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‘Environmental impact’ of Hinkley Point C debate due

2nd October, By Seth Dellow https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/24624674.environmental-impact-hinkley-point-c-debate-due/

A PARLIAMENTARY debate has been secured by Bridgwater’s MP Ashley Fox to address the ‘environmental impact’ of the proposed salt marshes at Pawlett Hams and other sites.

The Westminster Hall Debate will take place in Parliament on Wednesday, October 9 at 11am. It will enable concerns to be raised about the impact of Hinkley Point C’s water intake system. The securing of the debate follows ongoing concerns about the recently scrapped proposal to create a 800-acre salt marsh at Pawlett Hams, as part of mitigation efforts for marine life in the Severn Estuary.

Hinkley Point C requires effective environmental measures to protect fish from being harmed by its water intake pipes, which are located 2km offshore. Originally, a range of mitigation efforts were agreed upon, including the installation of an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (AFD). However, after years of study, EDF Energy deemed the AFD impractical due to safety concerns.

Therefore, as an alternative, the creation of a salt marsh was proposed, with Pawlett Hams identified as a potential site. But this plan has since been halted following strong local opposition.

Ashley Fox will use the debate to recognise the efforts of residents in advocating for the protection of Pawlett Hams, question why the AFD was recommended without precedent, and to urge the Environment Agency to commit to maintaining vital flood defences along the River Parrett. Mr Fox will also caution against environmental measures that may cause unintended damage to local ecology.

The debate will compel a government minister to respond to these concerns and can be watched live on October 9 online at Parliament TV.

Ashley Fox said: “I supported the campaign to protect Pawlett Hams when I was running to be the local MP.  I am pleased to have this opportunity to highlight the effective advocacy of the action group at the highest level.”

October 5, 2024 Posted by | environment, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Trial in New Hampshire of protesters against Elbit Systems – supplier of weapons for Israel.

(the above video  is actually from a few months ago when Bruce (alone) was arraigned. 

Here’s a link to the video about this week’s trial of all the Elbit 8: https://www.wmur.com/article/protesters-guilty-elbit-systems-merrimack-100124/62474455)

Space for Peace – Organizing Notes, Thursday, 3 Oct 24 Bruce Gagnon – Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

On Monday eight of us stood trial before a judge in a New Hampshire District Court. The nature of our charges (Trespass and Resisting Arrest) under N.H. law do not allow a jury trial.

The first several hours of the trial were dominated by local, county and state police officers testifying about the nature of the March 22 action by our protest group that blocked the entrance of Elbit Systems. The early morning blockage, prior to workers arriving, lasted about five hours before cops (from various N.H. police departments) cleared the protest.

(Elbit makes weapons for Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine, Lebanon and others. Elbit has weapons facilities in dozens of nations around the world. This is likely done to create jobs in the host country in hopes of ‘buying international support’ for Israel’s colonial apartheid system.)

After lunch the defense team began our case. The judge would not allow the full testimony of one expert witness who tried to make the case about the rights and impacts of protest movements

Then came the testimony of an Iraqi immigrant young doctor who attended medical school in New Hampshire and now works in Portland, Maine. Yusuf was arrested with us at Elbit and spoke beautifully about the human toll of Israeli’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people – thus his reason for joining the action. Surprisingly the judge let him talk so Yusuf was able to make many strong moral statements.

I testified next and talked about my role that day as police liaison. I described how I had previously taken this role at large protests in Portland and at the BIW naval shipyard (the destroyers built there are attacking Yemen in support of Israel).  I noted that the Portland Chief of Police thanked me for playing that role in a protest where arrests were made. Sadly the Merrimack police had no interest in communication with me once I introduced myself.  I was quickly arrested, hours before the others were.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………. I closed by saying that I know that the Nuremberg Law Principles have been adopted as international law. This legal framework resulted from Hitler’s WW2 army having committed genocide against the Jewish people across Europe. Nuremberg proclaims that all citizens have the legal right and duty to intervene to prevent such crimes when they are happening before our eyes. Still on the witness stand, I turned to the judge and said ‘Even this court is required to honor Nuremberg Law’. The judge didn’t buy this offer to join the resistance against US-UK-Israel-NATO war crimes.

Another of our expert witnesses (Lisa Savage was to talk about what Elbit does at the Merrimack facility) was pulled when the judge made it clear that he didn’t wish to listen to another expert witness.

Once the closing statements were done, by the state prosecutor and our defense lawyer, the judge took a 15 minute break. When he returned to the courtroom the verdicts were announced. He held all of us guilty of trespass and declared that three of us were not guilty of Resisting Arrest (RA) but the other five were. I was one of the three that beat the RA rap.

