Thou Shalt Not Embarrass The Pentagon Two Granies Two Priests and a Nun Sent Up The River

I think America needs to prioritise, does it want to grope nine year old kids getting off a train, or does it want to secure its nukes a bit better? Sister Anne Montgomery, 83 .....

Prison for Peacemakers in Tacoma, Washington
Two Grandmothers, Two Priests and a Nun Go onto a Nuclear Base
By Bill Quigley

March 29, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Two grandmothers, two priests and a nun were sentenced in federal court in Tacoma, WA Monday March 28, 2011, for confronting hundreds of US nuclear weapons stockpiled for use by the deadly Trident submarines.

Sentenced were: Sr. Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York, who was ordered to serve 2 months in federal prison and 4 months electronic home confinement; Fr. Bill Bischel, 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington, ordered to serve 3 months in prison and 6 months electronic home confinement; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington, ordered to serve 6 months in federal prison; and Fr. Steve Kelly, 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison. They were also ordered to pay $5300 each and serve an additional year in supervised probation. Bischel and Greenwald are active members of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a community resisting Trident nuclear weapons since 1977.

What did they do?

In the darkness of All Souls night, November 2, 2009, the five quietly cut through a chain link perimeter fence topped with barbed wire.

Carefully stepping through the hole in the fence, they entered into the Kitsap-Bangor Navy Base outside of Tacoma Washington – home to hundreds of nuclear warheads used in the eight Trident submarines based there.

Walking undetected through the heavily guarded base for hours, they covered nearly four miles before they came to where the nuclear missiles are stored.

The storage area was lit up by floodlights. Dozens of small gray bunkers – about the size of double car garages - were ringed by two more chain link fences topped with taut barbed wire.

USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED one sign boldly proclaimed. Another said WARNING RESTRICTED AREA and was decorated with skull and crossbones.

This was it – the heart of the US Trident Pacific nuclear weapon program. Nuclear weapons were stored in the bunkers inside the double fence line.

Wire cutters cut through these fences as well. There they unfurled hand painted banners which said “Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident Illegal and Immoral”, knelt to pray and waited to be arrested as dawn broke.

What were they protesting against?

Each of the eight Trident submarines has 24 nuclear missiles on it. The Ground Zero community explains that each of the 24 missiles on one submarine have multiple warheads in it and each warhead has thirty times the destructive power of the weapon used on Hiroshima. One fully loaded Trident submarine carries 192 warheads, each designed to explode with the power of 475 kilotons of TNT force. If detonated at ground level each would blow out a crater nearly half a mile wide and several hundred feet deep.

The bunker area where they were arrested is where the extra missiles are stored.

In December 2010, the five went on trial before a jury in federal court in Tacoma charged with felony damage to government property, conspiracy and trespass.

But before the trial began the court told the defendants what they could and could not do in court. Evidence of the medical consequences of nuclear weapons? Not allowed. Evidence that first strike nuclear weapons are illegal under US and international law? Not allowed. Evidence that there were massive international nonviolent action campaigns against Trident missiles where juries acquitted protestors? Not allowed. The defense of necessity where violating a small law, like breaking down a door, is allowed where the actions are taken to prevent a greater harm, like saving a child trapped in a burning building? Not allowed.

Most of the jurors appeared baffled when defendants admitted what they did in their opening statements. They remained baffled when questions about nuclear weapons were objected to by the prosecutor and excluded by the court. The court and the prosecutor repeatedly focused the jury on their position that this was a trial about a fence. Defendants tried valiantly to point to the elephant in the room – the hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Each defendant gave an opening and closing statement explaining, as much as they were allowed, why they risked deadly force to expose the US nuclear arsenal.

Sojourner Truth was discussed as were Rosa Parks, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

The resistance of the defendants was in the spirit of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the suffragist movement, the abolition of slavery movement.

Crowds packed the courtroom each of the five days of trial. Each night there was a potluck and a discussion of nuclear weapons by medical, legal and international experts who came for the trial but who were largely muted by the prosecution and the court.

While the jury held out over the weekend, ultimately, the activists were convicted.

Hundreds packed the courthouse today supporting the defendants. The judge acknowledged the good work of each defendant, admitted that prison was unlikely to deter them from further actions, but said he was bound to uphold the law otherwise anarchy would break out and take down society.

The prosecutors asked the judge to send all the defendants to federal prison plus three years supervised probation plus pay over five thousand dollars. The specific jail time asked for ranged from 3 years for Fr. Kelly, 30 months for Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald, 7 months in jail plus 7 months home confinement, Sr. Anne Montgomery and Fr. Bill Bichsel, 6 months jail plus 6 months home confinement.

Each of the defendants went right into prison from the courtroom as the spectators sang to them. Outside the courthouse, other activists pledged to confront the Trident in whatever way is necessary to stop the illegal and immoral weapons of mass destruction.

Bill Quigley is part of the legal team supporting the defendants and was in Tacoma for the sentencing. You can learn more about the defendants at disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com.

Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com ICH

Doomsday Is Upon Us: Fukushima The Planet is Fucked

Is Fukushima About To Blow?

By Mike Whitney

March 28, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- - Conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are deteriorating and the doomsday scenario is beginning to unfold. On Sunday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials reported that the levels of radiation leaking into seawater at the Unit 2 reactor were 100,000 times above normal, and the airborne radiation measured 4-times higher than government limits. As a result, emergency workers were evacuated from the plant and rushed to safe location. The prospect of a full-core meltdown or an environmental catastrophe of incalculable magnitude now looms larger than ever. The crisis is getting worse.




If spent fuel rods catch fire from lack of coolant, the intense heat will lift radiation plumes high into the atmosphere that will drift around the world. That's the nightmare scenario, clouds of radioactive material showering the planet with lethal toxins for months on end. And, according to the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of Vienna, that deadly process has already begun. The group told New Scientist that:

"Japan's damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl. ("New Scientist", March 24 ---thanks to Michael Collins "They said it wasn't like Chernobyl and they were wrong")

So, volatile radioactive elements are already being lofted into the jet stream and spread across continents. What's different here is that the quantities are much larger than they were at Chernobyl, thus, the dangers are far greater. According to the same group of scientists "the Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site" (while) "the Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes." The troubles at one nuclear facility now pose a direct threat to humans and other species everywhere. Is this what Obama meant when he called nuclear power, "Safe and green?"

This from CNN:

"Authorities in Japan raised the prospect Friday of a likely breach in the all-important containment vessel of the No. 3 reactor at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a potentially ominous development in the race to prevent a large-scale release of radiation."

And this from the New York Times:

"A senior nuclear executive who insisted on anonymity but has broad contacts in Japan said that there was a long vertical crack running down the side of the reactor vessel itself. The crack runs down below the water level in the reactor and has been leaking fluids and gases, he said....

