On Orwellian Control & Public Denial
No Mystery to 50 Years of US
Nat’l Security State Assassinations
The Hope In Confronting The Unspeakable
In the Assassination of President Kennedy
by Jim Douglass
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For at least a decade, JFK’s
favorite poem had been “Rendezvous,” a
celebration of death. Rendezvous was by Alan Seeger, an
American poet killed in World War One. With the same
background as Kennedy: from Harvard, volunteering for the
war. The poem was Seeger’s affirmation of his own
anticipated death.
The
refrain of Rendezvous, “I have a rendezvous with
Death,” articulated John Kennedy’s deep sense of his
own mortality. Kennedy had experienced a continuous rendezvous
with death in anticipation of his actual death: from the deaths
of his PT boat crew members, from drifting alone in the dark
waters of the Pacific Ocean, from the early deaths of his brother
Joe and sister Kathleen, and from the recurring near-death
experiences of his almost constant illnesses.
He
recited Rendezvous to his wife, Jacqueline, in 1953
on their first night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon.
She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the
years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the
poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline.
I
have thought many times about what took place in the
White House Rose Garden one fall day in 1963.
On the morning of October 5, President Kennedy met with his
National Security Council. It was a beautiful day so
they went outside. Caroline suddenly appeared at her
father’s side. She said she wanted to tell him something.
He tried to divert her attention so that the meeting could
continue. He told her to go over across the lawn where her
mother was riding a horse.
Caroline
kept tugging at his coat
and persisted. So the president smiled and he turned
his full attention to his daughter like he would to anybody
he was speaking with which is what people always said –
he gave you his total attention. And he said, ‘Go
ahead. What do you want?’ While the members of the
National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked
into her father’s eyes and she said:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air –
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath –
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
After
Caroline said the poem’s final
word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security
advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them said later the bond
between father and daughter was so deep “it was as if there
was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach
her.”
JFK
had heard his own acceptance of death from the lips of his
daughter. While surrounded by a National Security Council that
opposed his breakthrough to peace, the president once again
deepened his pledge not to fail that rendezvous. If God had a
place for him, he believed that he was ready.
So
how can the why of his murder give us hope?
Where do we find hope when a peacemaking president is
assassinated by his own national security state? How do we
get hope from that?
The
why of the event that brings us together tonight encircles
the earth . . . Because John Kennedy chose peace on earth at the
height of the Cold War, he was executed. But because he turned
toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity
is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful. Especially if we
understand what he went through and what he has given to us as
his vision.
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At
a certain point in his presidency, John Kennedy turned a
corner and he didn’t look back. I believe that decisive
turn toward his final purpose in life, resulting in his death,
happened in the darkness of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although
Kennedy was already in conflict with his national security
managers, the missile crisis was the breaking point.
At
that most critical moment for us all, he turned from any
remaining control that his security managers had over him
toward a deeper ethic, a deeper vision in which the fate of
the earth became his priority. Without losing sight of our
own best hopes in this country, he began to home in, with his
new partner, Nikita Khrushchev, on the hope of peace for
everyone on this earth – Russians, Americans,
Cubans, Vietnamese, Indonesians, everyone on this earth
– no exceptions. He made that commitment to life at
the cost of his own. What a transforming story that is.
And
what a propaganda campaign has been waged to keep us
Americans from understanding that story, from telling it,
and from re-telling it to our children and grandchildren.
Because that’s a story whose telling can transform a
nation.
But
when a nation is under the continuing
domination of an idol, namely war, it is a story that will be
covered up. When the story can liberate us from our idolatry
of war, then the worshippers of the idol are going to do
everything they can to keep the story from being
told.
From
the standpoint of a belief that war is the ultimate
power, that’s too dangerous a story. It’s a
subversive story. It shows a different kind of security
than always being ready to go to war.
It’s
unbelievable – or we’re
supposed to think it is – that a president was murdered by our
own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace
than relying on nuclear weapons.
It’s
unspeakable. For the sake of a nation that must
always be preparing for war, that story must not be told.
If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without
making war. We might even learn there is a force more
powerful than war. How unthinkable! But how necessary if
life on earth is to continue.
That
is why it is so hopeful for us to confront the unspeakable
and to tell the transforming story of a man of courage, President
John F. Kennedy. It is a story ultimately not of death but of
life – all our lives. In the end, it is not so much a story
of one man as it is a story of peacemaking when the chips are
down. That story is our story, a story of hope.