We will have a sentencing meeting with the judge via zoom-type tech on October 7. We are facing considerable fines to cover costs of Merrimack police on the day of the protest event.

Since I was the first arrested (early in the protest) I sat in a cop car hands cuffed behind my back for two hours listening to the police radio and heard calls for the ‘bomb squad’, paddy-wagons to take protesters away and reports of more police arriving from other nearby cities. During my testimony I described how I counted at least 50 cops and our attorney asked what they did. I answered that they stood around enjoying the ‘show’ and often laughing. One local reporter in Merrimack once told me that he’d worked for his media outlet for 20 years, ‘but had never seen anything like this [protest] before’. ……………………………………
https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2024/10/elbit-systems-protest-trial-in-new.html

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Legal, USA | Leave a comment

Sellafield Ltd fined £332,500 for cyber security shortfalls

Office for Nuclear Regulation, 2 October 2024

Sellafield Limited was today fined £332,500 for cyber security shortfalls during a four-year period following a prosecution brought by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR).

The offences relate to Sellafield Ltd’s management of the security around its information technology systems between 2019 to 2023 and its breaches of the Nuclear Industries Security Regulations 2003.

An investigation by ONR, the UK’s independent nuclear regulator, found that Sellafield Ltd failed to meet the standards, procedures and arrangements, set out in its own approved plan for cyber security and for protecting sensitive nuclear information.

Significant shortfalls were present for a considerable length of time, said ONR.

It was found that Sellafield Ltd allowed this unsatisfactory performance to persist, meaning that its information technology systems were vulnerable to unauthorised access and loss of data.  

However, there is no evidence that any vulnerabilities at Sellafield Ltd have been exploited as a result of the identified failings.

In 2023, an ONR inspector noted that a successful ransomware attack could impact on important ‘high-hazard risk reduction’ work at the site with a subsequent return to normal IT operations potentially taking up to 18 months.

Internally, Sellafield Ltd themselves had also observed how a successful phishing attack or malicious insider might trigger the loss or compromise of key systems of data.

A successful attack could have disrupted operations, damaged facilities and delayed important decommissioning activities.

At a hearing in June at Westminster Magistrates Court, the company pleaded guilty to three offences:………………………………………………………………………….

…………………..As part of the sentencing determination, District Judge Goldspring ruled the breaches represented a medium culpability (high end).

Sellafield in Cumbria is one of Europe’s largest industrial complexes, managing more radioactive waste in one place than any other nuclear facility in the world…………………………………… https://www.onr.org.uk/news/all-news/2024/10/sellafield-ltd-fined-332-500-for-cyber-security-shortfalls/

October 5, 2024 Posted by | UK | Leave a comment

Sizewell C nuclear project hit by fresh delays as investment talks drag on.

UK ministers have made contingency arrangements to fund the Sizewell C
nuclear power project in case a final agreement with potential investors is
delayed by as much as two years.

A £5.5 billion subsidy scheme envisages a
scenario where there is no agreement until mid-2026. Several industry and
Whitehall figures said no deal is expected before spring 2025.

 FT 3rd Oct 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/2a5d9462-b921-4577-82c1-4eb508775624

October 5, 2024 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

The guns of August killed 15 million…the missiles of October could kill 8 billion.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 2 Oct 24

There’s an eerie similarity to the blundering of nations that ignited the slaughter of WWI and the blundering of nations, led by America, which could lead to nuclear war 110 years later.

Two weeks ago President Biden blinked on authorizing the UK to use US technology to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to the White House seeking US permission to allow its Ukraine proxies to fire those US guided Storm Shadows in a desperate, futile bid to stave off Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.

It may take time to get the full story why Biden blinked. Russia’s UN speech declaring such missile strikes risk putting the US at war with Russia set the tone. Likely, a backchannel communication between a high ranking Russian official to a US counterpart helped seal the sensible US rejection of Starmer’s crazed war provoking proposal.

President Biden has spent his entire term mishandling the issue of NATO membership for Ukraine and autonomy for Donbas Ukrainians into a horrific lost war that could still go nuclear. After provoking it, Biden led a joint US, UK effort to scuttle the Ukraine, Russia negotiated peace set to end it in the first month without Ukraine losing a square mile of territory.  Thirty-one months later, Ukraine has lost 4 oblasts, about a fifth of its territory, without a prayer of regaining.