“There is a definite, definite crack in the vessel — it’s up and down and it’s large,” he said. “The problem with cracks is they do not get smaller.” (Thanks to Washington's Blog)

The media has switched into full "BP Oil Spill-mode", making every effort to minimize the disaster and to soothe the public with half-truths and disinformation. The goal is to conceal the scale of the catastrophe and protect the nuclear industry. It's another case of profits over people. Still, the truth is available for those who are willing to sift through the lies. Radiation has turned up in the Tokyo water supply, imports of milk, vegetable and fruit from four prefectures in the vicinity of Fukushima have been banned, and the evacuation zone around the plant has widened to an 18 mile radius.

Also, monitors have detected tiny radioactive particles which have spread from the reactor site across the Pacific to North America, the Atlantic and Europe...According to Reuters: "It's only a matter of days before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere," said Andrea Stahl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research."

Here's more from Brian Moench, MD:

"Administration spokespeople continuously claim "no threat" from the radiation reaching the US from Japan, just as they did with oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf. Perhaps we should all whistle "Don't worry, be happy" in unison. A thorough review of the science, however, begs a second opinion.

That the radiation is being released 5,000 miles away isn't as comforting as it seems.... Every day, the jet stream carries pollution from Asian smoke stacks and dust from the Gobi Desert to our West Coast, contributing 10 to 60 percent of the total pollution breathed by Californians, depending on the time of year. Mercury is probably the second most toxic substance known after plutonium. Half the mercury in the atmosphere over the entire US originates in China. It, too, is 5,000 miles away. A week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation." (Washington's Blog)

The smoldering Fukushima hulk is a perpetual death machine poisoning everything around it--sea, sky and soil. Here's a clip from the Collin's article:

"...The soil contamination is really high. Soil found 40 kilometers away.... the levels on the soil were very high—in fact, a thousand times iodine, 4,000 times the cesium standard. And we just got a report from the Kyoto Research Reactor Institute, Dr. Tetsuji Imanaka, that said that—he had to look a little bit more into the sampling of the Japanese government, but depending on how the sampling was done, this level of contamination in the soil could be twice the amount that was compulsory evacuation for Chernobyl. Aileen Mioko Smith, March 24 (thanks to Michael Collins "They said it wasn't like Chernobyl and they were wrong")

Twice as high as Chernobyl already, and the disaster is likely to persist for months to come. Things are getting worse, much worse.

The Japanese government has been downplaying the crisis to make it look like they have matters under control, but it's all a sham. They control nothing. The rescue mission has been a flop from the get-go and now things are at a boiling point. The emergency effort has been overtaken by events and now it's a matter of "wait and see". We're approaching zero hour.

So why the cover up? Why is the media trying to soft-peddle the real effects of a nuclear cataclysm? Does the Japanese government really believe they can make things better by tweaking their public relations strategy? They should focus on saving lives and abandon "perception management" altogether. This is from the Union of Concerned Scientists website:

"Our assessment is that the Japanese government is squandering the opportunity to initiate an orderly evacuation from larger areas around the site–especially of sensitive populations, like children and pregnant women. It is potentially wasting valuable time by not undertaking a larger scale evacuation at this time."

The Japanese government is trying to protect the powerful nuclear lobby. The same is true of Obama, who continues to promote nuclear energy even while radiation belches from battered Fukushima. He's not thinking about the public; he's thinking about the deep pocket constituents who fill his campaign coffers.

Japanese workers are putting their lives on the line to regain control of the broken facility, but with little success. The probability of another fire, another monstrous explosion, or a full-core meltdown increases by the day. The Fukushima fiasco is gaining pace putting tens of thousands of people at risk of thyroid cancer, childhood leukemia and other life-threatening ailments.

On Saturday, Japan's prime minister, Naoto Kan, said the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant was ''serious''. That might be the understatement of the century. ICH

Lord Bless This Defender of Freedom and Keep Him Safe in Your Hands: The Kill Team Photo's

Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. Back in those days, it seemed like he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident.

Before the military found itself short of troops and started accepting every dumbass shitferbrains redneck motherfucker they could lay their hands on, things must have been just dandy in that great big brotherhood of ''protectors of freedom around the world,'' the US Military. (Yesterday's NASCAR invocation at Fontana, and I kid you not.)

So what's the problem here? I guess it must be that those 'moral waivers' that the Pentagon dishes out, they just ain't no guarantee of morality.

Moral waivers must be approved by an officer of the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher and are required when an Army applicant has been found guilty of committing four or more minor offenses such as littering or disorderly conduct - or two to four misdemeanors such as larcency, trespassing, or vandalism.

Applicants who have committed a single felony such as arson, burglary, aggravated assault, breaking and entering, or marijuana possession must also receive a moral waiver to join. Applicants with more than one felony - or with a single conviction for a more serious crime such as homicide, sexual violence, or drug trafficking - are not eligible

homicide, sexual violence, or drug trafficking, they being reserved for after you enlist. (See photo caption 10, after the main link.) But, No Gays Mind You. Not Even If Your The Only Gay In The Village



But hey! lets not worry about standards, as long as the Pentagon gets its cannon fodder, no worries, not even What Happens When The Troops Do Come Home?

And I'm sure you didn't fail but to notice the sweetest of ironies, the star of our show, Morlock, grew up not far from, Missus, lock load and re-load, shoot it if it walks, Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol. Thank you God.

Right so! the story main.

Rolling Stone:

During the first five months of last year, a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan went on a shooting spree, killing at least four unarmed civilians and mutilating several of the corpses. The “kill team” – members of the 5th Stryker Brigade stationed near Kandahar – took scores of photos chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib.

The images – more than 150 of which have been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,” one of the soldiers told Army investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.”

Many of the photos depict explicit images of violent deaths that have yet to be identified by the Pentagon. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.

Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. Back in those days, it seemed like he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident.

Graphic Photo gallery and more.

Confining Manning and Falling Into the Outer Darkness

This is a great and sympathetic article that deals with, among other things, two issues that are close to my heart, the confining of felons in solitary confinement for years on end at Supermax facilities throughout the US, and the other, the shameful treatment of Jose Padilla.

I'm too tired to do this article justice tonight, so I shall keep my prattle to a minimum for the present, but I pray you read the the thing, it is a shocking testimony.

Supermax Prisons are dealt with in the sidebar under the tag, Prison Nation, and Jose Padilla has a dedicated tag.

Confining Manning and Falling Into the Outer Darkness
by: Kieran Manjarrez
23 March 2011


For a brief moment, December’s WikiLeaks scandal caused us to remember the forgotten Private Bradley Manning who was arrested in June 2010 and to this very day languishes in a perpetually lit white box, forbidden virtually all sentient stimulation or social contact.

In February, Manning’s lawyer announced that his client’s condition was “deteriorating” and this past weekend a few small groups gathered to protest the conditions of his confinement. Although the foreign press has reported on Manning’s isolation, the U.S. press has by and large ignored the matter except to report on the firing of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley who had dared to remark to a small academic audience that Manning’s confinement was “counter-productive and stupid.” Crowley’s failure of deference was countermanded by President Obama who stated that the Pentagon had assured him the conditions of Manning’s confinement were “appropriate and meeting our basic standards.”

