Archive for November, 2009
Evans Politics, November 29, 2009
The best place for U.S. Senators to receive healthcare?
The floor of a convention center or an animal stall?
The November 21st Little Rock Free health Clinic set up operations on the floor of the Little Rock Convention Center.
I recorded the heroic volunteers the night of November 20th, as they prepared the 80,000 square foot exhibition center to receive Americans in desperate need of healthcare the following day.
As I wandered around and observed all the work, more than anything, I reflected on what it means to live in a country which treats healthcare as a privilege not a right. Here I was standing in the middle of a MASH tent in a major American city–this would undoubtedly be the last hope for many of the people we’d meet the next day.
When Remote Area Medical set up in Wise County Virginia, they treated American citizens in animal stalls. In Little Rock, Americans were treated with great care, compassion and dignity on the floor of a convention center.
This is from the interview CIGNA whistle blower Wendell Potter described gave to Bill Moyers.
Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a “health care expedition,” a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, “It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls.”
See Wendel Potter on Profits Before Patients, Bill Moyers Journal, July 10, 2009.
As Keith Olbermann said the other night, and this is a paraphrase, if members of the United States Senate didn’t have healthcare, they would have dealt with this national cataclysm many decades ago.
But at the end of the day, dear friends, we have only ourselves to blame because we continue to vote for people who allow this vast and cruel American calamity to continue unabated decade after decade .
Bless you, Eve Gittelson: if the politicians cared one TENTH as much, the health care reform legislation would be settled and passed in two days. ~ Paul Evans
Evans Politics, November 28, 2009
Saturday Squash:
World Cup bans, kidnappings and giant rabbits –
Kim Jong-Il‘s top ten craziest moments
Hey, it’s Saturday! – my firm grasp of the obvious never ceases to amaze me, but it’s a lot better than Kim’s and he’s dictator of a freaking nation. Don’t believe me? Try these ten gems from fearless leader:
North Korea leader Kim Jong-Il has banned the World Cup from being broadcast in his country unless they win.
The communist country’s state-run TV stations have been ordered not to broadcast live matches or games involving other nations, with only heavily edited highlights of North Korean victories permitted to be screened.
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The news marks the latest in a long line of eccentric behaviour by the DPRK’s Supreme Leader. Here we list nine other mad moments:
1. You may not be aware of this, but Kim Jong-Il is in fact the best world’s greatest golfer.
According to an official government handout marking his 62nd birthday, its claimed Kim celebrated by demolishing a par 72 course in just 34 strokes, managing a world record five hole-in-ones on the way.
To top it all, the superhuman round was apparently the first time he had actually played the sport.
2. In 2006, German giant rabbit breeder Karl Szmolinsky was contacted by Pyongyang, asking if they could buy 12 of the bumper bunnies.
Having seen the massive rabbits in a newspaper, Kim planned to set up a breeding programme to boost meat production in the famine-hit country.
Despite Szmolinsky warning that the rabbits would make the situation worse – they only yield about 15 pounds of meat and have a huge appetite for carrots and potatoes – Kim insisted the animals should still be sent.
Szmolinsky claims once the animals arrived Kim ate them himself as part of his birthday celebrations.
3. In 2004, a former chef for Kim revealed that the North Korean leader employs staff to make sure that the grains of his rice served to him are absolutely uniform in size and colour.
4. His official biography claims that his birth was foretold by a swallow and led to the appearance of a double rainbow along with the emergence of a new star in space.
5. Hacked off by the lack of film-makers in his native land, in 1978 Kim arranged for two South Korean directors to be kidnapped from Hong Kong and brought to him. They tried to escape but eventually relented, making a string of movies for him including the cult Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.
6. After being told by doctor’s to give up smoking in 2007, Kim quit then decided he needed to go one step further to protect his health and so outlawed fags for the rest of his compatriots with a nationwide ban. (Oh, now THAT’S cruel!)
7. According to Russian emissary Konstantin Pulikovsky who travelled with Mr Kim by train across Eastern Europe, Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day which he ate with silver chopsticks.
8. After suffering a back injury following a horse riding accident, Kim was prescribed painkillers.
Fearful of becoming addicted, he ordered a half-dozen of his closest staff to receive the same injection under the logic that if he became dependent, he wouldn’t be the only one.
9. As well as being something of a foodie, Kim knows his booze. According to Hennessy, Kim is one their single biggest customers, importing £350,000 worth of the cognac every year.