Biden’s biggest mistake was likely framing the war as a zero sum game whereby the US must achieve total victory ensuring Russia’s total defeat. That explains why Biden and his UK poodle, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, demanded Ukraine President Zelensky reject the peace agreement about to end the war early on. Biden’s Ukraine destroying agenda could not allow any settlement short of unconditional Russian defeat and humiliation. All that accomplished was over half a million Ukrainian troops dead, millions displaced or fled Ukraine, a shattered economy, and Ukraine’s collapse now inevitable

To prevent that, Ukraine’s Zelensky and current UK Prime Minister Starmer continue badgering Biden to unleash the missiles of October. Some US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have also been lobbying Biden to ignore the reddest of Russia’s red lines

That may still happen. In response, Russia has publicly notified America and NATO that it has revised its nuclear policy to specifically allow their use when attacked by a non-nuclear country that is backed by a nuclear country. Russia will consider such attacks as putting Russia at war with the supporting nuclear power.

Let’s fervently hope President Biden continues to heed reality. By not publicly ruling out long range missile strikes, he’s likely still considering authorizing them to stave off a Ukraine defeat before the election. Losing a war, however criminal and senseless to begin with, in not good election strategy.

Biden, Blinken, Starmer, Zelensky all need to be locked into a room for a seminar on the stumbling and bumbling by revered European rulers that unleashed WWI. Then they must toss out their zero sum game against Russia and negotiate a win-win end to a war just as senseless, that could eventually be infinitely more destructive than the War To End All Wars 110 years ago.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Hurricane Helene sends a warning

 https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-sends-a-warning/

A nuclear plant, fortunately closed, was inundated, but we may not get so lucky next time, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

As no one can have failed to notice, our country has been ravaged once again by violent weather extremes, most recently by Hurricane Helene, which left areas in the south submerged and destroyed, and led to a significant number of deaths.

The press has routinely been describing the extreme flooding, especially in places such as North Carolina, as “Biblical. But, as my partner and colleague at Beyond Nuclear Paul Gunter points out, it is nothing of the sort. As should be obvious by now, our ever more frequent climatic disasters are entirely human-caused. 

Acts of God, whether you are a believer or not, have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Try telling that to our political leaders. No matter who wins in November, we are looking at drilling (Trump) or fracking (Harris) or possibly both. And, of course, more nuclear power!

The fact that all of these will obviously make the climate crisis far worse far faster does not pass these people by. They know it. But they push both fossil and fissile energy anyway, submitting willingly to the bidding of their corporate paymasters who would rather celebrate near-term greed and gain than leave a livable world to their children and grandchildren.

This means we are led by climate criminals who go not only unpunished, but who are routinely re-elected.

The push for license extensions for our aging reactor fleet is particularly heinous.  The lapdog nuclear regulator, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been exposed by the Government Accountability Office in a damning report as entirely uninterested in how the ravages of the climate crisis might jeopardize the safety of nuclear power plants.  

“NRC doesn’t fully consider potential increases in risk from climate change,” wrote the GAO. “For example, NRC mostly uses historical data to identify and assess safety risks, rather than data from future climate projections.”

Instead, the NRC is intent on colluding with the nuclear industry to sell us nuclear power as some sort of answer to the climate crisis.

Apart from the fact that nuclear power is too expensive and too slow, as we have argued here countless times, it is actually a hazard under climate chaos conditions. And we got the perfect demonstration of this from Hurricane Helene.

First of all, because of the extreme radiological risks, some nuclear power plants in the path of the hurricane were shut down as a preemptive precaution including Hatch in Georgia. This makes them completely useless in the wake of the storm’s onslaught when people are desperate for electricity. 

Then take the case of the Crystal River nuclear power plant on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Floodwaters swamped the site. Fortunately the plant has been shuttered since 2013 but all of the high-level irradiated radioactive fuel waste is still stored there.

“The whole site was flooded, including buildings, sumps, and lift stations. Industrial Wastewater Pond #5 was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge,” read a report filed by plant owner, Duke Energy.

Given the present enthusiasm for extending the licenses of the still operating US nuclear reactor fleet — and they are talking about out to 80 or even 100 years for reactors that were never designed or intended to run that long — Crystal River might easily still have been operating. 

Under today’s rush to relicense — and even reopen the country’s most dangerously degraded reactors including Palisades in Michigan — it probably would be.

Did nuclear waste escape as a result of the Crystal River nuclear site flood? 

“We are still in the process of obtaining access and assessing the damage, but due to the nature of this event we anticipate difficulty with estimating the total discharge amount of wastewater, and impacts are unknown at this time,” wrote Duke in its report.

In other words, we may never know.

