April 11, 2019, and British police immediately arrested him. Police transported Assange to Belmarsh, a maximum-security facility often referred to as “Britain’s Guantanamo.”
Around the same time, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment that alleged that Assange had conspired with U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to commit a “computer intrusion.” The following month the DOJ issued another indictment with 17 additional Espionage Act charges.
2019
On May 1, Assange was sentenced by a British court to 50 weeks in prison as punishment for seeking political asylum from Ecuador while Sweden was attempting to extradite him. His sentence was longer than the six-month sentence that Jack Shepherd, the “speedboat killer” received for “breaching bail.”
As Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin fervently fulfills his role as US pointman for America’s enabling Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The former commander of US forces in America’s senseless, criminal Afghan and Iraq wars, has never failed to embrace a monstrous US war destroying countries and the millions ruined in their wake.
After four decades making a great living engaged in those in those murderous follies, he joined the weapons makers making millions off his expertise in pulling the levers of defense influence peddling.
Now, as Secretary of Defense, he’s promoting tens of billions in weapons deliveries to continue the genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza of 2,300,000 Palestinians in the way of Israeli expansion on Palestinian land.
Austin knows his work is fueling genocide. But he told Superhawk Senator Tom Cotton at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing. ‘Genocide? Not a shred of evidence to support that charge.’
CODEPINK demonstrators with infinitely greater moral clarity than Austin, disrupted the hearing 25 times. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin responded to Austin’s ghoulish genocide denial with “We are obviously here to say stop the complicity, stop the sending of weapons, stop the sharing of intelligence, just killing so many people, just stop the blood on your hands.”
If there were justice, Austin would join his masters of war in Washington in the dock at The Hague. The Defense Secretary’s likely defense? ‘I was just following orders.’
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a new interview has speculated over the reasons behind Victoria Nuland stepping down from her high-ranking position as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three top official in the State Department.
Her retirement was announced by her boss Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. But the question is why now when the administration is attempting to stay the course and present a strong continued stance on Ukraine, also as Biden is still seeking to get tens of billions in defense aid through Republicans in the House.
While there have been rumors that maybe she could be in poor or declining health, McGovern has told Russia’s Sputnik that the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.
“My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, ‘look, Victoria’s got her own agenda here,’” said McGovern.
The former CIA official continued to speculate: “‘The president doesn’t really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it’s time for her to go to early retirement.’”
Another theory, though not necessarily contradictory to the above, has been advanced by professor of national security at Bowie State University Dr. Matthew Crosston.
He laid out what “a staunch anti-Putinist Nuland was and how fervently she wanted to continue to utilize Ukraine as a platform in which to continue to weaken and/or slight Russia on the global stage — and perhaps even up the ante in that conflict with her support of sending ballistic missiles into Ukraine.” But she also knows the Ukrainian side is losing.
She may have seen the writing on the wall as Ukraine forces are in retreat, and wanted to bail before potential total defeat:
“She undoubtedly understood that if American support lessons or wanes, Ukraine loses, period,” Crosston pointed out. “Perhaps she did not want to be in the Administration that would be responsible for that outcome.”
But both McGovern and Crosston would agree that with Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (in this capacity she basically ran all of US foreign policy in Europe), ceasefire talks between Kiev and Moscow remained an extremely distant prospect or even an impossibility.
“One thing is certain: as long as Nuland remained in that chair, there was literally no chance such talk could even be theorized. Now it can,” Crosston concluded.
ournalist Glenn Greenwald also weighed in on Nuland stepping down in an interview with The Hill. Greenwald describes the “singular monstrousness of Victoria Nuland and her bipartisan, blood-stained, ghoulish career“…
Nuland’s temporary replacement for under secretary upon her retirement has been announced as career diplomat John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan. He is currently in the position of the undersecretary of state for management. He oversaw Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so it is somewhat ironic that he’ll also oversee Ukraine policy at this critical juncture where Kiev is clearly against the ropes.
Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.
Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation. In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.” Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.” Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”
Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law. In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.” That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly. “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said. “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one…As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.” And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.
