An Open Letter to Liberal Supporters of the Libya War
Robert Naiman

Middle East historian and blogger Juan Cole recently wrote a polemic against progressive U.S. critics of new U.S. war in Libya. In his polemic, he wrote, “I hope we can have a calm and civilized discussion of the rights and wrongs here.”

I strongly agree with Juan that it is important for progressive critics of U.S. foreign policy to try to have a calm and civilized discussion about the issues that have been raised by the U.S. military intervention in Libya. In general, it’s important to try to have calm and civilized discussions about all issues of public policy, even when – especially when – the underlying issues are matters of life and death. The alternative is nasty polemics, and a principal effect of nasty polemics is to exclude people from discussion who don’t want to engage in nasty polemics. In this way the effect of nasty polemics are anti-democratic; nasty polemics tend to demobilize people and cause them to disengage, when what we need is the opposite: more engagement and more mobilization.

In this particular case, the decision of the Obama Administration to engage the country in a new Middle East war without Congressional authorization represents a long-term threat to the U.S. peace movement, because the U.S. peace movement is engaged in a long struggle to try to influence U.S. policy in the direction of less war, and Congress is a key arena in which the peace movement tries to assert influence over U.S. policy. If you take away power from Congress to determine issues of war and peace, you substantially reduce the power of the U.S. peace movement to influence issues of war and peace. Taking away Congressional war powers is to the peace movement like taking away collective bargaining is to the labor movement: a direct threat to our ability to move our agenda on behalf of our constituents.

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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
By Mark Boal

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

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MCM on election fraud:

An Open Letter to the Left on Libya

As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized by the UN allies’ air campaign, the liberation movement is regaining lost territory. Liberators took back Ajdabiya and Brega (Marsa al-Burayqa), key oil towns, on Saturday into Sunday morning, and seemed set to head further West. This rapid advance is almost certainly made possible in part by the hatred of Qaddafi among the majority of the people of these cities. The Buraiqa Basin contains much of Libya’s oil wealth, and the Transitional Government in Benghazi will soon again control 80 percent of this resource, an advantage in their struggle with Qaddafi.

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.

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There’s a TV news report at the site.

MCM

Low Concentrations Of Radiation Found In Mass.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/r-video/27338488/detail.html

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced Sunday that very low concentrations of radioiodine-131, likely associated with the Japan nuclear power plant vent, have been detected in a rainwater sample.

From Earl Katz:

This is the best info I’ve seen. If nothing else, watch the 1st link immediately below:

USA / EU Radiation and Jetstream Forecast – March 26, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JDNJEW8MJs

Stricken nuclear lant’s No.3 reactor ‘may have cracked’ as Fukushima Fifty workers are treated for radiation contamination

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369822/Jaan-nuclear-crisis -3-Fukushima-Fifty-exosed-radiation-taken-hosital.html

LINK UDATES:

iTunes Radiation Ma Tracker a – I just bought RadMa (RadTracker) from the iTunes store for $0.99. It is currently just a static ma of the world with monitoring sots that are suosed to show radiation levels when you touch them. They don’t work yet, but this kind of software front-end has the otential to be tied into a real time radiation ma.

http://itunes.ale.com/a/radiation-ma-tracker/id427091720?mt=8

Livestream iTunes a: Al Jazeera, BBC and other feeds are accessed with this viewer for iad or ihone.

Live NHK Jaan News and Video link (English)

http://www3.nhk.or.j/nhkworld/

Fukushima Live Webcam

http://www.woweather.com/weather/news/fukushima?LANG=us&am;VAR=webc am&am;SAT=201103260800