The implication of a nuclear plant inundated by a massive storm surge does not have to be imagined. We saw it at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, when a 50-foot tsunami swept over the inadequate sea wall and knocked out the backup onsite power after the earlier earthquake had already severed the offsite power connection.

Meanwhile, Crystal River owner Duke is the very same company that is trying to secure a license extension for its three Oconee reactors in South Carolina that sit downstream from not one but two dams!

The three reactors are sited 300 feet below the water level in Lake Jocassee behind Jocassee Dam and five feet below the water level in the immediately adjacent Lake Keowee.

  

What could possibly go wrong? Nothing, argues Duke, for whom the idea of a dam overtopping or breaking, sending a wall of water directly at the plant — effectively an inland tsunami — just isn’t a credible possibility. 

Out of our scope, declares the NRC, which contends it cannot include an assessment of likely climate change impacts on Oconee operations within its environmental review for license renewal. 

Beyond Nuclear and the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club have been fighting this through legal channels and will continue to do so. 

After last week, you might expect such a blinkered view of current — never mind future — climatic conditions to change. But it won’t. 

Retrofitting an old nuclear plant to adequately protect it against the impacts of a climate crisis never prepared for, costs money.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

Assange: ‘I’m Free Because I Pled Guilty to Journalism’

Assange: ‘My Naivete Was Believing in the Law’

October 1, 2024, By Julian Assange / Consortium News

Julian Assange’s address Tuesday morning to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), updated to include Assange’s responses during the Q&A:

Ladies and gentlemen, the transition from years of confinement in a maximum security prison to being here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and a surreal shift. The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey. It strips away one sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence………………………………………………………………….

Sooner I will start to investigate the circumstance surrounding my detention and conviction, and the consequent implications for human rights. However, like so many of the efforts made in my case, whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the pope, U.N. officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists or citizens, none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them, I never would have seen the light of day. This unprecedented global effort was needed because the legal protections of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper when not effective in any remotely reasonable time.

On the Plea Deal

I eventually chose freedom over and realizable justice. After being detained for years and facing 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the U.S. government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even the Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.

I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weakness, the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable. As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period. How expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished.


I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship. ………………………………

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream to educate people about how the world works, so that through understanding, we might bring about something better. ………………………………….

We revealed not just when and where these things happened, but frequently the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them. When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gotten camera footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers. The visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world, so we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the U.S. military could deploy lethal force in Iraq……………………………………………..

Manning’s Arrests

But 14 years ago, the United States military arrested one of our lead whistleblowers, Private First Class Manning, a U.S. intelligence analyst based in Iraq. The U.S. government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues………………………………………..

C.I.A.’s Retribution

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as C.I.A. director, and William Barr, a former C.I.A. officer, as U.S. attorney general.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the C.I.A.’s infiltration of fringe political parties. Its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economic ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French on the street as a whole. We revealed the C.I.A.’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains. Its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

C.I.A. Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution. It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the C.I.A. drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and authorize going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information. My wife and my infant son were also targeted.

A C.I.A. asset was permanently assigned to track my wife. And instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the U.S. press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized and the prosecution brought against some of the C.I.A. agents involved.

The C.I.A. is targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive, extrajudicial and extraterritorial means. Provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one. Due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain…………………………………………………………………………..

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes. The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and expedition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe. In Michael Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former C.I.A. director bragged about how he pressured the U.S. attorney general to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the C.I.A………………………………………………………………………………..

Criminalizing News-Gathering

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit. The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalization of journalists in Russia. But based on the precedent set in my expedition, there is nothing to stop Russia or indeed any other state from targeting European journalists, publishers or even social media users by claiming that their domestic secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened.

Transnational repression cannot become the norm here. As one of the world’s two great norms, setting institutions, PACE must act.

The criminalization of news-gathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted by a foreign power for asking, for receiving and publishing truthful information about that power. While I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society…………………………….

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad. I fear that unless institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation, it will be too late. Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never demands that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

Responses During Q&A

………………………………………………. I’m setting institutions like PA pace must move to make the situation clear that what happened to me cannot happen again.

Why He Attended

I am here because I believe it is an essential first step for PACE to act, to get the ball rolling, to address the problems of transnational repression and also to make it clear that national security journalism is possible within European borders……………………………………………………….

On Asylum

Political asylum is an absolutely essential relief valve for human rights abuses within states……………………….

On the High Court Case

In the final U.K. High High Court case, which I won and the U.S., appealed against.

