US Trying to Water Down New Cease-Fire Resolution at UN Security Council
“support for Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is losing him respect all over the world.” – Mary Robinson
“The U.S. is increasingly isolated, with allies like Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and Poland switching their votes in the UN General Assembly to support an immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” said Robinson. “The U.S. cannot afford to be further isolated by vetoing this resolution.”
“The U.S. cannot afford to be further isolated by vetoing this resolution,” said one human rights advocate.
SCHEERPOST, By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams, 19 Dec 23
The United Nations Security Council on Monday delayed an expected vote on a new Gaza cease-fire resolution as the U.S. worked to weaken the measure’s language, objecting to the proposed call for an “urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities.”
Unnamed diplomats toldThe Associated Press that the wording will likely be changed to call for a “suspension” of hostilities or some other watered down phrasing amenable to the U.S., which used its veto power to tank a Security Council cease-fire resolution less than two weeks ago.
The veto drew international condemnation, and calls for a cease-fire have grown in the days since. In an overwhelming 153-10 vote on December 12, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution demanding an “immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” with the U.S. and Israel among the small number of opponents. Unlike those passed by the Security Council, General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding.
The 15-member Security Council is expected to vote on the new, potentially watered down cease-fire resolution as early as Tuesday morning.
Mary Robinson, chair of The Elders and former president of Ireland, said in a statement ahead of the vote that U.S. President Joe Biden’s “support for Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is losing him respect all over the world.”
“The U.S. is increasingly isolated, with allies like Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and Poland switching their votes in the UN General Assembly to support an immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” said Robinson. “The U.S. cannot afford to be further isolated by vetoing this resolution.”
“But even if passed, such resolutions are not enough,” she continued. “UNSCR 2712, agreed last month, is not being fully implemented. It calls for the protection of civilians, the release of all hostages, and immediate humanitarian access. Only a cease-fire will allow for these calls to be met.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/19/us-trying-to-water-down-new-cease-fire-resolution-at-un-security-council/
I Can’t Sleep
Peace and Planet News, by Paul Biggar | Fall 2023 Edition 20 Dec 23
I can’t sleep. I’m lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Is this what Israel is? The tech outpost, the U.S. ally, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East? A country that kills journalists [30] and writers in surgical strikes [31]. That forces doctors away from ICU babies, leaving them to die and rot in their incubators [32]. Whose snipers shoot children and grannies in the head [33]………………………………………………………………………………………………………
When you read about the Holocaust and the Nazis, you like to imagine you’d be the good guy. You’d fight the Nazis, you’d free the concentration camps. But apparently I wouldn’t. Apparently I would have just sat there paralyzed, incapable of doing anything about the genocide I see every day. Unable to think of any way to help. All I can do is retweet and protest and write a stupid blog post. I feel so stupid.
I wasn’t ready to see that my friends are Brownshirts [34]. That they actively cheer on the genocide [35]. The anger, the desire – the need even – for retribution against innocent civilians. I wasn’t ready for my friends being camp guards, party officials, propagandists.
The propaganda is real, and organized [36], and obvious [37]. Posting about antisemitism in universities to cover indiscriminate bombing of civilians — have you no shame? Repeating Israeli claims which have no proof, and no credibility [38]. Keeping the discussion anywhere except on Palestinians being murdered in Gaza. Denying the number of dead because the numbers are reported by Hamas [39].
Of course, everyone is Hamas now. The child ripped in two by an MK-84 [40] is Hamas. The woman screaming for her sister, digging at the rubble – she’s Hamas. The orphaned 9-year-old, now the sole parent of her 4-year-old brother. Both are Hamas……………………………………………………………
My investors keep posting. How unsafe the kids feel at Harvard [42]. Railing against “From the river to the sea” as they conveniently omit “Palestine will be free” [43]. Cancelling Tiktok for teaching the kids history instead of U.S. and Israeli propaganda [44].
Anything to keep your eyes off the rubble that Gaza has become [45]. The trail of tears to an empty desert, bombed and shot as they go [46]. Anything to avoid their own culpability in this genocide. They are Hess. They post Israeli flags on twitter as Israel drops bombs on Gaza. They protest a ceasefire. THEY PROTEST A FUCKING CEASEFIRE.
I don’t know what to do, but I know these are not my people. Who can work with people whitewashing genocide? Are we supposed to pretend it’s business as usual as we send our friends’ intros, frolic at conferences, discuss monetization strategy?………………………………………………………………
Oct. 7 was an atrocity, and so was every day since then. 20,000 Palestinians have been killed by indiscriminate, deliberate Israeli bombs……………………………………………….
Actions
Pro-Israeli investors have created a culture of fear in tech where supporters of Palestinian freedom feel unable to raise their voices. I have spoken to many people in tech who are afraid that if they speak up, they’ll be unable to raise their next round, and lose 5-10 years of work on their venture, for their families and for their employees.
We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. I know this is a big ask. I know there are significant risks involved, and that’s not your fault. But all the same, we cannot continue to be complicit in this genocide.
Above all, name it. Say publicly what you see happening, and say that what Israel and the United States are doing is wrong.
- Feel silenced? Say that!
- Just like most in tech made Black Lives Matter statements in 2020, come out and say #FreePalestine. Put a banner on your website.
Secondly, don’t make money for investors who whitewash genocide, namely partners at Boldstart, DCVC, Harrison Metal, Redpoint, Bessemer, Sequoia, or First Round.
- Tech workers: Don’t work for companies who take funding from these firms. If you already work there, contact management and the founders, ask difficult questions in all-hands, anonymously if you need to. Threaten to get a new job – actually do get a new job.
- Founders: Don’t take money from these firms. If you already have, contact your partner to register your discomfort, and ask them to divest. Prevent them from investing in later rounds.
- Attend a protest. Find your local (US) Jewish Voice For Peace or international protest.
- Call your representative and senator
- Follow Palestinian journalists and sources to follow what’s happening in Gaza through their eyes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
- Finally, please share this post or my post on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Linkedin.
Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://peaceandplanetnews.org/i-cant-sleep/
Blood Money: The Top Ten Politicians Taking the Most Israel Lobby Cash
SCHEERPOST, By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News 20 Dec 23
As the Israeli attack on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria intensifies, the U.S. public watch on aghast. A new poll finds that Americans support a permanent ceasefire by a more than 2:1 ratio (including the vast majority of Democrats and a plurality of Republicans).
And yet, despite this, only 4% of elected members of the House support even a temporary ceasefire, and the United States continues to veto U.N. resolutions working towards ending the violence. Walter Hixson, a historian concentrating on U.S. foreign relations, told MintPress News:
“Unfettered support for Israel and the lobby consistently puts the United States at odds with international human rights organizations and the vast majority of nations over Israel’s war crimes and blatant violations of international law. The current U.N. vote on a ceasefire in Gaza [which the U.S. vetoed] is just the latest example.”
Here, Hixson is referring to the pro-Israel lobby, a loose connection of influential groups that spend millions on pressure campaigns, outreach programs, and donations to American politicians, all with one goal in mind: making sure the United States supports the Israeli government’s policies full stop, including backing Israeli expansion, blocking Palestinian statehood and opposing a growing boycott divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) at home.
Internationally, Israel has lost virtually all its support. But it still has one major backer: the United States government. Part of this is undoubtedly down to the extraordinary lengths the lobby goes to secure backing, including showering U.S. politicians with millions of dollars in contributions.
In this investigation, MintPress News breaks down the top ten currently serving politicians who have taken the most pro-Israel cash since 1990.
1 JOE BIDEN, $4,346,264
The largest recipient of Israel lobby money is President Joe Biden. From the beginning of his political career, Biden, according to his biographer Branko Marcetic, “established himself as an implacable friend of Israel,” spending his Senate career “showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage.” The future president was a key figure in securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state and helped block a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine.
The support for Israeli policies has continued into the present, with his administration insisting that there are “no red lines” that it could cross that would cause it to lose American support. In essence, Biden has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws he wishes to.
This has included ethnic cleansing and war crimes such as the bombing of schools, hospitals and places of worship using banned weapons like white phosphorous munitions. The arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the U.S. In November, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue.
For his staunch support, Biden has received more than $4.3 million from pro-Israel groups since 1990.
2 ROBERT MENÉNDEZ, $2,483,205
The New Jersey senator has received nearly $2.5 million in contributions and, in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has been a key figure in drumming up support for Israel. Describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as “barbaric atrocities” that were an “affront to humankind itself,” Menéndez gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor where he addressed Biden directly, stating:
“33
He went on to claim that Israel and the United States are intrinsically linked and were founded on the same principles.
Menéndez also courted controversy after he demanded that the U.S. help Israel “wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth,” even as Israel was leveling Gaza by carpet bombing it.
In October, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution “standing with Israel against terrorism” that passed unanimously, without dissent.
3 MITCH MCCONNELL, $1,953,160
The Senate Minority Leader is one of the most powerful politicians in America and has used his influence to attempt to force through legislation criminalizing BDS. He has described the peaceful tactic as “an economic form of anti-Semitism that targets Israel.”
McConnell is known to be very close to Prime Minister Netanyahu and supported a bill condemning the United Nations and calling on the U.S. to continue to veto any U.N. resolution critical of Israel. Last month, he strongly opposed steps taken towards applying basic U.S. and international law on weapons shipments to Israel.
Under current U.S. law, Washington is duty-bound to stop supplying arms to nations committing serious human rights violations. McConnell, however, said that applying these standards to Israel would be “ridiculous,” explaining that:
“Our relationship with Israel is the closest national security relationship we have with any country in the world, and to condition, in effect, our assistance to Israel to their meeting our standards it seems to me is totally unnecessary… This is a democracy, a great ally of ours, and I do not think we need to condition the support that hopefully we will give to Israel very soon.”
McConnell has received nearly $2 million from pro-Israel groups.
