PRESSTV– On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced that the al-Qaeda
leader was killed by US forces after he was found hiding in a compound
in Pakistan.
This is while in an interview following a failed assassination
attempt on Pakistan’s former premier in October 2007, Bhutto says bin
Laden has already been killed.
In the interview, she identifies the man who killed the notorious
al-Qaeda leader as one Omar Sheikh , excerpts of which was sent to Press
TV’s UReport.
In response to a question whether any of the assassins had links with
the government, Bhutto said, “Yes but one of them is a very key figure
in security, he is a former military officer … and had dealings with
Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden.”
Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in a bomb attack as
she was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi when a gunman shot her
in the neck and set off a bomb.
The announcement of bin Laden’s death comes almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Meanwhile, a US official says bin Laden’s body has been buried at
sea, alleging that his hasty burial was in accordance with Islamic law,
which requires burial within 24 hours of death.
This is while burial at sea is not an Islamic practice and Islam does not determine a timeframe for burial.
The official added that finding a country willing to accept the
remains of the world’s most wanted man was difficult, so the US decided
to bury him at sea.
A November 2, 2007 Benazir Bhutto interview in which she says the al-Qaeda leader was ‘murdered’ years ago contributes to the uncertainty surrounding US claims about Osama bin Laden’s death. David Frost did not challenge her on her assertion that Bin Laden was murdered.
MEDIA FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL– US military’s contractors in Afghanistan pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. An estimated ten percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts of hundreds of millions of dollars are paid to insurgents. It is a fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting.
In order for the US Army to transport supplies, they have to travel great distances in trucks, and there is a price to pay. For every corridor or checkpoint they pass, soldiers must pay to pass or else they take the risk of being attacked and killed.
Ahmad Rateb Popal and his brother Rashid are cousins to Afgan President Hamid Karzai. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies. Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road.
MOTHER JONES– Lots has changed on Elmer’s Island. Nearly a year after the great oilpocalypse of 2010, this Louisiana wildlife refuge about 50 miles south of New Orleans isn’t crawling with teams of cleanup workers raking big black pools
of crude off the sand; there’s no cleanup machinery or equipment; the
only immediately visible remnants of the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill are
the occasional tarballs, big as a kid’s head, that wash onto the shore.
Not that I can just waltz onto this public beach to see all that—not everything has changed. Like some lame iteration of Groundhog Day,
the hundredth time I try to pull onto the Elmer’s Island access road
from Highway 1 in southern Louisiana—some 200 days after the last time I
tried it—I am, once again, stopped. Last year, it was cops blocking the road. Now it’s private security hired by BP.
“You have to get permission from central command to come on here, and
then you’ll probably have to be escorted by an official,” the security
guard tells me.
“How hard is it to get permission?”
“Usually pretty hard.” She says a local reporter couldn’t get through recently.
LA TIMES– How did Japanese workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant
jury-rig fire hoses to cool damaged reactors? Is contaminated water from
waste pools overflowing into the Pacific Ocean? Exactly who is the
national incident commander?
The answers to these and many other
questions are unclear to U.S. nuclear scientists and policy experts, who
say the quality and quantity of information coming out of Japan has
left gaping holes in their understanding of the disaster nearly two
weeks after it began.
At the same time, they say, the depth of the crisis has clearly been
growing, judging by releases of radioactivity that by some measures have
reached half the level of those released in the Chernobyl accident of
1986, according to new analysis by European and American scientists.
REUTERS– Japanese engineers struggled on
Sunday to pump radioactive water from a crippled nuclear power
station after radiation levels soared in seawater near the plant
more than two weeks after it was battered by a huge earthquake
and a tsunami.
Tests on Friday showed iodine 131 levels in seawater 30 km
(19 miles) from the coastal nuclear complex had spiked 1,250
times higher than normal but it was not considered a threat to
marine life or food safety, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety
Agency said.
“Ocean currents will disperse radiation particles and so it
will be very diluted by the time it gets consumed by fish and
seaweed,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a senior agency official.
Fresh radiation
fears have emerged in reactor 2 of the Fukushima nuclear plant, as the radioactivity levels are reported to be 100,000 times the normal level.
COMMON DREAMS– What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear
scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of
the nuclear age?
Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian
journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the
horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.
“It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it
and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts … as a warning to
the world.”
The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact,
what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of
nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher
tech weaponry.
As Hiroshima becomes yesterday’s distant memory and Fukishima the
current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not
yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies
don’t want to alarm the public.
Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island
complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from
a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of
the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack
of transparency.
On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first
nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were
complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that
did take place:
“But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between
the “mainstream” media and the “alternative.” Despite a federal class
action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from
the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents
children with birth defects, despite three decades of official
admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where
it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might
have been killed there made its way into a corporate report”
Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The
great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book,
Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath
of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call “50 years of denial.”
One reviewer explained,
“The authors examine what they perceive to be a
conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about
the actual bombing, Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and the birth
and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim
that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating
psychological effects of the bomb.”
Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not
conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such
a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half
century.
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public
relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as
safe. Rory O’ Connor and Richard Bell coined the term “Nuke Speak” to
describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry’s PR
offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that
continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real
agenda.
And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian
struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as
information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out,
President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear
plants.
Others stress more parochial concerns. The TV production community
fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers
are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get
your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there
worry about a sushi shortage.
Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets
in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the
U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in
the opening plenary.
On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter
defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to
counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls
it a “cancer vaccine.”
In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not
making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government
said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I
questioned the wisdom of that approach, I was jeered because they felt I
was challenging their “right” to have what other countries have, their
right to “progress.” The thought that the plants could be dangerous was
dismissed,
What they don’t seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding
out is this technology—with spent rods that are never “spent” and the
nuclear waste that will outlive us all– is inherently unsafe. Jonathan
Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in the Nation:
“The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control
provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature
and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex,
high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a
humble kind.
The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat
generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate
continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional
power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong
in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump
grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a
big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go
awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and
sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.”
As the “incident” records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make
clear, these are not just Japanese problems. The Christian Science
Minitor reports, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve
known safety problems, leading to 14 ‘near-misses’ in US nuclear power
plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear
watchdog group.”
We don’t even know the full of the extent of the accidents,
unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country
much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected
Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the
next disaster will occur.
Bernie Sandeers is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes,
“The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in
Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the
United States — many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults,
some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis.”
The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and
restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an “event” that
cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that “Gen 4,” the
next generation of reactors, will be much safer.
Problem solved? Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists carries an assessment by Hugh Gusterson on “The Lessons of
Fukishima.”
“To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is
not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe
reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the
corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.
This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology
that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear
energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have
to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to
believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear
accidents.”
We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as
irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in
the public to buy iodine pills. The industry’s marketing machine is in
crisis response mode and hasn’t missed a beat, while many of us look on
with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what’s in our best
interest.
Former presidential candidate and longtime consumer advocate and nuclear
critic Ralph Nader strongly advocates phasing out nuclear power in the
United States by calling for public hearings on the status of every
single nuclear power plant in an interview with Democracy Now! March 18.
PRESSTV– On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced that the al-Qaeda
leader was killed by US forces after he was found hiding in a compound
in Pakistan.
MOTHER JONES