I won under the basis of nationality discrimination. That is in the U.K. Extradition Act. You’re not meant to discriminate. At trial or during a penalty phase against someone on the basis of their nationality……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/01/assange-im-free-because-i-pled-guilty-to-journalism/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=c5e55cd4-c28b-42af-8719-94afd51b6baa

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Israel’s Ideology of Genocide Must be Confronted and Stopped

Jeffrey D. Sachs • September 30, 2024,  https://www.unz.com/article/israels-ideology-of-genocide-must-be-confronted-and-stopped/

Israel’s violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.

Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.

The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.

To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.

There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.

It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.

Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.

Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).


At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”

What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):

[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”

Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10)

Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.

There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.

Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.

The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.

The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.

Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The Anishinaabe community fighting nuclear waste dumping, one step at a time‘

‘There’s more fresh water in this part of the country than there is in the Great Lakes, and they want to destroy that’

Ricochet, Crystal Greene, September 23 2024

Every September long weekend for the past five years, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies have walked together along the TransCanada Highway 17 to peacefully protest the proposed dumping of nuclear waste on Treaty 3 lands in northwestern Ontario.

Among the walkers at the annual Walk Against Nuclear Waste was an Anishinaabe grandmother, who started the walk in hopes that more people will “wake up” to what’s at stake with the possibility of a deep geological repository (DGR) that would contain all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste within their watershed.

“This is my last year and I feel like I’m gonna miss it, but it was a good awareness. I’m okay with that,” Darlene Necan, told Ricochet Media as vehicles zoomed by on TransCanada Highway 17, many beeping their horns in support throughout the roadside interview. 

On September 1, two groups left from Ignace and Wabigoon at the same time. Over two days the group of about 30 participants walked about 40 kilometres from each direction. 

They all met up at a rest stop near Revell Lake, the site where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization has done exploration drilling for the potential $26-billion DGR, which would sit at headwaters of the Wabigoon River and Turtle River watersheds. The underground facility would be used to bury and abandon millions of bundles of spent fuel from Canadian nuclear power plants.

“We cannot foresee the future, but what if it does happen? What if there’s a leak?” Necan said.  “The creator gifted us this beautiful land for all of us to live, but who are these people to come here and economically destroy it? Money is never going to last.”

Necan, 65, is also known for asserting Anishinaabe title by building a cabin on her traditional territory at Savant Lake, Ontario, without permits, after she grew tired of waiting for housing from her band, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen #258. She was charged under the Public Lands Act with​​ construction on so-called Crown land.

It’s no surprise that she took on the responsibility to alert others about the NWMO’s plan to transport, bury and abandon the waste.

There is a strong sense of urgency as the NWMO is set to finalize its chosen waste site, narrowed down from a list of 22 locations in Canada, a process that began in 2010.

By the end of the year, NWMO will choose either the Revell Lake site, near where the walk ended, or a Bruce County site in southwestern Ontario. 

Rather than having the radioactive waste shipped by truck or train for the next 50 plus years —which they foresee is an accident waiting to happen — walkers say they want to see the waste all kept where it originated from, and for Canada to stop producing nuclear energy altogether.

The NWMO is an industry-funded organization made up of representatives from Canada’s nuclear power industry who’ve been looking for a way to deal with the approximately 100,000 tonnes of waste they’ve produced that will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

In a report to the Standing Committee on Environmental and Sustainable Development, a northwestern Ontario coalition “We the Nuclear Free North” describes the flaws and weaknesses of the DGR project along with the serious risks expressed by experts.

“Numerous experts in the fields of geology, chemistry and physics warn of the insufficiency of current scientific knowledge to guide a project of the nature and magnitude of the NWMO’s proposed plan,” the coalition wrote .

Their report broke down NWMO’s “conceptual” plan.

The waste would be transported by truck and received at a fuel packaging plant where it would be placed into containers. 

The water used during the process to decontaminate the devices used for the waste in-transit would become contaminated with radionuclides and moved into a tailings pond, and be contained as a low-to-medium level radioactive liquid waste.

The waste in containers would be lowered to the DGR underground storage facility, made up of rooms blasted out of precambrian rock, 500 to 1000 metres below the Earth’s surface. 

Since there is no way for the high-level radioactive nuclear fuel to deactivate, except for time,  it would continue to generate heat, years after being stored. It could lead to pressure build-up, causing fractures in the DGR walls, where the groundwater would seep in and mix with water-soluble radionuclides. 

Eventually, the free-moving contaminated water would reach the two watersheds, through cracks in the DGR, and a sump pump would need to be used to bring liquid to a surface tailings pond. 