Spokesmen for the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia, where Manning is being held, pointedly deny that he is denied reading material and state that he is being treated no differently than other so-called high security prisoners. But to those familiar with so-called “supermax” confinements, being used in state and federal facilities since the 1990’s, the denials smack of officially crafted evasions.

The question in reply becomes: how are those other high security prisoners treated? The answer is that for two decades, extreme isolation and depersonalization have been standard and routine features in the American Gulag. The effects of these regimens both on individuals and on constitutional standards of justice are devastating.

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy summarized supermax conditions as follows: “Incarceration at OSP is synonymous with extreme isolation. ... It is fair to say OSP inmates are deprived of almost any environmental or sensory stimuli and of almost all human contact.” (Wilkinson v. Austin (2005) 545 U.S. 209, at p. 214.)

Kennedy’s synopsis merits a pause for actual thought. At least since the days of Aristotle, it has been recognized that Man is both a social and a sentient animal. (Politics, Bk I; De Anima, Bk II; De Sensu, Bk. I.) The essential importance of sense perception was summarized by the scholastic philosophers as, nihil in mente nisi prius in sensu (there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses). If there are no sensory stimuli, there can be nothing in the mind. Thus, the mind of a person confined to a box will ‘self-stimulate’ with what is already lodged in his brain, reacting to and within itself alone -- which is precisely what constitutes being crazy.

Similarly, just as the mind requires sensory stimulation, the human heart requires affection. Again Aristotle had it right when he said that all society was comprised of levels of friendship. A smile, a hand-shake, a pat on the back, an embrace are what anchor us to the reality of secure places within the common good. Without that external anchoring we are left to drift on a sea of doubts, fears, angers and paranoias. Without the love of a parent, wife, child, friend or faithful doggie, the human heart simply atrophies and dies.

This is nothing new. Speaking of ‘rehabilitation’ through isolation, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that uninterrupted solitary confinement “devours the victim incessantly and unmercifully; it does not reform, it kills.” (Du Systeme Penitentiaire Aux Etats-Unis Et De Son Application En France (1833).) Observing New York’s Cherry Hill prison in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote of the “immense torture” of solitary confinement “which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature.” (American Notes (1842) pp. 118-121.)

In re Medley (1890) 134 U.S. 160, Justice Miller reviewed the “very interesting history” of solitary confinement. In the nascent United States, the “experiment” was first tried at the Walnut-Street Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, in 1787. “The peculiarities of this system were the complete isolation of the prisoner... so arranged that he had no direct intercourse with or sight of any human being....” (Id., at p. 168.) However, it was soon discovered that even after a “short” confinement prisoners fell “into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide....” (Ibid.) Similar experiments were tried in England where persons condemned to hang were kept in solitary confinement. But “public sentiment revolted against this severity” and the additional punishment of solitary confinement was repealed. (Ibid.) The clear implication was that the Court agreed but, unfortunately for legal precedent, Medley’s sentence was reversed on other grounds.

Nevertheless, public sentiment in the United States was not that different from England and, for most of the last century, solitary confinement was recognized as a form of severe punishment to be imposed seldom and restricted in duration. That policy began to change in the 1990’s and, with the institution of the National Security State, detention once again became the gateway to insanity.

Prisoners in Guantanamo tried suicides in such numbers that a psychiatric ward had to be constructed. Pictures of inmates in supermax show them just screaming their lungs out in their iso-boxes. Those who wish to inform themselves of the grim and grotesque details can Google. The simple truth is that if sentient sociality is the essence of being a human being, then anything which destroys that essence is a form of killing.

If Justice Kennedy were actually to contemplate what he himself wrote he would know that solitary confinement is an excruciating living death which is more vile, more vicious and more cruel than a death which puts an end to suffering once and for all.

What is being done to Bradley Manning is a terrible, terrible thing. Those who are doing it are a disgrace to the uniform and we who tolerate it are become moral midgets who do not deserve and, in fact, will not long live under the rule of constitutional law.

This is not merely a question of acting ‘humanely’ -- although one is increasingly stressed to think that anything ‘human' can be regarded as decent. Nor is it just a question of individual rights -- America’s perpetual obsession. The sado-barbarism inflicted on Manning is a direct wound on the very organism of our social compact.

With good reason, most of the Bill of Rights is devoted to criminal justice, because the bottom line of any civilization is precisely how it treats the least of its members. The Bill imposes standards of decency, fair play and restraint on investigations before trial, on proceedings during trial and on punishment thereafter.

In this way, the Constitution embodies our determination as to ‘how we will be’ and ‘what we are about.’ It is our political faith; our practice today for the hope of tomorrow.

We know, in the inimitable words of Hobbes, that life is “nasty, brutish and short.” In myriad contexts men have written of the jungle, the outer darkness and the touhou bouhouh. But it is the Word -- and law is nothing but words -- that extracts us from that darkness. The English legal historian, Theodore Plucknett wrote that, “Out of all the confusion and disaster of the middle ages, there arose a uniform cry for law, which should be divine in its origin, supreme in its authority, rendering justly to every man his due.” (Brief History of the Common Law, (1929), T.Plucknett, Cambridge University Press, pg. 59.)

Plucknett was an admirer of the U.S. Constitution which, he said, was a fundamentally medieval document in its conception of law. To put it in medieval terms, the Constitution is our parousion -- the parable which resurrects us from the chaos of unordered appetites and passions. We live within its alabaster walls or we don’t.

Thus considered, the Bill of Rights is not just a guarantee of goodies to individuals; it is a confession amongst ourselves as to the political reality we wish to live and commit ourselves to living. We do this for our sakes because it establishes the kind of creatures we are.

What we are is what we recognize one another to be. Each of us, alone, is nothing but a configuration of flesh and bone, as much a mere thing in the vast cosmos as anything else. It is only in relation to the reactions of other sentient beings (be they humans or animals) that the ‘I’ comes into focus and shape. ‘I’ simply does not exist without ‘You’.

What we recognize amongst one another, most basically, is that everyone one of us is weak and prone to error. As is said of Judgement Day, “And what of me when the just are mercy needing?” And yet everyone one of us hopes to be treated with more than we deserve. In civilized societies, justice always consists in giving man more than is his actual due. In the Anglo-American legal tradition this more is called ‘due process’ and it consists in treating a man fairly and with dignity simply because he is one of us and we are he.

The Bill of Rights is not concerned with benefits but with process: how do we treat ourselves when the going gets rough? Of course, the simple answer is: with consideration and dignity. But the provisions of the Bill of Rights go further and specify what that dignity and consideration require. Because supermax regimes destroy the human mind they necessarily violate constitutional standards at each stage of the justice system.

The cases of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla illustrate the destructive effects of sensory and social deprivation on our Fifth Amendment right against coerced confession, on our Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury trial and on our Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishments. Both cases betoken what is being done to Bradley Manning and illustrate the less than heroic response of the judiciary to what has become a system of institutionalized sadism.

As will be recalled, Lindh was the ‘American Taliban’ who had gone to fight in Afghanistan’s civil war. In October 2001, he became involved in a fire-fight with U.S. troops upon their invasion of that country. Lindh was captured and held in brutally barbaric conditions which can be chalked up to the viscitudes of war. On discovering that he was an American, he was ordered transferred to an on ship brig.

