truthdig: Obama, Congress Owe Snowden Thanks, and a Pardon

By Robert Scheer: Now we know that even the president needs leaks from Edward Snowden to be fully informed about the dastardly acts of his own top spy agency. It was Snowden's recent revelations that led Obama to order an investigation into spying on private communications of 35 world leaders, including our closest allies, a clear betrayal of trust needed to establish a more peaceful world. According to a Wall Street Journal account from senior U.S. officials, the president had been kept in the dark as to the extent of the NSA spy program: "President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them. They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence -collection 'priorities', but that those below him make decisions about specific intelligence targets."Huh? So its beneath the president's pay grade to approve a decision on bugging the phones of most of the free world's leaders, and the president didn't know this as going on until Snowden leaked it? Yes, NSA spokeswoman Vance Vines confirmed, employing the finest of bureaucratic gobbledygook: "The agency's activities stem from the National Intelligence Priorities Frame Work, which guides Priorities Framework, which guides prioritization for the operation, planning and programming of U.S. intelligence analysis and collection."On Sunday, Vines added the reassuring news that the report in the German newspaper Bild alleging that President Obama personally authorized the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone back in 2010 was false. In any case, we already know, thanks again to information Snowden provided to another German publication, Der Spiegel, that the monitoring of Merkel's cellphone began back in 2002, when George W. Bush would have been the president the NSA kept out of the loop. Surely Bush would not have approved spying on the leader of a nation that supported his unjustifiable invasion of Iraq and long has been credited with supplying Washington with credible information on al-Qaida. Maybe the NSA just wanted to make sure that Merkel got home safely from some late night diplomatic soiree. In any case, the administration has confirmed that the president has declared Merkel's cellphone an eavesdrop-free zone and is re-evaluating the taping of phone calls of other free world heads of state. But what about the rights of ordinary folks like those in Spain, where 60 million phone calls were monitored in a single month, according to another Snowden's indispensable leaks? This is a double standard protecting leaders but not their subjects, fully endorsed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has previously supported the NSA's vast spying on Americans and people throughout the world. However, Feinstein announced Monday that "with respect to NSA collection on leaders of U.S intelligence on leaders of of U.S. allies, including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany, let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed." Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Feinstein, who has often invoked her commanding knowedge of the scope of NSA surveillance programs now suddenly confesses to having been completely duped:

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: Fukushima, A Global Threat That Requires a Global Response

October 25, 2013 "Information Clearing House - The story of Fukushima should be on the front pages of every newspaper. Instead, it is rarely mentioned. The problems at Fukushima are unprecedented in human experience and involve a high risk of radiation events larger than any in the global community has ever experienced. It is going to take the best engineering minds in the world to solve these problems and to diminish their global impact. When we researched the realities of Fukushima in preparation for this article, words like apocalyptic, cataclysmic and Earth-threatening came to mind. But, when we say such things, people react as if we were the little red hen screaming "the sky is falling" and the reports are ignored. So, we're going to present what is known in this article and you can decide whether we are facing a potentially cataclysmic event. Either way, it is clear that the problems at Fukushima demand that the world's best nuclear engineers and other experts advise and assist in the efforts to solve them. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson of Fairewinds.org and an international team of scientists created a 15-point plan to address the crises at Fukushima. A subcommittee of the Green Shadow Cabinet, of which we are members, which includes long-time nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, is circulating a sign-on letter and a petition calling on the United Nations and Japanese government to put in place the Gunderson et al plan and to provide 24-hour media access to information about the crises at Fukushima. There is also a call for international days of action on the weekend of November 9 and 10. The letter and petitions will be delivered to the UN on November 11 which is both Armistice Day and the 32nd monthly anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The Problems of Fukushima. There are three major problems at Fukushima: (1) Three reactor cores are missing: Radiated water has been leaking from the plant in mass quantities for 2.5 years, and (3) Eleven thousand spent fuel rods, perhaps the most dangerous things ever created by humans, are stored at the plant and need to be removed, 1,533 of those are in a very precarious and dangerous position. Each of these three could result in dramatic radiation events, unlike any radiation exposure humans have ever experienced. We'll discuss them in order, saving the most dangerous for the last. Missing reactor cores: Since the accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, three reactor cores have gone missing. There was an unprecedented three reactor 'melt-down.' These melted cores, called corium lavas, are thought to have passed through the basements of reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3, and to be somewhere inn the ground underneath. Harvey Wasserman, who has been working on nuclear energy issues for over 40 years, tells us that during those four decades no one ever talked about the possibility of a multiple meltdown, but that is what occurred at Fukushima. It is an unprecedented situation to not know where these cores are. TEPCO is pouring water where they think the cores are, but they are not sure. There are occasional steam eruptions coming from the grounds of the reactors, so the cores are thought to still be hot. The concern is that the corium lavas will enter or may have already entered the aquifer below the plant.