I
believe it is a providential fact that the anniversary of
President Kennedy’s assassination always falls around
Thanksgiving, and periodically on that very day. This year the
anniversary of his death, two days from now, will begin
Thanksgiving week.
Thanksgiving
is a beautiful time of year, with autumn leaves
falling to create new life. Creation is alive, as the season
turns. The earth is alive. It is not a radioactive wasteland. We
can give special thanks for that. The fact that we are still
living – that the human family is still alive with a
fighting chance for survival, and for much more than that
– is reason for gratitude for a peacemaking president,
and to the unlikely alliance he forged with his enemy.
So
let us give thanks this Thanksgiving for John F. Kennedy, and
for his partner in peacemaking, Nikita Khrushchev.
Their
story is our story, a story of the courage to turn toward
the truth. Remember what Gandhi said that turned theology on its
head. He said truth is God. That is the truth: Truth is God. We
can discover the truth and live it out. There is nothing,
nothing more powerful than the truth. The truth will set us free.
. . . FULL TEXT
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Oswald’s Doubles
How Multiple Lookalikes Were Used
To Craft One Lone Scapegoat
by Jim Douglass
Butch Burroughs, who witnessed Oswald’s arrest, startled me
in his interview by saying he saw a second arrest occur in the
Texas Theater only “three or four minutes
later.”
He said the Dallas Police then arrested
“an Oswald lookalike.” Burroughs said the second man
“looked almost like Oswald, like he was his brother or
something.” When
I questioned the comparison by asking, “Could you see the
second man as well as you could see Oswald?” he said,
“Yes, I could see both of them. They looked
alike.” After
the officers half-carried and half-dragged Oswald to the police
car in front of the theater, within a space of three or four
minutes, Burroughs saw the second Oswald placed under arrest
and handcuffed. The Oswald look-alike, however, was taken by
police not out the front but out the back of the
theater.
What
happened next we can learn from another
neglected witness, Bernard Haire.
Bernard J. Haire
was the owner of Bernie’s Hobby House,
just two doors east of the Texas Theater. Haire went outside his
store when he saw police cars congregating in front of the
theater. When
he couldn’t see what was happening because
of the crowd, he went back through his store into the alley out
back. It, too, was full of police cars, but there were fewer
spectators. Haire walked up the alley. When he stopped opposite
the rear door of the theater, he witnessed what he would think
for decades was the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.
“Police
brought a young white man out,” Haire told an
interviewer. “The man was dressed in a pullover shirt and
slacks. He seemed to be flushed, as if he’d been in a
struggle. Police put the man in a police car and drove
off.”
When
Haire was told in 1987 that Lee Harvey Oswald had been
brought out the front of the theater by police, he was
shocked.
“I
don’t know who I saw arrested,” he said in
bewilderment.
Butch
Burroughs and Bernard Haire are complementary witnesses.
From their perspectives both inside and outside the Texas
Theater, they saw an Oswald double arrested and taken to a police
car in the back alley only minutes after the arrest of Lee Harvey
Oswald. Burroughs’s and Haire’s independent,
converging testimonies provide critical insight into the
mechanics of the plot. In a comprehensive intelligence scenario
for Kennedy’s and Tippit’s murders, the plan
culminated in Oswald’s Friday arrest and Sunday murder
(probably a fallback from his being set up to be killed in the
Texas Theater by the police).
There
is a hint of the second Oswald’s arrest in the Dallas
police records. According to the Dallas Police Department’s
official Homicide Report on J. D. Tippit, “Suspect was
later arrested in the balcony of the Texas theatre at 231
W. Jefferson.”
Dallas
Police detective L. D. Stringfellow also reported to
Captain W. P. Gannaway, “Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested
in the balcony of the Texas
Theater.”
To
whom are the Homicide Report and Detective Stringfellow
referring? Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the orchestra, not
the balcony. Are these documents referring to the Dallas Police
Department’s second arrest at the Texas Theater that
afternoon? Was Butch Burroughs witnessing an arrest of the Oswald
look-alike that actually began in the balcony? That would have
likely been the double’s hiding place, after he entered the
theater without paying, thereby drawing attention to himself and
leading the police to the apprehension of his likeness, Lee
Harvey Oswald (who was already inside). As Butch Burroughs
pointed out, anyone coming in the front of the theater could head
immediately up the stairs to the balcony without being seen from
the concession stand.
The
Oswald double, after having been put in the police car in the
alley, must have been driven a short distance and released on
higher intelligence orders. Unfortunately for the plotters, he
was seen again soon. With the scapegoat, Lee Harvey Oswald, now
safely in custody, we can presume that the double was not
supposed to be seen again in Dallas—or anywhere else. Had
he not been seen, the CIA’s double-Oswald strategy in an
Oak Cliff shell game might have eluded independent investigators
forever. But thanks to other key witnesses who have emerged, we
now have detailed evidence that the double was seen
again—not just once but twice.