4 CHUCK SCHUMER, $1,725,324
“Next on the list is McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had taken over $1.7 million from Israel lobbying groups. In recent weeks, Schumer has taken the lead in steering the public conversation away from Israel’s crimes and towards a supposed rise in anti-Semitism across America. “To us, the Jewish people, the rise in anti-semitism is a crisis. A five-alarm fire that must be extinguished,” the New York Senator said, adding that “Jewish-Americans are feeling singled out, targeted and isolated. In many ways, we feel alone.”
The idea that anti-Semitic hate is exploding across the United States comes largely from a report published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which claims that anti-Semitic incidents have risen by 337% since October 7. Buried in the small print, however, is the fact that 45% of these “anti-Semitic” incidents the ADL has tallied are pro-Palestine, pro-peace marches calling for ceasefires, including ones led by Jewish groups like If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace. (MintPress recently published an investigation into the ADL’s fudged numbers and its history of working for Israel and spying on progressive American groups.)
Schumer, however, has deliberately tried to conflate opposition to Israel’s bombardment of its neighbors with anti-Jewish racism, ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
5 STENY HOYER, $1,620,294………………………………………………..
TED CRUZ, $1,299,194………………………………………………………………….
7 RON WYDEN, $1,279,376…………………………………………………………….
8 DICK DURBIN, $1,126,020…………………………………………………
9 JOSH GOTTHEIMER, $1,109,370………………………………………….
10 SHONTEL BROWN, $1,028,686…………………………………….
A DARK FORCE IN US POLITICS
The most well-known and likely most influential group in the loose coalition referred to as the Israel lobby is AIPAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee. With a staff of around 400 people and annual revenues that frequently top over $100 million, the organization is a huge, conservative force in American politics, flooding the system with gigantic amounts of money. Worse still, the group does not disclose the sources of its funding.
AIPAC’s stated goal is:
“To make America’s friendship with Israel so robust, so certain, so broadly based, and so dependable that even the deep divisions of American politics can never imperil that relationship and the ability of the Jewish state to defend itself.”
Yet Israel is widely recognized by international bodies such as the United Nations and human rights groups like Amnesty Internationaland Human Rights Watch as an apartheid state. It has near total control over the Gaza Strip, which, even before the latest attack, was an “unlivable” “open-air prison.” It is this state and these injustices that AIPAC and others seek U.S. support for.
American intransigence on Israel has helped make it a pariah nation, one that constantly has to veto U.N. resolutions and has lost its voting rights at UNESCO.
Not only does it give more money to Republicans than Democrats, but AIPAC also floods conservative Democrats’ coffers with funds, especially when they are up against progressive, pro-Palestine challengers……………………………………………………………….
IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG?
As such, AIPAC acts as a bulwark against progressive political change. In such a divisive political environment, few political issues unite Democrats and Republicans, as well as Israel and shutting down anti-establishment figures. As Hixson told MintPress:
Other than a handful of progressives (Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, etc.), the U.S. Congress invariably gives the lobby everything it wants, namely massive regular funding for Israeli militarism and an endless series of resolutions condemning Israel’s international foes and domestic critics.”
The question that arises from this is why? Why does Israel always seem to receive full support from Washington? Is the lobby really that effective? Why do so many U.S. politicians go along with it? Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at Bethlehem University, characterized Washington as full of amoral careerists, telling MintPress that:
“”They [Senators and Congresspersons] do not buy the Zionist argument. It is strictly personal interest: money and good media coverage and avoiding blackmail, as the Zionists have their dirty secrets which they could expose if they step out of line.”
Yet Israel also serves a vital purpose for the American empire. The region is not only geographically strategic but home to the world’s largest resources of hydrocarbons. Washington has always made it a top priority to control the flow of oil around the world, and Israel helps them do this. Militarily, Israel serves as a conduit the U.S. can work through, farming out its dirty work to Tel Aviv. It, therefore, represents an unofficial and beneficial “51st state.” As Joe Biden said in 1986 and has regularly repeated, Israel is the best investment the U.S. makes. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region,” he added.
Many other nations or industries have lobbied in Washington, D.C. But few have proven to be as organized or effective as the pro-Israel one. Nevertheless, public opinion, particularly among young people, has begun to drift away from it.
The Overton Window is shifting; Professor Qumsiyeh told MintPress. “When I first went to the U.S. in 1979, the average citizen did not know anything about Palestine or knew only a negative, distorted picture driven by Hollywood and biased media. Things [have] changed,” he said.
Things have indeed changed. The streets of America have been filled with demonstrations against Israeli aggression. Millions of Americans have participated in Palestine solidarity protests, including hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C. alone. Celebrities have spoken out against injustice. And social media is filled with posts showing sympathy for Gazans. There, too, Israel and pro-Israel groups have attempted to use their financial clout to influence the conversation, but to limited effect.
Fortunately for Israel, for now, at least, they can still rely on the unwavering support of senior American politicians, their pockets filled with AIPAC money, turning the other way as Israel carries out another genocide against Palestine. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/20/blood-money-the-top-ten-politicians-taking-the-most-israel-lobby-cash/
Buried secrets, plutonium poisoned bodies
Why did a Truchas woman die with extraordinary amounts of plutonium in her body — and why was she illegally autopsied? For this reporter, the answers hit close to home.
Searchlight, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, December 20, 2023
The first reference to her comes, of all places, on an airplane. It’s the end of April and sitting next to me is Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Both of us are on our way back to Santa Fe from Washington, D.C., after the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s weeklong annual gathering. Coghlan, galvanized by the last several days of activities, spends most of the flight ticking down his list of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s most recent sins. But suddenly he turns to the past.
“Did you know that the person with the highest levels of plutonium in her body after the atomic detonation at Trinity Site was a woman from Truchas?” he asks me. The remark, more hearsay than fact, piques my interest. As Coghlan knows, that’s my pueblito, the place in northern New Mexico where I grew up on land passed down through many generations of women. Tina Cordova — co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium — would know more, he adds. “Ask her.”
Truchas, short for Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Río de las Truchas, sits on a ridge in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level. With some 370 people in town, most everybody keeps up with the latest mitote, or gossip, at the local post office. A regional variation of Spanish is still spoken by elders. Bloodlines go back centuries. And neighbors might also be relatives. If she is from this tiny, but remarkable, speck on the map, I must at least know of her. My mom, a deft weaver of family trees, definitely would.
Truchas is also 225 miles north of the Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first atomic blast. On July 16, 1945, at the peak of monsoon season, a clandestine group of scientists lit up the skies of the Chihuahuan Desert with the equivalent of 24.8 kilotons of TNT. In the first 10 days, wind would carry the radioactive fallout across 46 states — so far, in fact, that the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, traced spots on film to radioactive material released by the bomb.
It’s plausible, given such an expansive reach, that this Trucheña who Coghlan casually mentions is among a wave of Trinity’s first unknowing victims. Historically, she signals a profound rupture in time — before nuclear weapons and after. But at the moment, his comment seems impossible to grasp. It’s only in hindsight that the single most important question takes form, one that will dog me for more than six months: Who is she?
Incomprehensible autopsies
Just over a month later, I hear about her for the second time, at a journalism conference…………………………………………………. this time adding the original source of the information: the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project, known as the LAHDRA report.
Published in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and based on millions of classified and unclassified documents from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project to the late 1990s — the report’s stated purpose was to identify “all available information” concerning radioactive materials and chemicals released at Los Alamos National Laboratory (known as the Los Alamos Scientific Library from 1947 to 1981).
Some of the documents are autopsy records, I come to find. The lab routinely released plutonium into the air from several facilities on its campus, but it wasn’t until 1978 that it began to measure those releases consistently. One question that preoccupied researchers was whether data culled from the autopsies would reveal higher rates of plutonium in people who lived near or worked in those nuclear facilities.
There is another cache of autopsies, too, for the scientific equivalent of a control group — randomly selected people who simply lived and died in northern New Mexico. Cases from the control group were also analyzed, the report added, “in an effort to review the possible plutonium exposure from the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.”
I quickly scroll down to see which person in this group had the highest plutonium levels. And there it is: The highest levels do indeed belong to an unnamed woman from Truchas, alive at the time of the Trinity detonation.
But what comes next in the report will preoccupy me for months: “The plutonium concentration in her liver was 60 times higher than that of the average New Mexico resident.”
The number is incomprehensible to me. First, the actual amount is never stated, nor is the amount for the average New Mexican. But there is also a glaring contradiction that I detect only after reading the paragraph’s final cryptic line many times over. Fallout from Trinity, it essentially explains, didn’t cascade over Truchas until 12 hours after the initial blast. At that distance, there was no telling whether fallout could be inhaled or ingested — the most direct and harmful paths of entry.
It’s a paradox. Trinity stood out as the most obvious culprit — she was, after all, alive when it was detonated — but even the researchers weren’t certain. The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration, from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The question is how?
The entry is most striking for its brevity, no more than a paragraph amid the report’s 638 pages. Partly, this has to do with the expansive scope of the LAHDRA project, which covers far more than these autopsies, and partly because of the secrecy and laws that protect personal privacy.
Through the prism of science, this Trucheña is a single, mysterious data point. From this same prism, the unwritten parts of her life look like negative space. But when I imagine who she is, I also imagine what would fill that space — all the parts of her story that must exist but have been left out.
For now, I don’t even know her name.
Exotic poison
In an interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 1965, chemist Glenn Seaborg described plutonium as “one of the most exotic metals in the periodic table — maybe the most.” Seaborg had created plutonium out of uranium in 1940 and still, 25 years later, at least some of its properties were anomalous.
How plutonium poisoned the body was also largely unknown. The survivors in Nagasaki, Japan, where U.S. forces dropped a plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945, began to see increased rates of leukemia in the years immediately following the blast, most notably among children. Twelve years later, tumor registries were founded to track the cancer incidences in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States detonated “Little Boy,” a uranium bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945.
But in Los Alamos, there were only three instances of acute radiation poisoning — Harry Daghlian in 1945, Louis Slotin, in 1946, and Cecil Kelley, in 1958. Daghlian and Slotin both received a fatal blast of radiation while handling the same core of plutonium, the “demon core” as it was later dubbed. Daghlian died 25 days after the accident; Slotin survived for only nine. Kelley died within 35 hours of performing an operation to purify and concentrate plutonium in a large mixing tank. As the tank swirled, the plutonium inside it assumed the right shape and size to produce a brief nuclear chain reaction. The injuries the men suffered were ghastly.