In preparation for his transfer, Marine guards stripped Lindh of his clothes, blindfolded him, bound him with duct tape to a stretcher and placed him in a metal shipping container” without insulation or heat. (Defense Memorandum, United States v. Lindh (E.D.,Va 2002)212 F.Supp.2d 541.) Lindh was denied medical attention to remove a bullet lodged in his leg since the uprising. He was held incommunicado and interrogated by military personnel. Nine days later he was delivered into civilian custody where he was interrogated by the FBI. (Ibid.)

One of the issues at Lindh’s subsequent trial, for aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States, was whether the F.B.I. had given him adequate Miranda warnings prior to eliciting self-incriminating statements. After the district court indicated in chambers that it felt the advisements were adequate, Lindh accepted an offer of 20 years prison.

Miranda has come to occupy a talismanic position in America’s perennial ‘kulturkamp’ (so-called). It is generally viewed as a legal technicality that ‘favors criminals.’ In actuality, the rule is designed to ‘save’ the confession under a tissue of legality on the unsubstantiated assumption that a warning can “balance the playing field” (hear! hear!) in what is otherwise an inherently coercive situation. (Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436, at pp. 458, 467, 468, 478.)

The rule that any in-custody interrogation is “inherently coercive” has its genesis in Bram v. United States (1897) 168 U. S. 532. In that case, Bram was arrested on suspicion of murder. He was stripped naked and brought before the Chief Inspector who recounted in a commanding but avuncular fashion what an eye-witness had said. Bram fatally replied, “he could not have seen me from where he was standing.”

On appeal, the Supreme Court held that Bram’s confession was involuntary and inadmissible because “it must necessarily have been the result of either hope or fear, or both, operating on the mind.” (Id., at p. 563.) The Court relied on English authorities for the rule that “[a] confession can never be received in evidence where the prisoner has been influenced by any threat or promise; for the law cannot measure ... its effect upon the mind of the prisoner...” (id., at p. 543) and “will not suffer a prisoner to be made the deluded instrument of his own conviction” (id., at p. 547).

Subsequent cases tended to obscure the Bram’s radical implications. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936) 297 U.S. 278, the Court invalidated a confession obtained by whipping a Negro as he was repeatedly hung by his neck; and, in Brooks v. Florida (1967) 389 U.S. 413, the Court struck a confession obtained by confining the defendant in a barren cage for two weeks on a daily ration of thin soup and 8 ounces of water. Brown and Brooks fall into the “of course” category and are basically insignificant except as evidence of ongoing official depravity. Bram, on the other hand, points to a pristine and incisive logic: a person in custody is by definition ‘not free’ and if he is ‘not free’ then anything he says or does simply cannot be ‘free and voluntary’. If it is not free and voluntary, then it violates the Fifth Amendment.

We can perhaps wink, nod and make excuses in the average flat-foot situation in order to make use of the golden apple of prosecutorial desire. But it is simply a sham and a fraud to maintain that a Miranda warning can rectify nine days of immobilized confinement, as in Lindh’s case, or nine months of solitary confinement as in Padilla’s. Private Manning’s detention in helpless dependency, stripped of social contact and sensory stimulation, has irreversibly destroyed his our Fifth Amendment promise.

Here we go, Jose Padilla. His treatment makes Manning's look like a stroll in the park.

Padilla’s case also illustrates how solitary confinement hollows out our Sixth Amendment guarantee of a jury trial.

Padilla, an American citizen, was first arrested as a so called ‘material witness’ to an alleged terrorist plot. After one month of being held incommunicado as a material witness, President Bush sought to preclude any legal challenge to his ongoing detention by designating Padilla an ‘enemy combatant’ and having him transferred to a Navy brig.

There, Padilla was subjected to an improved and cleaned up version of Lindh’s detention. His cell measured nine feet by seven feet. There was a toilet and sink. The steel bunk was missing its mattress. He had no pillow, no sheet, clock, calendar, radio, television, telephone calls or visitors. The windows were covered over and meals were slid through a slot in his door.

Padilla was subject to ongoing sleep deprivation. For most of his captivity, he was unaware whether it was day or night, or what time of year or day it was. When he was brought outside for exercise, it was done at night. His disorientation from not seeing the sun was exacerbated by his captors’ practice of turning on extremely bright lights in his cell or imposing complete darkness for durations of twenty-four hours or more. Padilla was routinely put in shackled stress positions for hours at a time. The temperature of his cell was manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time.

Padilla was subjected to exceedingly long interrogation sessions and would be confronted with false information, scenarios, and documents to further disorient him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault him.

Padilla was treated like an it. When taken out of his cell he was subjected to a ritualized routine of impersonal shackling and sensory deprivation by three or more handlers. Without embarrassment the Government allowed a reporter from the New York Times to witness the handling. Deborah Sontag reported:

“Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall.”

It was later revealed that Padilla’s depersonalizing was so total that he was required to sign his name as 'John Doe.' Members of the brig staff told Padilla’s lawyers that he became so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of “a piece of furniture.” We deprived him of his I.

According to psychiatrists who examined him, Padilla toggled between a state of absolute terror and total numbness. In a classic ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, he became distrustful of his own attorneys and identified with the Government. When his lawyers had done a good job of cross examining an FBI agent, Padilla got angry and said that the proceedings had been "unfair to the commander-in chief." Padilla, the psychiatrists concluded, had been “deconstructed and reformed.”



Padilla’s lawyers protested that it was impossible to prepare a defense with a client who had been so deformed. The motion was denied. The court ruled that Padilla could sue the government for emotional distress or whatever but otherwise his case was proceeding to trial. (United States v. Padilla (April, 2007) U.S.D.C. (So.Dist. Florida) No. 04-60001-CR-Cooke.)

More ©Woodchipgazette, 2011

I Don't Know What Justice Looks Like But I'm Sure It Doesn't Look Like This: Waterproof Louisiana

Race and Politics in a Rural Louisiana Town Attract National Attention
by: Jordan Flaherty
24 March 2011

A legal dispute in the rural Louisiana town of Waterproof has attracted the attention of national civil rights organizations and activists. Color Of Change, an online activist group that helped garner national attention for the Jena Six Case,* recently rallied their members in support of Waterproof mayor Bobby Higginbotham, who has been held without bail since May of 2010. Advocates say the town’s mayor and police chief, both African American, were targeted by an entrenched white power structure, including a Parish Sheriff and District Attorney, who were threatened by newly empowered Black political power in the town and are seeking to use the court system to undo an election.

While the mayor and police chief were both found guilty last year, their defenders say the trials have not resolved the conflict. Rachel Conner, a lawyer representing Higginbotham in his appeal, says she has never seen a case with so many flaws. “Essentially, every single thing that you can do to violate someone’s constitutional rights from beginning to end happened in his case,” she says.




