Color-coded lines track seismic activity at Tokyo University’s Earthquake Research Center. The yellow and red clumps reveal a small quake in the Tokyo-area district of Tsukuba. (Photo: Sam Eaton)
In a quiet room at Tokyo University, seismologist Shinichi Sakai points to steady, color-coded lines on a digital monitor. The screen displays real-time readings from Japan’s extensive network of seismometers. This is one of the most seismically active countries in the world, and the flat lines show that all is quiet across the region, at least for the moment.
Then, as if on cue, two of the lines start to jump violently, splashing the screen with red and yellow pixels. They’re tracking a very small earthquake, centered just outside of Tokyo.
Sakai says small quakes like this happen about ten thousand times a year in Japan, and for geologists like him, even the small earthquakes are worth paying attention to. He says there’s been a fivefold increase in small tremors around Tokyo since the huge quake off Japan’s northeast coast in March of last year. And that adds up to a mathematical omen for scientists like him.
In January, Sakai and the University’s Earthquake Research Institute crunched the new numbers and came up with a shocking prediction: a 70-percent chance that a major earthquake would hit Tokyo within the next four years.
Japan's one remaining operating reactor (of 54) may go dark tomorrow. Japan would be nuke-free for the first time in a half-century.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is desperately trying to get Osaka's Mayor to allow the Ohi nuke to stay open. But Japanese law gives local officials far more power over the reactor industry than in the US or China. And the 42-year-old Toru Hashimoto, the son of a Yakuza gangster, is holding firm. Now probably Japan's most popular politician, Hoshimoto has harshly criticized its nuclear industry for lying to the public and for causing the Fukushima catastrophe and then covering up its true impacts.
Japan has long been at the core of the global reactor business. It manufactures pressure vessels, steam generators and much more of the serious hardware that comprises the world's atomic infrastructure. Should it go totally post-nuclear, the symbolic as well as tangible impact would be huge. Even Germany, which has announced its intent to go green, has a number of nukes still going.
Japan's top brass are desperately trying to persuade Hashimoto to give in. We'll know tomorrow.
The last US nuke will not be shutting tomorrow, but the industry's death knell seems to be approaching faster every day.
Two reactors proposed for Florida will now, say its would-be builders, cost $24 billion or more…up from their original maximum guess of $4 billion each…far beyond comparable renewables and efficiency.
Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.
If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.
What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.
By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?
What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.
Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.
I confess: I have an interest in an unseemly topic. Last year I coauthored a report on the subject and testified before Congress about it. The subject is labor trafficking.
This is not, of course, a problem exclusive to the PMSCO sector but neither is it something that has happened only now and then either. Suffice it to say that it enough of a problem that this is the second conference ISOA organized on the issue, the first being seven years ago. The conference program guide minced no words in stating why a conference is necessary:
Labor trafficking is a disgraceful practice that plagues many country as well as international peacekeeping and stability operations. Poverty creates pools of desperate labor at high risk of human trafficking of all kinds, including forced labor. The problem is morally reprehensible but of such enormous complexity it cannot be solved by a single sector and must be addressed by stakeholders working in partnership from all sides — private, governmental, nongovernmental and humanitarians sectors; clients and employers
As a sign that of its recognition of the seriousness of the problem ISOA's Code of Conduct has long had a provision stating that “Signatories shall not engage or allow their personnel to engage in the act of trafficking in persons.”
Trafficking in persons takes different forms. It might be forced labor, sex trafficking or bonded labor, to name a few examples. The first two types have happened in the PMSC industry.
As an article in JIPO notes:
Human trafficking on U.S. government contracts in the Central Command (“CENTCOM”) sector is chronic, overt and unabated. The appalling fact that hundreds of thousands of men have been used as slave laborers to support “freedom” operations is not lost upon the victims.
Investigative journalists reporting of widespread human trafficking of laborers on U.S. government contracts in CENTCOM date back to 2004. The New York Times reported the too common fraudulent recruiting scheme that began in 2003 when contractors first started trafficking men to perform services on government contracts. The Chicago Tribune also covered human trafficking in 2005, calling out the use of US tax dollars to provide slave labor during wartime. Articles in USA Today have reported labor trafficking abuses of Asian workers in Saudi Arabia as well as forced labor of Thai workers in the United States, considered “the nations biggest human trafficking operations.”
