WMD

Outrageous Thought of the Day: Nuclear Hypocrisy

dlindorff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:47:22 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and
Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and
radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that
gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff
that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough
as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and
burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of
Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily
contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of
Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has
fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also
launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs
at it.

While I don't have direct knowledge, I'd say it's a safe bet that
there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have
also been widely used--maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine
training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern
California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an
ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country
with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F.
Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons
after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office
and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout
to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama
should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his
wife's and daughters' garden in the back yard of the White House. At
least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies
being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are
stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has
been employing against both that country and Afghanistan--his
"necessary" war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about
Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in
the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some
radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which
already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years--far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
"The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:08:18 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only
to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions
in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power
plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’
spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope
U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found
in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. Once simply a
nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose
of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number
of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times
heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added
property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an
ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense
concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through
the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside
(which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of
Iraqi tanks hit by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30
mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog
ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan
(as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks
and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker
buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its
warhead. DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns
up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise
missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly
feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which
carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is
used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment.
This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these
vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops
in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers,
etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched
vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried
in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear
materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait,
polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the
1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year
with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international health officials have
been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years
ago by the Christian Science Monitor
described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in
Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with
radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has
exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are
just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested.
Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly
poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in
the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of
deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons
were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US
Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has
received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found
a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects
have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq,
where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack
on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal
Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006,
stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies
born, 24% of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet,
fully 75% of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to
August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births
were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one
deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and
many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating
the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially
in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will
come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war
crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and
other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic
effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US
military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who
were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange,
the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously
denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims
by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to
do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a
cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban
on all depleted uranium weapons.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare: What If All Westerners Were Suddenly Sterile?

dlindorff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:12:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists like David Brooks, but today I can’t help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution,
in which that site’s two economists speculated on what would happen if
a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the
side of the earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that
side happened to include both the US and Europe.

Brooks fretted that if the people of these regions (and off course
South America and Africa, which are on the same half of the globe, but
which Brooks conveniently ignores) were suddenly to realize they would
have no descendants, it would be the end of all “grand designs.” There
would, he said, be no more justice, no sacrificing for the future, no
more building of great buildings.

Brooks and the authors of this nightmare fantasy took the view that
if the citizens of what Brooks perceives as “Western Civilization” were
to have no hope of offspring, there would within weeks be an end to all
striving.

After I finished laughing, I started to think seriously about the idea...

For the rest of this column, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange Causes Media Blindness

dlindorff — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:35:34 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

This is demonstrably the case at the New York Times, where a report in Saturday’s edition on new Agent Orange links
being found to Parkinson’s Disease and ischemic heart disease noted
that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible
for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention
the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who
were also exposed to the chemical—and for their descendants.

The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of
the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what
conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been
“used to clear stretches of the jungle” in Vietnam. As the article
noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17
medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, “13
of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits.”

There’s a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times
reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can’t know what is her
responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper’s editors)...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

What About the Iraqis?

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:59:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I found myself listing to a talk radio show on NPR’s Philadelphia affiliate WHYY today, which focused in part on the agonies suffered by families of American troops killed or seriously maimed in Iraq.

Left unsaid—and this I think is the case in nearly all the reporting that gets done on the costs of the Iraq War that are being borne here in the US by relatives of troops—is the terrible reality that we’re talking about the relatives of just 4500 American servicemen and women killed, and perhaps 30,000 seriously wounded (not counting the hundreds of thousands suffering mental damage). Not to diminish that suffering, it needs to be pointed out that by some accounts, well over 1 million Iraqis have died in this illegal, uncalled-for and criminal war.

And most of the dead, contrary to what we are told by the corporate media, are victims of the US military, not Iraqi bombers. The immense firepower of American forces, and the over-use of rockets, pilotless, rocket-firing drones, and aerial bombardment (designed to keep US casualties as low as possible), ensure high levels of civilian casualties (called collateral damage, or on rare occasions “unfortunate mistakes”), and we are unable to obtain accurate numbers because the US “doesn’t do bodycounts.”

Most are also civilians, not combatants. According to one study conducted by the Christian Science Monitor, one of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers, the ratio of civilians killed by US troops vs. enemy fighters killed was an appalling 30:1. As I’ve often noted, with a ratio like that it would be fairer to call any enemy fighters who are killed “collateral damage” in what should be seen as deliberate targeting of civilians.