The charges and counter charges are difficult to untangle. At the center of the case is a state audit of Waterproof that found irregularities in the town’s record keeping. The Parish District Attorney says the audit shows mayoral corruption. The mayor says the problems pre-date his term, and he had taken steps to correct the issues. The mayor’s opponents claim he stole from the town by illegally increasing his salary. His supporters say he received a raise that was voted on by the town aldermen. The mayor initially faced 44 charges; all but two were dropped before the trial began. Those charges – malfeasance in office and felony theft – were related to the disputed raise and use of the town’s credit card. Miles Jenkins, the police chief, faced charges related to his enforcement of traffic tickets.

The mayor was quickly convicted of both charges but lawyers have raised challenges to the convictions, bringing a number of legal complaints. For example: in a town that is 60% African-American, Mayor Higginbotham had only one Black juror. Higginbotham’s counsel was disqualified by the DA, and the public defender had a conflict of interest, leaving the mayor with no lawyer. Two days before trial began, the DA gave Higginbotham 10 boxes of files related to his case. Higginbotham’s request for an extension to get an attorney and to examine the files was denied.




There’s more: during jury selection, when Higginbotham – forced to act as his own lawyer – tried to strike one juror who had relationships with several of the witnesses, he was told he could not, even though he had challenges remaining. There was also a problem with a sound recorder that the court reporter was using, and as a result there is no transcript at all for at least two witness’ testimony. Finally, during deliberation, the judge gave the jury polling slips that had “guilty” pre-selected, and then later hid the slips.

When Higginbotham was convicted, the judge refused to set bail in any amount. Although a possible sentence for the crime was probation, and despite former mayor’s obvious ties to the community, Higginbotham has spent the last ten months in jail while his lawyers have worked on his appeal. “He’s not a flight risk,” says Conner. “He’s tied to Waterproof and he’s got a vested interest in clearing his name.” more

*Jena Six, now tagged.

South Dakothangers in the News Again + Tales From Nepal

Update below.

Women Seeking Abortions in South Dakota to (must) Get Anti-Abortion Advice

The sign out front advertises free pregnancy tests, information about abortion and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. But it is not an abortion clinic — it is home to the Alpha Center, an organization in Sioux Falls, S.D., dedicated to encouraging women to bring their babies to term.

A law signed by Gov. Dennis Daugaard on Tuesday makes the state the first to require women who are seeking abortions to first attend a consultation at such “pregnancy help centers,” to learn what assistance is available “to help the mother keep and care for her child.”

The legislation, which passed easily in a state Legislature where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 3 to 1, also establishes the nation’s longest waiting period — three days — after an initial visit with an abortion provider before the procedure can be done. It makes exceptions for medical emergencies, but not for rape or incest.....

.....Peggy Gibson, a Democratic state representative who voted against the measure, said the law amounted to “government intrusion into people’s medical decisions.”

“South Dakota women should not need to submit to an in-person lecture from an unqualified, noncertified, faith-based counselor or volunteer at an anti-choice crisis pregnancy center,” Ms. Gibson said.

“They’re not licensed, they’re not regulated, they’re not accredited and they’re openly ideological,” Ms. Stoesz said. more NYT

I hummed and arred over running with this next story, finally passing it over to a colleague. In light of the above, I have to go with it now. Check out yer man's attitude towards women in the clip. I think he might be from South Dakota.

Centuries-Old Nepal Banishment Ritual Endangers Girls and Women


The centuries old practice of chhaupadi in Nepal can cause prolonged depression in girls and women. In extreme cases it can also cause death.

Chhaupadi pratha, or ritual practice, places Nepali women and girls in a limbo of isolation. In history it is a practice that has been largely accepted. The word chhaupadi, translates in the Achham local Raute dialect as ‘chhau’ which means menstruation and ‘padi’ – woman.

Today the ritual of banishment surrounding chhaupadi still affects girls and women on all levels of Nepali society.

This dangerous practice also isolates woman during and after childbirth as they are banished for up to eleven days away from family members, causing critical danger and increasing complications that can, and do, lead to maternal and child mortality due to the possibility of excessive bleeding and asepsis following labour.

A chhaupadi shed or hut, also called chhaupadi goth, is a rudimentary stone, grass or stick shelter. Most shelters, many which are also commonly used as cow or goat sheds, have dirt floors and no windows. Many sheds have no water. Habitation by humans in these sheds can create dangerous situations as structures can reach below freezing temperatures in the winter and sweltering temperatures in the summer.

The January 2010 death of forty year old Belu Damai is a case in point. Damai was found dead on January 3rd in a chhaupadi (menstrual) shed in Bhairabsthan (VDC-8) in Nepal’s remote western district of Achham.

Damai’s death was part of a larger event. Cold temperatures in Northern India, Nepal and Bangladesh caused the death of over 165 people in the South Asia region from January 3rd through January 6th. Those who were the most vulnerable were those suffering from severe poverty. more

Update here.

The Planet is Fucked: US Nuclear Waste Edition

Just chuck her in that pond over there, she'll be right mate.

And a question if I may? Is Barack Obama's primary job, President of the United States, or shill and enabler for the nuke industry?

Some scary numbers here along with some equally scary attitudes.

U.S. storage sites overfilled with spent nuclear fuel
71,862 tons, with more created every year, and no permanent disposal solution

By JONATHAN FAHEY, RAY HENRY
The Associated Press
22 March 2011

The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States — the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.

The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.

Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.

Spent fuel at Dai-ichi overheated, possibly melting fuel-rod casings and spewing radiation into the air, after Japan's tsunami knocked out power to cooling systems at the plant.

The rest of the spent fuel from commercial U.S. reactors has been put into dry cask storage, but regulators only envision those as a solution for about a century and the waste would eventually have to be deposited into a Yucca-like facility.

The U.S. nuclear industry says the waste is being stored safely at power-plant sites, though it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility. Meanwhile, the industry's collective pile of waste is growing by about 2,200 tons a year; experts say some of the pools in the United States contain four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.

The AP analyzed a state-by-state summary of spent fuel data based on information that nuclear power plants voluntarily report every year to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. The NEI would not make available the amount of spent fuel at individual power plants.

While the U.S. Department of Energy previously reported figures on overall spent fuel storage, it no longer has updated information available. A spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear power plant safety, said the agency was still searching for a compilation of spent fuel data.

The U.S. has 104 operating nuclear reactors, situated on 65 sites in 31 states. There are another 15 permanently shut reactors that also house spent fuel.

Four states have spent fuel even though they don't have operating commercial plants. Reactors in Colorado, Oregon and Maine are permanently shut; spent fuel from all three is stored in dry casks. Idaho never had a commercial reactor, but waste from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania is being stored at a federal facility there.

Illinois has 9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country, according to industry figures. It is followed by Pennsylvania with 6,446 tons; 4,290 in South Carolina and roughly 3,780 tons each for New York and North Carolina.

Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency. The rest, about 4 percent, is a cocktail of byproducts of fission that break down over much shorter time periods, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, which break down completely in about 300 years.

How dangerous these elements are depends on how easily can find their way into the body. Plutonium and uranium are heavy, and don't spread through the air well, but there is a concern that plutonium could leach into water supplies over thousands of years.

