2 Nuclear Research Centers - At Least 108 Nuclear Warheads
Video report - Posted May 17, 2010, Aljazeera
NOTE:
It is now clear that the United States was involved either by design or neglect in furnishing nuclear weapons capability to Israel and has allowed the Jewish state to maintain a large and growing nuclear weapon stockpile without insisting upon Israeli participation in the NPT.
It is hypocritical in the extreme for the US and Israel to demonize Iran for developing a nuclear energy program (which it admits to) and for alleging as fact the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program (which Iran denies) and which to date has not been proven. Is it any wonder that the entire world sees the foreign policy of the US as duplicitous?
The United States must as a matter of moral principal and rational self-interest become a fair, just and impartial mediator in the Middle East. This of necessity involves ending its current preferential treatment of Israel. The US should insist that Israel allow complete and unfettered inspections of its nuclear weapons program through participation in the NPT as a prerequisite for further US aid and assistance including future support of Israel before the UN Security Council. It is no longer possible for the United States to tailor its foreign policy according to the demands of Israel.
As President John F. Kennedy attempted in 1963, the various members of the so-called Israel (Zionist) Lobby should be forced to register as agents of a foreign (hostile) government and treated accordingly. The American people should be made aware of each and every member of Congress who continues to do the bidding of the Israel Lobby.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
US Funds Israel’s Apartheid Roads Plan
MORE EVIDENCE FOR ISRAELI APARTHEID STATE
Settlers benefit from Israeli-only routes
By Jonathan Cook
May 16, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Jerusalem -- The construction of sections of a controversial segregated road network in the West Bank planned by Israel for Palestinians -- leaving the main roads for exclusive use by settlers -- is being financed by a US government aid agency, a map prepared by Palestinian researchers has revealed.
USAid, which funds development projects in Palestinian areas, is reported to have helped to build 114km of Israeli-proposed roads, despite a pledge from Washington six years ago that it would not assist in implementing what has been widely described as Israel’s “apartheid road” plan.
To date the agency has paid for the construction of nearly a quarter of the segregated road network put forward by Israel in 2004, said the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ).
The roads are designed to provide alternative routes to connect Palestinian communities, often by upgrading circuitous dirt tracks or by building tunnels under existing routes.
Meanwhile, according to human rights groups, Israel has reserved an increasing number of main roads in the West Bank for Israelis so that Jewish settlers can drive more easily and quickly into Israel, making their illegal communities more attractive places to live.
The US agency’s involvement in building a segregated West Bank road infrastructure would run counter to Washington’s oft-stated goal, including as it launched “proximity talks” last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity.
“The displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank’s main roads improves the appeal of the settlements by better integrating them into Israel,” said Suheil Khalilieh, the head of settlement monitoring at ARIJ. “Conversely, creating an inferior, alternative network of local roads makes travel between the main regions of the West Bank difficult and time-consuming for Palestinians.”
Israel proposed the creation of two separate road systems in 2004, after many of the West Bank’s main roads had been sealed off to Palestinians following the outbreak of the second intifada.
Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister, argued that segregated infrastructure would create “contiguity of transportation” for Palestinians and help to alleviate economic hardship resulting from hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that restrict Palestinian movement.
The international community was asked to finance 500km of roads for the Palestinians, later termed “fabric of life” roads, including upgrading agricultural tracks and constructing many underpasses and bridges, at a cost of $200 million.
The Palestinian Authority, however, objected, saying the plan would further entrench the illegal settlements in the West Bank and justify confiscating yet more Palestinian land for the new roads.
That position was backed by international donors, including the US, which declared it would not finance any road projects against the PA’s will.
Despite the US promise, however, a map of the West Bank recently published by ARIJ shows that 23 per cent of the “alternative” road network Israel proposed has been built with USAid money.
Many of these roads are located in so-called Areas B and C, more than 80 per cent of the West Bank that was assigned to Israeli security control by the Oslo accords. Israel oversees all road projects in these areas.
Mr Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road infrastructure wanted by Israel.
“What happens is that USAid presents a package deal of donations for infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads it does not want.”
He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said, following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.
After PA officials were presented with ARIJ’s map, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, issued a statement last weekend denying that the PA had contributed to the Israeli-proposed road network.
However, in a sign that such reassurances were unlikely to dampen concerns, he reconvened the inter-ministerial committee to conduct field visits to check on road projects that had been carried out or were in progress.
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman and a former planning minister, said the PA was taking the issue “very seriously” and was doing everything possible to resist the emergence of an “apartheid system” in the West Bank.
He added that, if roads were being built that served the settlers’ interests, “that is not supposed to happen”.
According to USAid’s figures, it has financed 235km of roads in the West Bank in the past decade, and is preparing to add another 120km by the end of this year.
Critics add that in some cases the upgrading by USAid of minor roads, even those not included in the Israeli plan, has worked to the same end of keeping Palestinians off the West Bank’s main highways.
USAid officials were unavailable for comment.
Among roads for Palestinians funded by USAid are several projects south of Bethlehem that appear to be providing an “alternative” to Road 60, a busy highway that has traditionally linked Jerusalem with the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank.
Israel has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to Road 60 because it also serves as a fast direct route for Jewish settlers in the Gush Etzion bloc driving to and from Jerusalem.
As a result, residents of several nearby Palestinian villages, including Batir, Wadi Fukin, al Walaja and Husan, have been forced off Road 60 and on to USAid-funded side roads and underpasses to connect them to Bethlehem and other neighbouring communities.
Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said 170km of roads in the West Bank were either off-limits to Palestinians or highly restricted, creating what the organisation has called “forbidden roads”.
B’Tselem noted that, after the 2004 scheme for complete separation was rejected by donors, Israel adapted the plan, using bridges, tunnels and interchanges to create partial separation, with Israelis “traveling on the fast upper levels, and Palestinians on the lower levels”. It concluded: “The plan allows Palestinian vehicles to travel on only 20 per cent of the [West Bank] roads on which Israeli vehicles travel.”
Ms Michaeli added that the growing dependence of Palestinian traffic on underpasses meant that Israel was in a position to control or even sever connections between Palestinian areas with only one military jeep.
Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, the director of Badil, a Bethlehem-based organisation that has lobbied against road segregation in the southern West Bank, said there was considerable domestic and international pressure on the PA to agree to roads dictated by Israel, if only because they often eased the existing restrictions on Palestinian movement.
“Sadly, the PA is helping to build its own Bantustans,” she said. “Palestinian towns and villages connected by back roads and tunnels while the settlers control the main highways is what the US appears to mean when it talks about a viable Palestinian state.”
Settlers benefit from Israeli-only routes
By Jonathan Cook
May 16, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Jerusalem -- The construction of sections of a controversial segregated road network in the West Bank planned by Israel for Palestinians -- leaving the main roads for exclusive use by settlers -- is being financed by a US government aid agency, a map prepared by Palestinian researchers has revealed.
USAid, which funds development projects in Palestinian areas, is reported to have helped to build 114km of Israeli-proposed roads, despite a pledge from Washington six years ago that it would not assist in implementing what has been widely described as Israel’s “apartheid road” plan.
To date the agency has paid for the construction of nearly a quarter of the segregated road network put forward by Israel in 2004, said the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ).
The roads are designed to provide alternative routes to connect Palestinian communities, often by upgrading circuitous dirt tracks or by building tunnels under existing routes.
Meanwhile, according to human rights groups, Israel has reserved an increasing number of main roads in the West Bank for Israelis so that Jewish settlers can drive more easily and quickly into Israel, making their illegal communities more attractive places to live.
The US agency’s involvement in building a segregated West Bank road infrastructure would run counter to Washington’s oft-stated goal, including as it launched “proximity talks” last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity.
“The displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank’s main roads improves the appeal of the settlements by better integrating them into Israel,” said Suheil Khalilieh, the head of settlement monitoring at ARIJ. “Conversely, creating an inferior, alternative network of local roads makes travel between the main regions of the West Bank difficult and time-consuming for Palestinians.”
Israel proposed the creation of two separate road systems in 2004, after many of the West Bank’s main roads had been sealed off to Palestinians following the outbreak of the second intifada.
Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister, argued that segregated infrastructure would create “contiguity of transportation” for Palestinians and help to alleviate economic hardship resulting from hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that restrict Palestinian movement.
The international community was asked to finance 500km of roads for the Palestinians, later termed “fabric of life” roads, including upgrading agricultural tracks and constructing many underpasses and bridges, at a cost of $200 million.
The Palestinian Authority, however, objected, saying the plan would further entrench the illegal settlements in the West Bank and justify confiscating yet more Palestinian land for the new roads.
That position was backed by international donors, including the US, which declared it would not finance any road projects against the PA’s will.
Despite the US promise, however, a map of the West Bank recently published by ARIJ shows that 23 per cent of the “alternative” road network Israel proposed has been built with USAid money.
Many of these roads are located in so-called Areas B and C, more than 80 per cent of the West Bank that was assigned to Israeli security control by the Oslo accords. Israel oversees all road projects in these areas.
Mr Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road infrastructure wanted by Israel.
“What happens is that USAid presents a package deal of donations for infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads it does not want.”
He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said, following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.
After PA officials were presented with ARIJ’s map, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, issued a statement last weekend denying that the PA had contributed to the Israeli-proposed road network.
However, in a sign that such reassurances were unlikely to dampen concerns, he reconvened the inter-ministerial committee to conduct field visits to check on road projects that had been carried out or were in progress.
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman and a former planning minister, said the PA was taking the issue “very seriously” and was doing everything possible to resist the emergence of an “apartheid system” in the West Bank.
He added that, if roads were being built that served the settlers’ interests, “that is not supposed to happen”.
According to USAid’s figures, it has financed 235km of roads in the West Bank in the past decade, and is preparing to add another 120km by the end of this year.
Critics add that in some cases the upgrading by USAid of minor roads, even those not included in the Israeli plan, has worked to the same end of keeping Palestinians off the West Bank’s main highways.
USAid officials were unavailable for comment.
Among roads for Palestinians funded by USAid are several projects south of Bethlehem that appear to be providing an “alternative” to Road 60, a busy highway that has traditionally linked Jerusalem with the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank.
Israel has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to Road 60 because it also serves as a fast direct route for Jewish settlers in the Gush Etzion bloc driving to and from Jerusalem.
As a result, residents of several nearby Palestinian villages, including Batir, Wadi Fukin, al Walaja and Husan, have been forced off Road 60 and on to USAid-funded side roads and underpasses to connect them to Bethlehem and other neighbouring communities.
Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said 170km of roads in the West Bank were either off-limits to Palestinians or highly restricted, creating what the organisation has called “forbidden roads”.
B’Tselem noted that, after the 2004 scheme for complete separation was rejected by donors, Israel adapted the plan, using bridges, tunnels and interchanges to create partial separation, with Israelis “traveling on the fast upper levels, and Palestinians on the lower levels”. It concluded: “The plan allows Palestinian vehicles to travel on only 20 per cent of the [West Bank] roads on which Israeli vehicles travel.”
Ms Michaeli added that the growing dependence of Palestinian traffic on underpasses meant that Israel was in a position to control or even sever connections between Palestinian areas with only one military jeep.
Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, the director of Badil, a Bethlehem-based organisation that has lobbied against road segregation in the southern West Bank, said there was considerable domestic and international pressure on the PA to agree to roads dictated by Israel, if only because they often eased the existing restrictions on Palestinian movement.
“Sadly, the PA is helping to build its own Bantustans,” she said. “Palestinian towns and villages connected by back roads and tunnels while the settlers control the main highways is what the US appears to mean when it talks about a viable Palestinian state.”
Oceans' Fish Could Disappear in 40 Years: UN
By AFP
May 17, 2010 "AFP" -- NEW YORK (AFP) – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.
"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.
UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies.
However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said.
Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter.
One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN.
The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.
According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.
The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.
Fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev said.
"What is scarce here is fish," he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity."
Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.
Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks recover -- would be able to land bigger catches.
"We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required," Sukhdev said.
May 17, 2010 "AFP" -- NEW YORK (AFP) – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.
"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.
UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies.
However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said.
Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter.
One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN.
The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.
According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.
The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.
Fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev said.
"What is scarce here is fish," he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity."
Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.
Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks recover -- would be able to land bigger catches.
"We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required," Sukhdev said.
BP And The 'Little Eichmanns'
By Chris Hedges
May 17, 2010 " TruthDig" -- Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 (now thought to exceed 200,000, JPH) barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge. (The super rich elites have for some time been transferring huge sums of money "off-shore" in preparation for the eventual implosion of the United States when the current imperial project has run its course. These are the true citizens of the world who have no need of nation state, JPH)
"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society." (A knowledge and application of orthodox Roman Catholic Philosophy and Social teaching would have prevented the current catastrophe from gaining intellectual and practical acceptance, JPH).
"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."
The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.
America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."
The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.
May 17, 2010 " TruthDig" -- Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 (now thought to exceed 200,000, JPH) barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge. (The super rich elites have for some time been transferring huge sums of money "off-shore" in preparation for the eventual implosion of the United States when the current imperial project has run its course. These are the true citizens of the world who have no need of nation state, JPH)
"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society." (A knowledge and application of orthodox Roman Catholic Philosophy and Social teaching would have prevented the current catastrophe from gaining intellectual and practical acceptance, JPH).
"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."
The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.
America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."
The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.
Monday, May 17, 2010
How US Weapons Grade Uranium was Diverted to Israel
Declassified GAO Report Exposes Fatally Flawed Israel Investigations
By Grant Smith
May 16, 2010 "Antiwar" May 10, 2010 -- The 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is underway at UN Headquarters in New York. A working paper calls for a nuclear-free Middle East. It would require member states of the NPT to “disclose in their national reports on the implementation of the resolution on the Middle East all information available to them on the nature and scope of Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” On May 6, 2010, the Government Accountability Office (formerly known as the General Accounting Office) released the previously secret 1978 report “Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” read internet version HERE.... It fills in important historic gaps about weapons-grade uranium diversions from the U.S. to Israel.
U.S. presidents have long acquiesced to “strategic ambiguity” – a policy of neither confirming nor denying that Israel even possesses nuclear weapons. This pretext has allowed the U.S. to deliver the lion’s share of its foreign assistance budget to Israel, despite clear legal prohibitions imposed by the Glenn and Symington amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act. UN member countries have long suspected that the United States either turns a blind eye or actively supports the transfer of know-how, weapons-grade uranium, and dual-use technology to Israel. The 62-page General Accounting Office investigation and correspondence confirms the United States refuses to mount credible investigations that would enable warranted prosecutions of the perpetrators.
“Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” investigates the period between 1957 and 1967 when the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) received over 22 tons of uranium-235 – the key material used to fabricate nuclear weapons. NUMEC’s founder and president Zalman M. Shapiro was head of a local Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) chapter and a sales agent for the Defense Ministry of Israel in the U.S. In the early 1960s the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began documenting suspicious lapses in security at NUMEC’s plant at Apollo, Pa. In 1965 an AEC audit found NUMEC could no longer account for over 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium. Subsequent estimates spiraled to almost 600 pounds.
The GAO was chartered by Congress to investigate four allegations about what happened to the uranium. The first was that “the material was illegally diverted to Israel by NUMEC management for use in nuclear weapons.” This was a result of early AEC and FBI investigations into the activities of Zalman Shapiro. The second theory “the material was diverted to Israel by NUMEC management with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)” came from the CIA’s silence and demonstrated lack of interest in the entire matter. The final theories explored by GAO were more general, that “the material was diverted to Israel with the acquiescence of the United States Government” or “there has been a cover-up of the NUMEC incident by the United States Government.”
GAO solicited all available information developed by the CIA, FBI, Department of Energy, and AEC, but was “continually denied necessary reports and documentation … by the CIA and FBI.” GAO attempted to fill in gaps or outright refusals to cooperate by directly interviewing FBI special agents. The GAO also intended to make the report public, in order to respond to growing public concerns. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, who requested the inquiry, was assured six months before it was issued that only the most sensitive areas in the report would be classified. The CIA and FBI insisted that the entire report be classified at the “secret” level over the objections of Dingell, who said, ”I think it is time that the public be informed about the facts surrounding the … affair and the possible diversion of bomb-grade uranium to Israel.”
The GAO report lambastes the FBI’s on-again off-again approach to investigating NUMEC: “The FBI, which had the responsibility and authority to investigate the alleged incident, did not focus on the question of a possible nuclear diversion until May 1976 – nearly 11 years later. Initially, the FBI declined DOE’s request to conduct an investigation of the diversion possibility even though they are required to conduct such investigations under the Atomic Energy Act….”
The FBI’s initial investigation during the 1960s quickly zeroed in on NUMEC management, but FBI recommendations for action were stymied. According to the GAO, “The FBI became so concerned about the security risks posed by NUMEC’s president that they asked DOE whether it planned to terminate his security clearance or stop the flow of materials to NUMEC. According to the FBI’s liaison with GAO, the FBI recommended that NUMEC’s operating license be taken away….” When the FBI request was ignored, it dropped the entire investigation between 1969 and 1976.
It took a direct order from President Gerald Ford in 1976 for the FBI and Department of Justice to “address the diversion aspect.” The renewed investigation soon led to reversals of official U.S. government positions on NUMEC. According to the GAO report, “until the summer of 1977, the only publicized Government view on the NUMEC incident was that there was no evidence to indicate that a diversion of nuclear material had occurred.” By February 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced it had “reconsidered” its previous position that there had been “no evidence” to support diversion.
But the 11-year gap “obviously hampered” the effort. The GAO revealed that the DOE’s nuclear materials safeguards, which before 1967 tracked the monetary value rather than the precise mass of the uranium, were seriously flawed. NUMEC claimed key records covering a period of heavy uranium loss were destroyed during a “labor dispute” in 1964. NUMEC paid a $1.1 million fine for 206 pounds of missing uranium in 1966, which closed the DOE case. NUMEC also hired away one of the DOE’s chief on-site investigators to enhance the appearance of serious materials control and accountability. The GAO found that even by 1978 the FBI had not contacted key individuals in the affair. An FBI agent-in-charge told the GAO it did not investigate the source of funds to pay NUMEC’s DOE fine anticipating “legal difficulties.” So the GAO investigated the matter, placing its own telephone calls to Mellon Bank.