Einstein promoted these ideas through a burgeoning atomic scientists’ movement in which he played a central role. To bring the full significance of the atomic bomb to the public, the newly-formed Federation of American Scientists put together an inexpensive paperback, One World or None, with individual essays by prominent Americans. In his contribution to the book, Einstein wrote that he was “convinced there is only one way out” and this necessitated creating “a supranational organization” to “make it impossible for any country to wage war.” This hard-hitting book, which first appeared in early 1946, sold more than 100,000 copies.
Given Einstein’s fame and his well-publicized efforts to avert a nuclear holocaust, in May 1946 he became chair of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a fundraising and policymaking arm for the atomic scientists’ movement. In the Committee’s first fund appeal, Einstein warned that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
Even so, despite the fact that Einstein, like most members of the early atomic scientists’ movement, saw world government as the best recipe for survival in the nuclear age, there seemed good reason to consider shorter-range objectives. After all, the Cold War was emerging and nations were beginning to formulate nuclear policies. An early Atomic Scientists of Chicago statement, prepared by Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, underscored practical considerations. “Since world government is unlikely to be achieved within the short time available before the atomic armaments race will lead to an acute danger of armed conflict,” it noted, “the establishment of international controls must be considered as a problem of immediate urgency.” Consequently, the movement increasingly worked in support of specific nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.
n the context of the heightening Cold War, however, taking even limited steps forward proved impossible. The Russian government sharply rejected the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy and, instead, developed its own atomic arsenal. In turn, U.S. President Harry Truman, in February 1950, announced his decision to develop a hydrogen bomb―a weapon a thousand times as powerful as its predecessor. Naturally, the atomic scientists were deeply disturbed by this lurch toward disaster. Appearing on television, Einstein called once more for the creation of a “supra-national” government as the only “way out of the impasse.” Until then, he declared, “annihilation beckons.”
Despite the dashing of his hopes for postwar action to end the nuclear menace, Einstein lent his support over the following years to peace, nuclear disarmament, and world government projects.
The most important of these ventures occurred in 1955, when Bertrand Russell, like Einstein, a proponent of world federation, conceived the idea of issuing a public statement by a small group of the world’s most eminent scientists about the existential peril nuclear weapons brought to modern war. Asked by Russell for his support, Einstein was delighted to sign the statement and did so in one of his last actions before his death that April. In July, Russell presented the statement to a large meeting in London, packed with representatives of the mass communications media. In the shadow of the Bomb, it read, “we have to learn to think in a new way…Shall we…choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
This Russell-Einstein Manifesto, as it became known, helped trigger a remarkable worldwide uprising against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in the world’s first significant nuclear arms control measures. Furthermore, in later years, it inspired legions of activists and world leaders. Among them was the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, whose “new thinking,” modeled on the Manifesto, brought a dramatic end to the Cold War and fostered substantial nuclear disarmament.
The Manifesto thus provided an appropriate conclusion to Einstein’s unremitting campaign to save the world from nuclear destruction.
Whatever you think of Alexei Navalny, he didn’t deserve what was done to him. I’ve written before on how the USA government prefers to kill people slowly, with finesse – as in the case of Julian Assange, (.and way way back, Wilfred Burchett.)
The czarist way is more blunt and definite, as in the case of Alexander Litvinenko – a cruel poisoning.
Now Alexei Navalny, a determined opponent of Vladimir Putin, has died suddenly at 47. We’re supposed to believe “of natural causes” – yeah, right, when you’ve been persecuted and ill-treated for years, you might die of a heart problem, anyway. But who believes the Kremlin?
Navalny fought courageously against corruption, and the rule of Putin. He has the guts to come back to Russia, and keep up the fight, even after a previous near-fatal poisoning.
There is another side to the Navalny story. He was an ultra-right racist and Russian nationalist, who railed against immigration and compared Muslims to “flies and cockroaches”. He joined in the fascist “Russian March” along with Monarchist, fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant organizations.
In earlier years he worked on the stock market, aligning himself with the liberal pro-market party “Yabloko” (The Apple), known for its long-standing relations with Washington’s State Department and the CIA. He had close links with influential bankers, and the support of a wealthy right-wing movement against Putin, which would be aimed at installing a pro-US puppet regime.
So, the traditional Czarist cruel and clumsy removal of Alexei Navalny has played right into the hands of the USA government. A very timely occasion for much propaganda for Ukraine’s irrational and doomed military fight against Russia, – and for buckets of crocodile tears.