Another risk to hosting a DGR in the Revell Lake area are low magnitude earthquakes that have been documented by Environment Canada. A quake could fracture the DGR and increase flow of water into the facility and send contaminated water into the watersheds…………………………………………………………. more https://ricochet.media/indigenous/the-anishinaabe-community-fighting-nuclear-waste-dumping-one-step-at-a-time/

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Canada, indigenous issues, opposition to nuclear, wastes | Leave a comment

UK Government seeks software to track radioactive waste as nuclear site decommissioned

1 oct 24, Power Technology,

Ten months after the Joint European Torus ceased operating, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority is embarking on a long-term decommissioning project and needs new software to support its work

A government body is seeking to make a six-figure investment in software to help log and track radioactive waste created over the coming years as a long-standing nuclear fusion research site is decommissioned.

Based in Oxfordshire, the Joint European Torus (JET) facility began operating in 1983 and conducted its final test late last year. A  decommissioning process – which will last until 2040 – has now begun. Work will be led by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, an arm’s-length body of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.,………………………………………

Government seeks software to track radioactive waste as nuclear site decommissioned

October 4, 2024 Posted by | UK, wastes | Leave a comment

First civil nuclear site decommissioned in the UK

 It took 10 years for Veolia and Imperial College London to complete the
decommissioning of the first civil nuclear site in the UK. The Reactor
Centre at Imperial’s Silwood Park eco-campus in Ascot housed the UK’s
last civilian nuclear reactor for almost 50 years until it closed in 2012.

The long and complex project required demolition of the reactor, safely
managing hazardous materials, and restoring the site to its original state
to make it safe for public use. Veolia’s specialist decommissioning team,
KDC, supported Imperial in planning the complex project, which included the
cutting operations to reduce the reactor concrete shielding, removal and
demolition of the facility. The operation required the design and use of
new equipment to safely deconstruct the facility.

 Construction Management 1st Oct 2024,
https://constructionmanagement.co.uk/first-civil-nuclear-site-decommissioned-in-the-uk/

October 4, 2024 Posted by | decommission reactor, UK | Leave a comment

Unrealisable Justice: Julian Assange in Strasbourg

October 2, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/unrealisable-justice-julian-assange-in-strasbourg/

It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.

The hearing in  Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), arose from concerns raised in a report by Iceland’s Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, in which she expressed the view that Assange’s case was “a classic example of ‘shooting the messenger’.” She found it “appalling that Mr Assange’s prosecution was portrayed as if it was supposed to bring justice to some unnamed victims the existence of whom has never been proven, whereas perpetrators of torture or arbitrary detention enjoy absolute impunity.”

His prosecution, Ævarsdóttir went onto explain, had been designed to obscure and deflect the revelations found in WikiLeaks’ disclosures, among them abundant evidence of war crimes committed by US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, instances of torture and arbitrary detention in the infamous Guantánamo Bay camp facility, illegal rendition programs implicating member states of the Council of Europe and unlawful mass surveillance, among others.

A draft resolution was accordingly formulated, expressing, among other things, alarm at Assange’s treatment and disproportionate punishment “for engaging in activities that journalists perform on a daily basis” which made him, effectively, a political prisoner; the importance of holding state security and intelligence services accountable; the need to “urgently reform the 1917 Espionage Act” to include conditional maliciousness to cause harm to the security of the US or aid a foreign power and exclude its application to publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

Assange’s full testimony began with reflection and foreboding: the stripping away of his self in incarceration, the search, as yet, for words to convey that experience, and the fate of various prisoners who died through hanging, murder and medical neglect. While filled with gratitude by the efforts made by PACE and the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, not to mention innumerable parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, even the Pope, none of their interventions “should have been necessary.” But they proved invaluable, as “the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.”

The legal system facing Assange was described as encouraging an “unrealisable justice”. Choosing freedom instead of purgatorial process, he could not seek it, the plea deal with the US government effectively barring his filing of a case at the European Court of Human Rights or a freedom of information request. “I am not free today because the system worked,” he insisted. “I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

When founded, WikiLeaks was intended to enlighten people about the workings of the world. “Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.” Power can be held to account by those informed, justice sought where there is none. The organisation did not just expose assassinations, torture, rendition and mass surveillance, but “the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them.”

Since leaving Belmarsh prison, Assange rued the abstracting of truth. It seemed “less discernible”. Much ground had been “lost” in the interim; truth had been battered, “undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self–censorship

Much of the critique offered by Assange focused on the source of power behind any legal actions. Laws, in themselves, “are just pieces of paper and they can be reinterpreted for political expedience.” The ruling class dictates them and reinterprets or changes them depending on circumstances.

