Obama's Vengeance - the director's cut

It's being hailed as the iconic picture: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their political-military entourage in the White House Situation Room (purportedly) watching Osama bin Laden's 'real time' murder.
 
Obama sits low, looking pensive, Clinton anxiously covers her mouth, others stare intently at the 'grisly action'.

Whatever they saw, we've still to learn.  No photographic "trophy" evidence will be released, says Obama.  Doubts have arisen as to whether they witnessed the actual killing.  It's only that photo which we've been given as 'proof' of Obama's 'defining moment'.

It could make the perfect movie still for 'Obama's Vengeance', in which an all-action Navy SEAL hero will cry "Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo, God Bless America!" as Washington's finest savour the final take-down of Bin Laden, the 'embodiment of evil'.  

As with the the BBC's reverential to Obama ("Watch the chin", gushes Matt Frei), the slaying of Osama will soon, no doubt, receive the best Hollywood treatment, every celluloid salutation: dutiful revenge, military honour, the defence of Western freedom.

It won't, we can be sure, depict a set of warmongering elites gazing gratuitously at the detail of their extrajudicial killing.

Beyond the intended photo-op, the picture of Obama's private 'snuff movie' reveals something deeply disturbing about the ways in which power internalises state killing on a personal level, offering a rare glimpse into the pornography of official violence.
 
Nor can the media-led celebrations and chants of "USA" remove the darker truth that this was the illegal murder of a still un-arrested suspect, even one very deeply suspected and widely reviled.

Consider the media treatment of a similar photo/film showing, say, the Iranian authorities eliminating a sworn enemy in some Western state.

Why, many suffering and bereaved Iraqis and Afghans will now ask, shouldn't George W Bush be considered a legitimate target on home soil for his multiple, untried crimes in their lands? 

Bin Laden has, we're told, been killed, his body removed and buried at sea.  Where's the photographic corroboration?  Assurances have been made about his 'resistance to capture', the 'necessity' of shooting him and the observation of Islamic burial protocols. Yet, beyond the far-out conspiracy theories, where's the standard proof of all this having happened, or having happened according to the Washington narrative?  The director is in charge of the final cut.

Nor should we be misled by the West's smokescreen vilification of Pakistan in, allegedly, harbouring Bin Laden, all serving to mask America's own illicit actions inside another country.   We've been told that the CIA didn't trust Pakistan intelligence (ISI), keeping them in the dark about the operation.  But the dirty dealings, long-standing, between Washington and Islamabad suggest a more nuanced version still to unfold; that this was, more likely, the result of a quieter quid pro quo and 'opportune moment' for the 'sacrifice' of Bin Laden.       

Whatever official 'evidence' might eventually surface on these matters, the essential purpose of the operation has been achieved.  There will be no fair trial, no inconvenient testimony, no public education of the background politics to Al Qaida, the Twin Tower attacks or the illegal invasion of Afghanistan.

As Robert Fisk notes:

"a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia's head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980."

'Justice is done', Obama and Western others proclaim, including the ever shameless Tony Blair.  No need for accountability or recourse to international law when pursuing a 'miltary foe', fighting the 'war on terror'.   

It's an interpretation convincingly rejected by many notable legal figures:

"The prominent defence lawyer Michael Mansfield QC expressed similar doubts about whether sufficient efforts had been made to capture Bin Laden. "The serious risk is that in the absence of an authoritative narrative of events played out in Abbottabad, vengeance will become synonymised with justice, and that revenge will supplant 'due process'.

"Assuming the mission was … intended to detain and not to assassinate, it is therefore imperative that a properly documented and verifiable narrative of exactly what happened is made public. Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves," he said, "they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice."

The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC argued that the killing risked undermining the rule of law. "The security council could have set up an ad hoc tribunal in The Hague, with international judges (including Muslim jurists), to provide a fair trial and a reasoned verdict...This would have been the best way of demystifying this man, debunking his cause and de-brainwashing his followers."

That ever-useful task - the effort to persuade individuals and states against the use of violence, murder and the abrogation of law - will not be advanced in any way by Bin Laden's death.  Whether it's murder committed by 'outlaw' extremists or 'our-law' extremists, the taking of life, any person's life, achieves nothing of any moral or practical worth.

America and its shrill media are in an ecstatic froth about this 'final avenging' of 9/11.  But there's no talk of the millions of lost Afghan, Iraqi and other lives that came about as 'responses' to that act. 

 All that has now, according to the Guardian, become "Obama's War":

"In the end, it all now comes down to one man, Barack Obama. On 11 September 2001 he was an obscure senator who reacted to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre by talking of the need to raise the hopes of embittered children across the globe. Almost a decade further on, the softest touch, in Dick Cheney's insulting view, has become the man who succeeded in hunting his quarry down. The irony will not be lost on Republicans who claim that America is now less safe under a Democrat president. There will undoubtedly be an al-Qaida response to their leader's death, and there is no shortage of evidence that plots are in the pipeline. A terrible life that brought misery to thousands is now over. Ending the legacy of that conflict will require all of Mr Obama's earliest and truest instincts. He now has the authority to carry them out."