Cesium-137 is easily transported by air. It is cesium-137 that can still be detected in a New Jersey-sized patch of land around the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in the Ukraine in 1986.

Typically, waste must sit in pools at least five years before being moved to a cask or permanent storage, but much of the material in the pools of U.S. plants has been stored there far longer than that.

Safety advocates have long urged the NRC to force utility operators to reduce the amount of spent fuel in their pools. The more tightly packed they are, the more quickly they can overheat and spew radiation into the environment in case of an accident, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Industry leaders say new technology has made fuel pools safer, and regulators have taken some steps since the 9/11 terror attacks to reduce fuel pool risks. Kevin Crowley, who directs the nuclear and radiation studies board at the National Academy of Sciences, says lessons will be learned from the crisis in Japan. And NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko says his agency will review how spent fuel is stored in the U.S.

A 2004 report by the academy suggested that fresh spent fuel, which is radioactively hotter, be spread among older, cooler assemblies in the spent fuel pool. "You're buying yourself time, basically," says Crowley. "The cooler ones can act as a thermal buffer."

First Energy, which runs two nuclear power stations in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, was able to reconfigure the spent fuel rods in its pools to make more room. Still, the company is now running out of space, says spokesman Todd Schneider. Ohio has 1,136 tons of spent fuel in pools and 37 tons in dry casks.

The casks in the U.S. are kept outdoors, generally on concrete pads, but industry officials insist they are safe. Unlike the pools, the casks don't need electricity; they are cooled by air circulation.

One cask model, selling for $1.5 million, places spent fuel inside a stainless steel canister, which is placed inside an "overpack" — an outside shell composed of a layer of carbon steel, 27 inches of concrete and another layer of carbon steel. When in place, the system stands 20 feet tall and weighs 190,000 pounds, said Joy Russell, said spokeswoman for manufacturer Holtec International of Florida.

Russell said engineers have designed the system to withstand a crash from an F-16 fighter jet and survive the resulting jet fuel fire.

Plant operators in some states have moved aggressively to dry cask storage. Virginia has 1,533 tons of nuclear waste in dry storage and 1,105 tons in spent fuel pools. Maryland has 844 tons in dry storage and 588 tons in spent fuel pools.

Utilities in Texas, though, have not. There are 2,178 tons kept in spent fuel pools at reactor sites there, and zero in dry casks. In New York, 3,345 tons are in spent fuel pools while only 454 tons are in dry storage.

No cask is totally invulnerable, but the academy report found that radioactive releases from casks would be relatively low.

"If you attacked a fuel cask and managed to put a hole in it, anything that came out, the consequences would be very local," Crowley said.

Casks can be licensed for 20 years, with renewals, said Carrie Phillips, spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Southern Co., which has a dozen such casks at its two-reactor Joseph M. Farley plant near Columbia, Ala. She said officials have "every expectation" the casks could last "in excess of 100 years by design."

But not the needed tens of thousands of years. For long-term storage, the government had looked to Yucca Mountain. It was designed to hold 77,160 tons — 69,444 tons designated for commercial waste and 7,716 for military waste. That means the current inventory already exceeds Yucca's original planned capacity.

The Simpsons Great Gig, the real thing below.

A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.

The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it. Nevadans have fiercely opposed Yucca Mountain, though a collection of state governments and others are taking legal action to reverse the decision.

Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power. He created a commission last year to come up with a long-term nuclear waste plan. Initial findings are expected this summer, with a final plan expected in January.

"They are 13 years late," says Terry Pickens, Director of Nuclear Policy at Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that operates three reactors in Minnesota. Xcel is building steel-and-concrete cask containers to hold old waste on site, and suing the government periodically to pay for them. "We would like them to get done with what they said they would get done."

Some countries — such as France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom — reprocess their spent fuel into new nuclear fuel to help reduce the amount of waste.

The remaining waste is solidified into a glass. It needs to be stored in a long-term waste repository, but reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by three-quarters.

Because reprocessing isolates plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear weapon, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter put a stop to it in the U.S. The ban was later overturned, but the country still does not reprocess.

France produces 1,300 tons of nuclear waste per year, and reprocesses 940 tons. Still, fuel is only reprocessed once and then it, too, needs to be stored. France is expecting that engineers will eventually succeed in building a new type of nuclear reactor called a fast reactor that will use the waste it can't reprocess as fuel.

"They've kicked the can down the road," says Frank von Hippel, a director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Other countries, such as Germany, store spent fuel in casks. Finland is building a repository it says will store waste safely for 100,000 years.

Even though there is no long-term storage in the U.S., utility customers and taxpayers have been paying for it — twice.

Customers have paid $24 billion into a fund Congress established in 1982 to pay for such storage. The charge — a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours — would typically add up to about $11 a year for a household that received all its electricity from nuclear plants.

Users pay as taxpayers, too — for dry storage. Utilities that have run out of storage space in pools successfully sued the federal government for breach of contract, because it failed to keep to the 1998 deadline to establish long-term storage. By law, the money for dry casks cannot come from the nuclear waste fund, and must come from the federal budget. msnbc

The all time greatest bit of wailing, performed by the sexiest creature ever to slip on a little black number.

Radioactive Discharge: Japan an Enduring Legacy. Sellafield Report and Chernobyl Twenty Years On

A few unpalatable facts and figures about the consequences and health hazards resulting from radioactive discharge from the damaged nuclear installations at Fukushima.

Twenty years after Chernobyl (2006) 374 UK hill farms were still operating under restrictions and produce banned from entering the food chain.

A 2009 report, Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe. Makes grim reading indeed.

Radiation: Nothing to See Here?
by: Brian Moench, MD
24 March 2011

Administration spokespeople continuously claim "no threat" from the radiation reaching the US from Japan, just as they did with oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf. Perhaps we should all whistle "Don't worry, be happy" in unison. A thorough review of the science, however, begs a second opinion.

That the radiation is being released 5,000 miles away isn't as comforting as it seems. The Japanese reactors hold about 1,000 times more radiation than the bombs dropped over Hiroshima.(1) Every day, the jet stream carries pollution from Asian smoke stacks and dust from the Gobi Desert to our West Coast, contributing 10 to 60 percent of the total pollution breathed by Californians, depending on the time of year. Mercury is probably the second most toxic substance known after plutonium. Half the mercury in the atmosphere over the entire US originates in China. It, too, is 5,000 miles away. A week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation.(2)

The idea that a threshold exists or there is a safe level of radiation for human exposure began unraveling in the 1950s when research showed one pelvic x-ray in a pregnant woman could double the rate of childhood leukemia in an exposed baby.(3) Furthermore, the risk was ten times higher if it occurred in the first three months of pregnancy than near the end. This became the stepping-stone to the understanding that the timing of exposure was even more critical than the dose. The earlier in embryonic development it occurred, the greater the risk.

A new medical concept has emerged, increasingly supported by the latest research, called "fetal origins of disease," that centers on the evidence that a multitude of chronic diseases, including cancer, often have their origins in the first few weeks after conception by environmental insults disturbing normal embryonic development. It is now established medical advice that pregnant women should avoid any exposure to x-rays, medicines or chemicals when not absolutely necessary, no matter how small the dose, especially in the first three months. more truthout

- - -

This report, is, as I mentioned earlier, twenty years after the event.