At 2:00 P.M.,
as Lee Harvey Oswald sat handcuffed in the back
seat of a patrol car boxed in by police officers on his way to
jail, Oswald knew what final role had been chosen for him in the
assassination scenario. That night, while being led through
police headquarters, he would shout out to the press,
“I’m just a patsy!”
Also at
about 2:00 P.M., a man identified as Oswald was seen in a
car eight blocks away from the Texas Theater, still very much at
large and keeping a low profile.
A sharp-eyed auto mechanic spotted him.
T. F. White
was a sixty-year-old, longtime employee of Mack
Pate’s Garage in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. While
White worked on an automobile the afternoon of the assassination,
he could hear police sirens screaming up and down Davis Street
only a block away. He also heard radio reports describing a
suspect then thought to be in Oak
Cliff. The mechanic
looked out the open doors of the garage. He watched as a red 1961
Falcon drove into the parking lot of the EI Chico restaurant
across the street. The Falcon parked in an odd position after
going a few feet into the lot. The driver remained seated in the
car. White said
later, “The man in the car appeared to be
hiding.” White kept his eye on
the man in the Falcon.
When Mack
Pate returned from his lunch break a few minutes later,
T. F. White pointed out to his boss the oddly parked Falcon with
its waiting driver who seemed to be hiding. Pate told White to
watch the car carefully, reminding him of earlier news reports
they had heard about a possible assassination attempt against
President Kennedy in Houston the day before involving a red
Falcon.
T. F. White
walked across the street to investigate. He halted
about ten to fifteen yards from the car. He could see the driver
was wearing a white t-shirt.
The man turned toward White and
looked at him full face. White stared back at him. Not wanting to
provoke a possible assassin, White began a retreat to the garage.
However, he paused, took a scrap of paper from his coveralls
pocket, and wrote down the Texas license plate of the car: PP
4537.
That night,
while T. F. White was watching television with his
wife, he recognized the Dallas Police Department’s
prisoner, Lee Harvey Oswald, as the man he had seen in the red
Falcon in EI Chico’s parking lot. White was unfazed by what
he did not yet know—that at the same time he had seen one
Oswald sitting freely in the Falcon, the other Oswald was sitting
handcuffed in a Dallas police car on his way to jail. Mrs. White,
fearing the encompassing arms of a conspiracy, talked her husband
out of reporting his information to the authorities. Thus, the
Oswald sighted in the parking lot might have escaped history, but
for the fact White was confronted by an alert reporter. . . .
At
the end of our conversation, Mayor Wise reflected for a moment
on the question posed by Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence
elsewhere at the same time as T. F. White saw him in El
Chico’s parking lot (in a car whose license plate could now
be traced, thanks to the scrupulous note-taking of White and
Wise, to the employee of a major CIA contractor).
“Well,”
he said, “You’re aware of the
idea of two Oswalds, I guess?”
I was
especially aware of “the idea of two Oswalds”
from the testimony of U.S. Air Force sergeant Robert G. Vinson of
the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Vinson
not only saw the second Oswald on the afternoon of November 22 soon
after T. F. White did. He actually witnessed the Oswald double
escaping from Dallas in a CIA plane. Sergeant Vinson was already
on the CIA getaway plane when the second Oswald boarded it.
Vinson also got off the plane at the same CIA base as
Oswald’s double did, a few moments after him. Robert Vinson
is a unique witness to the CIA’s secret movement of an
Oswald double out of Dallas on the afternoon of the
assassination.
. . . FULL STORY
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King And The Cross
by Jim Douglass
Investigating the
assassination of Martin Luther King over the past
decade has been pilgrimage into
martyrdom. From that journey I have learned, first of all, how
naïve I was about systemic evil. While there is nothing new
about prophets being murdered by the system, I was not aware of
how well our own system carries out such murders—and why.
I
said such murders. Plural. I discovered Martin’s
assassination was intertwined with that of Malcolm X, who was
also set up and murdered by our national security state. In his
case, U.S. intelligence agencies manipulated National of Islam
intermediaries for Malcolm’s execution on February 21,
1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.