Well, the pro Russisan propagandists will keep bleating about Navalny as a puppet of the USA.
And the “respectable” corporate English-language press will regurgitate the glorious pro – Zelensky and Ukraine stuff coming from Biden etc, (the Navalny death a boon to their story)
But the truth must be somewhere in between, and Navalny has to be remembered as a brave man, who fought for what he believed in, – but by no means as a model of a true democrat.
I look on with amazement after retiring from the university, at the same unproven scheme we had protested against in our college days, soon becoming a reality. We felt at that time a repository would ultimately host nuclear waste from around the world and I have no doubt this is what the future holds.
This year, a community will consent to host Canada’s first nuclear waste repository.
It will be hewn out of the granite in a shaft 500 metres underground and it will aspire to keep containers full of deadly radioactive spent fuel rods separated from the water that runs through it. The owners of the waste were federally appointed to convince a local population it would be safe for generations to come.
A massive PR campaign with a substantial financial hook has focused on two regions in Ontario, one adjacent to Ignace and the other near the South Bruce Peninsula. Nuclear waste is problematic for the industry and without some panacea for the spent fuel problem, building new reactors or refurbishing older ones would be untenable. Canada, along with 20 other countries, are desperate for any solution as they have called for the tripling of nuclear energy by 2050, and Ontario is planning a multibillion-dollar refurbishment of its 50-year-old reactors.
My first encounter with this bold and untested mineshaft proposal was 40 years ago in Lac du Bonnet, Man., where my parents had a small tract of land. Nestled on 10 acres and surrounded by towering pines, the farmhouse sat on a foundation of granite, part of the Pre-Cambrian Shield. It overlooked the Pinawa channel, a manmade tributary of the Winnipeg River dynamited out of the rock in the early 1900s to power a hydroelectric dam. The fishing and wildlife were abundant; great grey owls, bear and timber wolves often passed through the property.
The toings and froings of vehicles with Ontario licence plates navigating our dead-end gravel road became cause for concern. We knew that the nuclear research site near the town of Pinawa had been quietly conducting experiments since the ’60s, but were not aware that it had teamed up with Ontario Hydro to build an Underground Research Laboratory just down our road.
As a college student, I had been taught to be skeptical of biased literature, so when literature was distributed preaching nuclear power or extinction, and referring to those against nuclear power as “Kremlin inspired,” it raised my hackles.
We knew that this excavation in the rock had the potential to be easily transformed into an operating repository. A loose coalition of university students and local residents formed the Concerned Citizens of Manitoba in hopes of countering what we referred to as “Outhouse Technology” — digging a hole, throwing in the waste and covering it up for eternity. A hard-rock miner who knew first hand the permeability of the rock, a former disillusioned member of the U.S. nuclear industry who with his wife bought a cabin downstream from the site and eventually published a book entitled Getting the Shaft, as well as several keen and creative environmentalists formed a loose affiliation.
We sought to examine any relevant documents, but soon ascertained that the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), had an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act and many of their files were classified. The secrecy surrounding the Manhattan project, so brilliantly captured in the movie Oppenheimer, persisted in thwarting our pursuit of the truth.
We decided our best strategy was to follow the lead of Greenpeace and to reach the public and media through street theatre. We had many questions about the long-term plans for the shaft that we wanted straight answers to, as well as scantily referenced leaks at the reactor in Pinawa.
Using elaborate props, we re-enacted rolling a risky dice down the steps of the legislature, placed an outhouse in front of government hearings, and even demonstrated how nuclear salesmen were getting their feet in the door using an actual door frame. These protests were made for the age of television and drew the attention of viewers.
We became so effective at calling out secrecy and untruths that a public relations employee at AECL launched a defamation slap suit, based on a private email which was surreptitiously published on a chat page.
Our most effective demonstration occurred as we attempted to inform communities on or near the border that shipments of nuclear waste could be transported down their highways.
Using a borrowed flatbed truck and a number of painted barrels clearly marked Simulation, we donned our knock-off radiation suits and headed to small towns in North Dakota. Upon returning, the cameras were waiting for us at the Emerson border stop. We had filled the barrels marked “radioactive” with water and punched holes in them so they appeared to be leaking.
