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.
Water pollution brought a terminal disease to 70 percent of the rockfish population in Chesapeake Bay, according to a March 11 story on page one of the Washington Post. The infection imperils the species in the Chesapeake Bay, which is the most important fishery for rockfish (also called striped bass). It was the third most downloaded story on the Washington Post site that day. NRNS developed the exclusive and provided the experts for Elizabeth Williamson at the Post after a broader story on mysterious fish kills throughout the Eastern United States was developed for Elizabeth Shogren of NPR "All Things Considered.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since at least last May, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been chastising publicly our “frienemies” in Pakistan for protecting Al Qaeda leadership in their country and aiding and abetting Taliban operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan that are killing Americans and allied forces.
Hillary Clinton is right. She has seen the same intelligence as President Obama. But this administration leaves out a large piece of this very ugly pie: The Pakistani intelligence service – the ISI – takes its cues not from the United States or its own government but from the most extreme elements in the Saudi Royal family. That connection has brought Pakistan money to build nuclear weapons and helped create and now protects the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership. Saudi money continues to flow into places like Yemen and Somalia. So while Hillary Clinton takes on the Pakistani regime in public, their real puppet masters go about their deadly business through the Saudi intelligence service, unchallenged by U.S. policymakers. They are paying to kill our kids. George Bush let it happen and now Barack Obama follows the same policies. Saudi Arabia in intelligence parlance is the frienemy of our “frienemies.”
The general consensus, with which courts over the past decade have largely agreed, says high-intensity mid-frequency sonar can kill whales and dolphins. The National Marine Fisheries Services – part of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration – explicitly allows Navy sonar tests and training exercises to result in the deaths of specific numbers of whales and dolphins as long as they have a negligible impact to the population. Read more...
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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.
DC Bureau’s documentary “The Marcellus Shale: The Politics of Gas” reveals the controversy surrounding natural gas production in New York. While skeptics of production fear hydraulic fracturing, a widely used technique to extract gas, will ruin the state’s pristine waterways, proponents tout potential economic benefits. The political situation surrounding natural gas in New York is...
Another offshore oil facility caught fire Thursday morning in the Gulf of Mexico, sending 13 workers into the water to be safely rescued. U.S. Coast Guard officials said late Thursday afternoon the fire had been extinguished, there were no signs of an oil sheen and they do not believe there is a leak.
According to a USDA official, consumers routinely misinterpret the "USDA Grade A" shield on egg cartons. All it means is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had a "grader" at an egg-packing facility who checked the eggs' size and color and made sure the shells weren't cracked.
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, 
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