Besides those were the less dramatic cases: Nuclear workers who were routinely exposed to much smaller amounts of plutonium on the job, and citizens exposed through atmospheric testing, which began in Nevada in 1951 and didn’t end in America until 1963. By the time of Kelley’s death, data on those other groups had yet to be collected, much less analyzed.
When I email Joseph Shonka, the primary author of the LAHDRA report, I get my first insights about the Human Tissue Analysis Program, a landmark project that gathered data about how plutonium exposure affected people’s health long-term.
“During the concerns about global fallout in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a research program to measure the levels of plutonium in US residents,” he replied by email in August. The research was based on “plutonium workers who voluntarily agreed to contribute their bodies to research, as well as appropriately obtained tissues from autopsies from nearby residents of AEC facilities and from random individuals across the US, including New Mexico.”
I can’t help but obsess over two words: “appropriately obtained.” History tells of doctors performing grisly acts in the name of science, but that was before the dawn of biomedical ethics. I’d assumed that those ethics had become self-evident in modern-day autopsy practices and that tissues were always “appropriately obtained.” That’s not the case here, I realize after an Internet search. How the tissues for this research program were obtained was, in fact, deeply controversial, if not unlawful.
Autopsy authority from ‘God’
In 1996, Cecil Kelley’s wife and daughter filed a class-action lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California, the school that had managed the lab since 1943, and 10 other defendants, including former lab director Norris E. Bradbury. The autopsies, unlawful and fraudulent, were conducted on both lab employees and the general public “without the knowledge, informed consent, or permission of the families involved,” the complaint asserted. What occurred, it went on, was the “unauthorized and illegal research and experimentation” on the corpses of hundreds of New Mexico residents and others around the country. And plaintiffs only became aware of it, “to their extreme shock and horror,” many decades after the fact. In the press, it was known as the case of the “body snatchers.”
The human tissue program began on Jan. 1, 1959, a day after Cecil Kelley’s horrific death. Clarence Lushbaugh, who worked for the lab and was also the pathologist and chief of staff at Los Alamos Medical Center, had long been waiting for “an employee with known exposure to radioactive substances to die so that the body could be autopsied and the radioactivity of the lungs could be counted,” legal filings said. “Mr. Kelley’s accident and subsequent death provided Defendant Lushbaugh with the opportunity he’d been waiting for.”
By the program’s end in 1985, 271 lab workers and 1,825 members of the general population, from New Mexico and across the country, had been secretly autopsied and their organs sent to the lab to be studied for plutonium content. Besides the obvious transgressions, the project had a number of other yawning flaws, including 489 tissue samples that were lost when a freezer failed.
Participating pathologists, first at Los Alamos Medical Center, the program’s unofficial headquarters in New Mexico, and then in other cities, ostensibly performed the autopsies to determine a person’s cause of death. But that was just a cover for the real motive, which was to entirely remove and analyze lungs, kidneys, spleen, vertebrae, lymph nodes and, in men, gonads, the class action asserted.
The pathologists “exercised a clause in their autopsy permit form that allowed collection of tissues for ‘scientific research,’ a U.S. General Accounting Office report later said. “As a result, Los Alamos officials did not feel it was necessary to obtain their own informed consent documentation.” Families, in other words, were never asked for permission.
Among the records, I read about Kelley’s particularly ghoulish autopsy; Lushbaugh stored his entire nervous system in a mayonnaise jar and sent his brain to Washington, D.C., for study. When asked in his deposition who granted him the authority to do so, Lushbaugh said “God.”
Clues without names
A kind of armor protects the lab’s nuclear secrets. For that reason alone, I have little faith that I will be able to identify her — the anonymous Trucheña with 60 times more plutonium in her body than any other New Mexican autopsied in this hair-raising study. But I keep looking. Maybe it’s that I believe finding her can reaffirm, in some small measure, her humanity. All I know is that I need a tangible public record. And the class-action lawsuit is the best and only place to start.
……………………………………………………………………………………………. volume 37 of “Health Physics,” a medical journal devoted to radiation safety. Published in 1979, it contains the biggest lead yet — a list of the Human Tissue Analysis Program’s decedents in New Mexico and across the country, all unnamed.
Each entry reads like a bullet point: Case number, occupation, residence, state and cause of death. A separate column includes sex, age, years of living in Los Alamos — if they did live there — and year of death. The columns reveal, in clinical and unnerving detail, each organ by weight and radioactivity, if any.
Here, there is no whole greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it’s the parts that so preoccupied researchers — line after line of organs measured down to the gram, and line after line of radioactivity measured down to disintegrations per minute. But the story I glean is more complicated than these facts and figures alone. It’s about the scientific desire to reduce people into mere objects of study and the violence of that reduction.
…………………………………………………………………………..“Epifania S. Trujillo, a lifelong resident of Truchas died at the age of 91, September 26, in the Los Alamos Medical Center following a long illness,” reads the October 1972 obituary in the Rio Grande Sun. “She is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Cosme Romero of Truchas and Mrs. Glenn Manges of Gallup; a sister Veronice Padilla of Truchas, 25 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.”
…………………………………………….I tell them (descendants of Epifania Trujillo), she had by far the most plutonium in her body of any other New Mexico resident who was autopsied as part of that macabre program.
…………………It might explain, she (Cecilia Romero, granddaughter) continues, “why so many in the family have gotten cancer.” She begins to run down the list.
“My oldest brother, Sam, died of multiple myeloma. Susie had pancreatic cancer. My mom died of pancreatic cancer. Nora got pancreatic cancer, which is metastatic, so she now suffers from lung cancer. Mary Helen and I have both had breast cancer. And Henry had prostate cancer.” Only one sibling, Bernice, was spared. (Cecilia and Nora said they had genetic testing for both pancreatic and breast cancer risk that showed those cancers were not hereditary.)
I’m shocked. The only time I’ve heard of such a pervasive history of cancer is in conversations with Tina Cordova, Bernice Gutierrez and Mary Martinez White, all members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who lived within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. But this is different. Truchas is 225 miles from Trinity. How did a woman living at that distance end up with such an extraordinary amount of plutonium in her liver?
As I keep talking to the two sisters, I realize the answer might lie closer to home — Los Alamos.
Cosme (Cecilia’s father) was the only one in the family who worked at the lab. That he could have unwittingly carried home undetectable radioactive particles on his clothing and boots and trigger illness throughout the family had long flickered in the Romeros’ minds. But they never could have guessed that Epifania might be the bellwether. She lived to the age of 91 — no small feat — and did not suffer from cancer herself. But over the long arc of time, almost everyone around her did.
…………………………………………………. Cosme worked at Technical Area 8, a “hot site.”
Rare photos from TA-8
Technical Area 8, also known as Gun Site, was named after the gun-type design used in Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The War Department built the facility off of Los Alamos’s West Jemez Road, complete with three “bombproof” concrete buildings and a firing range for scientists to study projectiles and ballistics. Research there involved “high explosives, plutonium, uranium, arsenic, lithium hydride, and titanium oxide,” as one lab document read.
……………………………………………………… What, precisely, did Cosme do at the lab? And could he have brought home the plutonium that affected Epifania?
……………………….Safety measures at LANL have changed since Cosme’s time and today include shielding, protective clothing, air sampling, radiation safety evaluations and other precautions, all aimed at safeguarding workers, the environment and the community, according to LANL spokespeople.
………. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has recorded instances of radioactive “take-home toxins.” How many times might workers have taken toxins home and never known?
“I’ve visited hundreds of nuclear workers’ homes over the years, possibly thousands,” says Marco Kaltofen, a specialist in nuclear forensics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who wrote a 2018 report on nuclear workers’ house dust.
…………………………………….. The kind of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons, plutonium 239, has a 24,000-year radioactive half-life. With that lifespan, the particles could still be present today in a forgotten corner of an attic, cellar or basement, Kaltofen says. Radioactive dust is not only a “potential source of internal radiation exposure to nuclear site workers,” his report warned: It could also expose their families “via secondary contamination.”
Plutonium and cancer
Health studies have shown that residents downwind of the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where plutonium was first produced at full-scale, have high incidences of all cancers, including uterine, ovarian, cervical and breast.
There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to ionizing radiation, which includes alpha particles emitted by plutonium, is linked to an increase in pancreatic cancer. Additional research at LANL — the unpublished Zia Study — posits that increased radiation exposure among male employees between 1946 and 1978 led to increased rates of pancreatic cancer deaths. Any cumulative exposure to low doses of radiation is associated with higher risks of death by cancer, recent research shows.
………………………………………..It’s almost too easy to think of all the ways the Romero children, and the cousins who occasionally lived with them, could have come into contact with radioactive dust, and how their bodies, still growing, could have been poisoned.
The last clue
…………………………………………………………………………. Seeing her name among the court records is definite proof — Epifania was unlawfully autopsied as part of the Human Tissue Analysis Program.
……………………………………Indeed, it’s not until over a decade after the suit was settled that the Romeros get all the wrenching news at once: Their father might have brought home toxic plutonium on his work clothes; their grandmother was unlawfully autopsied; the family was left out of the settlement altogether; and Los Alamos had a hand in all of it. Epifania, emblematic of so much, fell through the cracks in every way possible…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Alicia Inez Guzmán
Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity, and land use in New Mexico. She brings this knowledge to her current role at Searchlight. https://searchlightnm.org/buried-secrets-poisoned-bodies/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=c42014a33e-12%2F20%2F2023+-+Buried+secrets%2C+poisoned+bodies&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-c42014a33e-395610620&mc_cid=c42014a33e&mc_eid=a70296a261
Regulators approve deal for ratepayers to pay for Georgia Power’s new nuclear reactors
Almost 15 years of wrangling over who should pay for two new nuclear
reactors in Georgia and who should be accountable for cost overruns came
down to one vote Tuesday, with the Georgia Public Service Commission
unanimously approving an additional 6% rate increase to pay for $7.56
billion in remaining costs at Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Vogtle.