Two
and one half weeks before his assassination, Malcolm was in
Selma, Alabama, hoping to meet with Martin. The paths of the two
prophets were converging. After leaving the Nation of Islam the
year before, Malcolm had embraced a universal vision of peace at
Mecca. He had also spent four months in Africa meeting with the
heads of its newly liberated states to organize a human rights
campaign to put the United States on trial in the United Nations
for its racist policies toward its own black citizens. By moving
from civil rights to human rights, Malcolm was a step ahead of
Martin, who was watching his work closely. However, they were
unable to meet in Selma, because Martin had been arrested and
jailed, and Malcolm had to leave for speaking in Europe before a
jail visit with Martin could be arranged.
It
is well documented that both Malcolm and Martin had been
placed under exhaustive government surveillance. The FBI and CIA
were monitoring their every move. The government knew it was only
a matter of time before they would get together. That would not
be allowed to happen. The long-simmering plot to kill Malcolm was
heated up, resulting in his murder at the Audubon Ballroom after
his return from Europe.
A
key to the untold history of our domestic
assassinations is the fact that our government was the first to
develop and use nuclear weapons. The democratic principles this
country professes were, from the beginning, in conflict with
such weapons and our reluctance to submit them to international
control. Nuclear weapons and civil liberties don’t go
together. Nuclear weapons and life don’t go together. The
rise of our national security state after World War Two, as
justified by the Cold War that our nuclear weapons created, was
the effective end of democracy in the USA. That history of a
national security state replacing a democracy was climaxed by
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that
foreshadows the martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin.
A
nuclear weapons state that maintains the myth of being a
democracy requires what our newspeak language calls
“intelligence agencies,” which specialize in covert
action, assassinations, and propaganda whose targets include U.S.
citizens. The CIA and its related covert action/propaganda
agencies have evolved into what we today, with more newspeak (and
a verbal surrender to our former World War Two enemies), call
“Homeland Security.” I believe the reason why
Malcolm’s and Martin’s assassinations by our own
government can still shock many of us is that we are in denial of
the fact that our government, by embracing nuclear weapons,
became a national security state.
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, each in his
own unique way, challenged that system to be true to its democratic
origins, as did John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert. The four
of them offered a combined witness to a process of justice, peace, and
nuclear disarmament through which the people of this country
could achieve a truly democratic government.
Until we turn in that direction, I believe what Martin said remains
true in a more terrible sense than ever: The greatest purveyor of
terrorism in the world today is my own government....
For about twelve years now, I have known with constantly
increasing detail how Martin Luther King was killed. I keep
learning more all the time. However, I am also aware that what I
know about this systemic murder is very little, compared to what
there is to know.
I have met extraordinary people on this pilgrimage into darkness,
witnesses to the truth who have great courage, like Dr.
King’s. The witnesses who have seen the unspeakable truth
of his martyrdom, and who have dared to speak its truth, are
themselves martyrs—witnesses who have been threatened,
persecuted, committed by the government to mental institutions,
and killed.
The truth of the assassination of Martin Luther King is one issue
on which the system will never retreat, any more than it would
retreat from its lies on the interrelated assassinations of
Malcolm X and the Kennedys.
Just as Jesus says in John, that truth of the cross would destroy
it. That truth of the cross, absorbed by us in widening circles
of nonviolent commitment, would drive our evil system out of this
country and the world. The transforming truth of King’s
martyrdom is the truth of our cross and resurrection as a people.
It is not beyond our reach, but the system would be driven out if
we did reach it.
My hardest task in learning the beginning truth about
King’s cross has to do with what Jesus, and Martin as his
disciple, have taught us to do to be truly human—love the
enemy. I have had to realize how profoundly naïve I have
been about evil, even when living with Shelley and our son Tom
for years in a house at the end of the line where our extended
Agape Community would regularly block trains carrying enough
nuclear weapons to destroy whole continents, perhaps all life on
earth. But as terrible as that concrete realization of evil was
and is, it was less overwhelming for me than what I feel now from
Dr. King’s murder. The systemic way in which this prophet
of compassion and transformation for our world was stalked, set
up, and executed by our government takes my breath away. The
cover-up to this day is no less elaborate.
So I have a hard time loving the enemies who are most responsible
for this crime against us all, this attempt to assassinate hope
that has succeeded to the extent we as a people have allowed it
to do so. Our scene has become more desperate in many ways since
April 4, 1968, or on that previous April 4 at Riverside Church.
The terrible widening of evil that King envisioned beyond Vietnam
forty years ago tonight, we have seen happen.
So it is hard to love the unseen enemies who work so feverishly
and systematically to murder voices of hope, as they continue to
do, covering their tracks all the way.