And a disproportionate number of those civilians are children and young people. This has also been documented by researchers and has been observed anecdotally in hospitals. Children, because they are less aware of what’s going on around them, are less able to defend themselves, and are in general more vulnerable, are the main victims in this kind of brutal urban war fighting.

Now recall that for every Iraqi killed, whether that person is a fighter or a civilian, there is a grieving family, whose loss is every bit as terrible as is the loss suffered by an American family. What you get is perhaps 4-5 million Iraqis, in a nation of 24 million, who are suffering this inconsolable losses.

It is as though 50 million Americans had lost someone in the war.

But that’s just the dead and the relatives of the dead.

For every Iraqi who has been killed, there are surely two or three or more who have been gravely wounded, crippled, or driven mad. Even if we assume that shamefully poor medical care in Iraq assures that half of Iraq’s gravely wounded die instead of surviving with their wounds as our returned casualties do, that would add another two million to the casualties, and another 8 million to the number of impacted family members—for a total of 12 million—almost half of all Iraq!

It is wrong to say much of this tragedy is the fault of Iraqis. Prior to the US invasion, Iraqis were not massacring Iraqis. Across most of Iraq, Shia and Sunni lived side by side. They intermarried easily, with no bad repercussions. Certainly they suffered under the repression of dictator Saddam Hussein, but nothing like what they suffer today.

The reality is that the Bush/Cheney regime tricked the nation into becoming a terrorist aggressor, invading a nation by claiming falsely that it had, or was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the process our military became what it was allegedly trying to find: a weapon of mass destruction that has wreaked devastation upon Iraq as far-reaching and incomprehensibly destructive as any atomic bomb.

I have great sympathy for those Americans who have lost loved ones in, or whose loved ones have returned broken to them from Iraq.

But I do not want us to forget the incomparably greater suffering that has been brought on Iraqis in our names and thanks to our tax dollars and our political naivety and gullibility.

Yes, Senator Jim Webb is right that we owe better treatment to our veterans, who for the most part are victims of the same criminal machinations of our political leaders as are the Iraqis. But we also owe much better to the Iraqis, who are continuing to be killed, maimed and left bereft by our military and by our government’s mad insistence on “staying the course.”

It is way past time that we started thinking about them.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush's Legacy Leads to Iran: Will Clinton or Obama Make Any Difference? Will You?

Heather Wokusch — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:22:17 -0400

The lack of oversight characterizing both the Bush administration and crony capitalism have bankrupted the U.S. and created the need for perpetual war. With Cheney stirring up trouble over Iran, we can't wait until November 2008 to fight back.

Toxic economy

Take the Fed's recent $30 billion bailout of Bear Sterns. Why throw taxpayer dollars at a company with massive amounts of "toxic waste" on its books, created largely through reckless behavior chasing short-term profits?

Reigning in Wall Street would make more sense. Force investment banks to disclose off-balance-sheet risks and put aside substantial reserves, at minimum.

But no, the Fed instead hands Wall Street taxpayer dollars. Moral hazard be damned.

Bear Sterns won’t be the only bailout - the precedent has been set. We are looking at the start of a wealth transfer from normal Americans to large and unaccountable financial institutions.

And the cancer is spreading. In the same way that subprime mortgages have become toxic for major investment banks, the U.S. dollar has become toxic for overseas creditors.

The greenback has been falling against the euro and other currencies since 2002 and is widely expected to plummet further this year. Doesn’t help that the Fed stopped releasing M3 money supply data in March 2006, making it impossible to tell how many dollars are being dumped on the global market.

The Bush administration's irresponsible fiscal policies have led central banks abroad to see "coupling" with the US as a moral hazard. It’s no surprise that, for example, Japan's war chest of treasury securities fell $40 billion from January 2007 to January 2008.

Bottom line, the U.S. public's lack of trust in Bush's economic policy (if he even has one) is shared by global creditors.

And that leaves just one area of influence for this administration: war, war and more war.

All roads lead to Tehran

In the past two weeks, the White House approach to Iran has become increasingly schizophrenic. While Bush gave two radio interviews emphasizing the possibility for a US-Iran reconciliation, Cheney crisscrossed the Middle East pushing for war.

Maybe they're playing good cop/bad cop. Or else Cheney's taking matters into his own hands.

