Washington DC—Former Senator Pete Domenici took a moment during last week’s Blue Ribbon Commission hearing to praise the discovery of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing. Mr. Domenici claimed that the discovery of hydraulic fracturing has affected the economic competitiveness of nuclear power in the United States.
“So here came the greatest nation on Earth, suffering for energy, and by an accident of intervention of scientists, who were working on drills to drill better holes to get natural gas and crude oil out of the ground, they found that all over America there was a source of energy called natural gas that we had not even looked for because we said, ‘It’s there, but we can’t get it.’”
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the practice of injecting a mixture of water and chemicals into the ground at extremely high pressure to crack open shale formations. The result is the release of massive amounts of natural gas, as well as the release of dangerous chemicals into the environment. Some states have issued a moratorium on the controversial practice, citing the unknown environmental dangers of natural gas drilling.
Renewed battle against nuclear energy
Activists opposed to nuclear power are trying to connect with a younger generation who do not remember the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl disasters. The Obama administration is supporting billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for two nuclear power plants under construction at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the first two nuclear units built in the United States in 30 years.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/29/AR2010082903890.html
Read more...Deep Drilling For Oil Very Risky
The New York Times reports that as well platforms become more capable and complicated the risks of deep sea drilling of oil increases.
The Times quotes an industry veteran: “Our ability to manage risks hasn’t caught up with our ability to explore and produce in deep water,” said Edward C. Chow, a former industry executive who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The question now is, how are we going to protect against a blowout as well as all of the other associated risks offshore?”
To read more go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/business/energy-environment/30deep.html?_r=1&hp
Read more...NYT: Troubles at Afghan Bank Jolt Financial System
Following in the United States’ footsteps, the Afghan government moved to bail out a failing bank fearing the entire corrupt system would fail. According to The New York Times, the bankers at Kabul Bank had unorthodox financial dealing that included lending tens of millions of dollars to themselves and government officials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/asia/01kabul.html?hp
Read more...WaPo: Worried Afghans yank Kabul Bank deposits
Run on Kabul Bank after the government steps in. Nervous account holders wanted to withdraw their deposits from the country’s largest private bank despite government assurances that their money was safe.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/01/AR2010090101620.html?hpid=topnews
Read more...The Navy refutes two incidents in Hawaii widely reported as being caused by sonar.
In 2008, during RIMPAC exercises, a Cuvier’s beaked whale washed up dead on a beach on Molokai, a small Hawaiian island. Mark Matsunaga, a Navy spokesman, says there's nothing to indicate Navy activity was involved in that stranding. The Navy’s use of sonar in the area ceased at least 72 hours before the whale stranded, Matsunaga says.Another event in 2004, where 200 Melon-headed whales showed up confused and out of place in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, is still the subject of controversy. While the Navy contends that sonar was too far away on the other side of the island to affect the whales, environmentalists point to sonar as the culprit. But multiple scientific articles have highlighted that a full moon could have been at play.
Read more...VIDEO: The Secret History of the CIA: The CIA in business with the parent group to Al Qaeda?
DCBureau.org editor Joe Trento interviews the author of an important new book that examines a CIA-funded mosque in Munich, Germany, that was controlled by the most extreme elements in Islam. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Ian Johnson’s book, A Mosque In Munich, tells how the CIA deliberately went into business with the pro-Nazi Muslim Brotherhood at the height of the cold war.
In postwar Germany, the CIA funded the same group of Muslims that the Third Reich had recruited to fight against the Soviet Union. They were members of the hugely powerful Muslim Brotherhood. “The Brothers,” as its members call each other, are described by Johnson as the “tree trunk” that produced extreme offshoots from Shi’a Islam like Hizbollah and Al Qaeda from the Sunni side.
Johnson talks about the negative blowback that politicizing religion has on a country. The CIA uses to this day many of the propaganda organs Hitler created to battle the Soviets. Trento and Johnson discuss how errors made in postwar Germany were repeated in the early 1980s in Afghanistan, and the cost to the United States of having an intelligence service with such poor institutional memory that it keeps repeating the same mistakes.
Read more...Trento’s Take: Atif Amin Sacked For Trying to Shutter the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Proliferation Network
For those of you who care about how nuclear proliferation really works, the story of Atif Amin should restore your faith that there are real public servants out there. Amin was the Customs investigator for the British government who uncovered A.Q. Khan and Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation network in Dubai in April 2000. Amin went to his bosses with the evidence, only to have his investigation shut down. Khan was allowed to proliferate nuclear technology to places like Iran and Libya for another three years.
David Armstrong and I told this story in our book, America and The Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise, which was published in 2007. We never met Amin before publication of the book. We got the secret documents that contained his story from American and French sources. But because these documents embarrassed British and American intelligence agencies, the British authorities targeted their collective wrath on Amin.
Read more...
VIDEO Interview: "You're killing me": How whales and dolphins sacrifice for national security
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Hexavalent chromium case: Iraq contractor cut deal for lawsuit immunity
Last year DCBureau.org reported on contractor abuse in Iraq. Another KBR abuse is once again revealed. Two past controversies involved the horrifying electrocution of soldiers in the Armed Forces, and the unethical exposure of troops to toxic chemical stew that occurred right under KBR’s noses. Contracted to help our soldiers, KBR is in reality killing them.
A recent Oregonian report uncovered KBR’s involvement in exposing the Oregon Army National Guard to Hexavalent Chromium, a cancer-causing rust fighter. In 2003, U.S. and British troops had guarded KBR workers repairing a water-treatment plant near Basra. Following that, troops from four states and Britain claimed they suffered health problems. At least two had died of cancer.
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