In the summer of 1961, a white student from
Union Theological Seminary named Gurdon Brewster worked with Dr.
King and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., at Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta. Brewster was forced to confront a racist system
made flesh for him in a group of white men who, in a parking lot
one night, almost took his life for working with the Kings. The
morning after that encounter, Brewster marched into Dr.
King’s office and demanded of the prophet of nonviolence,
“How do you love those people, anyway? How do you love the
enemy, when all those people do such violent things to you? How
do you still love them?”
Martin Luther King looked at him, sat still, and thought.
King’s phone was ringing, and his secretary was rapping on
his door, calling out that the Justice Department wanted to talk
to him. Brewster waited for an answer to his question.
Finally King said softly, “You’ve got to reach deeper
until you are transformed by your suffering. With your suffering
and your love, you must cut the chains of hate. You’ve got
to reach down deeper until your suffering and your love draw you
closer to God.”
At the trial held in Memphis for King’s assassination, one
of his assassins was present in the courtroom as a
defendant—Loyd Jowers....
I watched from a few feet away from Jowers when Coretta Scott
King entered the courtroom to be a witness in the trial. She
walked up to Loyd Jowers, who
in a state of confusion rose from his chair. She looked into his
eyes and shook his hand.
Yes, we can cut the chains of hate.
But we must reach down deeper until our suffering and our love
draw us closer to God.
. . . FULL STORY
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Richard Grossman Final Interview:
Citizens United is a Personhood Fetish
Greed and Corruption Are Diversions
Corporate Crime Reporter
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Careful now. Don’t repeat the signs on the street. Think
first. Beware of diversions. So warns Richard Grossman.
“There’s
no shortage of corruption and greed going all
around,” says Richard Grossman. “But corruption and
greed are not the problem. They are diversions.”
“The
essence of the power arrayed against the 99 percent
are structures of minority-rule governance deeply rooted, honored
and celebrated, even by, I suspect, many of the people who are
occupying Wall Street today.
“I’m
referring to the great myths of this nation’s founding
and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and constitutional
jurisprudence, the nonsense about limited governance, the
sanctification of ‘the rule of law’ when lawmaking
and interpreting and enforcing have been the special preserve in
every generation of a small minority.
“I’m
talking about the private ordering of economic
decision making, the sweeping constitutional privileges wielded
by directors of the ‘creatures of law’ we call
chartered, incorporated businesses camouflaged as ‘free
enterprise’ and ‘the invisible hand.’
“I
hope that teach-ins about such realities in Wall Street
and Washington and other places are going on. So far, I’ve not
seen evidence.”
Grossman
has been one of the major philosophers of the movement
to challenge corporate power.
Over
his career, his thinking has moved from regulate the
corporation, to challenge corporate constitutional empowerment,
to criminalize the corporate form.
“And
criminalizing public officials who have enabled and
abetted usurpation,” Grossman adds. “And then
rethinking everything relating to designing institutions to help
a sovereign people live in sane and rational ways.”
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Grossman
objects to being called the father of the movement to
challenge corporate personhood – what he dismissively calls
the “corporate personhood fetish.”
“I
never focused on personhood,” Grossman said.
“I helped to explain Supreme Court cases starting with
Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business corporation
directors into usurpers.
“My
focus was on the Constitution as a minority-rule plan
of governance, and on usurpations galore.
“And
so this move to amend the Constitution that sprung up
after the Citizens United decision – I don’t
understand it as strategy, as an educational process, as an
organizing process, as a goal.
“Why
validate the idea that amending the Constitution
offers a remedy for two hundred years of minority rule? For
today’s corporate state? Corporate ‘speech’ is such a
minuscule aspect of the nation’s private governance and mass
denials that have been in place since the nation was
founded.
“Let’s
keep in mind that when the Constitution was
ratified, all states denied most people standing before the law.
They denied most people the authority to vote.
“The
authors of the US Constitution included no language in
that plan of governance requiring the United States to remove all
barriers to human liberty – to maximize liberty throughout
the land.
“They
did craft language requiring the United States to
remove all barriers to commerce – to maximize production
and commerce throughout the land. To impose a national economy on
communities throughout the land.
“They
certainly understood the concept of a strong,
centralized federal government swimming in the preemption and
prerogative authority of kings.”
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Man-Made Radiological
Contamination of Planetary
Gene Pool Continuing
Fukushima — Ongoing Catastrophe
Implications of The Massive Contamination
of Japan With Radioactive Cesium
by Steven Starr
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Long-lived radionuclides such as Cesium-137 are something new to
us as a species. They did not exist on Earth in any appreciable
quantities during the entire evolution of complex life. Although
they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more
poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They
cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects,
malformations, and abortions at concentrations almost below human
recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the atomic or
molecular level.
