Month: January 2012

There are some “scary” reports out in the last few days about Iran beginning uranium enrichment at an underground bunker at the Fordow site near Iran’s holy city of Qom and “diplomats” are saying it is “particularly worrying because the site is being used to make material that can be upgraded more quickly for use in a nuclear weapon than the nation’s main enriched stockpile.”

The diplomats said that centrifuges at the Fordo site near Iran’s holy city of Qom are churning out uranium enriched to 20 percent. That level is higher than the 3.5 percent being made at Iran’s main enrichment plant and can be turned into fissile warhead material faster and with less work.

You have to read on – like, you know, beyond the headline and the first paragraph – to understand that it was back in February 2011, almost a year ago, that Iran sent a letter to IAEA explaining that they would begin enrichment for medical radioisotopes to treat cancer patients “by this summer” (which makes them 5 months late). Iran agreed in August that Forodow fell under IAEA safeguards and would not be making highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb. In fact, the underground enrichment site at Fordow has been inspected at least ten times since October 2009. In fact, all of Iran’s 15 declared nuclear sites are routinely inspected by the IAEA, making cheating nearly impossible (these links are all from the twitter account of Micah Zenko, Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has been great on this issue in the last few days). And, to reiterate, the last IAEA report again confirmed the non-diversion of nuclear materials from any of these declared sites, meaning that all of it is accounted for and none is confirmed as being highly enriched anywhere close to the point needed for weapons-grade material.

All of that should be the lede in these news reports. But instead, the jingoistic media bias on the Iranian nuclear issue again illustrates the journalistic obedience and servility to the power structure in Washington.

Unmentioned in the news reports and official acclaim about the supposed end to the U.S. war in Iraq was the ongoing suffering in Fallujah as a result of American crimes committed there in 2004. Al Jazeera recently released two reports on this of note (linked below).

As is known to anyone who pays attention, incidents of birth defects and cancer are off the charts in Fallujah and the doctors and scientists who’ve studied it point to the use of deadly weapons chemicals like depleted uranium and white phosphorous as the cause. The health problems faced by newborns and children in Fallujah include congenital heart disease, bone abnormalities like thanatophoric dysplasia, and physical deformities like “cleft palates, elongated heads, a baby born with one eye in the centre of its face, overgrown limbs, short limbs, and malformed ears, noses and spines.”

Just how common are these defects? In July 2010, British scientists “released a study that showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks.”

As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.

…Dr Alani visited Japan recently, where she met with Japanese doctors who study birth defect rates they believe related to radiation from the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She was told birth defect incidence rates there are between 1-2 per cent. Alani’s log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the affected areas of Japan.

Antiwar.com columnist Kelley B. Vlahos wrote a brilliant piece in April 2011 in The American Conservative cataloguing the scientific support behind the conclusion that this ongoing suffering in Fallujah is caused by the U.S. weapons used in America’s siege of the city in 2004.

Another piece at Al Jazeera reports on the other sorts of damage still apparent from the war. First of all, “doctors at Fallujah General Hospital told Al Jazeera in 2004 that 736 Iraqis had been killed,” 60 percent of whom were women, children, and elderly. By the end of the siege, well over 1,000 Iraqi victims died in the Fallujah General Hospital. The victims that never made it to the hospital surely number far higher than that. At least 300,000 residents had been displaced, 70 percent of the buildings and homes were destroyed, “along with at least 100 mosques, 6,000 shops, and nine government offices.” Reconstruction efforts have failed miserably and much of the city remains in shambles. “Everything here is bad,” one resident told Al Jazeera. “No water, no electricity, no good health care. We have between 75 and 80 per cent unemployment. Widows have no rights, no compensation.”

Not a single American politician or major media outlet that I know of has expressed one particle of concern over this. It is absent from the rhetoric, but more importantly, no blame has dared been placed on the shoulders of those who were responsible for it. As I wrote last week, the real legacy of the Iraq war is not the lies that got us into it, it was not even the civilian casualties. It is impunity for crimes against humanity.

