Weekend Edition
March 25 - 27, 2011
CounterPunch Diary
Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The war on Libya now being waged by the US, Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812.
Let’s start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members of the coalition, arguing about the basic aims of the operation. How does “take all necessary measures” square with the ban on any “foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Can the coalition kill Qaddafi , and recognize a provisional government in Benghazi? Who exactly are the revolutionaries and national liberators in eastern Libya?
In the United States the intervention was instigated by liberal interventionists: notably three women, starting with Samantha Power, who runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights in Obama’s National Security Council. She’s an Irish American, 41 years old, who made her name back in the Bush years with her book A Problem from Hell, a study of the U.S. foreign-policy response to genocide, and the failure of the Clinton administration to react forcefully to the Rwandan massacres. She had to resign from her advisory position on the Obama campaign in April of 2008, after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” in an interview with the Scotsman, but was restored to good grace after Obama’s election, and the monster in her sights is now Qaddafi.
America’s UN ambassador is Susan Rice, the first African American woman to be named to that post. She’s long been an ardent interventionist. In 1996, as part of the Clinton administration, she supported the multinational force that invaded Zaire from Rwanda in 1996 and overthrew dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, saying privately that "Anything's better than Mobutu." But on February 23 she came under fierce attack in the Huffington Post at the hands of Richard Grenell, who’d served on the US delegation to the UN in the Bush years. Grenell dwelt harshly on instances where in his judgement Rice and her ultimate boss Obama were drooping the ball, and displaying lack of leadership amid the tumults engulfing the middle east and specifically in failing to support the uprising against Qaddafi.
Both Rice and Clinton took Grenell’s salvo to heart. Prodded by the fiery Power they abruptly stiffened their postures and Clinton lobbed her furious salvoes at Qaddafi, “the mad dog”. For Clinton it was a precise re-run of her efforts to portray Obama as a peace wimp back in 2008, liable to snooze all too peacefully when the red phone rang at 3am.
For his part, Obama wasn’t keen on intervention, seeing it as a costly swamp, yet another war and one opposed by Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But by now the liberal interventions and the neo-cons were in full cry and Obama, perennially fearful of being outflanked, succumbed, hastening to one of the least convincing statement of war aims in the nation’s history. He’s already earned a threat of impeachment from leftist congressman Dennis Kucinich for arrogating war-making powers constitutionally reserved for the US Congress, though it has to be said that protest from the left has been pretty feeble. As always, many on the left yearn for an intervention they can finally support and many of them have been murmuring ecstatically, “This is the one.” Of course the sensible position (mine) simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed purpose or not.
So much for the instigators of intervention in the US. In France the intellectual author is the intellectual dandy and “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy, familiarly known to his admirers and detractors as BHL. As described by Larry Portis in our current CounterPunch newsletter, BHL arrived in Benghazi on March 3.
“Two days later BHL was interviewed on various television networks. He appeared before the camera in his habitual uniform – immaculate white shirt with upturned collar, black suit coat, and disheveled hair.
“His message was urgent but reassuring. “No,” he said, Qaddafi is not capable of launching an offensive against the opposition. He does not have the means to do so. However, he does have planes. This is the real danger.” BHL called for the scrambling of radio communications, the destruction of landing strips in all regions of Libya, and the bombardment of Qaddafi’s personal bunker. In brief, this would be a humanitarian intervention, the modalities of which he did not specify.
“Next step, as BHL explained: “I called him [Sarkozy] from Benghazi. And when I returned, I went to the Elysée Palace to see him and tell him that the people on the National Transition Council are good guys." Indeed, on March 6, BHL returned to France and met with Sarkozy. Four days later, on March 10, he saw Sarkozy again, this time with three Libyans whom he had encouraged to visit France, along with Sarkozy’s top advisors. On March 11, Sarkozy declared the Libyan National Transition Council the only legitimate representative of the Libyan people. Back in Benghazi, people screamed in relief and cheered Sarkozy’s name, popularity at last for Sarko, whose approval ratings in France have been hovering around the 20 per cent mark.”
So much for the circumstances in which intervention was conceived. It has nothing to do with oil; everything to do with ego and political self protection. But to whom exactly are the interveners lending succor? There’s been great vagueness here, beyond enthusiastic references to the romantic revolutionaries of Benghazi, and much ridicule for Qaddafi’s identification of his opponents in eastern Libya as Al Qaida.