As The Global News Service of the Jewish People (JTA) observed, a U.S. strike on Iran is unlikely unless, "the Democratic presidential candidates appear to be far ahead of their Republican rival and Bush senses a 'now or never' strike option." Since even that scenario may be doubtful, " the Israelis are hoping that the hard-line Cheney will push the envelope - a role he reportedly played vis-a-vis the U.S. invasion of Iraq. One official said Cheney is seen as 'a significant player' who could influence 'serious issues that cannot wait.'"

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem-based site DEBKA reported that "at the last minute" before Cheney's recent visit, the White House asked Israel to prepare for "exhaustive and lengthy discussions on Iran." As a result, ministers were convened to decide which of Israel's military plans of action were to be presented to Cheney."

DEBKA also noted: "The vice president's choice of capitals for his tour is a pointer to the fact that the military option, off since December, may be on again. America will need the cooperation of all four – Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey - to mount a military attack on Iran."

Intriguingly, Cheney's visit to the Middle East coincided with a U.S. nuclear submarine crossing the Suez Canal to join the massive Navy fleet already stationed in the Persian Gulf.

As the Russian news service RIA Novosti reported this weekend, "the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003." RIA quoted a high-ranking official as saying, "The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran."

Here we go again

True to form, Cheney made numerous unfounded allegations against Iran during his Middle East trip. Contrary to U.S. intelligence reports, for example, he declared that Tehran is "heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade levels."

Interesting coincidence that the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni just wrapped up a U.S. speaking tour beating the same war drum.

In a phone call to Barack Obama, for example, Livni stressed that "there is a direct connection between terror and Iran" which requires the "firm steadfastness of the international community against terror and against Iran." Obama reportedly reassured her that Iran will not have nuclear weapons.

Just last week General David Petraeus claimed that Iran was behind a rocket attack against the US-controlled Green Zone in Iraq. Petraeus insisted that the rockets "were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made" and that Iran's actions were "in complete violation of promises made by President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts."

We've been down this road of trumped up allegations before.

So what happens after November 2008?

It's obvious that McCain would be a foreign policy disaster. His "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" performance speaks for itself, as does his claim that it "is fine with me" if the US stays in Iraq for 100 more years.

He's also dangerously uninformed. Just weeks ago, McCain told reporters that Iranian operatives were "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." He said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate."

Small problem: Shia Iran does not support Sunni al-Qaeda. You'd think that after five years of war in Iraq McCain would have figured that out. Only when Sen. Joseph Lieberman quietly corrected him did McCain say: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda." Whatever.

McCain will keep the US at war indefinitely.

So why, for the first time in 14 years, are defense contractors throwing their money behind the Democrats? Since 2000, for example, they've given roughly 63% of their election contributions to Republicans, but in the 2008 election cycle, a full 52% of defense industry funding has gone to the Dems.

Maybe it's because Clinton and Obama can also be expected to keep defense contractors happy. Both speak of peace but have repeatedly voted to fund war. Both have plans for limited troop withdrawal once in office but neither has strongly argued against keeping tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq for years to come. Neither has fought to stop construction of the gigantic US embassy in Baghdad or to scale back the heavily-fortified Green Zone.

Perhaps more importantly, both Clinton and Obama have said that all options (code language for nuclear weapons) must be on the table for dealing with Iran.

Shadow economy, shadow government

So who would profit from broader-based war? Weapons manufacturers for one. In fiscal 2006 alone the Pentagon was involved in arms sales agreements of $21 billion. And from 2001 to 2005, the US provided developing nations with 2,099 surface-to-air missiles plus ten "major surface combatants," including aircraft carriers and destroyers.

Of course, taxpayers fund the bulk of many of these weapons agreements, through direct corporate subsidies or foreign military aid linked to weapons purchases. Yet defense industry profits remain private. Another wealth transfer.

Having apparently done quite nicely in Iraq, Big Oil could also profit from further unrest. The Iraqi government is soon expected to sign "technical support" contracts with five major oil companies (BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total and Chevron). Iraq will not only pay the five up to $2.5 billion to increase oil production but also fast-track them for bidding on future oil contracts. The oil majors might be hoping to pull off a similar coup when the smoke eventually clears in Iran, or at minimum, to scuttle the proposed Iran-Russia gas cartel.

The Republicans would clearly benefit from a wider war come November. McCain could flash his military credentials and emphasis would be taken off issues most likely to garner Democrats votes, such as the economy.

While the American people have no stomach for further conflict, it's debatable if their opinion even matters any more. In the same way that Wall Street's shadow economy is now sticking US taxpayers for billions in bailouts, the shadow government is setting us up for war.