The rate increase is projected to add $8.95 a month to a typical residential
customer’s current monthly bill of $157. It would take effect in the
first month after Vogtle’s Unit 4 begins commercial operation, projected
to be sometime in March. A $5.42 rate increase already took effect when
Unit 3 began operating over the summer.
Bryan Jacob of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy called the vote “disappointing.” He said residential and small business customers paid a disproportionate share of a financing charge that Georgia Power collected during construction, but Tuesday’s vote parceled out additional costs without giving customers credit for heavier shares of earlier contributions.
Independent 19th Dec 2023
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ap-atlanta-georgia-westinghouse-augusta-b2466797.html
Shuttering the Nuclear Weapons Sites: There’s Gold in Those Warheads but the Scrap Metal is Radioactive
by Robert Alvarez, Dec 18, 2023, https://washingtonspectator.org/shuttering-the-nuclear-weapons-sites-theres-gold-in-those-warheads-but-the-scrap-metal-is-radioactive/
As one of my first tasks early in the first Clinton Administration as the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, I conducted the first (and only) asset inventory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In carrying it out, we departed from the usual reliance on DOE contractors, and established a team of federal employees throughout the DOE complex to scour the system for data. In doing this we saved a lot of money and time that would otherwise be consumed by DOE contractors that had perfected the art of cost maximization.
After six months we briefed Energy Secretary O’Leary on what we found. With real estate holdings of more than 2.4 million acres–an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined–the DOE was the largest government-owned industrial energy supply and research enterprise in the country, responsible for:
- More than 20,700 specialized facilities and buildings, including 5,000 warehouses, 7,000 administrative buildings, 1,600 laboratories, 89 nuclear reactors, 208 particle accelerators, and 665 production and manufacturing facilities.
- More than 130,000 metric tons of chemicals, a quantity roughly equivalent to the annual output of a large chemical manufacturer.
- More than 270,000 metric tons of scrap metal—equivalent to more than two modern aircraft carriers in weight. (The dismantlement of three gaseous diffusion plants will generate about 1.4 million metric tons of additional scrap.)
- More than 17,000 pieces of large industrial equipment.
- More than 40,000 metric tons of base metals and more than 10,000 pounds of precious metals, such as gold, silver, and platinum.
- About 700,000 metric tons of nuclear materials, mostly depleted uranium but also including weapons-grade and fuel-grade plutonium, thorium, and natural and enriched uranium.
- About 320,000 metric tons of stockpiled fuel oil and coal for 67 power plants.
- About 600 million barrels of crude oil stored at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
- Electrical distribution systems for the Bonneville, Western Area, Southwestern, Southeastern, and Alaska power administrations.
If the Energy Department were a private concern with more than 100,000 employees, it would be one of the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations. And, we determined, if it were privately held, it would be filing for bankruptcy.
Major elements of Energy’s complex were closing down, leaving a huge unfunded and dangerous mess. After more than a half century of making nuclear weapons, the DOE possessed one of the world’s largest inventories of dangerous nuclear materials and it has created several of the most contaminated areas in the Western hemisphere.
We discovered that a significant percentage of overhead expenses at several shuttered sites were from hoarding fungible assets that were no longer needed. The challenge was to empty these warehouses and to generate an income for the U.S. government by selling off valuable excess materials.
Our first effort was aimed at the large amount of uncontaminated precious metals contained in nuclear weapons that would generate millions-of-dollars in revenue from warheads scheduled for dismantlement under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). For the first time, nuclear disarmament would actually make money for the taxpayer.
We were astounded to find that for decades intact weapons components containing large amounts of precious metals were being disposed at great expense in a classified landfill under heavy guard. It took a direct order from the Secretary for DOE’s PANTEX weapons assembly and dismantlement facility near Amarillo, TX to obtain an industrial scale hydraulic hammer to smash non-nuclear components into little pieces so that the gold and other metals can be recovered without revealing design secrets.
Further complicating the process for dismantling weapons, the DOE had failed to properly maintain its system for assessing and evaluating each nuclear weapon for reliability, aging problems, and safe dismantlement. Known as configuration management (CM), this system is a fundamental element in the control of the nuclear stockpile and is based on careful documentation of “as built” drawings and product definitions made during the design, manufacture, assembly, and deployment of a nuclear weapons.
My staff discovered that DOE could not find nearly 60 percent of the “as built” drawings that document all changes made to active weapons selected for dismantlement. I threw a fit and reported it to the front office, which promptly took action.
Over the ensuing decade, we wound up sending about $50 million from the sale of precious metals extracted from dismantled weapons back to the treasury. As a side benefit, we also set up the DOE’s first electronic recycling center to recover fungible materials from DOE’s huge inventory of excess computers.
After receiving a Secretarial Gold Medal for our asset management program, I became increasingly isolated from the DOE front office, and spent most of my time involved with environment, safety and health problems afflicting the DOE nuclear weapons complex. As soon as Secretary O’Leary departed in late 1996, our asset inventory was buried and barred from public disclosure.
However, I drew the line when it came to the disposition of radiologically contaminated materials, such as the vast amount of scrap metal resulting from the decommissioning of nuclear weapons facilities.
In 1994, I blocked a deal that would have allowed some 10,000 tons of radiation-contaminated nickel from nuclear weapons operations to be recycled into the civilian metal supply, where some percentage of it would inevitably wind up in stainless steel items such as intrauterine devices, surgical tools, children’s orthodontic braces, kitchen sinks, zippers, and flatware. However, that confrontation was not to be the end of the scrap metal gambit.
The pressures to recycle 1.7 million metric tons of contaminated metal scrap (equivalent to 17 U.S. aircraft carriers in weight) at nuclear weapons facilities in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio were enormous.
I dug in my heels and opposed an effort, supported by Vice President Gore’s office, to release tens of thousands of tons of radiologically contaminated metals into commerce. By claiming cost savings associated with foregoing landfill disposal, DOE contractors would be able to pocket the profits from the sale of scrap. Going forward however, I was seen as obstructionist and was effectively shunned from decision-making circles.
After Hazel O’Leary left as Energy Secretary in late 1996, I lost my political “air cover” and was perceived in the words of a colleague by the incoming leadership of the agency (Secretary Frederico Pena’s team) as “too radioactive.”
Even though I was being excluded from policy decisions, I still persisted.
As a former environmental activist, I had no compunctions about going outside of the Department to convince an old friend at the Natural Defense Resource Council to file a lawsuit to block the free release of the contaminated metal.
I knew that if DOE and its contractors got their way, this practice would lead to a major public backlash. Not to mention the market impacts the contaminated material would create for the U.S. steel industry, which was almost totally dependent on recycled metal for its feedstock. Steel makers had been burned before by errant radiation sources and the last thing they wanted was for the public to realize that the stainless-steel fork on the dinner table had some plutonium in it from a nuclear weapons plant. But consideration of these consequences could easily get overlooked in the DOE, where decisions were made in isolation and secrecy.
The lawsuit stopped the train temporarily. Judge Gladys Kessler, in a strongly worded opinion, stated: “It is . . . startling and worrisome that from an early point on, there has been no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input in a matter of such grave importance.” Calling the recycling effort “entirely experimental at this stage,” she concluded, “The potential for environmental harm is great, especially given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which the defendants seek to recycle.”
In the summer of 1998, I received a call from the White House indicating that I was being fired within the next 30 days. This was the third time my detractors sought to end my tenure as a senior political appointee in DOE’s Policy office. This time, it seemed to be final.
A week before my departure, I was summoned to meet with Bill Richarson – the newly installed Secretary of Energy. He was slouched on the sofa and disheveled after a long day. “I don’t know why you got on the list. You must have pissed-off quite a few people,” he said with a devilish smile. “But you have a lot of folks that want to keep you around. When I visited DOE sites, members of Congress, union officials, Indian tribes, and environmental activists, would ask me about this Alvarez guy.”
He then pulled out a news clipping from the Seattle Times about a walk-out staged by the members of a DOE advisory panel at the Hanford facility in protest to my sacking. “You must be a fighter, I like fighters,” he said approvingly. Richardson reversed the White House decision and appointed me as his Senior Policy Advisor, where I was tasked among other things to end the “hot scrap” recycling scam.
A senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
U.S. Nuclear Sector Set for Major Transformation
By ZeroHedge – Dec 18, 2023, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/US-Nuclear-Sector-Set-for-Major-Transformation.html
- Suggests reducing government intervention in commercial nuclear operations and focusing on public health and safety regulation.
- Calls for the Department of Energy to exit the commercialization of nuclear technology and for states to play a larger role in nuclear regulation.
- Recommends private sector management of nuclear waste and potential insurance coverage options for nuclear reactor accidents outside the federal Price-Anderson program.
The silver lining of this month’s United Nations COP28 global warming conference is the growing consensus that nuclear energy is critical to meeting national carbon dioxide reduction goals.
Denying the world access to clean, affordable fuels like gas, oil, and coal is a real problem. But recognizing that nuclear energy must play a pivotal role in our energy future is a major step forward—one that should enjoy widespread support, regardless of one’s views on CO2 reductions.
But to go big on nuclear requires thinking big on nuclear energy policy, and that means questioning the subsidize-first mentality that has defined U.S. energy policy for decades
The goal should not be to build a few nuclear power plants. Rather, we should strive to create an economically sustainable, competitive, innovative and uniquely American nuclear industry.
This will require a realignment of responsibility. The government’s role should be to protect public health and safety. The private sector’s role should be to operate a competitive commercial nuclear sector.
That means getting rid of the subsidies, rethinking regulation and getting Washington out of nuclear waste management. Washington should have a regulatory role, but not its current role as Nuclear CEO.
The reason is simple: Governments are not good at business, because they make decisions based on politics rather than on good economic sense. This never yields a successful industry.
Some argue that nuclear energy requires more governmental control, suggesting that nuclear presents more financial, technical, and political risks than other industries.
But all big projects have financial risk. Private oil refineries can cost billions of dollars, and projects like skyscrapers, liquid natural gas export terminals and other large industrial projects all require massive capital outlays. Companies and individuals regularly take big financial risks.