AlterNet By Nicolas J.S. Davies: The Tragic History of U.S. Military Supremacy.

The idea of U.S. "national security" seems inextricably entangled with the notion of "military supremacy." Over the past 15 years, this has served to rationalize the most expensive unilateral military build-up in history. But there is no evidence that having the most expensive and destructive military forces makes Americans safer than people in other countries, nor that restoring a more balanced military posture would leave us vulnerable to dangers we are currently protected from aggression. Many countries with smaller military forces do a better job of protecting their people by avoiding the hostility that is generated by U.S. imperialism, aggression and other war crimes. Now, successful diplomacy over Syria's chemical weapons has demonstrated that diplomacy within the framework of international law can be a more effective way of dealing with problems than the illegal threat or use of military force. Our government claims that its threat or use of military force. Our government claims that its use of force led to the success of diplomacy in Syria, but that's not really what happened. It was only when the sleeping giant of American democracy awoke from its long slumber and pried the cruise missiles from our leaders' trigger fingers that they grudgingly accepted "diplomacy as a last resort." For once in a very long while, our political system worked the way it's supposed to: the public made its views clear to our representatives in Congress, and they listened. We saved our leaders from the consequences of their own criminality, and their efforts to sell a propaganda narrative that turns on its head is a sad reflection on their disdain for democracy and the rule of law. For most of our history, Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the 20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that probably killed a million Filipinos, Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the 20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that probably killed a million Filipinos, American diplomats played key roles in the Hague Peace Conferences and the establishment of international courts, eager to adapt American concepts of democracy and justice to the international arena to develop alternatives to war and militarism. In response yo the horrors of the First World War, an international social movement demanded the abolition of war. In 1828, the U.S. government responded by negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, in which all major powers renounced "war as an instrument of national policy." The treaty failed to prevent the Second World War, but it provided the legal basis for the convictions against genocide,, torture and other war crimes, under which senior U.S. officials must eventually face justice. The allied defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War was not the result of American military supremacy, but of an alliance across ideological lines with imperial Britain and the communist Soviet Union, based on mutual trust, vigorous diplomacy and the recognition of a common existential threat. Most Americans believed at the time that the war would lead to a renewed international commitment to peace and disarmament, not to an American bid for military supremacy. American, British and Soviet leaders agreed that their common interests required what Roosevelt called "a permanent structure of peace" after the war.

By Isreal Shamir: The War on Syria: The September 2013 Military Stand-off between Five Destroyers