Evans Politics, November 28, 2009
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
T’was that Saturday after Thanksgiving and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a Daily Kos editor. But the pundits… ah, the pundits…
Is there such a thing as communications malpractice? If so, we might consider the case of Women v. the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
I’m not talking about medical malpractice. The scientists who surveyed the mammogram studies did their job honorably.
The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall Street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit — emotionally, psychologically and otherwise.
One effect of the Great Recession, according to a recent series in The Times, has been a big jump in the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on the street.
Some people can’t stand prosperity, my father used to say. Today, he might be talking about Republicans, who, in the midst of declining support for President Obama’s hope-and-change agenda, are considering a “purity” pledge to weed out undesirables from their ever-shrinking party.
Just when independents and moderates were considering revisiting the GOP tent.
The Democrats, in our scary 2010 movie, will be heading toward the midterm elections hoping to preserve their 81-seat margin in the House. Vulnerable incumbents will be clamoring for more economic stimulus, but the Obama administration will be constrained by the huge budget deficits needed to bail out the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.
Trust the Villagers to get around to noticing the obvious. Once they do, you begin to question whether it’s as true as they say.
Two events in the last month have raised the terror alert to red: the killing of 13 soldiers and police at Ford Hood, apparently by a Muslim psychiatrist, and the decision to try high-level 9/11 suspects in a civilian criminal court in New York City.
However, these events are being manipulated by the right wing to bang the alarm bells ever louder. From House Republican leader John Boehner and Republican Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan to former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson and blogger Michelle Malkin, many on the right are grandstanding on both events with such force that it is cultivating terror in the American public.
Robert Read (UK):
Alongside improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and housing, vaccination has practically eliminated infectious diseases as a cause of childhood deaths in industrialised countries. Our children no longer die or are crippled by diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, or polio, to name a few examples. Even in the world’s poorer countries that have yet to benefit from infrastructure improvements, vaccination has eradicated smallpox, is on the verge of doing the same for polio, and has cut deaths from measles by three quarters in the past decade alone. The countless millions of lives saved by vaccination are arguably science’s greatest triumph.
The anti-vax movement is well organized and not going away. It will look for any opening to get a foot in the door. But Euro vaccine has adjuvant, and it’s not as well studied as the rest of the vaccine components. This is one of those cases (vaccines are evil, buy my all-natural snake oil and make me rich instead; don’t do any more studies) where you look at the extremes and say “a pox on both your houses”.
*****
DemFromCT is a longtime member of the Daily Kos community with interests ranging from polling to Iraq to bird flu, and has graciously agreed to allow us here at Evans Politics to republish his articles on an ongoing basis. He is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (www.fluwikie.com) and its sister site, the Flu Wiki Forum (www.newfluwiki2.com). Since its inception in June 2005, Flu Wiki has grown into an international clearinghouse of pandemic influenza information and links.
You can view his diaries (blogroll) at Daily Kos, here. DemFromCT is a featured writer at Daily Kos, and you can read more about him here.
Evans Politics, November 28, 2009
Shocking: High School Grads 234% More Likely
To Be Jobless Than College Grads – and Right-Wingers
are Profiting From Their Pain
The economic meltdown has hit non-college grads much harder than the educated. And conservatives are very good at exploiting their anger and unease.
You know how bad the economy is, right? Maybe your 401(k) has tanked. Perhaps you were out of work for a few months. You could have a mortgage under water. Or your health insurance has an impossibly high deductible. Yeah, we’re all singing the blues.
I’ve gotten out my violin to play a mournful accompaniment to our collective angst.
Wait, what’s that I hear in the distance? A dissonant, thundering chord someone just hammered on the piano — a harsh interruption of my languid dirge. Now it repeats, getting louder and nearer.
It’s the sound of rage, of people I don’t know — millions of them — unable to make rent or feed their families. Why don’t I know them? They don’t have college degrees, and nearly everybody I know does.
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The truth is, brothers and sisters, however much we the degreed are suffering, we don’t know the half of it. And unless we familiarize ourselves with the other half very, very soon, what was supposed to be a new progressive era could quickly give way to the rage of the Tea Party.
We all know that unemployment is high — 10 percent nationwide, and higher than that in certain geographic pockets. (Michigan tops the states with more than 15 percent.) Economists tell us that when you factor in all the underemployed people, and those who have given up looking for work, the national employment picture is more like 17 percent who are either out of work or barely working. But chances are, if you’re at all like me, those numbers tell you that something’s terribly wrong, but your day-to-day life is more or less holding together. Those who do not possess a college diploma are having a far more visceral experience of this recession.