In fact two documents strongly back Qaddafi on this issue. The first is a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “Extremism in Eastern Libya”which revealed that this area is rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.
According to the cable, the most troubling aspect
“… is the pride that many eastern Libyans, particularly those in and around Dernah, appear to take in the role their native sons have played in the insurgency in Iraq … [and the] ability of radical imams to propagate messages urging support for and participation in jihad.”
The second document or rather set of documents are the so-called Sinjar Records, captured Al Qaeda documents that fell into American hands in 2007. They were duly analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Al-Qaeda is a bureaucratic outfit and the Records contain precise details on personnel, including those who came to Iraq to fight and when called for, to commit suicide , fighting American and Coalition forces.
The West Point analysts’ statistical study of the al-Qaeda personnel records concludes that one country provided “far more” foreign fighters in per capita terms than any other: namely, Libya. The records show that the “vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country’s Northeast.” Benghazi provided many volunteers. So did Darnah, a town about 200 kms east of Benghazi, in which an Islamic emirate was declared when the rebellion against Qaddafi started. New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid even spoke with Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi who promulgated the Islamic emirate. Al-Hasadi “praises Osama bin Laden’s ‘good points,’” Shadid reported, though he prudently denounced the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Other sources have said that this keen admirer of Osama would be most influential in the formation of any provisional government.
The West Point study of the Iraqi Sinjar Records calculates that of the 440 foreign al-Qaeda recruits whose hometowns are known, 21 came from Benghazi, thereby making it the fourth most common hometown listed in the records. Fifty-three of the al-Qaeda recruits came from Darnah, the highest total of any of the hometowns listed in the records. The second highest number, 51, came from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Darnah (80,000) has less than 2 per cent the population of Riyadh. Darnah contributed “far and away the largest per capita number of fighters.”
As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild writes, "Amid the apparent absence of any plan for post-Gaddafi governance, an ignorance of Libya’s tribal nature and our poor record of dealing with tribes, American government documents conclusively establish that the epicenter of the revolt is rife with anti-American and pro-jihad sentiment, and with al-Qaeda’s explicit support for the revolt, it is appropriate to ask our policymakers how American military intervention in support of this revolt in any way serves vital U.S. strategic interests.”
As I wrote here a few weeks ago, “It sure looks like Osama is winning the Great War on Terror.” But I did not dream then that he would have a coalition of the US, Great Britain and France bleeding themselves dry to assist him in this enterprise.
Fukushima: It’s Getting Worse
A week ago, Fukushima abruptly dropped out of the news headlines. The NATO onslaught on Qaddafi took over. This came after an initial week – following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, of steadily escalating alarums about what the EU energy commissioner tactlessly called “apocalypse.” Suddenly the down-column stories about the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant took on a tone of cautious reassurance: there were “improvements” in effort to keep units 5 and 6 at the Daiichi plant cool; “progress” in efforts to reconnect the stricken plant to the electrical power grid were proceeding; hydrogen explosions should be no cause for alarm; why, TEPCO workers could even switch on lights in a control room in Unit 1. Reports stressed the restraint and dignity of beleaguered Japanese citizens, thus implying that spreading alarmist reports was pretty much the equivalent of robbing refugees. Speaking personally, news of lynch parties of outraged Japanese prodding TEPCO executives into clean-up duty in the plant alongside George Monbiot and the 50 Japanese worker-martyrs would have been most welcome.
TEPCO’s crimes and cover-ups go back to the dawn of Japan’s nuclear power industry. A Russian, Iouli Andreev who once ran the Soviet Spetsatom agency involved in the Chernobyl clean-up told Reuters that “corporations had deliberately ignored the lessons of Chernobyl” in the pursuit of profit and had been abetted by the negligence of of the IAEA and that “in order to cut costs, spent fuel rods at Fukushima had been too closely stacked in pools near the nuclear reactors. One of those pools caught fire, dispersing radioactivity into the atmosphere. The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin, you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin.”
Amid reasonable suspicions that leading news media might have been in receipt of informal government advisories to stop creating panic, it became much harder to find credible bulletins on what was actually happening. In fact careful perusal of the daily briefings at the Vienna hq of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna disclosed absolutely no substantive progress and indeed discreet admissions that “[this was on March 23) the “Agency still lacks data on water levels and temperatures in the spent fuel pools at Units 1, 2, 3 and 4.”
The IAEA emphasized each day that the situation at Fukushima’s Daiichi plant remained “extremely serious.” Bulletins from other bodies such as France’s Autorité de sûreté nucléaire retained a similarly grave tone.
Meanwhile bulletins about hazardous fallout and poisoning of air, earth and sea were similarly cast in a reassuring frame, even as the Japanese government issued warnings about eating spinach and other greens from Japan’s north east, and by the end of the week putting out an advisory for parents not to let small children drink tap water in Tokyo. On our own website, by contrast, several articles and interviews stressed what Hirose Takashi said:
“All of the information media are at fault here I think. They are saying stupid things like, why, we are exposed to radiation all the time in our daily life, we get radiation from outer space. But that’s one millisievert per year. A year has 365 days, a day has 24 hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760. Multiply the 400 millisieverts by that, you get 3,500,000 the normal dose. You call that safe? And what media have reported this? None. They compare it to a CT scan, which is over in an instant; that has nothing to do with it. The reason radioactivity can be measured is that radioactive material is escaping. What is dangerous is when that material enters your body and irradiates it from inside. These industry-mouthpiece scholars come on TV and what to they say? They say as you move away the radiation is reduced in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. I want to say the reverse. Internal irradiation happens when radioactive material is ingested into the body. What happens? Say there is a nuclear particle one meter away from you. You breathe it in, it sticks inside your body; the distance between you and it is now at the micron level. One meter is 1000 millimeters, one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter. That’s a thousand times a thousand: a thousand squared. That’s the real meaning of “inverse ratio of the square of the distance.” Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.”
Both Arjun Makhijani and Robert Alvarez stressed that a Worst Case explosion at Fukushima Daiichi could be worse than Chernobyl. As Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Maryland, wrote:
“The mechanisms of the accident would be very different than Chernobyl, 4 where there was also a fire, and the mix of radionuclides would be very different. While the quantity of short-lived radionuclides, notably iodine-131, would be much smaller, the consequences for the long term could be more dire due to long-lived radionuclides such as cesium- 137, strontium-90, iodine-129, and plutonium-239. These radionuclides are generally present in much larger quantities in spent fuel pools than in the reactor itself. In light of that, it is remarkable how little has been said by the Japanese authorities about this problem.”
Now, by March 25 TEPCO and the Japanese government can’t keep the lid on any longer. They are admitting that the containment vessel in unit 3 is ruptured. Radiated water sloshing into workers’ boots is 10,000 times above safety levels. Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, announced that radiation from the mox fuel in reactor 3 — a combination of uranium and plutonium — could be escaping into the atmosphere.
In other words, Japan and the rest of the world indeed face “the worst case”, as we have since March 11. There’s been no let up.
What the nuclear industry and the nuclear agencies have been aiming for is a kind of Mithridatization of the crisis. Mithridates was the king who took poison every day to immunize himself against poisoners. Crisis becomes normalcy. Sure, radiation levels are way above the redline; the dirt around Fukushima and huge slabs of north east Japan is poisoned; the ground around Fukushima is radiated sludge; the seas show significant contamination, not least because the seawater being sprayed on the units itself become poisoned and sinks into the dirt and back into the ocean after its detour to pick up toxicity.
Sure, this is all true, but “there’s no cause for alarm.” Never believe anything till it’s officially denied! The industry’s flacks lie steadily, as they have always done, about impacts on humans and the environment.
The fiercest defenders of nuclear power these days are greens like George Monbiot who wrote yet another insane hosanna to nuclear power in The Guardian (“Why Fukushima Made Me Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power … Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to nuclear power.” It was written on the 21st of March.) Greens like Monbiot, fixated on their increasingly discredited anthropogenic – humanly caused -- global warming (AGW) models, clamber even further out in their assertions that the nuclear industry’s official spokesmen.