Then there is technological risk. But nuclear is not really that different from other industries. With 440 nuclear reactors operating globally, technical risk for existing technology is relatively low. Industry knows how to build and operate nuclear plants.
Possible technological risks with new designs are not beyond the realm of those posed by innovation in other cutting-edge businesses, such as fracking or offshore energy exploration. e. Beyond that, as it pertains to nuclear energy, there is a vast federal research infrastructure in place that the private sector can access to help mitigate that risk.
Political risk, however, is real and uniquely high when it comes to nuclear energy, and it exacerbates financial and technical risk calculations.
Any justification for government intervention is based on mitigating government-imposed risk.
But here is the problem.
When government intervenes to mitigate a risk that it has created, it adds another layer of political risk. Worse, it creates dependence, distorts capital flows, incentivizes rent-seeking and lobbying, and forces firms to allocate resources to satisfy politicians and bureaucrats rather than improve its business.
This creates misalignments between responsibility and authorities and undermines economic efficiency.
Even worse, politics often changes, making it difficult to build a sustainable business model around political preferences. At best, this approach could yield a couple of reactors or keep some firms above water, but it won’t produce a robust, competitive, innovative nuclear industry. Failure is likely.
The major question is: How does America minimize political risk and allow the private sector to manage other risks, so that a robust industry can emerge?
It will require changing the Department of Energy’s role, bold regulatory reforms, and solving the problem of nuclear waste management.
We need to get the Energy Department totally out of the nuclear commercialization business. The problem is not that people are not doing their jobs, the problem is the nature of government.
The Department should not be funding grants, loans, or demonstration projects. Nor should it be attempting to improve operations or economics of existing plants or new technologies. The private sector can do these better than government.
The Energy Department has an important role to play in nuclear research and scientific discovery, but it needs to get as far from any commercialization or commercial operations as possible.
What about regulation?
Worthwhile attempts are being made to improve the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An efficient, predictable, and affordable regulatory process for new reactor technologies is essential.
But America needs to think bigger.
For example, states could be authorized to take a larger role in nuclear power plant regulation. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 already allows states to regulate some nuclear materials. That should be expanded. States could regulate existing reactor technology, and the NRC could focus on new technologies. Not all states will use this opportunity, but some will.
This is a reasonable proposition because U.S. utilities have been safely operating large light water reactors for over 50 years. America should not be regulating large light water reactors as new, scary technology, because it is neither new nor scary. The regulatory burden should be significantly lifted on those reactors.
NRC personnel should not be the only ones who can review permit applications and other regulatory review work. Private firms should be able to compete for this business. They would lighten the NRC’s load and likely do a quicker job at lower cost.
Lastly, companies should be allowed to build reactors outside the existing NRC regulatory regime if they obtain their own liability insurance against accidents. In exchange they would forgo participation in the federal Price-Anderson program that currently provides liability coverage.
Some might question whether private insurers would cover a nuclear reactor absent a government backstop. But given outstanding safety records of existing reactors and promises that new technologies are safer, this should be an option. Insurance comes in many forms, and no one can predict what could ultimately emerge.
Either way, the insurance industry is extraordinarily sophisticated and does a tremendous job at pricing risk. It will be effective at ensuring that only the safest nuclear plants are built.
Finally, there is the question of what to do with nuclear waste—or, more accurately, spent nuclear fuel.
The federal government took responsibility for managing the nation’s spent nuclear fuel in 1982. By removing responsibility from the spent fuel producers, the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act removed any incentive for the nuclear industry to integrate spent fuel management into its long-term business planning and left it instead to Washington bureaucrats. It should surprise no one that the plan has failed.
Reforms are needed to reconnect the nuclear industry to waste management. Reforms would allow for a private spent fuel industry to emerge that would drive innovation in reactor technologies and spent fuel processing. They would allow the nuclear industry and communities to engage in real negotiations, bound by legal contracts, to build and operate spent fuel management facilities.
There is no question that these proposed reforms are a major departure from the status quo, but they are reasonable, not radical. They would foster good governance and economic progress in the industry. As COP28 representatives discuss how to reduce carbon while raising global living standards, nuclear energy should be on the front burner.
Biden Intends To Keep Participating In The Incineration Of Gaza
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 15, 2023
Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel.
The Biden administration currently has no plans to place conditions on the military aid it is providing to Israel, officials told CNN, despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for the US to stop providing weapons unless Israel does more to protect civilians in Gaza.
Biden administration officials are telling the press that they have no plans to place any conditions on military aid to Israel.
Speaking to Democratic donors in Washington this week, President Joe Biden acknowledged that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign, how Israel is losing international support, and the need for a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority. But he said even throughout those discussions, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.”
Echoing that sentiment, US officials told CNN that the US has no plans to shift its position and draw any red lines around the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel.
This is the real story of Washington’s relationship with the incineration of Gaza. Ignore all their feigned concern about civilian casualties and posturing about Israel’s need to wrap this up soon; in reality they intend to keep backing this mass atrocity unconditionally.
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“Israel has a right to defend itself” sounds reasonable until you realize it actually means “Israel has a right to kill as many Palestinian children as it wants in its efforts to eliminate all armed resistance to a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime.”
Israel supporters like to say, “Hamas can end this any time by surrendering.”
Israel can end this any time by ceasing to be a murderous and tyrannical occupying regime held together by endless violence and apartheid. Israel wasn’t attacked because Palestinians are innately evil and want to kill Jews, Israel was attacked because it has treated Palestinians horrifically for generations. If Israel and its allies ended the injustices, paid reparations and righted the wrongs that have been inflicted on Palestinians for the last 75 years, there could be a sustainable peace.
The only way to believe all this intense civilian-slaughtering warfare is necessary to obtain peace is to believe Palestinians are orc-like subhumans who are acting out of an innate hatefulness and thus cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this.
“Hamas can end this any time by surrendering” really just means “Israel gets to keep murdering Gaza’s children until Gaza’s government gives it what it wants.” Which is about as evil a position as you can possibly imagine. This is not an acceptable position for any person to have
Israel’s unique focus on attacking hospitals makes no sense as a military strategy but makes lots of sense as an ethnic cleansing strategy.
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Western media are constantly babbling about “Iran-backed” forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, yet Israeli bombings are never described as “US-backed”, even though they indisputably are, and even though the evidence for this is far stronger than any claims about Iranian backing.
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Both Zionists and people who hate Jews conflate Judaism and Zionism, and both Zionists and people who hate Jews contribute to spreading hatred of Jews by indoctrinating the public with this distortion……………………………………………….
I don’t criticize Israel because I want to, I criticize Israel because I have to. If I could avoid saying stuff that gets weird sociopaths shrieking at me and calling me a Nazi all day long, I would. But if Israel’s going to commit horrific mass atrocities, it must be opposed. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-intends-to-keep-participating?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139812608&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email
ACTION ALERT: New York Times Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots
because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.
JIM NAURECKAS, DECEMBER 15, 2023
“Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?” a New York Times article (12/10/23) by Jonathan Weisman asked. Trying to pinpoint the moment when “anti-Zionism crosses from political belief to bigotry,” Weisman suggested there were different kinds of anti-Zionism based on different visions of what Zionism means. But his effort to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable critics of Israel painted principled supporters of equal rights as antisemitic bigots.
Weisman offered one definition of Zionism—the way it was “once clearly understood”—as “the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors.” To oppose this kind of Zionism “suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews”—which he said to many Jews “is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.” Their argument is:
Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.
On the other hand, wrote Weisman, “some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state.” This kind of anti-Zionism merely opposes “an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank,” land that could serve as “a separate state for the Palestinian people.”
These two views of Zionism seemed to represent the poles of acceptable and unacceptable anti-Zionism. The piece quoted Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) explaining that “some anti-Zionism” isn’t “used to cloak hatred of Jews”; Nadler stressed, though, that “MOST anti-Zionism—the type that calls for Israel’s destruction, denying its right to exist—is antisemitic.”
The Nexus Task Force, a group associated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has a definition of antisemitism that is more tolerant of criticism of Israel than that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also cited by the Times. But it still insists, Weisman wrote, “that it is antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people and exercise self-determination.”
Not ‘self-determination’
The phrase “self-determination” is doing a lot of work here. In international relations, it is generally used to mean that the residents of a geographical area inhabited by a distinct group have a right to decide whether or not they want that area to remain part of a larger entity. It’s a right that seems to come and go depending on political allegiances: When Albanians in Kosovo wanted to secede from Serbia, their right to do so was enforced with NATO bombs. If ethnic Russians who wanted to split off from Ukraine got help from Moscow, though, that wasn’t self-determination but a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
To call Zionism a belief in Jewish “self-determination,” however, perverts the concept to include moving to a geographic region and forcibly expelling many of the people who already live there, in order to create a situation where members of your group can have a “sovereign homeland” where they “are assured of governing themselves.”
Ensuring the dominance of a particular ethnic group through forced migration is not usually called “self-determination,” but rather “ethnic cleansing.” This is the older version of Zionism that Weisman seems to suggest can only be opposed by antisemites.
It’s true that there is another vision of Zionism, unsatisfied with expelling the indigenous residents to the fringes of Israel/Palestine, that insists on incorporating those fringes. Ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has occupied the remaining parts of what was the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, where many refugees from the establishment of Israel were forced to live.
But because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.
As it happens, this is precisely the strategy that white-ruled South Africa employed to pretend that white supremacy was compatible with democracy; it called the fictitious countries that the nation’s Black majority supposedly belonged to “bantustans.” This and other resemblances to white South Africa are why leading human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem call Israel an apartheid state.
But both versions of Zionism involve the dismissal of one group’s rights in order to create a polity dominated by another group—a project that can certainly be opposed in either iteration without signifying animosity or prejudice toward anyone. (To be sure, there are antisemites who use “Zionists” as a transparent codeword for Jews. These are generally pretty easy to spot.)
A smear that needs correction
There is much to take issue with in Weisman’s article, but there is one point he makes that really warrants a correction. As an example of straightforward “Jew hatred,” he cites “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions”—and offers as an example that this is what “pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.”