and the Russian Flotilla in the Eastern Mediterranian.The Cape of Good Hope Presentation at the Rhodes Forum, October 5, 2013. First, the good news. American hegemony is over. The bully has been subdued. we cleared the Cape of Good Hope, symbolically speaking, in September 2013. With the Syrian crisis, the world has passed a key forking of modern history. It was touch and go, just as risky as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The chances for total war were high, as the steely wills of America and Eurasia had crossed in the Eastern Mediterranean. It will take some time until the realization of what we've gone through seeps in: it is normal for events of such magnitude. The turmoil in the US, from the mad car chase in the DC to the shutdown of federal government and possible debt default are the direct consequences of this event. Remember the Berlin Wall? When it went down, I was in Moscow, writing for Haaretz. I went to a press-conference with Politburo members in the President Hotel, and asked them whether they concurred that the end of the USSR and world socialist system was neigh. I was laughed at, it was an embarrassing occasion. Oh no, they said. Socialism will blossom, as the result of the Wall's fall. The USSR went down two years later. Now our memory has compacted those years into a brief sequence, but in reality it took some time. The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks toward Damascus and facing them, the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Mosva and supported by Chinese warships. Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination. It as claimed by a Lebanese newspaper quoting diplomatic sources that the missiles were launched from a NATO air base in Spain and they were shot down by the Russian ship-based sea-to-air defence system. Another explanation proposed by the Asia Times says the Russians employed their cheap and powerful GPS jammers to render the expensive Tomahawks helpless, by disorienting them and causing them to fail. Yet another version attributed the launch to the Israelis, whether they were trying to jump-start the shoot-out or just observed the clouds, as they claim. Whatever the reason, after this strange incident, the pending shoot-out did not commence, as President Obama stood down and holstered his guns. This was preceded by an unexpected vote in the British Parliament. This venerable body declined the honour of joining the attack proposed by the US. This was the first time in two hundred years that the British parliament voted down a sensible proposition to start a war, usually the Brits can't resist the temptation. After that, President Obama decided to pass the hot potato to the Congress. He was unwilling to unleash Armageddon on his own. Thus the name of action was lost. Congress did not want to go to war with unpredictable consequences. Obama tried to browbeat Putin at the 20G meeting in St Petersburg, and failed. The Russian proposal to remove Syrian chemical weaponry allowed President Obama to save face. This misadventure put paid to American hegemony.

Noam Chomsky: The Week the World Stood Still: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World

The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended though unknown to the public, only officially. The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history. Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. "Never before or since, he concludes, "has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations," culminating in "the week the world stood still." There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might "destroy the Northern Hemisphere," President Dwight Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy's own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the "secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect" in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his well-researched bestseller on the crisis, though he doesn't explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war. Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, "a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup," who saw no way out except "war and complete destruction" as the clock moved to "one minute to midnight," the title of his book. Kennedy's close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as "the most dangerous moment in human history." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he "would live to see another Saturday night," and later recognized that "we lucked out" barely. "The Most Dangerous Moment" A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment. There are several candidates "for the most dangerous moment." One is October 27th, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were "rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximately the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945." In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke. Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (DEFCON 2) which authorized "NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb, according to the well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison,writing in the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs.

By Pepe Escobar: America Helping the Medieval Saudi KIngdom Step Up Its Sunni Empire.

October 18, 2013  |  

Life is good if you're a member of the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, officially known as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). You can crush the Arab Spring at will. You can hire goons all across dar-al-Islam to advance a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite divide. You can be deeply implicated in the destruction of Syria. You can treat a significant part of your own population as third-class citizens.

Not only you get away with it; you get rewarded with expensive toys. And in one particular case - Saudi Arabia - even with a two-year seat at the UN Security Council.

Not to mention that the House of Saud expertly gets away with manipulating Islam as the pillar of its "legitimacy". The House of Saud controls the Hajj - which took place this week; an enormous logistical operation that "legitimizes" its role as leader of Sunni Islam, and automatically, the whole Islamic world. Well-informed Muslims though are very much aware of the fallacy - as much as they're aware of how the House of Saud is fast transforming Mecca into a Vegas-style pay-per-prayer luxury resort. Who's profiting? Certainly not the pilgrims.

This week, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced it had notified congress about selling more state-of-the-art heavy metal for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That breaks down into "various munitions and associated equipment, parts, training and logistical support" to Riyadh for $6.8 billion and to Abu Dhabi for $4 billion.

Weaponizing "our" Wahhabi bastards is the sweetest deal for the industrial-military-Orwellian Panopticon complex. Sequestration? Tight budgets? Who cares? There's a never-ending contractor bonanza in the Gulf - inbuilt in the narrative of the benign superpower "benefactor" of those helpless oil and gas monarchic monopolies defending them against assorted evildoers; one day the evildoer is Iraq, the next day Iran, the next day could be their own people, so one's gotta be prepared.