The GAO report is highly critical of the CIA: “From interviews with a former CIA official and with former and current officials and staff of DOE and the FBI we concluded that the CIA did not fully cooperate with DOE or the FBI in attempting to resolve the NUMEC matter.” The report is inconclusive about exactly what happened at NUMEC, but not about the agencies involved in the investigation through 1978. “We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so.”
The passage of time has removed any remaining doubts that NUMEC diverted uranium to Israel. Rafael Eitan, who visited NUMEC in 1968, was later revealed as the top Israeli spy targeting U.S. nuclear, national defense, and economic targets when his agent (U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard) was arrested spying for Israel in 1985. According to Anthony Cordesman, “there is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.” CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden called NUMEC “an Israeli operation from the beginning,” a conclusion supported by its startup financing and initial ties to Israeli intelligence. Why both the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations failed to credibly investigate NUMEC as a diversion challenge is also now obvious.
John F. Kennedy’s direct diplomatic pressures for U.S. inspections of Israel’s Dimona reactor grew throughout 1962-1963. During a Dec. 27, 1962, meeting with Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Kennedy expressed his hope that the relationship was a “two-way street.” Meir reassured President Kennedy that there “would not be any difficulty between us on the Israeli nuclear reactor.” Kennedy delivered a final ultimatum to Israel on July 5, 1963, insisting that Dimona undergo serial inspections “in accord with international standards” in order to verify its “peaceful intent.” Simultaneously, the Kennedy Justice Department was waging an intense battle behind closed doors to register and regulate Israel’s elite U.S. lobby, the American Zionist Council, which was bringing in funds from overseas to lobby. Kennedy’s assassination in November traumatized the nation and led to the complete and permanent reversal of both initiatives. (Author's comment: This is simply one more reason why JFK was targeted by the MIMIC for assassination. For further details see Douglas Horne's 5 volume tome, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, 2009. See also James W. Douglas' excellent book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. (New York: Maryknoll, 2008). Both books are available through Amazon.com. For a "You Tube" lecture in which James W. Douglas discusses his book see THIS....)
According to Avner Cohen, in 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had arranged with Abraham Feinberg, a “major Democratic fund-raiser,” to secretly finance a nuclear weapons program among “benefactors” in America. Abraham Feinberg, who backed Harry S. Truman’s successful whistle-stop election campaign, was personally succinct about his role in the U.S. political system: “My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed – campaign money.” Feinberg opened doors in Congress for up and coming leaders of the Israel lobby, including AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen. According to Seymour Hersh, “there is no question that Feinberg enjoyed the greatest presidential access and influence in his 20 years as a Jewish fund-raiser and lobbyist with Lyndon Johnson. Documents at the Johnson Library show that even the most senior members of the National Security Council understood that any issue raised by Feinberg had to be answered.” His power and role in financing Lyndon B. Johnson’s election prospects temporarily quashed scrutiny of Israel’s nuclear weapons program – in the U.S. and abroad – at a critical moment.
On Oct. 14, 1964, less than three weeks before the 1964 presidential elections, Johnson’s top administrative assistant Walter Jenkins was arrested in a public restroom on sexual solicitation charges. At least $250,000 Abraham Feinberg raised for Johnson was located in Jenkins’ office safe. Johnson phoned his trusted aides Bill Moyers and Myer Feldman with orders to move the cash, which they did with the help of a heavy briefcase. Israel would later replenish Feinberg’s coffers (as it had with Zalman Shapiro through sales commissions) with multi-million dollar favors, such as major ownership in the nation’s Coca-Cola franchise.
In 1968 as Israel noticeably ramped up activities at the Dimona nuclear weapons facility, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford placed a final urgent call to Johnson, “Mr. President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.” President Johnson was abrupt before he hung up on Clifford, “Don’t bother me with this anymore.” By the time Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier lobbied President Nixon to redefine U.S. non-proliferation policy as “ambiguity” toward Israeli nuclear weapons, Israel’s stockpile and number of deployed weapons was steadily growing.
The report reveals why the 2010 Non-Proliferation Review Conference at the UN – like the GAO – isn’t really capable of challenging the true drivers of Middle East nuclear proliferation. “Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” is a report so unique and noble in intent that there will probably never be another like it. While it leaves unexplored the ongoing presence, influence, and effect of Israel’s lobbyists working at the center of U.S. presidential administrations, for concerned Americans the GAO provides a snapshot of a moment in time before their Congress, aspiring politicians, and mid-level management of government agencies all “got the memo.”
In 2010 that unwritten memo reads something like this: Crimes committed in the name of Israel – no matter how audacious – will never be properly investigated, let alone prosecuted… so don’t waste your time. (Author's Bold emphasis throughout)
By Grant Smith
May 16, 2010 "Antiwar" May 10, 2010 -- The 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is underway at UN Headquarters in New York. A working paper calls for a nuclear-free Middle East. It would require member states of the NPT to “disclose in their national reports on the implementation of the resolution on the Middle East all information available to them on the nature and scope of Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” On May 6, 2010, the Government Accountability Office (formerly known as the General Accounting Office) released the previously secret 1978 report “Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” read internet version HERE.... It fills in important historic gaps about weapons-grade uranium diversions from the U.S. to Israel.
U.S. presidents have long acquiesced to “strategic ambiguity” – a policy of neither confirming nor denying that Israel even possesses nuclear weapons. This pretext has allowed the U.S. to deliver the lion’s share of its foreign assistance budget to Israel, despite clear legal prohibitions imposed by the Glenn and Symington amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act. UN member countries have long suspected that the United States either turns a blind eye or actively supports the transfer of know-how, weapons-grade uranium, and dual-use technology to Israel. The 62-page General Accounting Office investigation and correspondence confirms the United States refuses to mount credible investigations that would enable warranted prosecutions of the perpetrators.
“Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” investigates the period between 1957 and 1967 when the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) received over 22 tons of uranium-235 – the key material used to fabricate nuclear weapons. NUMEC’s founder and president Zalman M. Shapiro was head of a local Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) chapter and a sales agent for the Defense Ministry of Israel in the U.S. In the early 1960s the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began documenting suspicious lapses in security at NUMEC’s plant at Apollo, Pa. In 1965 an AEC audit found NUMEC could no longer account for over 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium. Subsequent estimates spiraled to almost 600 pounds.