They
emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we
might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human
tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that
issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It
is not a fire that can be scattered or suffocated because it burns
at the atomic level—it comes from the disintegration of
single atoms.
Thus,
radioactivity is a term which indicates how many
radioactive atoms are disintegrating in a time period. We measure
the intensity of radioactivity by the rate of the disintegrations
and the energy they produce....
The
International Commission on Radiological Protection [ICRP]
states in this document
[Source: ICRP, 2009. Application of the Commission’s
Recommendations to the Protection of People Living in
Long-term Contaminated Areas After a Nuclear Accident or a
Radiation Emergency. ICRP Publication 111. Ann. ICRP 39 (3).]
that a whole body activity of
1400 Becquerels is equivalent to an exposure of one-tenth a
millisievert per year. In other words, the radiation models
used by radiation biologists that convert this level of internal
absorbed dose to “effective dose,” do not predict
serious health risks from such exposures. In fact they state
that it is safe to have 10 times this exposure level.
There
is however strong evidence that the ingestion of these
levels of so-called “low-dose” radiation are, in
fact, particularly injurious to children. Research done by
Dr. Yuri Bandazhevsky, and his colleagues and students, in
Belarus during the period 1991 through 1999, correlated whole
body radiation levels of 10 to 30 Becquerels per kilogram of whole body weight
with abnormal heart rhythms and levels of 50 Becquerels per kilogram of body
weight with irreversible damage to the tissues of the heart and
other vital organs.
One
of the key discoveries made by Bandazhevsky was that
Cesium-137 bioconcentrates in the endocrine and heart tissues,
as well as the pancreas, kidneys and intestines. This goes
completely against one of the primary assumptions
used by the ICRP
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to calculate “effective dose” as measured
by milliseiverts: that Cesium-137 is uniformly distributed in
human tissues.
Let me restate that. The current ICRP methodology is to assume
that the absorbed dose is uniformly distributed in human
tissues. This is, in fact, not the case....
While
we generally worry about radioactive iodine concentrating
in the thyroid, Bandazhevsky’s work shows us that
Cesium-137 is likely to play a major role in thyroid cancer
too.
I
want to point out again that the currently accepted medical and
legal understanding of Cesium-137 is that it is
“distributed fairly uniformly” in human tissues. I
copied the web page from the US EPA website, from which this
quote is taken. Clearly, the autopsied human tissue samples
analyzed by Bandazhevsky show that this is not the case. This new
understanding needs to be incorporated into the way we understand
how internally ingested radionuclides act upon the human body.
Two
million people in Belarus live on lands severely contaminated
by Cesium-137. Most of the children that live there are not
considered to be healthy although they were before the nuclear power
plant at Chernobyl exploded in 1986. Fourteen years after the
explosion, 45 to 47 percent of high school graduates had physical
disorders, including gastro-intestinal anomalies, weakened hearts,
and cataracts. And 40% were diagnosed with chronic “blood
disorders” and malfunctioning thyroids.
I
am afraid that there are many Japanese people now living on
lands equally contaminated with radioactive cesium. If Japanese
children are allowed to routinely ingest foodstuffs contaminated
with Cesium-137, they will likely develop the same health problems
that we see now in the children and teenagers of Belarus and
Ukraine.
Thus
it is very important that we recognize the danger posed to
children by the routine ingestion of contaminated food with
Cesium-137 where ever they might live. It is also important to prevent
further nuclear disasters which release these fiendishly toxic
poisons into the global ecosystems. Given the immense amounts of
long-lived radionuclides which exist at every nuclear power
plant this is an urgent task.
I
hope I have made it clear that long-lived radionuclides
produced by nuclear power plants are neither “safe”
nor “clean.” I would suggest that it is very bad
idea to manufacture these nuclear poisons to try to make electricity,
that it is past time we stopped manufacturing them and try to manage
those which we have already created which must be isolated from the
ecosystems for at least 100,000 years.