In his case, the security state “was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of the US constitution,” thereby denuding the expansive, “black and white” effect of the First Amendment. Mike Pompeo, when director of the Central Intelligence Agency, simply lent on Attorney General William Barr, himself a former CIA officer, to seek the publisher’s extradition and re-arrest of Chelsea Manning. Along the way, Pompeo directed the agency to draw up plans of abduction and assassination while targeting Assange’s European colleagues and his family.

The US Department of Justice, Assange could only reflect, cared little for moderating tonic of legalities – that was something to be postponed to a later date. “In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect.” A “dangerous new global legal position” had been established as a result: “Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights.”

PACE had, before it, an opportunity to set norms, that “the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all”. “The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.”

A spectator, reader or listener might leave such an address deflated. But it is fitting that a man subjected to the labyrinthine, life-draining nature of several legal systems should be the one to exhort to a commitment: that all do their part to keep the light bright, “that the pursuit of truth will live on, and the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.”

October 3, 2024 Posted by | civil liberties, Legal, Reference | Leave a comment

Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an “Intelligence Age,” but tech breakthroughs alone can’t solve global warming.

James Temple, September 28, 2024,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai-wont-fix-climate-change/

In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”

It’s a promise that no one is in a position to make—and one that, when it comes to the topic of climate change, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem. 

More maddening, the argument suggests that the technology’s massive consumption of electricity today doesn’t much matter, since it will allow us to generate abundant clean power in the future. That casually waves away growing concerns about a technology that’s already accelerating proposals for natural-gas plants and diverting major tech companies from their corporate climate targets. 

By all accounts, AI’s energy demands will only continue to increase, even as the world scrambles to build larger, cleaner power systems to meet the increasing needs of EV charging, green hydrogen production, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Altman himself reportedly just met with White House officials to make the case for building absolutely massive AI data centers, which could require the equivalent of five dedicated nuclear reactors to run.  

It’s a bedrock perspective of MIT Technology Review that technological advances can deliver real benefits and accelerate societal progress in meaningful ways. But for decades researchers and companies have oversold the potential of AI to deliver blockbuster medicines, achieve super intelligence, and free humanity from the need to work. To be fair, there have been significant advances, but nothing on the order of what’s been hyped.

Given that track record, I’d argue you need to develop a tool that does more than plagiarize journalism and help students cheat on homework before you can credibly assert that it will solve humanity’s thorniest problems, whether the target is rampant poverty or global warming.

To be sure, AI may help the world address the rising dangers of climate change. We have begun to see research groups and startups harness the technology to try to manage power grids more effectively, put out wildfires faster, and discover materials that could create cheaper, better batteries or solar panels.

All those advances are still relatively incremental. But let’s say AI does bring about an energy miracle. Perhaps its pattern-recognition prowess will deliver the key insight that finally cracks fusion—a technology that Altman is betting on heavily as an investor.

That would be fantastic. But technological advances are just the start—necessary but far from sufficient to eliminate the world’s climate emissions.

How do I know?

Because between nuclear fission plants, solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries, we already have every technology we need to clean up the power sector. This should be the low-hanging fruit of the energy transition. Yet in the largest economy on Earth, fossil fuels still generate 60% of the electricity. The fact that so much of our power still comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas is a regulatory failure as much as a technological one. 

“As long as we effectively subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to use the atmosphere as a waste dump, we are not allowing clean energy to compete on a level playing field,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth, wrote on X in a response to Altman’s post. “We need policy changes, not just tech breakthroughs, to meet our climate goals.”

That’s not to say there aren’t big technical problems we still need to solve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways of fertilizing crops or flying planes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, development obstacles, and inertia.

We’ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can’t remedy all that just by generating better ideas. 

To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.

But with every proposal for a stricter law or some big new wind or solar farm, forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone’s wallet, block someone’s views, or threaten the areas or traditions someone cherishes. Climate change is an infrastructure problem, and building infrastructure is a messy human endeavor. 

Tech advances can ease some of these issues. Cheaper, better alternatives to legacy industries make hard choices more politically palatable. But there are no improvements to AI algorithms or underlying data sets that solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe the fresh air in an unsullied wilderness. 

To assert that a single technology—that just happens to be the one your company develops—can miraculously untangle these intractable conflicts of human society is at best self-serving, if not a little naïve. And it’s a troubling idea to proclaim at a point when the growth of that very technology is threatening to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.

As it is, the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it’s making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve.