Thinking the coverage was done, we returned home with water spilling onto the road in front of our house. Before long, the sound of fire engines and emergency vehicles echoed through the neighbourhood.
An off-duty fireman had failed to see the simulation sign and had called the fire department assuming a radioactive spill had occurred.
Needless to say there was great consternation among the editorial writers who felt we should pay for the false alarm, however the public uproar persuaded the provincial government to enact the Manitoba’s High-Level Radioactive Waste Act with fines of up to $1 million a day for disposing of nuclear waste in the province.
Under the guise of research, the labyrinth of tunnels through the granite did get built but it was short-lived. The Underground Research Laboratory was eventually backfilled after a decade of running pumps 24-7 to rid the so-called “impermeable” shaft of groundwater. The Manitoba law we had fought so hard for, excluded our province from being considered a candidate for a repository.
Water, however, knows no boundaries and Ignace is on the Lake Winnipeg watershed.
I look on with amazement after retiring from the university, at the same unproven scheme we had protested against in our college days, soon becoming a reality. We felt at that time a repository would ultimately host nuclear waste from around the world and I have no doubt this is what the future holds.
An elder who testified at the Seaborn hearings years ago related that the rock of the Canadian Shield was sacred, the grandfather of the Earth, and he warned, “Don’t put poison in your grandfather.”
Forty years later blasting the shield will start again and a community will soon be getting the shaft.
Dave Taylor writes from Winnipeg. You can see his blog of published works on the subject at manitobanuclea.wordpress.com.
For nearly two decades, Tona Henderson collected newspaper articles, letters and photographs documenting who in the small town of Emmett, Idaho, was diagnosed with cancer, including her own family. The result is a wall in her home covered in pictures and pages displaying the names of community members who may have been exposed to lethal radiation during the country’s Cold War-era nuclear weapons testing program.
Henderson is the director of the Idaho Downwinders, a nonprofit representing people who lived in Idaho between 1951 to 1962 when the United States tested nuclear weapons aboveground in Nevada. She has been a leading advocate for the federal government to provide financial compensation to Idahoans impacted by that nuclear testing, which sent radiated clouds beyond Nevada’s boundaries to other neighboring states, including Idaho.
This December was the closest Congress has gotten to passing legislation that would have provided compensation to Idahoans who developed cancer after radioactive contamination and exposure, she said. But Congress ultimately removed a provision that would have expanded and extended the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include Idahoans who were “downwind” from radioactive fallout. Currently, only two dozen downwinder counties in Arizona, Nevada and Utah are included in the program.
Despite that setback, Henderson said she won’t abandon the cause, and remains committed because she hopes to fulfill a promise she made to a friend.
Among her collection of photos of Emmett residents diagnosed with cancer sits a photo of Sheri Garmon, who died in 2005 at the age of 53 while advocating for an expansion of the federal radiation compensation program to help Idahoans .
“Sheri Garmon spent the last year of her life fighting this, and I told her I would not give up on it,” Henderson said. “This is the promise I made to her 20 years ago.”
Counties among the most impacted by nuclear testing
Born in 1960 and raised on a dairy farm in Emmett, Henderson told the Idaho Capital Sun that she believes the leading cause of cancer in her family is exposure to radioactive contamination from nuclear testing in Nevada.
Gem County, along with Idaho’s Custer, Blaine and Lemhi counties, are among the top five in the U.S. that were most affected by fallout from Nevada nuclear tests in the mid-20th century, according to research by the National Cancer Institute.
The Nevada Test Site is located 65 miles north of Las Vegas, and it was one of the most significant nuclear weapons test sites in the country. After concluding the Trinity Test Site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, presented too great of a risk to nearby civilian populations, the U.S. military and the Atomic Energy Commission centered on the Nevada desert due to its perceived lack of radiological hazards and “the public relations problem related hereto.” President Harry Truman authorized the establishment of the site in December 1950.
Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government conducted roughly 1,000 nuclear tests at the Nevada site, of which about 100 were atmospheric and more than 800 took place underground, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Even though just a few thousand people are said to have lived within a 125-mile radius downwind of the Nevada Test Site, government planners miscalculated the extent and wide geographic range of the radioactive fallout.
Henderson’s parents were married a couple of weeks after the federal government detonated what was called the “How” bomb on June 5, 1952.