How touchingly liberal of the Guardian to invest in Obama this 'legacy of responsibility', this 'mantle of redemption'.

The non-Guardian truth is that it's not just Obama's war, but America's 'law' that counts.

As the facile-named "Geronimo" action shows, Obama and his fellow sheriffs don't adhere to the law, they're above the law; America is the law, a self-proclaimed authority still imposing its Wild West version of patrol, capture and retribution on a long-suffering East.

Much is being made of Al Qaida's collapsing project against the current Middle East/North African revolutions, with popular demands for true participatory democracy rather than Islamic theocracy.

But - as with 'Nobel Obama's' extension of the war in Afghanistan and further violations into Pakistan - America's Cruise missile 'solution' for Libya and support for ruthless Saudi, Bahraini and other Gulf autocrats will, assuredly, not prevent or discourage even more Al Qaida-type responses.

Bin Laden may be gone, his killing officially witnessed (or not), his demise lauded on American streets.  But the greater risk, by far, to peace and human security lies with Obama, his posse of military 'avengers' and the media acolytes who iconise their gory executions.  

John

SAS recruitment 'crisis' and BBC militarism

The BBC is reporting a deepening 'crisis' in SAS recruitment.

Various Ministry of Defence and political figures have been quoted by the BBC, offering explanations for the fall in applicant numbers, including the possibility that the SAS doesn't carry the same appeal of 'exclusivity' and 'danger' anymore:

"[Brigadier Richard] Dennis said the SAS was also losing its unique status among the services because "interesting operations are no longer seen as the preserve of special forces".  In the letter to the head of the Army, Gen Sir Peter Wall, he said he had deep concerns over the "challenge of fully manning the SAS" and urgent action was needed to improve the "depth and quality" of potential recruits."

 The article also offers this anti-war comment and counterview:

"Perhaps the decline in SAS recruitment is a good thing, indicating a receding inclination, even amongst the more 'daring' applicants, to join in useless, destructive wars. 

"Hopefully, potential recruits are coming to realise that the 'allure' and 'excitement' of such operations usually involves illegal and covert interventions in lands where Britain and its allies, under the guise of 'humanitarian assistance', are seeking to appropriate  natural resources and secure corporate interests.

"But even if the fall in SAS recruitment can be linked to more prudent factors such as increased fear of being killed or disillusion over the unit's 'elite' status, why is such reticence towards militarist activity portrayed by politicians and the media as a matter of 'national concern'? 

"Isn't the 'crisis' in military recruitment, more generally, a moderately encouraging sign that people are thinking twice about going off to kill foreign civilians in the service of western realpolitik and big business - however 'intoxicating' the experience?"

Of course, the article doesn't actually include these lines, because, despite its proclamations of 'balance', the BBC is only concerned with presenting one side, the militarist view.

As with current 'anxieties' over the availability of parts for Britain's Typhoon bomber planes, it's the same culture of militarism that pervades BBC news. 

Thus, MoD officials, parliamentary committees and BBC journalists speak in bland technicalities about the Typhoon's 'delivery deficits', expressing their collective worries over whether we can keep the bombs raining down on Libya:

"The committee said that the MoD relied on a "small group of key industrial suppliers who have the technical and design capability to build, upgrade and support" the jets.
"Problems with the availability of spare parts have meant that Typhoons are not flying as many hours as the department requires," it added.  "The Typhoon supply chain is complex and stretches across Europe. However, the department admitted that it had not been managed well enough or delivered all the required parts when needed."

 No mention of the appalling suffering of others at the receiving end of this 'awesome' technology.    

As with SAS recruitment, what's readily perceived as a 'problem' - failure to deliver the means of killing and violence - could, more reasonably, be regarded as positive, life-saving developments.  Fewer killers, fewer killed.  Less bombs, less bombed. 

Yet, pacifist perspectives or anti-war comment to that effect have no serious place in such output.  It's part of the special treatment reserved for 'our' armed forces and the wars they're engaged in.  The arms industry, the economy of death, is treated with due deference.  Like BBC coverage of the royals, militarism is 'just there', a 'benign' 'fact of life', something we should identify with as an unstated and assumed part of the 'national interest'.

Nor are we likely to see any BBC journalists deviate from the standard script.  It's all about keeping to the establishment consensus.  Say nothing that questions the integrity of 'our' wars and military culture - who dares, sins.
 
John

Hate crime and the BNP

As noted in the Sunday Herald, the British National Party has been reported to the Electoral Commission over race hate claims in its literature for the forthcoming Scottish elections.

It's an encouraging intervention, one that will, hopefully, see the BNP pursued through the courts.

The BNP election leaflet includes this malicious and fatuous statement:

"No more mosques!  There are already more Muslims in Britain than Scottish people."

Besides the facile 'logic' of such claims - as though there aren't any Muslim Scots - this looks like a clear incitement to religious and racial hatred.