No one really knows, for example, what Cheney is cooking up or what new justification for an attack on Iran will be thrown at us next. False flag perhaps?

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans against "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power" from the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower said: "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Now is the time for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry to take action.

Now is the time to dump the hero worship and ask very tough questions of our presidential candidates. Some basics include:
- Will you commit to never using the so-called bunker-buster or any other kind of nuclear weapon against Iran? Will you take that option "off the table" right now?
- Will you insist on a full briefing to the US public and congressional approval before any attack on Iran?
- When will you stop funding the war in Iraq? In Afghanistan?
- When will you bring all troops home? Will you commit to removing Blackwater and other private security companies too?

Now is also the time to ask a very tough question of ourselves. If there is some kind of attack on US interests and the administration insists Iran did it, yet supplies little in the way of viable proof, will we take action? If so, why wait?

Action Ideas

1. Have Fallon testify before Congress

Admiral William Fallon, head of the US Central Command, left his job recently over differences with the White House regarding an attack on Iran. As CODEPINK notes: "The Bush Administration will not let Admiral Fallon testify before Congress in April; it only wants Congress to hear the voice of General Petraeus, the 'feel good' military man who says the surge is working. This is a travesty. Congress needs the perspective that Fallon's deep and reasoned knowledge of the situation in the Middle East brings. During a time when military endeavors in both Afghanistan and Iraq have failed miserably, we can't afford to let our President start a third catastrophe in Iran."

Call Senator Biden (202-224-4651) or email the Foreign Relations Committee today to urge them to have Fallon testify.

2. Learn more about Iraq Town Halls and make your voice heard.

Democrats.com has an important initiative called Iraq Town Halls : "In April, Congress will vote to give George Bush another $102 billion blank check for Iraq - unless we finally persuade our Representatives to Just Say No. One of the best ways to persuade a Representative is to hold a Town Hall Meeting and fill the hall with people who care and are willing to speak passionately. That gets their attention!"

3. Impeach Cheney

Do you think Cheney should be impeached? The People's Email Network has made it easy for you to take action. The one-click form on their site "will send your personal message to all your members of Congress, with your vote on the question 'Should Vice President Cheney be impeached?' At the same time it will send your personal comments only as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper, if that option is selected below."

While you're at The People's Email Network site, consider creating your own issue action petition. It costs nothing and enables you to start your own movement using their dedicated submission server.

4. Find out if there are WMD facilities in your area

Weapons manufacturers have had a bonanza under Bush, and often the public isn’t aware that a domestic WMD lab is nearby.

Curious about where the nation's nuclear weapons plants are located? Then check out the Federation of American Scientists at: "Where the Bombs Are"

Is a university or military facility in your area involved in biological weapons research? One resource to help you locate biodefense projects is Project Sunshine's "Map of High Containment and Other Facilities of the US Biodefense Program," under "Biodefense" on the Project Sunshine site.

If your group would like to conduct its own PR-generating "inspection" of a domestic WMD facility, check out the Citizen Weapons Inspection Teams site for materials, pointers and a 5-page Citizen Inspection Team Event Checklist, covering everything from budgeting resources to issuing a declaration.

5. Put the media to work

Progressive Democrats of America has put together a terrific resource to help you contact the media with your comments, complaints and suggestions.

Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives’ Handbook series and can be reached at heatherwokusch.com

The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

dlindorff — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:24:39 -0400

“It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
---Pentagon official

There is something deeply disturbing about the Air Force’s official report on the Aug-29-30 “bent spear” incident that saw six nuclear warheads get mounted on six Advanced Cruise Missiles and improperly removed from a nuclear weapons storage bunker at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, then get improperly loaded on a B-52, and then get improperly flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana—a report that attributed the whole thing to a “mistake.”<--!break-->

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52’s wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems—automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn’t mention any of this, what it means is that if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone—and actually at least two people, since it’s long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem—had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

Since the Air Force report does not explain how this hurdle to unauthorized removal of the six nukes could have been surmounted by “mistake,” the report has to be considered a whitewash, at best, or a cover-up.

That leaves us speculating about what actually happened, and about who might have authorized the removal of those nukes from storage, and why the Defense Department would be covering up the true story. We know that the loading of nuclear-armed missiles or bombs onto an American bomber has been barred since 1991, even for practice and training purposes. We know also that the carrying of nuclear weapons by bombers flying over US airspace has been banned for 40 years. So if the evidence suggests strongly that the removal of the nukes from the bunker was done intentionally and with some kind of authorization from higher authorities, then the loading of nukes onto the plane, and the flight of those nukes to Barksdale have to also be assumed to have been authorized.