“Less than 20 days later, they had a church wedding, and their reception was outside in the grass at my uncle’s house, and all of these people were in radiation,” Henderson said in an interview while gesturing to a photo of her relatives at the wedding. “All of these people that are in here had some weird medical complications, or they had cancer.”
Both of her parents developed cancer. And her two older brothers, born in 1953 and 1955, did too. Henderson said she believes they developed cancer because they grew up drinking contaminated milk from the cattle they raised.
According to the National Cancer Institute, American children at the time faced a high risk of developing thyroid cancer if they consumed milk from pastures where cows and goats grazed that were contaminated with iodine-131 — a radioactive element that is released into the environment during nuclear weapons testing.
Children, with smaller and still-developing thyroids, consumed more milk than adults, placing them at greater risk for cancer because of the concentration of iodine-131 in the thyroid gland.
Emmett is a tight-knit community, Henderson said. The population stands at about 8,000 people today, according to the latest census numbers. She used to run a doughnut shop in town, and customers, knowing her role in tracing diagnoses, would tell her about locals facing cancer. From 2004 to 2019, she said she recorded hundreds of instances of cancer diagnoses among Emmett residents who were present during the testing period.
“That’s a lot of people for such a small town,” she said. “The fight isn’t over.”
Idaho downwinders still uncompensated
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was approved by Congress in 1990, and it provides financial compensation to people who developed specific cancers and other serious illnesses from exposure to radiation during nuclear testing.
RECA expanded in 2000, and aims to acknowledge the federal government’s role in causing disease in its citizens. If a person can prove that they contracted one of the compensable diseases after working or living in an area for a specific period of time, they qualify for one-time lump sum compensation to help pay their medical bills.
But Idaho downwinders aren’t yet covered.
RECA provides compensation to three populations:
Uranium miners, millers and ore transporters, who may be eligible for up to $100,000“Onsite participants” at atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, who may be eligible for up to $75,000People in certain states who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site and may be eligible for up to $50,000
Under the original RECA program, only individuals who lived in parts of Utah, Nevada and Arizona between 1951 and 1958 and during the month of July 1962 were eligible.
The expansion would have broadened the geographic downwinder eligibility to include Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and the territory of Guam, along with more regions in Utah, Nevada and Arizona.
Henderson said it was devastating to discover that Congress had stripped the RECA expansion from the national defense budget bill in December. By investigating cancer in her family and Idaho community, she said she has become an “encyclopedia” on nuclear issues — something she said she never wanted to become.
“It was pretty hard to realize that it’s been 20 years of doing this work,” Henderson said. “It doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten anywhere. I didn’t sign up for it, but I definitely can’t walk away and leave it.”
RECA program short on time
RECA legislation cleared the U.S. Senate in July on a 61-37 vote, and it would have extended the program for 19 years. As things stand, it’s set to expire in June.
U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, has been a longtime Senate lead on RECA, and efforts have received broad bipartisan support. Last year, he worked alongside U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Ben Ray Luján, D-New Mexico.
Henderson said she invited Crapo to a rally at Emmett City Park in 2004 to hear the stories of people who had been diagnosed with cancer after living downwind from the Nevada Testing Site.
“Far too many innocent victims have been lost to cancer-related deaths from Cold War era above-ground weapons testing,” Crapo said in a statement. “The Senate’s passage of this amendment is an important step toward future enactment of this legislation, which will mean Idahoans and Americans who have suffered the health consequences of exposure to fallout from nuclear weapons testing will finally start to receive the compensation they rightfully deserve.”
When RECA was cut from the defense bill, Crapo said in a speech before the U.S. Senate that the federal government’s tests of nuclear weapons poisoned thousands of Idahoans.
“When America developed the atom bomb through the Manhattan Project, and tested those weapons through the Trinity Test, our country unknowingly poisoned those who mined, transported and milled uranium, those who participated in nuclear testing, and those who lived downwind of the tests,” he said.
Crapo vowed to keep working to expand and extend the program before it expires this spring.
The Wikileaks founder says he fears his own imprisonment, US government surveillance, and restrictions on the group’s funding have effectively scared off potential whistleblowers.