But not everyone thinks this issue is closed and shut. “Resistance fighters” are still present in Iraq and, as one told Al Jazeera, “We learned not to trust the words and promises of the Americans. They say they left, but have over 10,000 people at their embassy. This means they have not left our country.” He added: ‘’No one should be disillusioned that the resistance has ended or defeated. They say there are leaving … we doubt that … but if the Americans don’t leave we will continue fighting them.”

Someone is playing games on Youtube, and they’ve managed to fool an awful lot of people – mostly “reporters” and bloggers who hate Ron Paul – into falling for one of the more transparent hoaxes of this election season.

It all started with an incredibly stupid video posted on Youtube by “NHLiberty4Paul” accusing Jon Huntsman of being a Chinese agent — a “Manchurian candidate” — and making fun of his daughters. The Huntsman campaign was quick to pounce on this, responding very quickly with a blast of righteous indignation from Huntsman himself.

Of course, anyone can post anything on Youtube, and the content of the video – in the course of which Huntsman is called a “Chicom” – is not something an authentic Ron Paul supporter would say. The complete lack of evidence that the Paul campaign was behind it didn’t stop Huntsman, however, nor did it stop the Usual Suspects from glomming on to the video as “evidence” of Paul’s perfidy. The Huffington Post jumped on the “story,” as did Gawker (natch!), Breitbart.com, and RedState.com.

There’s just one problem with this “story” – it has a sequel. Hours after the now-infamous video was put up yet another video was posted by “NH4MittRomney,” and, subsequently, by “NH4Santorum” – the same video that is supposed to be the work of Paul’s supporters. What’s funny is that “NH4Santorum” is posting comments under the other two Youtube pages. On the page attributed to “NHLiberty4Paul” he advertises his latest masterpiece: “Watch our ad about Huntsman on our chanel [sic] !!! rick also dislikes huntsman!” He (or she) also points out to one commenter on the Santorum page that “Rick has the same opinion as the Paul-supporters [sic].” Meanwhile, “NH4MittRomney” pays a visit to “NHLiberty4Paul”’s page and advertises his wares.

It’s the political version of “The Three Faces of Eve.”

So who is behind all this? Someone took a screen shot of the earliest statistics of the “NHLiberty4Paul” page: it clearly shows that one of the first four visitors to the page (aside from its creator) came from the Huntsman web site, jon2012.com.

Pretty quick on the draw, those Huntsman people — a little too quick, wouldn’t you say? If you suspect this is a case of “The Three Faces of Jon Huntsman” — that the Huntsman campaign, or one of his supporters, is responsible — I won’t argue with you. It does seem odd that whoever posted the video just happened to have footage of Huntsman’s daughters — what appear to be home movies — that I haven’t seen anywhere else. However, the following scenario seems far more likely to me:

Some fool put up a nasty video and made it look like the work of a Paul supporter, and Huntsman immediately went nuclear, blaming the Paul campaign. Even as Huntsman was playing the victim, the same idiot was putting up the same  video trying to make it look like the work of supporters of Romney and Santorum. Huntsman has been hoaxed — but don’t hold your breath waiting for a retraction.

Question: if Huntsman flies off the handle this easily, and can be taken in by a transparently obvious prank like this stupid video, then do we really want his finger on the nuclear trigger?

 

This Frontline documentary is well worth a watch. It covers opium eradication policies in Afghanistan and all of the pain and suffering that ends up causing ordinary, peaceful Afghans. Watch, in particular, for Afghan government authorities, watched after by NATO forces, destroying impoverished people’s crops with which they planned to pay back debts. They’re failure to do so leads to violent retribution and sometimes being forced to sell off their daughters to radical thugs and Taliban forces. Watch also for farmers protesting in the fields of Afghanistan, only to be shot at with live rounds by Afghan policemen. And it gets worse.

Watch Opium Brides on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.