But the protesters at Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant, weren’t blaming “Jews around the world” for Israel’s assault on Gaza; they were holding Goldie’s owner, Israeli-born Michael Solomonov, responsible, because his restaurants had raised $100,000 for United Hatzalah, a medical organization that supports the Israeli Defense Forces.
According to the Guardian (12/8/23), which interviewed “protesters and current and former employees at Solomonov’s restaurants,” critics both inside and outside the staff were concerned that Solomonov hosted a fundraiser for prominent pro-Israel politicians, and had “booked and paid for multiple, lavish private dinners…for IDF members preparing to deploy to fight for Israel.” (The New York Times article—12/4/23—that Weisman linked to did not appear to be based on interviews with any protesters, but instead quoted numerous politicians condemning their demonstration.)
Obviously Solomonov and his critics have different views of his actions. But there is no evidence that protesters were targeting his restaurant simply because he was Jewish, and it’s an irresponsible smear for Weisman to assert that they were
ACTION: Please tell the New York Times to correct its false claim that people protesting at a Philadelphia restaurant owned by a prominent supporter of the Israeli Defense Forces were “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions.”
CONTACT: You can send a message about factual errors to the New York Times at nytnews@nytimes.com.
Biden Has Damned the United States Over Israel’s Gaza Genocide
The Biden White House has brought the U.S. into global disrepute for its flagrant complicity in Gaza’s genocide.
Strategic Culture Foundation, Finian Cunningham, December 14, 2023
On a day of global shame this week, the United States voted against calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. It means the U.S. is an accomplice in the genocide by the Israeli regime.
It can’t get more graphic than this. Out of 193 nations at the United Nations, 153 of them (nearly 80 per cent) voted for an immediate ceasefire and the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza where more than two million civilians have been subjected to over two months of non-stop indiscriminate bombing by the Israeli military.
Not just callous deliberate murder of civilians, but a blockade on all basic humanitarian needs. Water, food, medicines, and fuel have all been cut off by an Israeli regime that calls Palestinians “human animals”.
This is the second time the U.S. has voted against the vast majority of nations at the UN General Assembly appealing for an end to the violence. The United States has also vetoed three resolutions at the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire.
In the latest vote on December 12, the U.S. joined with Israel and a handful of minor states in opposing the call for peace. Another 23 states shamefully abstained including Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Ukraine.
On the same day, President Joe Biden gave a speech to fundraisers in Washington DC in which he cautioned Israel to be “more careful” in conducting the military onslaught against Gaza. Biden was more concerned that Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of civilians was a public relations problem, not a moral outrage and war crime.
Nevertheless, Biden again reiterated “unconditional” support for Israel by supplying all the bombs and weapons it requests. In the past week, the White House has approved over $100 million in tank artillery shells for Israel as part of an emergency fund that does not require any vetting by lawmakers. The Biden administration is also pushing Congress to pass a much larger military support package worth over $14 billion.
Professor Francis Boyle, a renowned international legal authority, says that the United States is fully complicit in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank territory.
In an email to this author, Professor Boyle points to evidence “all across the board” from the unconditional supply of bombs and missiles by the United States to Israel, to the U.S.’ repeated voting positions at the UN that are enabling the continued mass, systematic violence.
Several Israeli leaders, including Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, have openly stated their genocidal intent of erasing the Palestinian population from occupied territories. The blatant bombing of hospitals and refugee camps and the killing of women and children, in particular, shows that the Israeli regime has no respect for international law.
Netanyahu has publicly thanked President Biden for the United States’ support. It is openly reported that U.S. and Israeli military commands are liaising in the conduct of operations in Gaza.
The presence of U.S. naval forces in the East Mediterranean is meant to deter any Arab or Muslim nation or group from intervening to help defend Palestinians.
The Biden administration is as cowardly as it is duplicitous. It talks about “concern” for civilian casualties in Gaza while giving the Israeli regime its full support to commit the sickening slaughter of innocents. Biden is only concerned about how the massacre doesn’t look so good to the rest of the world and American voters as a presidential election approaches.
Hence the creepy advice from Biden for Israel “to be more careful”. His advice is not to stop the mass murder of children but to just do it more discreetly…………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/12/14/biden-has-damned-united-states-over-israels-gaza-genocide/
HOW BIDEN’S STATE DEPARTMENT CONCEALS ITS “HUMAN RIGHTS BLACK HOLE” IN THE MIDDLE EAST
At a key meeting, U.S. stage management stops the world from hearing critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Jon Schwarz, December 12 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/12/12/universal-declaration-of-human-rights-state-department/?fbclid=IwAR3RvuNtk5azWxFu4KHGXg4zyZmA4dVF724kTpsKCcMOiiy4ScuWLkYYulQ
LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a meeting with leaders of human rights organizations to mark the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. But through subtle stage management, the State Department arranged for Blinken’s praise for human rights to be recorded and promulgated — while the world was not able to hear the retorts from human rights advocates who criticized America’s backing of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Universal Declaration was a landmark in history. While it was only a statement of principles, and so did not have legal force in itself, it was broadly inspirational and has formed the basis for numerous subsequent treaties and laws. According to Guinness World Records, it’s been translated into more languages than any other document — over 550, from Abkhaz to Zulu.
After the December 7 meeting, the internet exploded in bitter laughter at Blinken, and it’s easy to understand why. At the start of the meeting at the State Department, Blinken informed the assemblage that “the universality of human rights is under severe challenge and rights are being violated in far too many places … And of course we see atrocities in the midst of conflict.” Yes, of course. Just one day later, on December 8, the U.S. vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.
Notably, the Universal Declaration states that “everyone has a right to a nationality.” The Universal Declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, one day before U.N. Resolution 194 was passed. Resolution 194 famously stated that, in the wake of the establishment of Israel earlier that year, Palestinian refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This anniversary has not been commemorated with an event at the State Department.
Indeed, the whole process with Blinken was as distastefully funny as the Russian government’s own recent celebration of the Universal Declaration’s anniversary, in which it spoke of its deep concern over “the human rights situation in Ukraine.” This is where the U.S. government’s stage management comes in.
There were four human rights organizations in attendance, all represented by their top officials: Amnesty International (Agnès Callamard), Human Rights Watch (Tirana Hassan), the Committee to Protect Journalists (Jodie Ginsberg), and Freedom House (Michael Abramowitz).
We know this because all four leaders appeared in the above photo happily tweeted out by Blinken himself. And all four groups confirmed their presence to The Intercept. But when asked, the State Department refused to name who was in attendance because, it explained, this meeting took place in a “private setting.”
In addition to the photo provided by Blinken, you can watch a video of this private setting on the State Department’s publicly available website. At 0:59, as Blinken natters on, you can see one of his bored functionaries glancing at his watch.
What actually happened is that, as the Committee to Protect Journalists puts it, “the State Department made clear that Secretary Blinken wanted to make a statement on the record but the meeting was private.”
In other words, the U.S. government insisted that there be a public section of the meeting at the start, in which Blinken spoke and the human rights leaders would be photographed listening to him. Then, these photographs and Blinken’s words were distributed to the world. But the human rights leaders’ words were not.
Asked about his own experiences in such situations, Kenneth Roth, Hassan’s predecessor as head of Human Rights Watch, says that “there is nothing inherently wrong with having an off-the-record meeting with government officials … but it is odd for the Biden administration to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration with an off-the-record meeting.” Roth explains that the Universal Declaration had modest influence in the decade after its adoption because it was considered undiplomatic for governments to criticize others by name. However, that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. “A commemoration of the Declaration that embraced what has made the document so impactful,” Roth contends, “would have been an on-the-record meeting in which abusive governments were unabashedly singled out by name.”
Human Rights Watch and Freedom House both declined to provide any details about what their officials told Blinken, stating that the post-photo op section of the meeting was off the record.
However, Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International’s national director for government relations and advocacy, did comment. Callamard, she says, “urged Secretary Blinken to seize the current inflection point, be consistent in the US’s attention to human rights, and send the message that human rights apply equally to non-US allies and to its closest friends. She made clear that this is especially urgent today, as Amnesty International has documented that the government of Israel – one of the US’s closest allies – is flagrantly violating international humanitarian law in its attacks on Gaza. She urged him to see the need for an immediate ceasefire and a stop to the transfer and sale of arms to the government of Israel in the existing context.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists was also willing to describe its leader’s remarks. According to CPJ, Ginsberg “most certainly brought our full-range of deep and urgent concerns regarding journalists in Gaza. The ongoing disaster is a top priority for us. Ginsberg underscored that more than 60 journalists have been killed (the vast majority Palestinians in Gaza), the increasingly difficult conditions, and the broader clampdown on the press and arrests including the West Bank. Notably, we strongly reiterated our demand for accountability in the likely targeting of journalists in southern Lebanon. In doing so, we stated our deep concern that the pattern of journalists being killed with impunity by the Israel Defense Forces is a long one.”
Roth, for his part, adds that “we don’t need another symbol of the Biden administration’s commitment to human rights. … A more meaningful way to celebrate the Universal Declaration would have been to visibly enforce it in the human rights black hole that the Middle East has largely become for the Biden administration.”
In a nice touch by the State Department, the meeting was held in its Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room, so the participants were overseen by both a statue and a painting of Jefferson. Jefferson was America’s first secretary of state, as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence — in some ways the progenitor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Jefferson also enslaved 600 people over his lifetime and raped his dead wife’s half-sister, whom he owned. He thus is perhaps America’s greatest exemplar of our history of soaring rhetoric combined with a much grimier reality.
INTERNS ACCUSE CONGRESS OF SUPPRESSING CALLS FOR CEASE-FIRE
Poplsr Resistance, By Molly Redden, HuffPost., December 14, 2023, Resist!
The Workers In 71 Congressional Offices Have Recorded A Total More Than 690,000 Calls For A Cease-Fire.
But most are “unnoticed and unheard,” an open letter said.
Congressional interns and fellows released a letter on Monday accusing Congress of having “suppressed and ignored” a tidal wave of constituent support for a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza conflict.