. . . FULL TEXT
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Open Letter:
On Renewing Hope,
for the Future:
Divest From The
Nuclear Power Industry
This is an open letter to leaders and groups in the religious community in
the United States inviting participation to expand a campaign
currently being mounted to divest from fossil fuel companies to also include
the nuclear power industry as well. There are good reasons for this
expanded action. In addition to the astronomical releases
of radioactive isotopes from such calamities as Chernobyl and Fukushima,
there are also the medical and public health consequences of all aspects
of the nuclear fuel cycle. Long-lived radionuclides being generated
in nuclear reactors did not exist on Earth, in any appreciable quantities,
during the entire evolution of complex life. There is no safe dose or
exposure to radiation. It is not humanly possible to achieve 100%
containment of these man-made radioactive particles that burn at the
atomic level. An expanding campaign directed by elements of the religious
community to divest from the nuclear power industry – which
necessarily includes nuclear weapons since their production derives
from radioactive materials generated in nuclear reactors –
embodies a moral, life-affirming imperative of the highest order.
It is an action for both peace and greater equity: safer energy
sources and more efficient products and lifestyles will bring
multiple advantages, for us now and for the planet and its
climate we leave for future generations.
. . . FULL STORY
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Into
Eternity:
A Film For The Future
2009 Documentary Film Written & Directed by Michael Madsen
“Once upon a time, man learned to master fire.
Something no other living creature had done before
him. Man conquered the entire world. One day he
found a new fire. A fire so powerful that it could
never be extinguished. Man reveled in the thought
that he now possessed the powers of the universe.
Then in horror, he realized that his new fire
could not only create but also destroy. Not only
could it burn on land but inside all living
creatures; inside his children, the animals, all
crops. Man looked around for help, but found none.
And so he built a burial chamber deep in the bowels
of the earth, a hiding place for the fire to
burn, into eternity....
“I am now in this place
where you should never come. We call it Onkalo.
Onkalo means ‘hiding place’. In my
time it is still unfinished though work began in the 20th
century when I was just a child. Work would be completed in
the 22nd century long after my death. Onkalo
must last one hundred thousand years. Nothing
built by man has lasted even a tenth of that time span.
But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization.
If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest
lasting remains of our civilization. If you, sometime
far into the future, find this, what will it tell you
about us?...
“Onkalo
is our very first permanent repository for
nuclear waste. But when Onkalo is sealed a century from
now, it’ll hold only a fraction of the waste we have. We must
build many more Onkalos far from earthquakes and volcanoes
to keep the waste away from the surface of the earth. We
must build many more secret chambers that we hope to hide
from you.”
. . . FULL PRESENTATION
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Health Effects of Chernobyl, 25 years after the reactor catastrophe
by Dr. rer. nat. Sebastian Pflugbeil, Society for Radiation Protection,
Henrik Paulitz and Dr. med. Angelika Claussen, IPPNW,
Prof. Dr. Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Society for Radiation Protection,
With support of Strahlentelex information service
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from the Executive Summary:
According
to UNSCEAR between 12,000 and 83,000 children were born with
congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around
30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide. Only
10% of the overall expected damage can be seen in the first
generation....
A
paper by Kristina Voigt, Hagen Scherb also showed that after 1986,
in the aftermath of Chernobyl, around 800,000 fewer children were
born in Europe than one might have expected. Scherb estimated that,
as the paper did not cover all countries, the overall number of
“missing” children after Chernobyl could be about one
million. Similar effects were also observed following
above-ground nuclear weapons tests....
Up
until today, there has unfortunately been no conclusive overview
of the changes in the health condition of the whole of the
affected population in the region of Chernobyl, not to mention
the lack of an overview of the catastrophe for the people in the
Northern hemisphere. The numbers referred to here may seem on
the one hand to be terribly high, on the other hand rather low.
But it has to be taken into account that nearly all of the
collated studies dealt with relatively small sections of the
population. Even supposedly slight changes in rates of sickness
can signify serious health damage and a large extent of human
suffering when they are extrapolated onto a larger population
group....
from 4. Genetic and teratogenic damage (malformations),
4.1 The Chernobyl region:
Scientists from the
Universities of Moscow and Leicester examined blood samples from
79 families, the parents of which had been living within a
300-kilometre radius of the reactor. The scientists were
surprised by the fact that in those children born between
February and September 1994 cases of mutations had doubled. The
genetic scientists reasoned, that as the examined children were
only two years old this was due to genetic changes in the
parental germ cells. Professor David Hillis from the University
of Texas in Austin drew attention to the correlation
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with measurement results from field mice that had lived off highly
contaminated food in the area around the Chernobyl sarcophagus:
“The rate of mutation amongst the field mice is one
hundred thousand times higher than
normal”.[92]....
from 6. All cancers and leukaemia:
The
estimated whole-body doses for the affected population in the
area around Chernobyl ranged from 0-1.5 Gy. At the same time,
it must be noted that an increasing number of Chernobyl studies
from the three countries affected have come to the conclusion
that the risk of cancer due to chronic low-level radiation is
higher in comparison with the results from studies on atomic
bomb survivors. The multi-centre study that was carried out on
nuclear industry workers in 15 countries shows that the risk
for all cancers, except leukaemia and lung cancer, is
approximately 3-times higher than for the atomic bomb survivors.