This possibility has been dismissed out of hand by the Air Force and Defense Department. The very idea is, in fact, not even discussed in the Air force report released in mid-October.

Yet we are left with the unresolved question of how the weapons could have been moved out of the bunker accidentally.

The Air Force has not been forthcoming about the automated alarm protections on American nuclear weapons, refusing to confirm or deny that they even exist. But we can know that they are in place for several reasons. One is that since writing about this incident in the current edition of American Conservative Magazine ("The Mystery of Minot," Oct. 24, 2007 ed.) and in several online venues, I have been contacted by several active-duty and retired military people who have assured me that such electronic protections are in place. A second is that an article in the Oct. 31 issue of the New York Times, reporting on the early completion of a project by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to secure Russian nuclear weapons, said that the measures implemented at 25 classified sites on 12 Russian nuclear bases included “measures that have long been part of American efforts” to secure nuclear weapons, and that these included “alarm and motion detection systems,” as well as “modern gates, guard houses and fighting positions, “ and also “detectors for explosives, radiation and metal.”

Ask yourselves, would American nuclear weapons be equipped with lesser security systems than those that the NNSA is providing for Russian weapons?

Of course not!

And yet we’re asked to believe that some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing that they were armed with nuclear weapons. We’re asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process.

When I mentioned the automated alarm and motion sensors to Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, a public affairs person at the Department of the Air Force, and asked her how the movement of the six nukes could have occurred without those alarms being disabled, she said, “It’s an intriguing question, and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

` As it should.

` So why isn’t it making the hair stand up on the back of the necks of members of Congress?

Incredibly, to date, there has been no demand for public hearings into this frightening incident.

Congress appears ready and willing to accept the Air Force whitewash at face value: It was an accident. It won’t happen again.

That is not good enough!

We need honest answers to some hard questions. Among them:

* Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?

* Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

* Who authorized them to perform this operation?

* Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

* Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

* Was there targeting information in the missile’s guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

* What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper <em>Military Times?</em>

* Why hasn’t the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle “accidents” involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force “investigation” didn’t even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

The Secretary of Defense appears to have been upset about this incident. Secretary Robert Gates ordered an unprecedented stand-down of all air bases in mid-September to check out and account for the entire nuclear inventory, and a general was dispatched immediately to Minot after the discovery of the wayward nukes on August 30 to investigate what had happened. Following a subsequent Air Force investigation, 70 people at Minot and Barksdale AFBs were removed from their posts and decertified from handling nuclear weapons, including five officers, one of them the Minot base commander.

* But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked?

There is speculation that the order may have come via an alternate chain of command.

Vice President Dick Cheney is known to be pressing within the administration for a war with Iran, to be launched before the end President Bush’s second term of office. According to some reports, Cheney has even, on his own authority (or lack thereof), urged Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, in hopes that Iran might retaliate, thus drawing the US into a war.
Could the nation’s war-mongering VP have used his neo-con contacts in the Defense Department or some of the Armageddon-believers in the Air Force to bypass the official chain of command and spring those nukes from their bunker?

Was there a plan to use one or more of those nukes—W80-1 warheads that can be calibrated to detonate with an explosive power ranging anywhere from 150 kilotons down to just 5 kilotons—against Iran? The Advanced Cruise Missile, a stealth weapon almost impossible to spot on radar, is designed to be launched from a remote location by a B-52, and then to fly close to the ground to its target, using terrain maps and GPS guidance. It is also designed to penetrate hardened sites, such as Iran’s nuclear processing and research facilities.

Or was there a plan for a so-called “false-flag incident, “where a small nuke—made to resemble a primitive weapon of the type a fledgling nuclear power might construct—might be detonated at a US target abroad, or even within the US?

These are terrible and terrifying questions to have to ask, but when you have six nuclear weapons go missing, when the military investigation into the incident is so clearly a whitewash or cover-up, and when you have a vice president who is openly pressing for an illegal war of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the US, and who, in fact, appears to be conducting his own treacherous foreign policy behind the back of the president and the State Department, they are questions that must be asked, and that demand answers.

In a couple of weeks, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is planning on calling for a Privilege of the House vote in Congress on moving his Cheney impeachment bill (H Res. 333) to a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has been stalled by House Democratic leaders since being filed last April 24. Such a hearing should demand answers from the vice president and his staff about his treasonous efforts to push the country into yet another war in the Middle East. It should also grill Air Force personnel about the true nature of the Minot nuclear incident.