Jaan Radioactivity Ma

http://www.maion.co.j/toics/genatu/

MEXT – Ministry of Education Culture, Sorts, Science and Technology Jaan

http://www.mext.go.j/english/radioactivity_level/detail/1303962.htm

NISA – Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency

http://www.nisa.meti.go.j/english/index.html

Jaan Atomic Industrial Forum

http://www.jaif.or.j/english/

EA – US Environmental rotection Agency

http://www.ea.gov/radiation/

Online Geiger Counter Nuclear Radiation Detector Ma

http://www.blackcatsystems.com/RadMa/ma.html

Nuclear ower lants Around the World

http://www.nucleartourist.com/

Finland Radiation Monitoring – Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority

http://www.stuk.fi/index_en.html

Dutch Radiation Monitoring

http://www.rivm.nl/milieuortaal/dossier/meetnetten/radioactiviteit/ resultaten/

Swiss Radiation Monitoring

htts://www.naz.ch/en/aktuell/zeitverlaeufe.html

IRSN

http://www.irsn.fr/EN/ages/home.asx

Euroe Radioactivity Mas

http://eurdeub.jrc.it/eurdeub/home.asx#

http://strahlenbelastung.wo-wann-wer.de/

NEWLY ADDED LINKS:

Northern Hemishere Cryoshere Conditions

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html

Northwest acific Infrared Loo

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/troicalwx/satix/nwac_ir4_loo.h

Weather Model – Global Jet Stream Wind and 250 mb ressure

http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/dislay_alt.cgi?a=glob_250

NOAA

http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/

Jet Stream Analyses and Forecasts

http://squall.sfsu.edu/crws/jetstream.html

Realtime radiation data collected via the System for rediction of Environment Emergency Dose Information (SEEDI)

http://www.bousai.ne.j/eng/

Telascience Ma Visualization – twenty-three values from two hundred+ stations, every ten minutes, including: radiation level, wind seed, wind direction and reciitation

http://hyerquad.telascience.org/j_earthquake/

http://telascience.org/

RDTN created this site to dislay the reliable data readings as they become available

http://www.rdtn.org/

The best information and links are being consolidated on

http://geigercounter.com

Germany’s solar panels produce more power than Japan’s entire Fukushima complex

Germany is the world leader in installed solar photovoltaic panels — and they also just shut down seven of their oldest nuclear reactors. Coincidence? Maaaaybe … Anyway, it’s worth noting that just today, total power output of Germany’s installed solar PV panels hit 12.1 GW — greater than the total power output (10 GW) of Japan’s entire 6-reactor nuclear power plant.

Read more.

For example, ABC and NPR (and Yahoo) have this AP story on their sites (as a side story):

More obstacles impede crews in Japan nuke crisis
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=13231064
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/27/134896508/radiation-rises-sharply-inside-japan-nuclear-plant

That AP story’s also up on Fox’s site, although with this more thrilling headline (and as a side
story):

Workers Struggle to Remove Radioactive Water From Japanese Nuclear Complex
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/27/workers-grapple-radioactive-water-troubled-japan-nuclear-plant/

The Wall Street Journal has this different piece (with a headline much the same as Fox’s,
no doubt due to Murdoch’s ownership of both):

Japan Nuclear Workers Struggle With Radioactive Water
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396904576225961395484904.html

And here’s the latest from the New York Times–suitably alarming, and yet it too is over-
focused on what happening (only) at the plant (and, again, as a side story):

Higher Levels of Radiation Found at Japan Reactor Plant
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/world/asia/28japan.html?hp

But worse than all that peephole coverage is this AP dispatch–now up on CNN, CBS and MSNBC–implying that things really aren’t as bad as they may seem:

Utility says readings of radioactivity spikes were wrong
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/27/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T2
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/27/501364/main20047606.shtml
http://www.breakingnews.com/seed/ahBicmVha2luZ25ld3Mtd3d3cg0LEgRTZWVkGIPv7wIM/2011/03/27/more-on-japan-plants-water-radiation-levels-operators-say-extremely-high-reading-of-10-million-times-the-normal-level-was-inaccurate-ap

Kochs lash out at ‘dangerous’ critics, ‘radical’ Obama
That’s like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black
Politico

In lengthy interviews with a conservative magazine, the billionaire Koch brothers mounted an aggressive defense of their business and political interests, describing their liberal critics as “very, very extreme” and “very dangerous” and President Barack Obama as a “radical” with “Marxist” ideas whose success is owed largely to his “silver tongue.”

Obama is “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation Š and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had,” David Koch is quoted saying in a story posted late Friday on the website of the Weekly Standard.

Read more.