It must therefore be ascertained that the results of studies
carried out on atomic bomb survivors cannot be applied to the
Chernobyl population, as they systematically underestimate the
risk.[168]....
from the Executive Summary:
By 2050 thousands
more cases of illnesses will be diagnosed that will have been
caused by the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. The delay between
cause and noticeable physical reaction is insidious. Chernobyl
is far from over.
Particularly tragic is
the fate of the thousands of children who were born dead or
died in infancy, who were born with malformations and hereditary
diseases, or who are forced to live with diseases they would not
have developed under normal circumstances.
The genetic defects
caused by Chernobyl will continue to trouble the world for a
long time to come – most of the effects will not become
apparent until the second or third generation.
Even
if the extent of the health effects is not yet clear, it can
still be predicted that the suffering brought about by the
nuclear disaster in Fukushima
is, and will be, of a similar magnitude.
. . . . FULL TEXT
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30-plus years later, as relevant today as then:
A nuclear war has already begun
by E. Martin Schotz
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A while back I got a call from two students asking me to speak at
their high school on the danger of nuclear war. Because I am a
psychiatrist, the students specifically requested that I talk
about the psychological effects a nuclear war would be likely to
have. They said. “A lot of students expressed an interest
in hearing a doctor talk about that.” Their request seemed
to indicate a misunderstanding, since in the aftermath of a
nuclear war, psychology would be the least of our problems.
But
their request set me to thinking. I thought about Einstein’s
statement. “The splitting of the atom has changed
everything in the world save man’s mind, and so we drift toward
unparalleled catastrophe.” I thought about Jonathan
Schell’s magnificent book. The
Fate of the Earth,
in which the author has given flesh to Einstein’s skeletal
warning. For Schell has drawn our attention to the problem of
extinction – that mankind could actually annihilate itself
in a nuclear war – that it is very likely we would
annihilate ourselves in such a war. That extinction is something
no one can suffer because, when it happens, there is no one there
to suffer it. Because extinction is not something we can suffer
in reality, we must suffer it in imagination – suffer it
and begin solving it in imagination. That is the unique
historical reality with which nuclear war confronts us.
I began thinking of the Catholic Bishops’ recent pastoral letter,
“The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,”
the stress they put on peace as more than simply the absence of
hostilities, that peace is a process, a process that must be
built and defended, that war begins before the first shot is
fired, that war begins when we plan it, when we fall prey to
the illusion that security can rest in our capacity to
destroy others.
I
returned to Einstein’s thought and began thinking that one of
its meanings is that the whole order of things has been reversed
by nuclear weapons. Before we could think of war as beginning
when the
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bombs started falling, when fear and suspicion crossed a
threshold into physical hostility.
But the
threat of nuclear
weapons is once and for all calling a halt to that illusion. Now
we must understand that the last act of the war would be
launching nuclear weapons.
It is a mistake to call what is going
on now a “cold war.” We are in a hot war whose end
will be our incineration if we do not turn back. The targets have
all been picked out. The weapons are amassed and aimed. Hate and
hysteria are being fostered daily. We have only to commit the
final act to conclude the present war. The child
in the film said it right: “There’s a nuclear war
going on inside me.”
But
something else is also happening – for in the midst of
this war unprecedented forces of peace have sprung up. Peace has
broken out and entered the fray.
I
am thinking of how our problem is seen by a Soviet author, Chinghiz
Aitmatov, one of the leading writers in the Soviet Union today:
“The movement for peace ... is an irreversible
process of the social awakening of the masses, a spiritual birth
... Mankind is proposing liberation from a universal humiliating
terror, from a feeling of isolation, indifference, and cruelty
– from everything that impudently inspires and provokes one
through propaganda to serve insanity ... In the movement for
peace, as in no other, concretely and not abstractly, the
contemporary thought of mankind in all its fullness is reflected,
tests itself and is realized ... we must find ... a path which
transforms the idea of humanism into an activity which will be
able to preserve peace.”
How
to encourage in every person a faith that knowledge and
action are not irrelevant, an awareness that the building and
defending of peace and mutual understanding between peoples is a
daily personal responsibility, a commitment to join with others
in turning our moral and spiritual resources into energies for
active good. This is the real psychological problem of nuclear
war.
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