The GAO was chartered by Congress to investigate four allegations about what happened to the uranium. The first was that “the material was illegally diverted to Israel by NUMEC management for use in nuclear weapons.” This was a result of early AEC and FBI investigations into the activities of Zalman Shapiro. The second theory “the material was diverted to Israel by NUMEC management with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)” came from the CIA’s silence and demonstrated lack of interest in the entire matter. The final theories explored by GAO were more general, that “the material was diverted to Israel with the acquiescence of the United States Government” or “there has been a cover-up of the NUMEC incident by the United States Government.”
GAO solicited all available information developed by the CIA, FBI, Department of Energy, and AEC, but was “continually denied necessary reports and documentation … by the CIA and FBI.” GAO attempted to fill in gaps or outright refusals to cooperate by directly interviewing FBI special agents. The GAO also intended to make the report public, in order to respond to growing public concerns. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, who requested the inquiry, was assured six months before it was issued that only the most sensitive areas in the report would be classified. The CIA and FBI insisted that the entire report be classified at the “secret” level over the objections of Dingell, who said, ”I think it is time that the public be informed about the facts surrounding the … affair and the possible diversion of bomb-grade uranium to Israel.”
The GAO report lambastes the FBI’s on-again off-again approach to investigating NUMEC: “The FBI, which had the responsibility and authority to investigate the alleged incident, did not focus on the question of a possible nuclear diversion until May 1976 – nearly 11 years later. Initially, the FBI declined DOE’s request to conduct an investigation of the diversion possibility even though they are required to conduct such investigations under the Atomic Energy Act….”
The FBI’s initial investigation during the 1960s quickly zeroed in on NUMEC management, but FBI recommendations for action were stymied. According to the GAO, “The FBI became so concerned about the security risks posed by NUMEC’s president that they asked DOE whether it planned to terminate his security clearance or stop the flow of materials to NUMEC. According to the FBI’s liaison with GAO, the FBI recommended that NUMEC’s operating license be taken away….” When the FBI request was ignored, it dropped the entire investigation between 1969 and 1976.
It took a direct order from President Gerald Ford in 1976 for the FBI and Department of Justice to “address the diversion aspect.” The renewed investigation soon led to reversals of official U.S. government positions on NUMEC. According to the GAO report, “until the summer of 1977, the only publicized Government view on the NUMEC incident was that there was no evidence to indicate that a diversion of nuclear material had occurred.” By February 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced it had “reconsidered” its previous position that there had been “no evidence” to support diversion.
But the 11-year gap “obviously hampered” the effort. The GAO revealed that the DOE’s nuclear materials safeguards, which before 1967 tracked the monetary value rather than the precise mass of the uranium, were seriously flawed. NUMEC claimed key records covering a period of heavy uranium loss were destroyed during a “labor dispute” in 1964. NUMEC paid a $1.1 million fine for 206 pounds of missing uranium in 1966, which closed the DOE case. NUMEC also hired away one of the DOE’s chief on-site investigators to enhance the appearance of serious materials control and accountability. The GAO found that even by 1978 the FBI had not contacted key individuals in the affair. An FBI agent-in-charge told the GAO it did not investigate the source of funds to pay NUMEC’s DOE fine anticipating “legal difficulties.” So the GAO investigated the matter, placing its own telephone calls to Mellon Bank.
The GAO report is highly critical of the CIA: “From interviews with a former CIA official and with former and current officials and staff of DOE and the FBI we concluded that the CIA did not fully cooperate with DOE or the FBI in attempting to resolve the NUMEC matter.” The report is inconclusive about exactly what happened at NUMEC, but not about the agencies involved in the investigation through 1978. “We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so.”
The passage of time has removed any remaining doubts that NUMEC diverted uranium to Israel. Rafael Eitan, who visited NUMEC in 1968, was later revealed as the top Israeli spy targeting U.S. nuclear, national defense, and economic targets when his agent (U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard) was arrested spying for Israel in 1985. According to Anthony Cordesman, “there is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.” CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden called NUMEC “an Israeli operation from the beginning,” a conclusion supported by its startup financing and initial ties to Israeli intelligence. Why both the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations failed to credibly investigate NUMEC as a diversion challenge is also now obvious.
John F. Kennedy’s direct diplomatic pressures for U.S. inspections of Israel’s Dimona reactor grew throughout 1962-1963. During a Dec. 27, 1962, meeting with Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Kennedy expressed his hope that the relationship was a “two-way street.” Meir reassured President Kennedy that there “would not be any difficulty between us on the Israeli nuclear reactor.” Kennedy delivered a final ultimatum to Israel on July 5, 1963, insisting that Dimona undergo serial inspections “in accord with international standards” in order to verify its “peaceful intent.” Simultaneously, the Kennedy Justice Department was waging an intense battle behind closed doors to register and regulate Israel’s elite U.S. lobby, the American Zionist Council, which was bringing in funds from overseas to lobby. Kennedy’s assassination in November traumatized the nation and led to the complete and permanent reversal of both initiatives. (Author's comment: This is simply one more reason why JFK was targeted by the MIMIC for assassination. For further details see Douglas Horne's 5 volume tome, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government's Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, 2009. See also James W. Douglas' excellent book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. (New York: Maryknoll, 2008). Both books are available through Amazon.com. For a "You Tube" lecture in which James W. Douglas discusses his book see THIS....)
According to Avner Cohen, in 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had arranged with Abraham Feinberg, a “major Democratic fund-raiser,” to secretly finance a nuclear weapons program among “benefactors” in America. Abraham Feinberg, who backed Harry S. Truman’s successful whistle-stop election campaign, was personally succinct about his role in the U.S. political system: “My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed – campaign money.” Feinberg opened doors in Congress for up and coming leaders of the Israel lobby, including AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen. According to Seymour Hersh, “there is no question that Feinberg enjoyed the greatest presidential access and influence in his 20 years as a Jewish fund-raiser and lobbyist with Lyndon Johnson. Documents at the Johnson Library show that even the most senior members of the National Security Council understood that any issue raised by Feinberg had to be answered.” His power and role in financing Lyndon B. Johnson’s election prospects temporarily quashed scrutiny of Israel’s nuclear weapons program – in the U.S. and abroad – at a critical moment.
On Oct. 14, 1964, less than three weeks before the 1964 presidential elections, Johnson’s top administrative assistant Walter Jenkins was arrested in a public restroom on sexual solicitation charges. At least $250,000 Abraham Feinberg raised for Johnson was located in Jenkins’ office safe. Johnson phoned his trusted aides Bill Moyers and Myer Feldman with orders to move the cash, which they did with the help of a heavy briefcase. Israel would later replenish Feinberg’s coffers (as it had with Zalman Shapiro through sales commissions) with multi-million dollar favors, such as major ownership in the nation’s Coca-Cola franchise.
In 1968 as Israel noticeably ramped up activities at the Dimona nuclear weapons facility, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford placed a final urgent call to Johnson, “Mr. President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.” President Johnson was abrupt before he hung up on Clifford, “Don’t bother me with this anymore.” By the time Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier lobbied President Nixon to redefine U.S. non-proliferation policy as “ambiguity” toward Israeli nuclear weapons, Israel’s stockpile and number of deployed weapons was steadily growing.
The report reveals why the 2010 Non-Proliferation Review Conference at the UN – like the GAO – isn’t really capable of challenging the true drivers of Middle East nuclear proliferation. “Nuclear Diversion in the U.S.? 13 Years of Contradiction and Confusion” is a report so unique and noble in intent that there will probably never be another like it. While it leaves unexplored the ongoing presence, influence, and effect of Israel’s lobbyists working at the center of U.S. presidential administrations, for concerned Americans the GAO provides a snapshot of a moment in time before their Congress, aspiring politicians, and mid-level management of government agencies all “got the memo.”
In 2010 that unwritten memo reads something like this: Crimes committed in the name of Israel – no matter how audacious – will never be properly investigated, let alone prosecuted… so don’t waste your time. (Author's Bold emphasis throughout)
US Senate Begins Oil Spill Cover-Up
NOTE:
I encourage readers to investigate the claims made in this piece for themselves, putting aside for the moment the fact that the author's essay appeared in the World Socialist Web site. Given the current political climate in the United States (in which at best there once existed a Democratic Constitutional Republic) the ruling oligarchical elites have since the administration of President John F. Kennedy successfully taken control of virtually the entire country. The best description I have seen for the new Plutocracy is the euphemistic MIMIC (media, intelligence, military industrial complex). It is an entity which totally transcends the notions of liberal, conservative, Democrat/Republican and has rendered them obsolete.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
By Tom Eley
Global Research,
May 13, 2010
World Socialist Web Site- 2010-05-12
On Tuesday, the US senate began hearings into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which took the lives of 11 workers in an April 20 explosion and has since poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the region with an environmental and economic catastrophe.
Appearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the morning and the Environmental and Public Health Committee in the afternoon were executives from the three corporations implicated in the disaster: Lamar McKay, president of the US operations of BP, which owned the oil and the drill site; Steven Newman, president of Transocean, the contractor that owned the rig and employed most of its workers; and Tim Probert, an executive with Halliburton, which contracted for the work of cementing the rig’s wellhead one mile beneath ocean’s surface.
The hearing resembled a falling out among thieves, with multi-millionaire executives—who, until April 20, had collaborated in thwarting basic safety and environmental considerations—each blaming the other for the explosion.
McKay of BP blamed Transocean. “Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and its equipment, including the blowout preventer,” he said. “Transocean’s blowout preventer failed to operate.” Newman flatly denied that the blowout preventer was responsible for the disaster, shifting blame to BP, which he said controlled the operation, and Halliburton, which was responsible for the cementing around the well cap. “The one thing we know with certainty is that on the evening of April 20 there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing, or both,” Newman said. Probert of Halliburton pushed back, indicating that BP and Transocean had moved forward operations before cementing was adequately set.
There was, in fact, some harmony between the accounts offered by the executives of Halliburton and Transocean, both of whom appeared to suggest that BP ordered the skipping of a usual step in offshore drilling—the placing of a cement plug inside the well to hold explosive gases in place. That this step was passed over was corroborated by two workers on the rig, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on condition of anonymity. The workers also told the Journal that BP first cleared the decision with the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS). Both BP and the MMS refused comment to the Journal.
Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor, has gathered testimony from Deepwater Horizon survivors that indicates the rig was hit by major bursts of natural gas, promoting fears of an explosion just weeks before the April 20 blast, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. This raised concerns about whether mud at the well head should be replaced by much lighter seawater prior to installation of a concrete plug. The decision to proceed won out, according to information gathered by Bea.
Whatever the immediate cause of the disaster, the clear thrust of the hearings was to focus public outrage on a single, correctable “mistake,” such as a mechanical failure or regulatory oversight, in order to obscure the more fundamental reasons for the disaster: the decades-long gutting of regulation carried out by both Republicans and Democrats at the behest of the oil industry that made such a catastrophe all but inevitable.
A similar calculation lay behind Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s Tuesday announcement that the MMS, which ostensibly regulates offshore oil drilling, will be split into two units—one that collects the estimated $13 billion in annual royalties from the nation’s extractive industries, and one that enforces safety and environmental regulations. Salazar’s claim that this would eliminate “conflicts of interest” in government regulation was nervy, to say the least, coming from a man with long-standing and intimate ties with oil and mining concerns, including BP.
Indeed, more farcical than the executives’ recriminations against each other was the spectacle of senators attempting to pose as tough critics of the oil industry. The US Senate, like the House of Representatives, the Department of the Interior, and the White House, is for all intents and purposes on the payroll of BP and the energy industry as a whole. Among the senators sitting on the two committees who have received tens of thousands in campaign cash from BP and the oil industry are Richard Shelby (Republican, Alabama), Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Louisiana), John McCain (Republican, Arizona) and Lisa Murkowski (Republican, Alaska).
One of the few truthful moments in the hearings came when an exasperated Murkowski told the executives, “I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together.” Murkowski and Landrieu also expressed concerns that the disaster could compromise offshore drilling.
None with even a passing familiarity of the workings of Washington or the Senate can have any doubt that Tuesday’s hearings were but the opening of a government whitewash. The ultimate aim is to shield the major industry players and the financial interests that stand behind them from any serious consequences.
The assemblage of the guilty parties inside the Senate chambers took place as ruptured pipes on the ocean floor continued to gush forth oil at a rate conservatively estimated at 220,000 gallons per day (roughly 4500 barrels) some 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast. The rate could be many times greater, but arriving at a more accurate estimate is impossible because BP has refused to release its underwater video footage for independent analysis.
(Editor's bold emphasis)
BP, which is liable for cleanup costs, has all but admitted it has no idea of how to stop the leak. Its attempt last weekend to lower a four story box over the piping failed when ice crystals clogged a portal at the structure’s roof, a result that was widely anticipated. BP is now considering lowering a much smaller box in order to avoid icing. US Coast Guard and BP representatives have also floated the idea of a “junk shot,” firing golf balls, tire shreds, and other refuse at high pressure into the well.
The drilling of two relief wells continues, with the aim of disrupting the flow of oil from the current well. This option will take a minimum of 90 days, during which 18 million gallons more oil will pour out at the low-end estimate. Even this option provides no certainty. “The risks include unpredictable weather, since the wells will be operational at the start of hurricane season,” according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor. “The wells are also being drilled into the same mix of oil and gas that caused the original explosion, and operating two wells in the area creates the potential of igniting a second explosion that is more powerful.”
If the spill cannot be stopped—a distinct possibility—the ruptured well could release a large share of the deposit’s underground reserves into the Gulf of Mexico, which totals upwards of 100 million barrels of crude oil. And even if the spill is stopped at a lesser volume, with each day there is a growing probability that the oil will devastate the entire Gulf from Louisiana to Florida and possibly reach the Gulf Stream, impacting the Atlantic seaboard.
In the interim, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has given BP clearance to resume pumping chemical dispersants into the oil column as it emerges from the broken piping. BP also continues to dump large quantities of dispersant onto the ocean’s surface. The environmental impact of such heavy use of dispersants is unknown, but a growing number of scientists and environmental groups are warning that the highly toxic substance could simply be transferring the brunt of the spill from the shore to marine ecosytems.
“The companies love the idea of using a chemical to spray on an oil slick to sink it,” Rick Steiner, a former professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Alaska, told the World Socialist Web Site. “It’s ‘out of sight out of mind’ as far as the public is concerned because TV cameras can’t see it. This is the big oil company playbook: public relations, litigation protection, and image.”
Oil has now washed ashore in three places: the Chandeleur Islands off Louisana’s coast, on the coast of a navigable channel from the Mississippi River known as the “South Pass,” and on Alabama’s Dauphin Island. Fishing has been blocked over a wide area, effectively imposing layoffs on thousands of fishermen, many of whom are self-employed and therefore not entitled to unemployment benefits. Sightings of birds covered in oil and dead sea turtles washed ashore have increased in recent days.
In his testimony, McKay boasted that BP would make available “grants of $25 million to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida,” and that it has paid out approximately $3.5 million in damage claims to those affected by the spill. These figures, presented as an act of enormous magnanimity, are such a tiny share of BP’s revenues as to be almost inconsequential.
The company took home $93 million per day in profits—for a total of $6.1 billion—during the first quarter alone. The $3.5 million in damage claims paid out are significantly less than CEO Tony Hayward’s 2009 compensation, estimated at over $4,700,000 by Forbes.
I encourage readers to investigate the claims made in this piece for themselves, putting aside for the moment the fact that the author's essay appeared in the World Socialist Web site. Given the current political climate in the United States (in which at best there once existed a Democratic Constitutional Republic) the ruling oligarchical elites have since the administration of President John F. Kennedy successfully taken control of virtually the entire country. The best description I have seen for the new Plutocracy is the euphemistic MIMIC (media, intelligence, military industrial complex). It is an entity which totally transcends the notions of liberal, conservative, Democrat/Republican and has rendered them obsolete.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
By Tom Eley
Global Research,
May 13, 2010
World Socialist Web Site- 2010-05-12
On Tuesday, the US senate began hearings into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which took the lives of 11 workers in an April 20 explosion and has since poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the region with an environmental and economic catastrophe.
Appearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the morning and the Environmental and Public Health Committee in the afternoon were executives from the three corporations implicated in the disaster: Lamar McKay, president of the US operations of BP, which owned the oil and the drill site; Steven Newman, president of Transocean, the contractor that owned the rig and employed most of its workers; and Tim Probert, an executive with Halliburton, which contracted for the work of cementing the rig’s wellhead one mile beneath ocean’s surface.
The hearing resembled a falling out among thieves, with multi-millionaire executives—who, until April 20, had collaborated in thwarting basic safety and environmental considerations—each blaming the other for the explosion.
McKay of BP blamed Transocean. “Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and its equipment, including the blowout preventer,” he said. “Transocean’s blowout preventer failed to operate.” Newman flatly denied that the blowout preventer was responsible for the disaster, shifting blame to BP, which he said controlled the operation, and Halliburton, which was responsible for the cementing around the well cap. “The one thing we know with certainty is that on the evening of April 20 there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing, or both,” Newman said. Probert of Halliburton pushed back, indicating that BP and Transocean had moved forward operations before cementing was adequately set.
There was, in fact, some harmony between the accounts offered by the executives of Halliburton and Transocean, both of whom appeared to suggest that BP ordered the skipping of a usual step in offshore drilling—the placing of a cement plug inside the well to hold explosive gases in place. That this step was passed over was corroborated by two workers on the rig, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on condition of anonymity. The workers also told the Journal that BP first cleared the decision with the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS). Both BP and the MMS refused comment to the Journal.
Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor, has gathered testimony from Deepwater Horizon survivors that indicates the rig was hit by major bursts of natural gas, promoting fears of an explosion just weeks before the April 20 blast, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. This raised concerns about whether mud at the well head should be replaced by much lighter seawater prior to installation of a concrete plug. The decision to proceed won out, according to information gathered by Bea.
