The Obama administration had asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to withdraw its application to build a waste dump at a Yucca Mountain site but nuclear waste from the Savannah River site will go to Yucca Mountain after all.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled against the Obama administration Tuesday. The state of Nevada and the DOE have not said if they will appeal.

Aiken County and the state of South Carolina were working on lawsuits to re-institute the plan that has been in the works for decades.

READ THIS STORY AT WJBF.COM

James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence, warned me in the 1970s that a group of right-wing, anti-Castro Cubans had become assassins for a number of conservative governments around the world with the CIA’s blessing.

I reported and wrote a series of stories for the News Journal newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, on this group of Cuban Nationalist Movement extremists. One of the stories was about a bizarre assassination in South Africa of a government official and his wife in their home. That official, Robert Smits, had discovered a secret slush fund in a South African government bank account in Washington, D.C. My story connected the murders of Smits and his wife, Cora, to a scandal that threatened the racist regime in South Africa at the same time the Reagan White House was supporting it.

The story I wrote received little traction either here in the United States or the apartheid-controlled media in South Africa.

At a press conference on April 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization and representatives of South Carolina and Georgia business organizations told the media why they were supporting a lawsuit filed by Aiken County, South Carolina, against the U.S. Department of Energy over its decision to close the Yucca Mountain high level nuclear waste storage facility. DCBureau.org covered the press conference.

In 2006, the U.S. Navy claimed it had a defense against the Iranian C-802 cruise missiles. But Iran, once again, put U.S. credibility to the test. During the war between Hezbollah and Israel, on July 14, 2006, Iranian-trained Hezbollah elite forces, operating with undercover Iranian commandos in Lebanon, fired two radar-guided C-802 missiles at the Israeli warship INS Hanit stationed 10 miles off the coast of Lebanon. The attack was timed to coincide with a speech being aired in the region by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who promised to deliver a series of “surprises” to Israel at the time the rocket was fired. In that missile attack, launched from Iranian-manned launchers smuggled into Beirut, four Israeli sailors died, and the Hanit suffered severe damage. The ship’s cruise missile detection system was not turned on. According to Israeli navy sources, these defensive systems are only turned on if the ship’s captain feels his ship is threatened by a cruise missile attack. If there is a small boat attack, that would be handled by the ship’s guns, a different system.

Scores are still being settled from the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. It is no wonder. If anyone has any doubt about Iran’s ruthless use of all its human resources at the Mullahs’ disposal, let me describe for you what I witnessed on the marshes in the swamps along the Shatt Al Arab near Al Qurna, Iraq, in February 1984 when CNN sent me to cover the Iran Iraq War. As I approached the front on an old Soviet helicopter, I saw what I thought was a huge sandstorm. But, as I got closer, I realized I was witnessing a human wave attack from Iran. What unfolded was a huge and furious battle.

In a city known for the sometimes overwhelming presence of acronyms, two have been noticeably absent from the Senate floor for over a decade.  The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) both pertain to nuclear nonproliferation measures. Almost ten full years after the passage of the CTBT failed in the Senate, President Obama said in Prague in April 2009, “My administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”  Little has been mentioned of the CTBT since.

The bungled attempt by the young Nigerian to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day has raised a lot of eyebrows in and out of government.  Within days The New York Times was reporting that Abdulmutallab had been trained in Yemen by the one-time Guantanamo detainee Ali al-Shihri, that his wealthy father, the Nigerian businessman Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had “urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cell phone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical,” and that the CIA “in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab – including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen – but did not share the information with the other security agencies,” most significantly the National Counterterrorism Center.  The Center already had Abdulmutallab on a 550,000-person list of individuals with “possible ties to terrorism” but declined to include him on “more refined watch lists” or the worldwide no-fly list vital for airport security.