More than 140 interns and fellows signed the letter, and 71 disclosed the number of calls and emails in support of a cease-fire that their offices have recorded. Those 71 offices (out of the total of 535) have received a total of 693,170 messages supporting a cease-fire since Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip began in early October.
But in spite of constituents’ outreach, most senators and representatives have refused to publicly support a cease-fire — and privately, the letter said, many senior staffers responsible for briefing members of Congress are downplaying the number and intensity of the calls.
“In some cases, Members of Congress are not being adequately briefed about the volume or contents of these messages,” the letter says. “In several instances, senior staff have deliberately provided inaccurate information about these data to Members. In other cases, Members have willfully ignored the pleas of large swaths of their constituents.”
Congressional phone lines have been clogged with calls for a cease-fire almost since the very start of hostilities, staffers have previously reported………………
The indiscriminate nature of the retaliation, coupled with the Biden administration’s steadfast support for its closest military ally, has sparked nationwide protests in the U.S. and profound outrage among many of the president’s own voters.
“While we refrain from telling our bosses how to do their jobs, as congressional interns and fellows, we owe it to the American people to expose the patent malpractice of Congress,” the letter says. “We can no longer stand by while the voices of constituents are suppressed and ignored by their elected officials.”
The letter came together after interns and fellows in several offices witnessed senior staff downplaying the number of calls and emails supporting a cease-fire, one of the letter’s organizers told HuffPost. In his office, a senior staffer quoted a number to the congressman that was 3,000 less than the actual number of callers, the organizer said.
“It’s very deliberate,” he said. “They see these overwhelming numbers, and they decrease it.”
Letter To Congress…………………………………………………………..
Signers of the letter work in Democratic and Republican offices and are remaining anonymous out of fear of career retaliation. The organizers, who spoke with HuffPost on the condition they not be named, verified the identities of those who signed.
Because interns answer the vast majority of constituent calls, many of those who signed the letter have personally fielded thousands of calls from constituents demanding a cease-fire.
“Out of the tens of thousands of calls made to our office, one in particular stood out to me: A constituent called in tears to share that her husband’s family had been killed in a hospital bombing in Gaza,” wrote one of the letter’s signers. “She had pleaded with me to change the Member’s stance on the war.”………………………………….. more https://popularresistance.org/interns-accuse-congress-of-suppressing-calls-for-cease-fire/
Why can’t the US ever say no to Israel?
The American UN veto on a Gaza ceasefire is a low point of wag-the-dog international politics
Rt.com, Tarik Cyril Amar, 13 Dec 23
December 8, 2023, is a day that will live in infamy. The United States made history of the worst kind by using its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to veto a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The resolution was advanced by the United Arab Emirates (a US partner) and supported by more than 90 member states. It also had preponderant backing in the global organization’s privileged “upper chamber,” the Security Council, where 13 of its 15 members were in favor (while the UK abstained, abdicating its sovereignty to the US, again).
The American veto directly defied UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Not a natural-born rebel, the UN chief had deployed a rarely used procedure to promote the ceasefire, putting his authority on the line. Referring to Article 99 of Chapter 15 of the UN Charter, he already implied that “international peace and security” were in danger. His spokesperson was explicit that Guterres was making a “dramatic constitutional move.” While maintaining diplomatic balance by also highlighting the Hamas attack on Israel, Guterres’ letter to the Security Council depicted the catastrophic suffering of the Palestinians under the ongoing Israeli attack and concluded that “nowhere” was safe in Gaza.
All to no avail. The US could not be swayed and maintained its de facto unconditional support for Israel, even while the latter is conducting an intensifying genocidal assault on Gaza and its civilian population. This is no longer up for debate, and is no secret either; Israeli leaders have repeatedly made statements that signal the kind of intent that is a crucial element in the crime of genocide, while their actions and those of their forces on the ground speak even louder than their words.
The world has taken note. It took no special bias for the Palestinian leadership – the one derived from the PLO, as well as Hamas – to identify the veto as “disastrous” and “a disgrace and another blank cheque given to the occupying state to massacre, destroy and displace.” China and Russia have denounced American double standards and the “death sentence” Washington has handed down on future Palestinian victims of the Israeli assault.
Amnesty International says Washington has “brazenly wielded and weaponized its veto to strongarm the UN Security Council… undermining its credibility” and displaying a “callous disregard for civilian suffering in the face of a staggering death toll.” Doctors without Borders did not mince its words either, accusing the US of standing “alone in casting its vote against humanity,” with America “complicit in the carnage in Gaza” and undermining not only its own credibility but also that of international humanitarian law.
Craig Mokhiber – an authority on international law and former head of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in New York – tweeted that “on the eve of the 75th Anniversary of the Genocide Convention, the US has again vetoed a ceasefire in the UN Security Council… demonstrating its further complicity in the #genocide in #Palestine.”
This list of censure and condemnation could be prolonged almost ad infinitum, especially if we add voices from the Global South. The key point, however, should be clear already: The US stands isolated and disgraced by its very own, easily avoidable – or so it would seem – decision. This was, after all, not a vote asking for justice and restitution for the victims, or – perish that radical thought! – for prosecution of the perpetrators. All this was about was the barest of bare minimums, just a ceasefire, not even a peace deal. Still, that was too much to ask of the US……………………………..
Future historians will ask how this happened. How could the single most powerful nation in the world, which claims to lead not only by force but by “values,” side with the Israeli perpetrators of such an outrageous and open crime, while openly contravening much of the international community? Some will even ask the more cynical question how America, even if its elites are entirely bereft of ethics, could do so much harm to itself.
The simplest, almost technical answer to that question has to do with a historical irony. America owes its veto power – as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council – to what happened in World War II. And while World War II and the German Holocaust against the Jews of (mostly) Europe are not the same, they are part of the same history. Much US pride has been invested in being among the powers that brought down the Holocaust perpetrator state Germany. And yet, here we are: The same US is now using that very veto not only to shield another genocidal state but to help it continue its crime.
There are, of course, broader reasons for this great American failure. Many have been discussed before. Israel serves the function of an enforcer and imperial outpost in the Middle East and sometimes beyond. As current US President Joe Biden – by now often trending on X as #GenocideJoe – stated in 1986, when still an ambitious and pandering senator, if there were no Israel, America would have to invent one. Let’s set aside that even the callous realpolitik behind such thinking is flawed: If it ever was an asset, Israel is turning into a liability. Let’s just note that the American elite claims to believe that Israel is so useful that the commitment to it must be, in Vice President Kamala Harris’ words, “ironclad.”
But so it was for Ukraine only, as it were, yesterday. And yet Kiev is about to be dropped, as so many US clients before. What makes Israel different? Clearly, it is the long-standing top recipient of US financial and military support. Is it sunk cost fallacy then? Is America so over-committed to Israel that it simply won’t walk away?
Yet that hypothesis does not explain the striking one-sidedness of the US-Israel relationship. If there has ever been a case of wag-the-dog, this is it: One thing that the American veto on the Gaza ceasefire resolution shows is that it is Israel that is dominating US foreign policy, not the other way around. Otherwise, Washington would have sought to find a compromise between preserving its own credibility and interests by allowing at least this very modest resolution to pass, while still supporting Israel in multiple other ways.
Clearly, one thing that is determining this American dependence on another, much smaller country is the massive success of lobbying and foreign influence operations on behalf of Israel. Indeed, it is Israel that has run the most invasive and effective such attack on US politics in history. And for the avoidance of any misunderstandings: Noting this obvious fact has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism.” Indeed, trying to smear those who dare bring it up with that accusation is part of how that influence operation works. It’s time to entirely disregard such cheap tricks.
………………………………………………………………. If only we could return, at least, to a world where Americans could forget a little about their Russia obsession when thinking about foreign influence on their country and focus that concern where it matters, namely on Israel. If in addition they could think a little more about Russia as a viable partner – at least occasionally – in helping resolve severe international crises, we would all be much better off. We might even be able to stop a genocide here or there. https://www.rt.com/news/588952-us-israel-un-veto/
Bernie Sanders Votes No on Giving Israel Aid to Continue ‘Inhumane War’ on Gaza
“I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached.”
By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams, more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/13/bernie-sanders-votes-no-on-giving-israel-aid-to-continue-inhumane-war-on-gaza/
Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone member of the Senate Democratic caucus to oppose advancing a $110.5 billion supplemental foreign aid measure on Wednesday, expressing opposition to the bill’s unconditional military assistance for the Israeli government.
“I voted NO on the foreign aid supplemental bill today for one reason,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached to continue their inhumane war against the Palestinian people.”
“Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on October 7,” Sanders added. “They do not have the legal or moral right to kill thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children.”
The aid package, which also includes billions in military assistance for Ukraine, failed to clear a procedural hurdle Wednesday, with every Republican voting no over the absence of immigration policy changes that progressives have condemned as draconian. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) flipped his initial yes vote to no in a maneuver that will allow him to bring the bill forward again at a later date.
According to a summary released by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the supplemental package contains over $10 billion in military aid for Israel, which already receives roughly $4 billion in assistance from the U.S. per year and has gotten tens of thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and other weaponry since the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
The measure is largely in line with a request issued in October by the Biden White House, which has sought to expedite U.S. arms shipments to Israel even as the nation’s military is using American-made weaponry to commit heinous war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
One human rights monitor estimated earlier this week that at least 90% of the people killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7 have been civilians.
Sanders, who has faced progressive criticism and outrage for rejecting calls for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, said in a Senate floor speech on Monday that Israel “must dramatically change its approach to minimize civilian harm and lay out a wider political process that can secure lasting peace.”
The senator conceded during his remarks that there is no evidence Israel has altered its approach in response to light pressure from top U.S. officials, pointing to recent bombings of United Nations schools and other civilian infrastructure.
“Israel’s indiscriminate approach is, in my view, offensive to most Americans, it is in violation of U.S. and international law, and it undermines the prospects for lasting peace and security,” said Sanders.
Wins, losses and participation trophies for US nuclear power in 2023
From the long-awaited commissioning of Vogtle 3 to the NuScale pilot’s collapse, here are the biggest wins and losses for nuclear from this year.
