Qatar-Gaza: The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, on Tuesday became the first head of state to visit the Gaza Strip since Hamas won control of it through elections in June 2007. He crossed into Gaza from Egypt.
The Emir pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that the visit by Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani has helped lift the Israeli blockade.
“The nuclear plant at Fukushima was built by GE (General Electric), which means it was not the Japanese who miscalculated the risks of building in a flood plain in an area subject to earthquakes and consequent tsunami. GE has been involved in a great many similar projects in Japan for many decades, since long before WW2. A full investigation of GE's role is imperative, because blaming it all on the Japanese is a cop-out — especially when you realize that the consequences of the Fukushima disaster are much greater (and scarier) than has been revealed so far. Sterling Seagrave”
In the world of security clearances for access to classified information, the term “reciprocity” is used to indicate that one executive branch agency should ordinarily recognize and accept a security clearance that has been granted by another executive branch agency.
This is not just a nice, cost-efficient thing to do, it is actually a requirement of law. Under the 2004 intelligence reform law, “all security clearance background investigations and determinations… shall be accepted by all agencies.”
This requirement for mutual recognition and acceptance applies equally to the higher order clearances of the intelligence community, where reciprocity is intended to promote employee “mobility” throughout the intelligence system, according to the 2009 Intelligence Community Directive 709.
So possessing a clearance from one agency should simplify the process of access approval at another agency. But the opposite is not supposed to be true. If an agency refuses for some reason to recognize the clearance granted by another agency, that refusal is not supposed to incur loss of clearance in the original agency.
Officially, such “negative reciprocity” is not an authorized, legitimate security clearance practice. And yet there are signs that it is being adopted within the Department of Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), which rules on contested security clearance cases.
A new paper by attorney Sheldon I. Cohen describes a series of DOHA rulings in which a perverse form of negative reciprocity has been used to justify the denial or revocation of a security clearance, to the obvious detriment of due process.
“While the burden of proof has always been placed on the employee by the DOHA Appeal Board to show why he or she should be granted a security clearance, until now there was a modicum of a right to confrontation, and a right to challenge the evidence presented by the government,” Mr. Cohen wrote.
But in a ruling he describes, “anonymous redacted reports and other agency's decision are enough to deny or revoke a DoD clearance regardless of contrary evidence.”
Every war is hell, particularly for civilians. And while every war produces deadly familiar impacts on the civilian population whether it is death and injuries due to combat or subsequent illness and death due to destruction of infrastructure sometimes the impact can be unique.
Sadly, such seems to be the case in Iraq which links the past war there with a “staggering” increase in birth defects in areas of the country where bombing and heavy fighting occurred.
A recent study, titled “Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities” was underwritten by the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan and which was published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, focused on the cities of Basra and Fallujah, where serious fighting occurred during the war. According to the study:
The spent fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4 is the top short-term threat to humanity, and is a national security issue for America. As such, it is disturbing news that the ground beneath unit 4 is sinking. Specifically, Unit 4 sunk 36 inches right after the earthquake, and has sunk another 30 inchessince then. Moreover, Unit 4 is sinking unevenly, and the building may begin tilting. An international coalition of nuclear scientists and non-profit groups are calling on the U.N. to coordinate a multi-national effort to stabilize the fuel pools. And see this. Given the precarious situation at Unit 4, it is urgent that the world community pool its scientific resources to come up with a fix.
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.