On the recruitment of Greens to the cause of the nuclear industry, Martin Kokus sent us the following very interesting letter:
“Instead of saying that global warming rescued the nuclear lobby, I would say the nuclear complex invented global warming. I was working on man-made climate change during the 70's and I think that even the biggest conspiracy theorist is underestimating the role that the nuclear complex played in shaping the debate on AGW. When I say nuclear complex, I am not just referring to the power lobby, but also the weapons manufacturers, the military, the nuclear labs, the academics who are funded by nuclear labs, and those who think that there is some huge geopolitical advantage for the west to go nuclear.“The nukes were pushing AGW from my earliest political memory. In 1973-74, the Hoover Institute funded a tour by Edward Teller where he described co2 as the real environmental problem and nuclear power was its only solution. (I am sure that you are aware that the Hoover Institute is now espousing AGW as a liberal conspiracy.) During the same time period Bernard Cohen, head of U of Pitt's Nuke Labs, self-appointed expert on safety, and proponent of nuclear power was funded by Americans for Energy Independence (AEI) to do the same thing. One of the organizers of AEI was longtime Cohen associate Zalman Shapiro who was the subject of a series of Counterpunch essays by Grant Smith in regards to the Israeli nuke program. These speakers were not sponsored by climatology departments but by nuclear engineering departments.“I was in the first US seminar on man-made climate change at UVA. We were worried about particulates, land use, deforestation, and most of all the introduction of agribusiness into the third world. My profs dismissed AGW in about 15 minutes. But even then, one of our contract monitors from Oak Ridge AEC was pushing me to get interested in the greenhouse effect. I also remember Outside magazine (which I always considered right wing and phony environmentalist) doing a series that considered AGW to be the most serious environmental threat. I always found this interesting because there were absolutely no data behind it.“The real money came into AGW after Thatcher got elected. I am sure that you are familiar with the Centre for Policy Studies, a conservative British think tank, decision to hype AGW. Well, the Reagan administration more than matched that money. We funded half the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s climate group. The UEA was the scene of the recent Climategate scandal. The Hadley Centre and the UEA were the incubators for the IPCC. The money was monitored by what used to be the AEC lab at Oakridge which is now under DOE. The older climatologists were ignored in this funding buildup. In fact, existing funding for non co2 climate change research disappeared.”
One more email from CounterPuncher James Cronin:
“One important aspect of the current nuclear catastrophe is not being discussed in progressive media: the fact that radiation-induced cancers do not simply arise immediately following exposure. It's not as though it will be like the Black Plague, where one would see one's neighbors being hauled out of their houses, dead. This damage to human life, these murders, will only be visible -- if they are allowed to be visible -- in statistical data collected long years after the exposure event.“In other words, there will be no evident epidemic that would stimulate citizen action. So we may well be exposed to enough radiation, such as with Iodine-131, to give us thyroid cancer, but the distribution of these cancers will be over the entire population in the exposed areas, manifesting only as a statistic years after the fact. Even if we know someone who develops thyroid cancer, we will be unable to identify the Japan catastrophe (at least at this point) as the cause. Thus the nuclear industry has a clear escape path at this point.“I think we can be assured that the research exists. If we know the exposures or potential exposures, the number of cancers (and deaths) that will result can be estimated. I think this estimate should be found or done ASAP. A table could be generated, if it does not already exist in the scientific literature somewhere.“I have long distrusted many so-called progressive websites for their obvious promotion of Obama, and how they report this catastrophe should be looked at, as you have with Monbiot.”“Keep up the good work, Counterpunchers.”
As I wrote last week, the New York Academy of Sciences report on Chernobyl, published in 2009 has a wealth of data on lethal health consequences surfacing years after the disaster. The report by Yablokov and the Nesterenkos, had as its consulting editor Janette Sherman-Nevinger whose commentary, on this site last week, is well worth reading.
A Fantastic Newsletter
I’ve already mentioned Will Parrish’s great article in our new subscriber only newsletter, narrating Obama’s boost for nukes while Fukushima was in meltdown, and how US “Atoms for Peace” helped birth Japan’s nuke program; while back in US homeland the “let them eat plutonium” mindset has maimed and killed for 70 years and will go on doing so till it’s stopped dead in its tracks.
The newsletter also features Shaukat Qadir on why Davis was in Pakistan in the first place plus Larry Portis on how much the French loathe Sarkozy and, as noted above the role of Bernard-Henri Levi in getting him to declare war on Libya.
And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”