UK sheep above radioactive safety limits due to Chernobyl
12-Apr-2006

The radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident means sheep at 374 farms in the UK are still restricted from entering the food chain.

The UK's food regulator yesterday published three reports showing that sheep at the farms in Cumbria, Scotland and Wales still contain levels of radioactivity above safety limits.



The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is responsible for ensuring food safety by preventing products with unacceptable levels of radioactivity from entering the supply chain.

In 1986, an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what is now the Ukraine released large quantities of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Some of the radioactivity, predominantly radiocaesium-137, was deposited in some upland areas of the UK, where sheep farming is the primary land-use.

Due to the particular chemical and physical properties of the peaty soil types present in the areas, the radiocaesium is still able to pass easily from soil to grass. The radiocaesium then accumulates in the sheep that feeds on the grass.

The FSA has used the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985 (FEPA) since 1986 to impose restrictions on the movement and sale of sheep exceeding the limit in certain parts of Cumbria, North Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Only sheep that have less than the maximum limit of 1,000 becquerels (a measure of radioactivity) per kilogram of radiocaesium are allowed to enter the food chain under the emergency orders in the FEPA.

Initially the restricted areas were large, but have been reduced substantially as levels of radioactivity have fallen. All restrictions were lifted in Northern Ireland in 2000, the FSA stated.

In 1986, almost 9000 farms were under these restrictions in the UK. Since then, the levels of radioactivity have fallen in some of the affected areas and the number of farms still under restriction in Cumbria, Scotland and Wales now stands at 374.

A management system known as the "mark and release: scheme operates in the restricted areas. Under this scheme, a farmer wishing to move sheep out of a restricted area can have them monitored to determine the level of radiocaesium.

Any sheep that exceed the working action level are marked with a dye and are not released from restrictions. Those that pass are allowed to enter the foodchain.

Based on a new survey results, the reports propose that none of the farms still under restriction in Cumbria and Wales should have their restrictions lifted in the near future. In Scotland, the results led to one farm being released from restrictions in January 2006.

The FSA plans further surveys so farms can be released from restrictions when the levels of radioactivity in sheep are within safety limits. foodproductiondaily

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Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe
19 April 2009

Last week the government announced plans for a new generation of nuclear plants. But Britain is still dealing with the legacy of its first atomic installation at Sellafield - a toxic waste dump in one of the most contaminated buildings in Europe. As a multi-billion-pound clean-up is planned, can we avoid making the same mistakes again?

Building B30 is a large, stained, concrete edifice that stands at the centre of Sellafield, Britain's sprawling nuclear processing plant in Cumbria. Surrounded by a three-metre-high fence that is topped with razor wire, encased in scaffolding and riddled with a maze of sagging pipes and cabling, it would never be a contender to win an architectural prize.

Yet B30 has a powerful claim to fame, albeit a disturbing one. "It is the most hazardous industrial building in western Europe," according to George Beveridge, Sellafield's deputy managing director.

Nor is it hard to understand why the building possesses such a fearsome reputation. Piles of old nuclear reactor parts and decaying fuel rods, much of them of unknown provenance and age, line the murky, radioactive waters of the cooling pond in the centre of B30. Down there, pieces of contaminated metal have dissolved into sludge that emits heavy and potentially lethal doses of radiation.

It is an unsettling place, though B30 is certainly not unique. There is Building B38 next door, for example. "That's the second most hazardous industrial building in Europe," said Beveridge. Here highly radioactive cladding from reactor fuel rods is stored, also under water. And again, engineers have only a vague idea what else has been dumped in its cooling pond and left to disintegrate for the past few decades.

During the miners' strike of 1972, the nation's nuclear plants were run at full stretch in order to supply electricity to a beleaguered nation. As a result, it proved impossible to process all the waste that was being generated. Cladding and fuel were simply thrown into B38's cooling ponds and left to disintegrate.

But the building, like so many other elderly edifices at Sellafield, is crumbling and engineers now face the headache of dealing with its lethal contents.

This, then, is the dark heart of Sellafield, a place where engineers and scientists are only now confronting the legacy of Britain's postwar atomic aspirations and the toxic wasteland that has been created on the Cumbrian coast. Engineers estimate that it could cost the nation up to £50bn to clean this up over the next 100 years.

The figure is, by far, the largest part of the £73bn that has been committed to cleaning up Britain's nuclear-polluted past. It is also an acute embarrassment to the government, which is now anxiously promoting nuclear power as the solution to Britain's energy problems.

Last week ministers revealed a list of 11 sites for new nuclear plants around Britain. Atomic power will be the nation's salvation as it battles global warming and seeks to cut its carbon emissions, they insisted.

But the condition of edifices such as B30 and B38 - and all the other "legacy" structures built at Sellafield decades ago - suggest Britain might end up paying a heavy price for this new commitment to nuclear energy. After all, if it is going to cost that much to decommission early reactors, green groups and opponents of nuclear energy are asking, what might we end up paying for a second clean-up if we go ahead with new nuclear plants?

For its part, the nuclear industry is adamant. New reactors will produce little waste and pose few threats to the environment, say UK nuclear chiefs who point to the example of France where almost 80% of electricity is generated by atomic fission and waste is safely reprocessed. Atomic energy today is safe and

Sellafield's problems are merely a historic accident - the result of Britain's desperation to be a leading postwar power, they say.

The disused plutonium reactors at Sellafield are a 'slow-motion Chernobyl', according to Greenpeace campaigners against nuclear energy.

But it will be a tricky job convincing the public that modern nuclear plants are the answer to Britain's energy worries, given that there are buildings in Sellafield filled with "appalling radioactive crap", as one senior nuclear physicist put it, and which will cost tens of billions of pounds to clean up.

"It is going to be a very difficult business," admitted Dr Paul Howarth, executive director of Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University. "The taxpayer now has to pay around £1.5bn a year to clean up Sellafield's waste problems and will have to maintain that investment for years to come.

"That is a very large financial commitment. Nevertheless it would be wrong to dismiss nuclear energy out of hand. Modern reactors are indeed very different creations compared to the first reactors that were built at Sellafield in the 1940s and 1950s. New ones produce relatively little waste, will be easy to decommission and are intrinsically clean and safe. Convincing the public of these points will not be easy, however."

A former second world war ordnance factory, Sellafield was chosen to be the site for Britain's first atomic reactors - known as Pile 1 and Pile 2. These were not built to generate electricity, but to produce plutonium for the nation's independent nuclear deterrent. Construction was carried out at breakneck speed as political leaders pressed scientists to complete the project quickly.

As a result of these efforts, Britain was able to explode its own atomic bombs by 1952. The UK became a nuclear power and won itself a permanent seat on the UN security council, thanks to its nuclear engineers and scientists.

But success came at an appalling price. Those scientists had no time to think about the waste produced by their atomic bomb programme, a point starkly demonstrated by another Sellafield legacy building, B41. It still stores the aluminium cladding for the uranium fuel rods that were burnt inside Piles 1 and 2. That aluminium posed serious disposal problems when it was removed, in a highly radioactive state, from the two reactors as their fuel was decommissioned and their plutonium extracted.

So scientists hit on what seemed to be an ingenious solution: they would dump it in a silo. "If you drive across the plains of North America, you see these isolated grain silos where farmers store their grain," says Beveridge. "And that, essentially, is what B41 is - a grain silo."

Nuclear waste was tipped in at the top of B41 once it was erected and then allowed to fall to the bottom. Later, when it was realised that pieces of aluminium and magnesium among this waste could catch fire and cause widespread contamination, inert argon gas had to be pumped in to smother potential blazes. And so, for the past 60 years, building B41 has remained in this state, its highly radioactive contents mingling and reacting with each other. Now engineers have been told to clear it up.

They do, fortunately, have a plan. In a few years, vast metal-cutting machines will be brought into Sellafield and used to slice into the sides of the B41 silo before mechanical grabs pull out and sort through its contents. Then this radioactive debris will be mixed with liquid glass and allowed to solidify, a process known as vitrification, before it is kept for subsequent storage in underground vaults. Isolating this material will be immensely difficult, however: B41 will have to be covered and sealed to ensure no leakage of radioactive material. At the same time, the giant cutting machines employed to slice open the silo will have to negotiate the treacherous, tight concourses that separate Sellafield's different buildings. These are lined with cabling, ducts and, most worrying of all, elevated pipes, called pipe-bridges, that carry radioactive liquid waste around the site. Damaging or opening up one of these could have disastrous consequences.

Hence the care taken by engineers as they prepare their plans for B41 while their colleagues continue their work at the silo's sister plant, B29, where decommissioning work has already begun.

In effect, B29 is simply a huge covered cooling pond that once stretched between the heat stacks of Piles 1 and 2.

Fuel rods were removed from these two reactors, moved into the cooling pond of B29 and split open. Most of this material was removed for reprocessing but several tonnes of waste and old fuel still lies below the pond's thick milky waters and it is the task of Steve Topping, leader of the building's decommissioning team, to ensure that this is extracted and safely stored.

Calm, with greying hair, Topping has a reassuringly confident air about his work despite the fact he has to deal with tonnes of nuclear waste and old oxide fuel whose exact composition and location is unknown. "The trouble is there is no one left at Sellafield to tell us where things were put down there. The stuff in the pond has been down there for 50 years," says Topping.

Today B29 is showing its age and looks more like a dirty old dock than a pool with its crumbling grey concrete, grimy brickwork and old ducts and sections of corroding pipes. The water is filled with green algae and has the clarity of Milk of Magnesia, which defies all efforts to see what lies beneath.

To clean it up, robot machines will soon begin to split open the submerged skips in which old waste and fuel from Piles 1 and 2 are stored. The radioactive sludge at the bottom of the pool will then be pumped into a new tank that is now under construction beside B29. Then the internal linings of its walls will be scraped clean of radioactivity before the edifice is taken down, concrete section by concrete section. At the same time, the most dangerous waste will be vitrified ready for disposal.

The whole process will take at least 10 years to complete - and that is just for a single building. On top of the dismantling of B29 and B41, in which the waste from Britain's atom bomb programme is stored, there are the headaches that will be involved when dealing with the contents of B30 and B38.

These hold the leftovers from the nation's first civil reactor programme, a series of reactors known as Magnox plants. Eleven of these were built and two are still in operation. Piles of the waste they have generated is to be found around Sellafield awaiting the attention of engineers like Topping, who has spent his working life at the site.

"Sometimes I think this is the best job in the world," he said. "There are real skills needed to dismantle buildings like these. Every action has to be carefully planned. I love being among it all. On other days, though, it is really frustrating work. Everything has to be done in such a slow, safe and controlled manner."

The key problem for Sellafield is that so much of its highly radioactive waste has been stored in water. This was done to cool fuel rods and cladding as they emerged from reactors heated to hundreds of degrees celsius. But once in water, they disintegrated and immediately posed a hazard in case a pond wall became breached.

And that is why Sellafield is now undergoing its massively expensive clean-up. Those pond walls are getting old and their contents - forgotten by politicians for half a century - must be turned into solid waste that can be contained safely and buried once Britain has finally decided on the location of a deep underground repository.

"We are delivering the largest environmental restoration programme in Europe and making safe and disposing of some of the most hazardous material anywhere in the world, much of which originates from early nuclear research and military projects," says Richard Waite, acting chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. "At the same time we are providing essential services to enable current nuclear sites to 'keep the lights on'."

Nuclear opponents have less complimentary views about what goes on at Sellafield, of course. The place is "a slow-motion Chernobyl", according to campaigners from Greenpeace, a group which has a reputation for never missing out on the catchy phrase.

Nevertheless, Greenpeace has a point. Many of Sellafield's buildings are, essentially, no more than containers of highly radioactive scrap whose disposal is set to devour tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

The site has become the biggest, and mostly easily waved, stick in the armoury of the green movement. As one senior employee admitted: "If you want to object to anything nuclear, you just have to point to Sellafield."

In fact, Sellafield is a classic illustration of the failure of British industry. We were pioneers of nuclear power but in our desire to build our own atomic weapons, failed abysmally when it came to developing and managing our own civil reactors and reprocessing plants.

As a result, we have been left with a multibillion-pound clean-up bill and the prospect of buying either American or French reactors for our next generation nuclear plants. The lesson of Sellafield is not so much that nuclear power is dangerous but that Britain seems incapable of implementing any long-term engineering plan that comes its way, from high-speed trains to wind turbines or rocket launchers.
Gruniad

Inside The Nuclear Exclusion Zone. Chernobyl big site

One Step Two Steps Nearer The Edge

Rights Are Curtailed for Terror Suspects

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

The move is one of the Obama administration's most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

The Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights. more WSJ

Power to strip search passengers claimed by Feds

In a breathtaking statement delivered in an official court proceeding, the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims authority to strip search every airline passenger; and to begin such a practice without even soliciting comment from the public.

This outrageous statement recently was delivered to the American people by a DHS lawyer in arguments before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considering a challenge to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) nude body scanner devices. The suit was brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Currently TSA, which is a component of DHS, claims authority to subject passengers to either an intrusive hand searches or to x-ray scans that reveal a nude image of the passengers’ bodies. Many, including this author and EPIC, consider such searches unconstitutional as violative of the the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches, because they are being conducted without any suspicion at all that such passengers are attempting to bring weapons or explosives on board commercial aircraft.

The U.S. House is scheduled to open hearings today on TSA searches and authorities.

Most observers expect the D.C. Appeals Court to uphold TSA’s current practices. This would leave only the Congress to put a stop to these outrageous, privacy-invasive and unconstitutional searches by the federal government. If TSA and DHS are permitted to continue unchecked, then truly the Fourth Amerndment will have been gutted; and with it, the single most important and effective check on government power enjoyed by the American People for over two centuries.

by Bob Barr — The Barr Code