Whatever the immediate cause of the disaster, the clear thrust of the hearings was to focus public outrage on a single, correctable “mistake,” such as a mechanical failure or regulatory oversight, in order to obscure the more fundamental reasons for the disaster: the decades-long gutting of regulation carried out by both Republicans and Democrats at the behest of the oil industry that made such a catastrophe all but inevitable.
A similar calculation lay behind Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s Tuesday announcement that the MMS, which ostensibly regulates offshore oil drilling, will be split into two units—one that collects the estimated $13 billion in annual royalties from the nation’s extractive industries, and one that enforces safety and environmental regulations. Salazar’s claim that this would eliminate “conflicts of interest” in government regulation was nervy, to say the least, coming from a man with long-standing and intimate ties with oil and mining concerns, including BP.
Indeed, more farcical than the executives’ recriminations against each other was the spectacle of senators attempting to pose as tough critics of the oil industry. The US Senate, like the House of Representatives, the Department of the Interior, and the White House, is for all intents and purposes on the payroll of BP and the energy industry as a whole. Among the senators sitting on the two committees who have received tens of thousands in campaign cash from BP and the oil industry are Richard Shelby (Republican, Alabama), Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Louisiana), John McCain (Republican, Arizona) and Lisa Murkowski (Republican, Alaska).
One of the few truthful moments in the hearings came when an exasperated Murkowski told the executives, “I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together.” Murkowski and Landrieu also expressed concerns that the disaster could compromise offshore drilling.
None with even a passing familiarity of the workings of Washington or the Senate can have any doubt that Tuesday’s hearings were but the opening of a government whitewash. The ultimate aim is to shield the major industry players and the financial interests that stand behind them from any serious consequences.
The assemblage of the guilty parties inside the Senate chambers took place as ruptured pipes on the ocean floor continued to gush forth oil at a rate conservatively estimated at 220,000 gallons per day (roughly 4500 barrels) some 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast. The rate could be many times greater, but arriving at a more accurate estimate is impossible because BP has refused to release its underwater video footage for independent analysis.
(Editor's bold emphasis)
BP, which is liable for cleanup costs, has all but admitted it has no idea of how to stop the leak. Its attempt last weekend to lower a four story box over the piping failed when ice crystals clogged a portal at the structure’s roof, a result that was widely anticipated. BP is now considering lowering a much smaller box in order to avoid icing. US Coast Guard and BP representatives have also floated the idea of a “junk shot,” firing golf balls, tire shreds, and other refuse at high pressure into the well.
The drilling of two relief wells continues, with the aim of disrupting the flow of oil from the current well. This option will take a minimum of 90 days, during which 18 million gallons more oil will pour out at the low-end estimate. Even this option provides no certainty. “The risks include unpredictable weather, since the wells will be operational at the start of hurricane season,” according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor. “The wells are also being drilled into the same mix of oil and gas that caused the original explosion, and operating two wells in the area creates the potential of igniting a second explosion that is more powerful.”
If the spill cannot be stopped—a distinct possibility—the ruptured well could release a large share of the deposit’s underground reserves into the Gulf of Mexico, which totals upwards of 100 million barrels of crude oil. And even if the spill is stopped at a lesser volume, with each day there is a growing probability that the oil will devastate the entire Gulf from Louisiana to Florida and possibly reach the Gulf Stream, impacting the Atlantic seaboard.
In the interim, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has given BP clearance to resume pumping chemical dispersants into the oil column as it emerges from the broken piping. BP also continues to dump large quantities of dispersant onto the ocean’s surface. The environmental impact of such heavy use of dispersants is unknown, but a growing number of scientists and environmental groups are warning that the highly toxic substance could simply be transferring the brunt of the spill from the shore to marine ecosytems.
“The companies love the idea of using a chemical to spray on an oil slick to sink it,” Rick Steiner, a former professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Alaska, told the World Socialist Web Site. “It’s ‘out of sight out of mind’ as far as the public is concerned because TV cameras can’t see it. This is the big oil company playbook: public relations, litigation protection, and image.”
Oil has now washed ashore in three places: the Chandeleur Islands off Louisana’s coast, on the coast of a navigable channel from the Mississippi River known as the “South Pass,” and on Alabama’s Dauphin Island. Fishing has been blocked over a wide area, effectively imposing layoffs on thousands of fishermen, many of whom are self-employed and therefore not entitled to unemployment benefits. Sightings of birds covered in oil and dead sea turtles washed ashore have increased in recent days.
In his testimony, McKay boasted that BP would make available “grants of $25 million to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida,” and that it has paid out approximately $3.5 million in damage claims to those affected by the spill. These figures, presented as an act of enormous magnanimity, are such a tiny share of BP’s revenues as to be almost inconsequential.
The company took home $93 million per day in profits—for a total of $6.1 billion—during the first quarter alone. The $3.5 million in damage claims paid out are significantly less than CEO Tony Hayward’s 2009 compensation, estimated at over $4,700,000 by Forbes.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
"New York Car Bomb Incident: Another False Flag?"
Friday, May 7, 2010
By Stephen Lendman
On May 1, New York Times writers Al Baker and William Rashbaum headlined, "Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square," saying:
"A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks was discovered in a 'smoking' Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed "We were very lucky. We avoided what could have been a very deadly event."
For much of the evening, Midtown New York, from 43rd - 48th streets, was closed, heightening fear reported for hours on cable news shows, including statements by Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, saying the bomb "appeared (to be) in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned."
Good luck or something else? We've seen this too often not to be suspicious. This one, like others, has all the earmarks of a false flag, more likely given its coverage and location in Times Square on Saturday night, followed by a May 2 video saying the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. Read it all at James Fetzer's blog HERE...
By Stephen Lendman
On May 1, New York Times writers Al Baker and William Rashbaum headlined, "Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square," saying:
"A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks was discovered in a 'smoking' Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed "We were very lucky. We avoided what could have been a very deadly event."
For much of the evening, Midtown New York, from 43rd - 48th streets, was closed, heightening fear reported for hours on cable news shows, including statements by Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, saying the bomb "appeared (to be) in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned."
Good luck or something else? We've seen this too often not to be suspicious. This one, like others, has all the earmarks of a false flag, more likely given its coverage and location in Times Square on Saturday night, followed by a May 2 video saying the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. Read it all at James Fetzer's blog HERE...
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