Among college graduates, the unemployment rate for October was 4.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF). For people with some college or an Associate’s degree, the rate is almost doubled, at 9 percent. Among high school graduates who never went to college, 11 percent are unemployed, while high-school drop-outs show a whopping 15.5 percent unemployed.
So, unless you know a lot of people who never graduated college, you really have no idea just how bad things are.
Maybe that’s why the political establishment in Washington, D.C., was stunned last week when members of the Black Congressional Caucus came together in the House Financial Services Committee to halt a financial reform bill put together by committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-MA. While CBC members took issue with some specific provisions in the bill, the real intent of the caucus members’ stalling was to protest the administration’s lackluster response to the growing jobs crisis within their constituencies. (Among African Americans, the unemployment rate for October was 15.7 percent, according to BLS, compared to 9.5 percent for white people. According to a 2003 survey by the U.S. Census, 17 percent of blacks had college diplomas, compared to 27.2 percent of whites.)
A poll released last week by ABC News and the Washington Post found that 30 percent of Americans say that either they or someone in their household has lost a job in the past year, a finding the pollsters present as a new high. But, because it’s an average, that figure tells only part of the story. Those losses are not evenly distributed across the economy; pollsters found that people living in households with income of less than $50,000 were twice as likely to have experienced a job loss by a member of their household than those with earnings above that threshold.
Among the unemployed, 90 percent describe themselves as stressed, according the ABC News Washington Post poll. Of those stressed-out people, 58 percent say they’re depressed, and 62 percent say they’re angry. That’s a lot of angry, depressed, stressed-out people.
The right is clearly much more aware of the popular unease, and its leaders are organizing, organizing, organizing. That’s what the Tea Party movement is all about: it taps into that vein of seething discontent and redirects it toward racial resentment and distrust of the government. Using corporate dollars, leaders of the right have built an impressive infrastructure comprising two major astro-turfing groups — Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks — whose efforts are trumpeted through the megaphone of FOX News. Then there’s the community organizing done by FOX’s Glenn Beck through his own FOX television show, his radio show and his 912 Project Web site — in addition to the free publicity granted AFP and FreedomWorks on nearly all the FOX News programs.
Continue reading this article on AlterNet, here.
See Jobs! Can They Not Hear and See?, OpEdNews, November 25, 2009, by James Brett.
Evans Politics, November 28, 2009
Hacked climate change email furor
(discussion and video)
As see on Daily Kos.
The Climate Change Research Unit in the University of East Anglia had their email system hacked and several of the emails were apparently quite damning as to the validity and integrity of the climate change data being produced by the scientific community. There was a rush to judgment around the internet. For example, see The Skeptics are Vindicated, Real Clear Politics, November 25, 2009, by David Warren. Warren, and many who wished to see the abundant evidence for climate change discredited, were sure this is the smoking gun.
A Daily Kos commenter on my article, kickbass, has given us good commentary and sources to the effect that the so called “damning” emails were in fact largely taken out of context in the first place, dealing with freedom of information acts (which were refused) from climate science refuters. See especially The CRU Hack and The CRU Hack: Context on Real Climate, and read the comments.
In this Real News Network video, Professor Brklacic of Carleton U. concurs with George Monbiot (Global warming rigged? Here’s the email I’d need to see, The Guardian (U.K.), November 24, 2009, by George Monbiot): This email evidence compromises 3 or 4 lines of evidence among several hundred, as far as global warming is concerned. Moreover, remember, Brklacic continues, we’re talking not just of global warming, but of climate change for which we have several (other) important changes taking place rapidly. Sea levels are rising, polar ice is melting, species are rapidly becoming extinct and the “composition” of species populations, especially in the oceans, is changing rapidly and ominously.
We suggest a visit to IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We also suggest, staying away – very, very far away – from the Washington Post and George Will and the right’s “evidence” based on citing the comments on right wing social networks as those of authorities.
The number of people in the U.S. who believe in global warming is down, partly due to shenanigans such as this email mess. But it’s still at 72 percent, and the real problem here is the media’s coverage. See The Real Scandal Over Climate Change Isn’t About Hacked Emails But the Media’s Coverage, Alternet, November 24, 2009, by Alex Steffan. For coverage of what’s happening to the climate change/energy bill in Congress, see The Inhofe Climate Skeptic Roadshow, Mother Jones, November 23, 2009, by Kate Sheppard.
Climate Change is very real, and it will probably be very damaging to the earth, its species, AND the world’s economies. One recent study indicates an increase in temperature of 9 degrees Centigrade by 2100 (New Study: Global Temperatures to Rise 9 Degrees by 2100, Ecoworldly, May 22, 2009, by Bryan Nelson) ….. makes me sweat just to think about it. These emails prove nothing.