October 3, 2024 Posted by | climate change, technology | Leave a comment

‘Western Press Obscured the Sheer Terror of What Israel Had Carried Out’: CounterSpin interview with Mohamad Bazzi on Lebanon pager attacks

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.

Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson,

Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”

It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:

Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.

That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.

Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.

Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.


JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?

MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.

I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”

And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.

A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.

JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.

MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.

So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.

…………………………..It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

JJ: There are calls now for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to resign after it’s been reported, I believe by ProPublica, that he was in receipt of assessments, from both USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau, that Israel had blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He had that information, Blinken did, when he went before Congress, and said there was no evidence of that.

Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?

MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.

The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.

And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.

So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.

It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.

And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?

…………………MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.

I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza. …..more https://fair.org/home/western-press-obscured-the-sheer-terror-of-what-israel-had-carried-out/

October 3, 2024 Posted by | Israel, media | Leave a comment

Nuclear Annihilation Threatened by Revival of 20th Century McCarthy Era Cold War & Red Scare

 Alice Slater, Wednesday, October 02, 2024, Inter Press Service,  https://www.globalissues.org/news/2024/10/02/37850
– The world may have dodged an immediate bullet when the US intelligence agencies warned, this week, that by giving in to Ukraine’s pleading for long range missiles that could attack targets deep into Russia, we would be poking the Russian bear beyond its patience without even influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine’s favor.

There had been a sense of waiting with bated breath in the wake of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin recent announcement that he would lower the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, as the US and its NATO allies broadcasted their plans to ignore a repeated “red line” articulated by US President Biden not to provide arms to Ukraine which could be launched deep inside Russia.

Britain is playing its usual provocative role by sending clear messages that it would welcome US approval to let Ukraine use its “Storm Shadow” long-range missiles. We just got a short breather, in light of this recently issued public US intelligence evaluation.

Despite repeated requests to the US from Russian President Vladmir Putin to honor US promises made to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that the US would not expand NATO east of a unified Germany, when the wall came down and Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe without a shot, the US, driven by visions of Empire, steadily expanded NATO eastward.

It began with Clinton’s annexation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2017. At one point Putin was so dismayed at this expansion, he asked the Clinton administration if Russia could join NATO, but he was denied membership.

Putin made it very clear to the US and NATO that Russia, which shares a long border with Ukraine, would not tolerate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. After the US supported a 2014 coup d’état replacing the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with Petro Poroshenko who immediately announced that only the Ukrainian language would be recognized in Ukraine, a civil war broke out in the Eastern part of the country where the majority of the people were Russian and Russian speaking. More than 14,000 people were killed in that war before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Putin provided a draft agreement in 2021 to the US proposing that Ukraine remain neutral and that the Donbass region, undergoing the civil war, remain in Ukraine as a federation and have the right to speak Russian. The US completely ignored the proposal and Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin was negotiating for a ceasefire with Yeltsin six months after the invasion, but Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister came to Ukraine and told Zelensky not to make the deal! And the slaughter continues, with more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 soldiers killed.

Thanks to the brief respite we just received from imminent nuclear annihilation, thanks to the sensible US intelligence services who took Putin’s recent warnings as a reason for caution in pursuing a headlong and heedless expansion of military aid to Ukraine, it is time to change the conversation with bold new proposals.

Proposals that are guaranteed to bring us a respite from the growing terror. Proposals that will bring a shift in planetary consciousness allowing us to respond cooperatively to the impending cataclysmic climate disaster down the road! Mother Earth grows impatient with the folly of humankind.

Here are a series of steps that are guaranteed to bring us peace on earth if the US is ready to mobilize against the MICIMATT (Military Industrial, Congressional Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank complex) and work for peace!

  • Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the UN and in frequent speeches for a treaty to ban weapons in space
  • Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the UN to negotiate a cyberwar ban treaty
  • Reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and get US missiles placed by Obama and Trump out of Poland and Romania
  • Remove US nuclear weapons stationed in five NATO states: Turkey, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium as a deal for Russia removing its recently placed weapons from Belarus
  • Take all nuclear weapons off high alert and separate the warheads from their delivery system as China does–the wisdom of the East
  • Dismantle NATO and pull it back from Russia’s border immediately

The ball, as they say, is in the US court. Or as Pogo Possum, a character in Walt Kelly’s 1950s comic strip was known to say, “We met the enemy and he is us!”

There is no doubt that Russia and China would be willing partners in these new initiatives. They have been proposing them to the United States for more than ten years!!

Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and as an UN NGO representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

IPS UN Bureau

October 3, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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