Personal investigations both on the ground in Iraq, and in conducted interviews of victims who have returned to the Indian subcontinent, have produced conclusions consistent with other investigative journalists. Other investigative journalists such as David Phinney and reporters who have been on the ground, observed the practice and interviewed thousands of victims have also highlighted this blight on our national image. In fact, the only thing parties agree upon is that the practice is prolific, unabated and contrary to the very foundation and core of American values.
A more blunt way of putting is, as one conference speaker noted, is that we now have people enslaved than at any time in human history, with estimates ranging from 12 to 27 million people.
Interestingly, this is not an issue where people think this is something best left to industry to self-regulate. As the morning keynote speaker Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, senior adviser to the secretary of state, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said:
Government is the answer, government is the solution, but it is not the only player. We have to dismiss the notion that this is someone else's problem. This is our problem and we have to be part of the solution. Our starting point has to be that we're not making the problem worse.
Those wanting more detail should see the current (May/June) issue of ISOA's JIPO magazine, which is devoted to the subject. According to ISOA it will be online later this week.
(Reuters) – Jose Rodriguez said it took a “few hours” to destroy 92 videotapes showing his CIA colleagues using harsh interrogation techniques – including waterboarding – on al Qaeda leaders such as September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
But the former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service told Reuters on Monday that he ordered the tapes destroyed to protect his colleagues from possible retaliation by al Qaeda.
The tapes of interrogations at a CIA “black site” included images of waterboarding – a form of simulated drowning – on Mohammed, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, three al Qaeda leaders now held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Rodriguez said he was afraid the material would be leaked.
“You really doubt that those tapes would not be out in the open now, that they would not be on YouTube?” he said. “They would be out there, they would have been leaked, or somebody would have ordered their release.”
After the tapes were destroyed in an “industrial-sized disintegrator,” he said, “I felt good.”
Phi Beta Iota: Rodrigues is what you get when a clandestine service becomes a bureaucracy, and people are promoted for ass-kissing, going along, and generally playing the political game. Latin America Division has been a joke for decades, relying heavily on liaison for hand-outs, on making up stuff taken from the newspapers, on Chiefs of Station claiming recruitments that could never be turned over, and so on. One legitimate reason for DIA to want its own clandestine service (with full non-official cover options) is because CIA no longer know how to train, equip, or operate a clandestine service. It has lost its integrity across the board and despite the best of intentions, General Petraeus will never “get it” and not have time to fix it even if he did. Rodriguez' book is beneath contempt — a perfect companion to the books by Dick Cheney and Doug Feith. In retrospect, Rodriguez may merit investigation for his role in enabling Dick Cheney's many high crimes and now known lies. Between Rodriguez and Khost Kathy you have the disembowelment of CIA in a nutshell. This sort of stuff disgraces the profession of intelligence.
This represents one of the dishonorable acts a politician can commit. Using other people's lives to win an election…….a clear indication of the lack of integrity of an individual who holds the highest office of the land….and the speech sounds like it was modeled after LBJ's equally incoherent speech in the closing days of Viet-Nam. The second article is pure propaganda, witless and without merit.
WASHINGTON — The 10-year security compact that President Barack Obama signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai contains promises the United States and Afghanistan cannot guarantee they will keep, and loopholes for both nations.
The deal signed Tuesday also allows either nation to walk away on a year's notice. That could allow the next U.S. president, or the next Afghan leader, to scuttle a deal negotiated by his or her predecessor.
For Obama, the agreement represents a compromise with Karzai after messy negotiations over U.S. military detention of Afghan suspects and raids on Afghan homes that offend Afghans.
The radioactive Fukushima Genie is out of the bottle and is primed to accomplish a worldwide disaster. If the roof of Reactor building #4 collapses, a building that is now seismically rated at zero, a pool of 1563 spent fuel rods perched 100 feet above the ground would also collapse ~ resulting in a gusher of global radiation that would put most of the world’s human and biological populations at severe risk.
The greatest and most dangerous on going cover up in the world today is not the official 9/11 cover up (now into its 11th year); it is not the supposed assassination of Bin Laden by Navy Seals last year (an operation with no confirmed body, no video and completely staged as a re-election gimmick as we are now witnessing); but instead, it is the unspoken on going conspiracy of silence regarding the spreading worldwide nuclear radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011.
. . . . . .
Just recently, authorities in Japan confessed that the amount of cesium-137 released by Fukushima is equivalent to 168 of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A brief confirmation came from a recent article in the Telegraph ~ “Japan’s government estimates the amount of radioactive caesium-137 released by the Fukushima nuclear disaster so far is equal to that of 168 Hiroshima bombs.”