Hacked climate change email furor
Evans Politics, November 28, 2009
Scahill and Olbermann on Blackwater:
Murderous Crusaders for Christ
“Scary Stuff.”
(Below) “see a frequent AlterNet contributor discuss Blackwater on Keith Olbermann’s show. And if you missed it this Tuesday, be sure to check out Jeremy’s piece on the shady mercenary firm’s secret war in Pakistan,” parts of which are quoted below:
From Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan Revealed, AlterNet, November 24, 2009, by Jeremy Scahill of The Nation:
An elite division of Blackwater plans targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. And everyone’s denying it.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.
The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story.
…SNIP…
The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”
A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.
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His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater’s covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, “From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct,” adding, “There’s no question that’s occurring.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me because we’ve outsourced nearly everything,” said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater’s role in Pakistan.
Read the full article, here.
Getting back to the original article and video, the allegations are that Blackwater operates, according to one of the witnesses testifying anonymously, who was in fact in Blackwater management, as part of a “global war to eliminate Islam and establish Christian supremacy.” The two witnesses said that at least one Blackwater employee who tried to testify had been murdered by Blackwater. Blackwater now operates under a new identity, Xe, but it is more prevalent, and more dangerous around the world, than ever.
The Blackwater employee testified that Mr. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, “views himself as a Christian Crusader, eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”
In the video, The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill says of Prince that “this is a guy, who comes from one of the powerhouse families of the radical religious right. His father was a major bankroller, and gave the seed money to Gary Bower to start The Family Research Council, James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and then we have his forces deployed in Iraq, as part of a war against a Muslim nation….”
Watch the video; it’s compelling. Evans Politics and Christians who consider themselves liberal or even rational cannot condone, cannot even tolerate, the use of such a group to “outsource” the war in such a manner. Blackwater, now Xe, must be, as it is beginning to be, investigated, and prosecuted and removed from the service of the United States.
They have no place in our government’s service. ~ Paul Evans
See Is Blind Faith in God and the Bible a Modern Invention?, Alternet and Daily Kos, November 10, 2009, by Devilstower: “A new book points out that the ancient Christians — and even early Americans — did not share the blind faith of today’s fundamentalists.”
Blackwater: Murderous Crusaders for Christ
Glenn Beck Scoffs at Palin/Beck 2012 Ticket, Doesn’t Like Palin’s ‘Yapping’ (Video)
Author: PaulEvans Politics, November 27, 2009
Glenn Beck Scoffs at Palin/Beck 2012 Ticket,
Doesn’t Like Palin’s ‘Yapping’
The Beck/Palin dream ticket is not to be? NOOOOO!!!
Is your drunk conservative uncle ranting about our fascist President turning America socialist? You could take the classy route and stay quiet until they exhaust their Glenn Beck talking points. Or, you can taunt them with this: apparently the Beck/Palin 2012 ticket, coyly “not ruled out” by Sarah Palin during last week’s publicity blitz, is not to be! Beck — who just last week somberly upbraided Newsweek for running a sexist picture of Palin — doesn’t want to hear her “yapping” as “I’m not in the kitchen.”
How are these two going to make America great again if they can’t get along? Does all hope rest with Michele Bachmann?
From Think Progress:
In recent days, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has indicated that she may be open to a conservative presidential dream ticket in 2012: Palin-Beck (or Beck-Palin). “I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet,” Palin told Newsmax. “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot.” Fox and Friends plugged the idea yesterday morning and asked Palin whether she would run with Beck. She kept the door open, saying, “I don’t know. We’ll see, we’ll see.”
BECK: I don’t think things are hoots. I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word “hoot.” [...]
No, no I’m just saying — Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck — can you imagine, can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? What? Come on! She’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, “I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.”
But just a few hours later on his radio show, Beck shot down the idea, saying he was “absolutely” ruling out a Palin-Beck ticket. He explained that if he had the number two job, Palin would always be “yapping” like they were in “the kitchen”:
See Bachmann and Palin to unite for Tea Party convention, Think Progress, November 27, 2009, 2009, by Faiz Shakir: Tickets are only $549! Wow, girls, why don’t you play to the base if they’re important to ya!
Glenn Beck Rules Out 2012 Run With Sarah Palin
America’s News Today, Nov. 25, 2009 – 2:41
(what an imbecile, just listen to the guy, apparently the whole thing is a “hoot”)
Evans Politics, November 8, 2009
Iran rebuked over nuclear ‘cover-up’ by UN watchdog
Israeli Attack on Iran in the Works?