Once in a while Israel exhibits the requisite raised eyebrow, but that's just for show. Israel and the GCC have a de facto alliance against the bloc regionally known as the axis of resistance - Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah. Israel would not prevent the GCC from gorging on F-15 Eagles, F-16 Desert Falcons, assorted air-launched cruise missiles, satellite-guided bombs and plenty of high-tech communication gear. Just your average, innocent "military and defense cooperation".

There are glitches in this cozy relationship, of course. Currently, the House of Saud is livid facing the possibility of a negotiated solution for the Iran nuclear dossier - immediately after the Russian-US deal on Syria's chemical weapons. Yet now the House of Saud has even managed to find a pulpit to voice its anger; Saudi Arabia has just won a two-year, rotating UN Security Council seat for the first time - taking over from Pakistan as an Asia-Pacific representative.

The House of Saud has always refrained from competing for a Security Council seat in the past. But now - facing its fabricated version of an "existential threat", which is not only Iran but also Assad in Syria - it's time to act.

So get ready to watch an angry, fearful, medievalist oil kingdom notorious for its spectacular record on human rights and women's rights, and so fond of lashings and beheadings, pontificating on the global stage about…human rights. This is what US Think Tankland describes as "seeking a more active role in key international bodies". When that applies to "our" bastards, of course; otherwise it's about "terror states" trying to subvert the international order.

A number of House of Saud princes are now engulfed in a lethal battle for the Saudi succession - as King Abdullah is about to meet his maker. Are these princes worthy of Machiavelli? Don't hold your breath.

Machiavelli taught us that individual will is as crucial as international power play in determining foreign policy decisions. The Florentine stressed how fortuna (fortune) can be capricious, and how history can be contingent. So how does a great Prince steer his state? By deploying virtu (virtue).

Oh no, this has nothing to do with the guilt-ridden Christian mish-mash, which also happens to be a crucial pillar of the "American exceptionalism" concept. It's all got to do with classical values predominant in the Ancient World - from Greece to Persia. Virtue as in knowledge, strength, courage, and cunning.

So under this gold standard, Vladimir Putin certainly qualifies as a worthy Prince. Deng Xiaoping certainly did. Hassan Rouhani in Iran may reveal himself to be of the same caliber. But what about those angry, fearful, intolerant, yet heavily weaponized Arab princes? You don't need to be a pilgrim to Mecca-as-Disneyland to find your answer.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky: Fukushima Fraud and Corruption: Japanese Organized Crime

Involved in Recruitment of "Specialized Personnel". What prevails is a well organized camouflage. The public health disaster in Japan, the contamination of water, agricultural land and the food chain, not to mention the broader economic and social implications, have neither been fully acknowledged nor addressed in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion by the Japanese authorities. The crisis in Japan has been described as "a nuclear war without a war". In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami: This time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives." Several Global Research reports and background articles have outlined the dangers of Worldwide radiation resulting from the Fukushima disaster. This disaster is now being sustained and aggravated by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the Abe government. Fukushima and the Yakuza: There is another dimension: The coordination of the multibillion dollar Fukushima decontamination operation relies on Japan's organized crime, the Yakusa, which is actively involved in the recruitment of "specialized" personnel for dangerous tasks. "The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan's organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets
for generations." (Reuters, October 25, 2013) The Yakuza labor practices at Fukushima are based on a corrupt system of subcontracting, which does not favor the hiring of competent specialized personnel. It creates an environment of fraud and incompetence, which in the case of Fukushima could have devastating consequences. The subcontracting with organized crime syndicates is a means for major corporations involved in the clean-up to significantly reduce their labor costs. This role of Japanese organized crime also pertains to the removal of the fuel rods from Reactor no. 4. As documented in several GR articles, this undertaking, if mishandled, by careless workers under the lax supervision of corrupt subcontractors linked to the Yakusa creates an environment which could potentially lead to a massive radioactive fallout: An operation with potentially "apocalyptic" consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now, "as early as November 8" at Fukushima's damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor's upper floor. While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event. To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room. A recent Reuters report documents in detail the role of Japan's Yakuza and its insidious relationship to both TEPCO as well as agencies of the Japanese government including the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare: