05/12/2011

Bin Laden Furor: It’s All Theater

The UK Guardian ran a story Monday about a secret deal between the US and Pakistan, reached in 2001, shortly after Osama bin Laden gave our troops the slip at Tora Bora. (Heckuva job, Rummy!)

According to active and retired officials from both nations, if the US got a shot at bin Laden, they were authorized to make a unilateral strike inside Pakistani territory. The Pakistanis, in return, would scream and holler about it for the consumption of the Pakistani public, but really they had no problems with it. The pact was renewed in 2008, when Pakistan transitioned to a civilian-led government.

It’s interesting, because it describes exactly what happened when the US figured out where bin Laden was hiding. We took him out and Pakistan screamed and hollered. The US press, which has not picked up on the Guardian piece, has spilled several barrels of ink describing the myriad ins and outs of US-Pakistani relations and how the bin Laden raid may or may not affect them. How about this for a headline: “Bin Laden Furor: It’s All Theater”?

We know that. (By “we,” I mean you, the people who continue to read these depressing commentaries and me.) We’re jaded. We expect our government’s activities – foreign policy especially – to be theater.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, September 11th | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
05/05/2011

Thousands and Ten Thousands

I have a friend who came back from serving in Vietnam 40 years ago. Shortly thereafter, his father, who owned a liquor store, was shot and killed during a robbery. The killer was African American. My friend’s family is white.

“I used that for a long time,” he told me. “I’d say, ‘It’s OK for me to hate black people, because a black guy killed my dad,’ but really, I was racist. I was racist before the guy killed my dad and I was racist after. The only difference was that I had an excuse.”

For some reason, that conversation – which is two decades old itself – has been rolling around in my head since I saw the news of Osama bin Laden’s death Monday morning. When I read the news, I felt relieved. I did not feel glad. I did not run out into the street and dance.

Is it good Osama is dead? It’s clearly good he will no longer kill and given it’s extremely unlikely he was ever going to have a change of heart, his death is also expedient.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
04/28/2011

Stop Making Sense

Yesterdays’ Wall Street Journal carried an op-ed attacking Barack Obama for a draft executive order which would require businesses contracting with the federal government to disclose their owners’ political contributions over $5,000.

One of the authors is John Yoo, who famously wrote memos authorizing torture for the Bush administration. So, on one hand, Mr. Yoo thinks a president should not have authority to investigate if there’s even the appearance of a quid pro quo in federal contracting. On the other, in 2005, Mr. Yoo said the president should have the authority to crush a child’s testicles in front of the child’s father as a means of torturing the father to gain information.

I have a rule about never engaging in personal invective in this space. John Yoo has always been the toughest test of that rule. He does, however, illustrate the guiding principle of the Republican Party: We want what we want and we don’t care how we get it.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)
04/21/2011

Let’s Have At It

Entergy, the Louisiana-based company that owns Vermont Yankee, announced Monday it will sue the state of Vermont in federal court, asking for a judgement to allow the nuclear plant to continue operating past March 21, 2012, the day its certificate of public good (CPG – a.k.a. state operating permit) expires.

The company held a “conference call” in which a PR suit with a South African accent (always a nice touch) announced Richard Smith, a management suit (with a vaguely southern accent) would make “remarks” but would not answer questions, “because today’s subject matter is now in litigation.” Always on the high road, these people. (How is a one-way transmission a “conference”?)

Last month, ten days after the tsunami that touched off the Fukushima catastrophe, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), issued Vermont Yankee a 20-year extension of its federal operating license, despite knowing Vermont Yankee is of the same flawed design as the reactors at Fukushima and despite the fact that its spent fuel pool (50 feet off the ground) is jammed with highly radioactive waste, far beyond its design capacity.

Everyone expected Entergy to file suit. Mr. Smith said doing so was Entergy’s “least favored approach,” but was the “appropriate and responsible” thing to do. From my experience with Entergy, these people wouldn’t know “appropriate and responsible” if they ran up and bit them in the leg.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
04/14/2011

About That Time

Skies are gray; temperatures are in the 40s. We had the first big downpour (liquid) in Burlington Sunday evening. I stood on the porch and watched the rain. Twigs on the crabapple trees glistened in the streetlights. It’s rare, I realized to see rain come down with no leaves on the trees.

It’s not exactly spring, more like winter’s appendix. Mud season. People find it depressing, but I don’t. I grew up in the eastern Great Lakes, so this is normal for me. I find it nostalgic; the way some people find autumn. The snow is gone (at least down here by the lake) and the brown grass is turning green.

The croci are up and a few warm days brought buds to the lilacs. Then it turned cool again and the budding stopped. They remain suspended, little green tips, neither dying nor growing further, like startled deer unable to decide whether or not to bolt.

The days were warm last weekend, so I put up the clothesline and we hung out some wash. That felt like spring. I still have to take the snow tires off the car and replace the storm windows with screens, but not just yet. I did put the snow shovels in the shed, tempting the winter gods. So far so good, though.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
04/11/2011

Tomorrow’s News Today

Since the beginning of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, the one source that has had the news before any major outlet reported it has been Fairewinds Associates of Burlington, Vermont.

Fairewind’s principal – nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen – has posted a series of video updates, explaining what is happening inside the crippled reactors and what we can expect next. The news is not encouraging, but there is some small comfort in getting straight answers.

See his updates here.

By floegel | Posted in Asides, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , | Comments (0)
04/07/2011

Burned by Water

The northeast coast of Japan was shaken by another earthquake today – 7.4 on the Richter scale this time. In Washington, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) is arguing with bureaucrats at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about whether fuel in one of Fukushima’s reactors has breached the containment vessel. Just another day in the 21st century, I suppose.

I know, rationally, the world doesn’t work like this, but in an odd sense, I’m looking forward to the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The irrational part of my brain thinks, “Maybe we’ll wake on September 12th and things will stop being so strange, that this decade of global chaos will end.”

This train of thought started last week, when I realized I was startled about not being startled. I was reading about the workers who were hospitalized after standing in highly irradiated water. They received radiation burns on their legs.

Interesting, but no big deal, right? “Burned by water,” however, just lodged in my head and I found myself muttering it over and over. It slowly surfaced in my brain that what was once absurd is now commonplace.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Global Warming, Iraq Invasion, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)