MP BELMARSH—It is 2:30 PM on Wednesday, December 13, when Julian Assange strides into the visitors’ area. He stands out in the column of 23 prisoners for his height—6′ 2″—and flowing white locks with trimmed beard. He squints, looking for a familiar face among the wives, sisters, sons, and fathers of the other inmates. I am waiting, as assigned, at D-3, one of about 40 sets of small coffee tables surrounded by three upholstered chairs—two blue, one red—screwed into the floor of what looks like a basketball court. We spot each other, walk forward, and embrace. It is the first time I have seen him in six years. I blurt, “You’re pale.” Through a mischievous smile I remember from past meetings, he jokes, “They call it prison pale.”
He has not been outdoors—apart from a minute when police dragged him into a paddy wagon—since he took refuge in London’s cramped Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012. The embassy’s French windows had afforded glimpses of sky. Here at Belmarsh maximum security prison in southeast London, his abode since April 11, 2019, he has not seen the sun. Warders confine him to a cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. His single hour of recreation takes place within four walls, under supervision. His paleness is best described as deathly……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Julian and I sit down, face to face, me on the red chair, he on one of the blues. Above us, glass globes hide cameras that record the interactions between inmates and their guests.
…………………………. Julian had thought prison meant communal meals at long tables, as in the movies. Belmarsh’s warders shove the food into the cells for prisoners to eat alone. It is hard to make friends that way. He has been there longer than any other prisoner apart from an old man who had served seven years to his four and a half. There are occasional suicides, he tells me, including one the night before.
……………………………… I ask whether he still has the radio he had struggled to obtain in his first year. He did, but it was not working due to a defective plug. Regulations permit each prisoner to have a radio purchased from prison stores. The authorities, however, said no radios were available for him. When I heard about it, I sent him a radio. It was returned. I then sent him a book on how to make a radio. That too was returned………………………………………………………………
How did he, a news addict, keep in touch? The prison allows him to read printouts of news stories, and friends write to him. With the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza, I say, now is an important time for whistleblowers to send documents to WikiLeaks. He regrets that WikiLeaks is no longer able to expose war crimes and corruption as in the past. His imprisonment and US government surveillance and restrictions on WikiLeaks’ funding wards off potential whistleblowers. He fears that other media outlets are not filling the vacuum.
Belmarsh does not offer him education programs or communal activity, like orchestra practice, sports, or publishing a prison journal, that are standard at many other prisons. The regime is punitive; although Belmarsh’s 700-odd inhabitants are on remand, awaiting trial or appeal. They are Category A prisoners, those who “pose the most threat to the public, the police or national security” and stand accused of terrorism, murder, or sexual violence.
We talk about Christmas, which is just another day in Belmarsh: no turkey, no carols, no presents. The prison is closed to visitors on Christmas Day and the day after, and the prison has informed his wife, Stella Moris, that she and their two young sons, Gabriel and Max, may not see him on Christmas Eve. He can attend Catholic Mass celebrated by the Polish chaplain, who has become a friend.
John had been battling illness since early 2023. The news was announced on John’s Facebook page a short time ago.
“It is with great sadness the family of John Pilger announce he died yesterday 30 December 2023 in London aged 84. His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family he was simply the most amazing and loved Dad, Grandad and partner. Rest In Peace,” the post read.
John was twice awarded Britain’s Journalist of the Year, and his work has received numerous accolades around the world including from the British Film and Television Awards, and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009.
John was a regular contributor to New Matilda, and a staunch ally of jailed Australian publisher Julian Assange, a campaign which engulfed much of the last decade of Pilger’s life. But it was his work on documentaries for which he was known globally. His first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny, was released in 1970 after a visit to Vietnam. His most recent work was The Dirty War on the NHS, an investigation into the assault on Britain’s health system.
John had a strong and enduring interest in Indigenous affairs. His book The Secret Country became renowned internationally for blowing the lid on the Australian Government’s treatment of its Aboriginal people. He turned the book into a film in 1985, and then completed several more documentaries on the First Australians, including Utopia in 2014, with New Matilda editor Chris Graham, and former New Matilda writer Amy McQuire.
John was also a friend of the Palestinian people. In 1977, he released a documentary entitled ‘Palestine is Still The Issue’. He released a new documentary in 2002 with the same name.