By Eric Wesoff, 12 December 2023, https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/wins-losses-and-participation-trophies-for-us-nuclear-power-in-2023
With this bumpy year for nuclear coming to a close and the world’s energy stakeholders having just gathered for the most nuclear-focused COP meeting ever, it’s a good time to assess the state of atomic power in the U.S.
Government pledges and consumer support for nuclear power in the U.S. have surged in recent years. Armed with this newfound policy support and financing, the relatively stagnant U.S. nuclear industry now has to start executing on its ambitious plans if the fuel is to play a meaningful role in decarbonizing the energy system.
So how did the U.S. nuclear sector fare in 2023? Here’s a list of its major wins and its losses.
A win on the world stage: Dubai hosts the first “nuclear COP”
More than 20 countries including the U.S., France, Japan and the U.K. pledged to triple global generation from nuclear energy by 2050 during this year’s COP28 global climate meeting in Dubai. Hitting that goal would require the world to install an average of 40 gigawatts of nuclear every year through 2050; presently, that annual installation figure is closer to 4 gigawatts.
Nuclear has received scant attention at previous COP meetings due to its financial challenges and the thorny issue of managing spent fuel, so the pledge is a marked departure from the policy status quo. All of this was enough to make this the year of the “nuclear COP.”
And although it’s a global pledge, President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry helped spearhead the declaration, indicating the increasing embrace of nuclear power at the highest echelons of U.S. climate policy. Kerry said that the science has proven “you can’t get to net-zero 2050 without some nuclear.”
Participation trophy for Georgia Power: Vogtle 3 connects to the grid
It’s a bit of a stretch calling Vogtle 3’s long-awaited connection to the grid a “win” after a $16 billion cost overrun and a six-year overshoot of the target launch date, but the Department of Energy was looking forward to a new commercial reactor coming online this year, and the department ultimately did get its wish.
As of July 31, Georgia Power’s 1,100-megawatt Plant Vogtle Unit 3 nuclear reactor is supplying power to the grid — making it the first reactor to enter service since Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2 began operating in 2016. Vogtle 4, a second 1,100-megawatt reactor, is nearing the finish line as well, with operations expected to start in early 2024, according to Georgia Power.
Thanks to then-Secretary Rick Perry, in 2019 the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office provided up to $12 billion in loan guarantees to help complete the Vogtle expansion amid a spate of spending freezes and lawsuits. The project generated more than 9,000 jobs during peak construction and will provide an additional 800 permanent jobs at the facility once fully operational.
Dan Yurman, publisher of Neutron Bytes, a blog on nuclear power, offered Canary Media this explanation for Vogtle’s major cost and schedule overruns: “The utility and the vendor kicked off a massive infrastructure project with major unaddressed risks in terms of supply chain, labor force skills, regulatory compliance and a 30-year gap in know-how to build large nuclear power plants. It is no surprise that the first-of-a-kind AP1000s came in at twice the cost and double the estimated time to complete them.”
The nuclear industry can call this a win — if it can learn from Vogtle and begin to remedy the missteps called out by Yurman.
A financial win: Nuclear funding and government support
The U.S. government is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to supporting nuclear power: The (barely) Bipartisan Infrastructure Law added $3.2 billion for development of modular and advanced nuclear reactors, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has devoted $11 billion in loan-making authority for advanced reactors and supply chains. What’s more, the epochal Inflation Reduction Act devotes $700 million to the HALEU Availability Program to support the development of a non-Russian supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium.
Additionally, the IRA offers a preposterously generous $15 per megawatt-hour production tax credit meant to keep today’s existing nuclear fleet competitive with gas and renewables, as well as a similarly generous investment tax credit to incentivize new plant construction.
Losing the global nuclear crown: China is sprinting ahead of the U.S. on nuclear
America has the world’s biggest nuclear power fleet at 93 reactors, but it’s on its way to losing that distinction.
China has built 37 new reactors over the last decade for a total of 55, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. America has added a grand total of two reactors during that same period. China also aims to double its nuclear energy capacity by 2035, and it is well on its way; it has 22 nuclear plants currently under construction with more than 70 in the planning stages.
Outside of Vogtle 4, it’s unclear when — or if — another nuclear reactor will be connected to the U.S. grid.
And despite small modular reactors being held up as a cure-all to the U.S. nuclear industry’s significant challenges, the only country in the world that has actually built an SMR is China. It demonstrated a pair of smallish high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor units using a “pebble-bed” design and a more concentrated fuel format last year.
Notably, China is not a participant in the COP28 nuclear pledge — an ironic development as it’s the only country with any real chance of meeting the goal of tripling its capacity by 2050.
Huge win, disappointing loss for SMRs: NuScale’s ups and downs
The nuclear gods are fickle creatures. Small modular reactor pioneer NuScale Power made history in January 2023 when it scaled the highest regulatory peak in the U.S.: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the design of its 50-megawatt module, the first small modular reactor and only the seventh reactor design ever approved for use in the U.S.
This was a long-fought victory for NuScale and advocates of SMRs: Utilities and developers can now reference NuScale’s SMR design when applying for a license to construct and operate a reactor. NuScale and the DOE spent more than 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to reach this regulatory milestone.
Armed with this historic design certification, NuScale landed a promising inaugural customer in the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and began working on a deployment near the Department of Energy’s national laboratory in Idaho. Project plans had called for one 77-megawatt unit to begin operation in 2029.
The Idaho project was once widely predicted to be not only the first small module reactor completed in the U.S., but the next nuclear reactor to be built in the country, period. However, it was not to be so.
The project was ultimately scrapped in November because it couldn’t secure enough subscriptions from utilities in the Western U.S. to make the project work financially.
The innovative SMR aspirant still has a pipeline of tentative agreements to deploy reactors across North America, Europe and the Middle East.
Win for domestic HALEU fuel: Bringing uranium enrichment capabilities back to the U.S.
Call this one a win because, for the first time in 70 years, America is home to a U.S.-owned enrichment facility producing the concentrated fuel needed by the many advanced reactors now in development.
Centrus, a company with roots in the Manhattan Project, began demonstration-scale enrichment operations at its facility in Piketon, Ohio in October. It marks the potential rebirth of a once-strong American enrichment industry. America was once the only source of uranium enrichment outside of the Soviet bloc, but over the last 30 years, it has surrendered that role to Russia and other countries.
The HALEU produced in Centrus’ centrifuges will be used to test new fuels and reactor designs, as well as to fuel the cores of the two demonstration reactors funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and supported by DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
The U.S. currently depends on Tenex, part of Russian state-owned nuclear supplier Rosatom, to supply the low-enriched uranium fuel that’s used in our civilian fleet. And Russia (which is not blockaded on nuclear fuel exports) supplies all of America’s high-assay low-enriched uranium, the more concentrated material required by the new generation of advanced reactors.
It is a precarious situation for U.S. national and energy security.
The DOE is looking to jump-start the domestic market by directing IRA funding toward enrichment and fuel-processing facilities like Centrus’ plant in Ohio, as well as by acting as the initial customer, creating an inventory and providing a reliable customer and price.
It’s a win for the U.S., but it comes after years of stepping on rakes.
A win for preserving the existing nuclear fleet: Diablo Canyon lives on
Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the three large investor-owned utilities in California, decided to decommission both of the reactors at California’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2017.
But public outcry, political pressure and worries about grid failures seem to have helped get the plant’s operations extended an additional five years with the help of a state loan and up to $1.1 billion through the federal Civil Nuclear Credit Program designed to support economically ailing plants. It’s a win for California nuclear advocates and the emissions of the state’s grid.
PG&E has now filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a 20-year operating extension for the two 1,150-megawatt reactors at Diablo Canyon, which will trigger a review process expected to take a minimum of two years.
The U.S. nuclear fleet is the largest in the world, but it’s also one of the oldest: The average age of an American nuclear reactor is 42 years, compared to a world average of 31 years.
The majority of nuclear plant operators in the country have expressed interest in extending their operating licenses to allow operation up to 80 years, according to a poll of member utilities of Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade organization.
But even with such extensions, these older plants would all need to be replaced by around 2060, and nuclear power’s long lead times mean that decisions will have to be made about replacing their generation capacity in the late 2030s.
Neither a win nor a loss: Action in advanced reactors and microreactors
Encouraged by government funding, shifting societal sentiment and a cornucopia of new reactor designs, 2023 witnessed a raft of startups and established vendors making deals in the U.S. and abroad to build next-generation nuclear reactors.
Microreactors like Oklo’s 15-megawatt fast breeder reactor, Aalo Atomics’ 20-megawatt thermal design based on the Marvel reactor at Idaho National Labs, and Westinghouse’s 5MWe eVinci design are intended to provide electrical power and heat in remote or behind-the-meter industrial applications. Ultra Safe Nuclear has plans to construct a microreactor facility in Gadsden, Alabama. The Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office’s Project Pele program is looking to build and demonstrate a 1–5 MWe mobile, high-temperature, gas-cooled microreactor capable of powering U.S. military bases.
But none of these designs are approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
For its part, the DOE is betting big on TerraPower and X-energy, with the agency’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program providing initial funding of $80 million to each, along with future cost-sharing funds. These two demonstration projects are poised to use HALEU from Centrus’ newly commissioned 16-centrifuge cascade.
TerraPower, founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is developing a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage system. The company has raised $750 million to build its operating demonstration reactor in Wyoming.
X-energy is developing its high-temperature gas-cooled advanced small modular reactor and plans the initial deployment at a Dow Chemical facility in Texas.
These reactor designs also are not approved by the NRC.
Despite the proliferation of tentative agreements, memorandums of understanding and handshake deals, all of these planned reactors — with the possible exception of NuScale’s — fall into the famous “paper reactor” category — meaning they are simple, light, small, cheap and quick to build. Importantly, they are also never actually going to be built.
1 This Month
19 November – Webinar – The Reality of Reprocessing
Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) / 2:00 PM Eastern / 7:00 PM UK / 8:00 PM CET
Register for the Zoom Event Here
Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
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