Every member of the House of Representatives should have to take a stand on this issue.

The Democratic House leadership, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, can be expected to try to table Kucinich’s privilege motion, which would prevent such a vote.

Americans should demand that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders let Kucinich’s privilege motion go forward, and should insist that every member of Congress put their position on the line. Every American should demand that their representative to Congress support the start of impeachment hearings on Vice President Cheney.

We need to know if the Vice President’s office was behind the flight of those six warheads.

We need to know in what other treasonous, conspiratorial actions the Vice President has been engaged in his unremitting effort to expand the war from Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran.
------------------------

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and political columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Gang Indeed

Marvin_Jones — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:20:01 -0400

Missing Nukes--Treason of the Highest Order

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158

New NSA Whistleblower Speaks

davidswanson — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 01:46:58 -0400

By David Swanson

A former member of U.S. military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq.

Adrienne Kinne describes an incident just prior to the invasion of Iraq in which a fax came into her office at Fort Gordon in Georgia that purported to provide information on the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The fax came from the Iraqi National Congress, a group opposed to Saddam Hussein and favoring an invasion. The fax contained types of information that required that it be translated and transmitted to President Bush within 15 minutes. But Kinne had been eavesdropping on two nongovernmental aid workers driving in Iraq who were panicked and trying to find safety before the bombs dropped. She focused on trying to protect them, and was reprimanded for the delay in translating the fax. She then challenged her officer in charge, Warrant Officer John Berry, on the credibility of the fax, and he told her that it was not her place or his to challenge such things. None of the other 20 or so people in the unit questioned anything, Kinne said.

Kinne dates this incident to the period just before the official invasion of Iraq or possibly just after. She says that because the US engaged in so much bombing prior to the official invasion, she cannot recall for sure.

Prior to September 11, 2001, Kinne says, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalls an incident in 1997 in which an American's name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans. Kinne was serving from 1994-1998 on active duty as an Arabic linguist for military intelligence at Fort Gordon in Georgia, sending reports to and collaborating with the NSA. She served at the same station after 9-11 when she was activated as a reservist.

Kinne says that post-9-11 she and others routinely collected information on people even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. A common rationale was that the phones of such organizations could conceivably be seized by terrorists. She recalled one case in which she was listening to an American talk to his British colleague in an international aid organization. The Brit expressed concern about the American military eavesdropping, and the American replied that they couldn't possibly be doing that because of USSID 18. Kinne recalls that her colleagues got quite excited and behaved as if the American had divulged secrets by mentioning that directive. They continued eavesdropping on the man although they were unclear at that point whether they were permitted to spy on Americans.

Shortly after this incident, however, in mid-2002, they were given a waiver to spy on Americans. This waiver was communicated to Kinne and her colleagues orally, and she assumed that it had come from the President or someone very high up. The waiver, she says, also permitted spying on Canadian, French, German, Australian, and British citizens without probable cause.

Many of the people, including Americans, whom Kinne spied on were journalists. These included journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad that later showed up on a list of targets. Again, Kinne says, she expressed concerns to her officer in charge, letting him know that the military should be informed or the journalists should be warned to move to another location. Kinne says Berry brushed her off. He was, she says, "completely behind the invasion of Iraq. He told us repeatedly that we needed to bomb those barbarians back to kingdom come."

Berry was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer. Kinne left, went back to school, and took a job at the Veterans Administration helping some of the victims of the fixing of intelligence that she had witnessed. And early this year she joined a tour of Vermont with activists Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, Dan DeWalt, and veterans of the war, a tour promoting the passage of impeachment resolutions in Vermont towns, a tour that helped effect the passage of those resolutions in over 40 towns up and down the state. Kinne found the experience "life-changing", and she's now decided to tell everything she knows, and to encourage others still in the government to speak out and release documentation.

"I wish that I had said something back then, but I don't think people would have listened," Kinne said.

Kinne, who now works for the VA at White River Junction, Vermont, said that she has written to Senator Patrick Leahy, who has not replied to her. Kinne has become active in Iraq Veterans Against the War. She said that the news of the current escalation of the war also helped move her to act. "That's the only reason why I am choosing to break whatever rules I may have just broken by telling you about it," Kinne said. "Because I think that this all needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. And the only way it's going to stop is if people start speaking out."