In the furur over the discovery/announcment over Iran’s hidden and unnanounced nuclear facility at Qom, IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has issued a preliminary condemnatory rebuking declaration. This was the first U.N. resolution against Iran in nearly four years. The vote was 25 to 3, with six abstentions. BBC reports:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also demanded that Iran freeze the (Qom) project immediately.
… The IAEA resolution was passed with rare Russian and Chinese backing.
Speaking at a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that the vote sent the clearest possible signal to Iran.
“I believe the next stage will have to be sanctions if Iran does not respond to what is a very clear vote,” he said.
It comes a day after the outgoing head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, expressed frustration at Iran’s refusal to accept an international proposal to end the dispute over its nuclear programme (see video, below).
The plan envisages Iran’s low-enriched uranium being shipped overseas for processing into fuel. This is seen as a way for Iran to get the fuel it wants, while giving guarantees to the West that it will not be used for nuclear weapons.
Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said the resolution was a “hasty and undue” step that would jeopardise the chances of success of the talks on the proposal.
The US ambassador to the nuclear watchdog, Glyn Davies, said patience with Iran was “running out”….
Al Jazeera fleshes out the situation for us:
Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tehran, said that the resolution comes as Iran’s government faces pressure from its supporters inside the country to be forthcoming in its negotiations with the world powers over exchanging enriched uranium.
Ronaghi was referring to an IAEA-brokered plan to provide Iran with fuel for a nuclear medicine reactor in exchange for enriched uranium that could be turned into bomb material if further refined.
“Iran’s economy has been under pressure for almost four years, since President Ahmadinejad took power and immediately adopted some very aggressive policies in Iran’s nuclear programme,” Ronaghi said.
“It is not going to be easy to handle any more sanctions from now on. I’m sure it is going to be a very serious concern among members of Iran’s ruling elite.”
The well-known Arab news source adds important details to our knowledge:
The resolution notes that the IAEA cannot confirm that Tehran’s nuclear programme is exclusively geared towards peaceful uses and expresses “serious concern” that Iran may be hiding a military nuclear program.
On Thursday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the IAEA, said an investigation into whether Iran was seeking to build nuclear weapons had reached “a dead end”.
Al Jazeera goes on to question the claim that the Qom facility had in fact been designed for peaceful purposes:
Tehran says the bunkered Qom site, which is to start operating in 2011, is a backup for its much larger Natanz enrichment centre in case it is bombed by foes such as Israel.
Western nuclear analysts say Qom’s low capacity makes it unsuitable for any purpose but to enrich smaller quantities of uranium suitable for a bomb.
Enrichment plants generally need tens of thousands of centrifuges to feed a nuclear power plant.
The Draft Resolution will serve as the basis for a Security Council resolution possibly including the aforementioned sanctions.
Several videos making the rounds on the internet heighten the concern about the immediate future. Iran is engaging in war games simulating its defense in the case of attack, and Israel is very gravely concerned with Iran’s nuclear potential for attack on it, given the Iranian leader’s calls for Israel’s destruction. The second video below from Russia today makes clear the gravity of the situation.
Israel has already “wargamed” the attack on Iran twice in training exercises. The most recent dry run included not just bomber but fighters with new fuel tanks allowing them to accompany the bombers the entire distance of the mission. These weren’t just computer simulations but air force flights to a comparable length of the mission, with the fighters. Saudi Arabia has been reported to have cleared the use of Saudi air space in such an attack. The two Saudi oil terminuses are particularly vulnerable to any reciprocal measures by Iran: even using their many conventional warheads on intermediate range missiles (they were reported to have some 1,500 about a year ago), these two terminuses would be history if Iran really were seriously attacked.
That is why not just liberals and peace advocates, but many intelligent foreign policy analysts are so focused on a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program crisis, and why President Obama has so far said no to Israeli requests to attack Iran. The situation is indeed dire, not just for Mideast peace, but for the whole world’s energy supply.
See also IAEA’s ElBaradei expresses ‘disappointment’ at Iran, November 26, 2009, Agence France Presse video on YouTube.
See also, Nuclear defiance? IAEA votes on Iran censure resolution, November 27, 2009, Russia Today video on YouTube.
IAEA Chief ElBaradei Reports on Iran
Israel likely to attack Iran?
Russia Today – November 24, 2009 – 4:12
Evans Politics, November 27, 2009
Colbert Nation Classics: Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger
Stephen Colbert Examines German Political Campaigns,
Russian Dogs, and Flying Rabbis
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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