In total, he’s propduced more than 50 documentaries. but it was Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which launched John into the journalism stratosphere. John was amongst the first journalists into Cambodia after the collapse of the regime, and when his documentary for ITV aired in Great Britain, it shocked the conscience of a nation. It also broke records, raking in almost $50 million in fundraising to assist the people of Cambodia.
John remained a prolific writer throughout his life, and has published countless articles and at least a dozen books.
New Matilda will release a more detailed tribute to John Pilger in the coming days.
When it comes to love for the limelight and delusions of grandeur, Zelenskiy outstrips most politicians and not least of all Putin. Almost all politicians are egoistic, but Zelenskiy is narcissistic.
Zelenskiy’s inexperience and ego likely played pivotal roles in his disastrous decision-making.
Zelenskiy himself remained mired in personal corruption as the Pandora Papers demonstrated
Zelenskiy’s failures also have made him eminently expendable
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zeleneksiy appears to be at the end of the line politically and perhaps biologically. Portraying himself as a fighter for peace, anti-corruption, and full democratization when he ran for and won the presidency in 2019, he proceeded to lead the country into war, further corruption, and de-republicanization (authoritarianization).
On both a personal and global level this is high tragedy. A superb comedian and actor stars in a television fictional series as the president of Ukraine, rises in popularity, wins the country’s presidency on a peace platform, and leads the country into a catastrophic, easily avoidable war that threatens the survival of his country and himself.
The unreality of Ukraine refracts in our century of simulacra and disinformation through this icon moved from the television screen to real life politics, and the tragedy of it all is sold as a heroic triumph on the road to universal democracy, peace, and brotherhood.
In the real world, however, there is a rub. The country is historically divided along every conceivable line (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, ideological, economic, and social), an almost accidental state cobbled together by communists but claimed by hapless republicans and determined ultra-nationalists. Thus, Zelenskiy becomes president of a fundamentally divided country further riven by schism as a result of two ‘revolutions’ – really revolts – and a civil war compounded by foreign (Russian) intervention.
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Zelenskiy’s emergence and victory are as surreal as the Maidan regime of which he assumed leadership.
There are reports of more than 100 safety problems at the Sellafield nuclear power plant and a leak first reported four years ago has been allowed to worsen. It’s a nightmarish prospect and I hope someone is taking urgent remedial action, writes Cumbria native Chris Blackhurst
Every so often, when we were children, Father would borrow a portable Geiger counter and take us to the beach. While we – my sister and I – played on the sand, he would wander around with the machine. Whenever it neared a clump of seaweed the gadget would click furiously and loudly.
He taught in a secondary school and the device was in their laboratory. We lived at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, just down the coast from Sellafield, Europe’s largest nuclear reprocessing plant.
Back then, we would see ships from Japan regularly dock and unload their radioactive cargo onto special freight trains for transporting to Sellafield. Meanwhile, in the nearby shipyard, they were building submarines powered by nuclear reactors.
By and large, we Cumbrians were grateful for the atomic business. Employment in that part of the world does not come easily. There is the adjacent Lake District, with its tourist trade, but otherwise, that’s about it as far as mass numbers are concerned. Sellafield and the shipyard are by far the biggest single employers.
Not everyone was so delighted. The campaign group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment made plenty of noise, but because of the jobs and cash that was flowing into the local economy from things nuclear, struggled to have any impact.
We knew that the risk of a spillage, of a major accident, was an ever-present. It was a given, it went with the Faustian pact of relative prosperity in return for accepting the danger. We put it from our minds, reassuring ourselves that the powers-that-be would ensure our wellbeing and that the standards would be maintained.
Reading of a worsening leak from a crumbling silo of radioactive waste and fears concerning cracks in a reservoir of toxic sludge at Sellafield sparks alarm and other memories. The authorities had not always been so vigilant.
The dreadful thought is that none of this comes as a major surprise. As we’ve discovered recently, successive governments have let the nation’s infrastructure creak and wear away. If schools are forced to close because they have asbestos in them; if other public buildings are shut for the same reason or because they are in a state of neglect and no longer fit for purpose; if our motorways and railways are in a constant state of disrepair, what prospect is there of Sellafield being any different? Equally, poor working culture has been shown to be rife in many areas of British life.
nuclear-news 