There's a belief among some left-liberals that, however odious the message, the BNP should still be permitted to express their views and stand for election.  This is the basic 'freedom of speech' line, insisting that the banning of even such loathsome views is fundamentally illiberal and a slippery slope to further curtailments of civil freedom.

Another, I believe, much stronger, argument against a ban speaks of the reluctance to single-out the BNP when one compares their hateful words with the actual mass war crimes and violence committed by the 'respectable' mainstream parties.

After all, Nick Griffin may be a fascist, but his offences are of the 'petty/juvenile' type when set against the actual part played by Tony Blair and his friends in the murder of over a million Iraqis.

Yet, however valid, this argument still shouldn't preclude legal efforts to expose and prosecute the BNP's hate speech.

If it's morally appropriate to invoke international law in pursuing Blair and his fellow warmongers, it's also, by the same moral token, right to apply available domestic laws against the BNP.  

Preventing publication of such language, banning far-right parties and arresting their leaders will never, of course, eradicate the politics of hate.  That goes much deeper than the BNP.  The same kind of racist messages are being brazenly repeated in the Daily Mail, while 'humanitarian' politicians like David Cameron continue to speak of immigrants as some kind of sub-human problem.

Yet, without public resistance, including legal challenges, to such naked incitement, that kind of hate can only fester and spread.   

John

Goldstone co-authors hold the line on report

The three co-authors of the Goldstone Report have written a devastating defence of their investigations, rounding on Richard Goldstone and reaffirming, unreservedly, their findings, conclusions and recommendations.

Their statement includes a complete rejection of Israel's claims to be conducting serious inquiries into cases arising from the report. 

While noting the pressure and personal abuse they have endured in writing and upholding the report, the three co-authors also insist that the main charge of pre-planning the attacks on Gaza has never been addressed by Israel.  Citing a further UN committee finding on the progress of the report, they note:

"In addition, with regard to the issue of the policies guiding Operation Cast Lead, the committee states that there is "no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead". In other words, one of the most serious allegations about the conduct of Israel's military operations remains completely unaddressed." 

This statement will come as a catastrophic blow to Israel and its lobby's efforts to have the report fully retracted at the UN.  It also leaves Goldstone himself badly exposed. 

Perhaps the Goldstone document should now become the Jilani, Chinkin and Travers report.

John

Goldstone's 'retractions' - caving-in to Israel's menace

Judge Richard Goldstone's apparent 'retractions' over his landmark report into the bombing of Gaza shows very clearly the powerful and mendacious impact of Israel and its lobby in pursuing, intimidating and punishing its 'errant own'.  

Honourable figures like Norman Finkelstein have shown a remarkable ability to resist, suffering a lifetime of opprobrium for doing so, but others seem unable to hold the moral line.

Ilan Pappe has felt and withstood the same terrible pressures:

"Readers might ask "so what?" and "why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?" Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes.

Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable [to] stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a "self-hating Jew" with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them.

You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror."

Pressure on Goldstone has been particularly intense in his homeland South Africa.  Following the report's publication, Avram Krengel, chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, led a relentless campaign to get Goldstone to recant.   It seems to have worked.  As noted by Israel's Ynet News:

"He [Krengel] said the Jewish lobby in South Africa had a part in Goldstone's surprising confession. "We met him about a year ago, and during the meeting he insisted on his stance. We, on the other hand, told him why we were angry with him.

"We asked where were the investigation committees against all those countries which are undoubtedly committing war crimes and where was the UN on their matter, and why did he only come out against Israel, which was defending itself. He said Israel was the first among many, but that didn't happen of course."

Krengel added that "Goldstone was very quiet months after that. Perhaps he self-examined himself and realized that what we said was true – that there was a bias against Israel and not a bias to probe the truth – and then he started talking and expressing reservations." 

Or perhaps he simply just gave in to the psychological pressure exerted by an openly hostile Jewish community: 

"It has been like watching an innocent man whipped at the stake,” said Goldstone’s friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founder of Ms. magazine. “His dedication to Israel is so strong and rooted. He suffered at the thought that his work was being used to delegitimize Israel. It truly wounded and pained him.”

“His family is taking terrible strain,” reported a close South African friend who would speak only on condition of anonymity. “He told us, ‘If I had known what it would do to my family, I wouldn’t have done it.’”

Fearing protests and abuse, Goldstone even, initially, felt unable to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah.   

However, despite his apparent 'regrets', Goldstone's 'atonement' remains incomplete:

"According to Krengel, as far as South Africa's Jews are concerned, there is a long way to forgiveness. "He has a long road to take. The damage he has caused Israel and the Jews is very heavy. He has a lot to say and do in order to atone what he did."

Looking back, Krengel give South Africa's Jews credit for the battle against Goldstone. "He suffered greatly, especially in the city he comes from. We took sides against him, and it encourages us to know that our way had an effect against the international pressure and made him admit and regret his remarks." 

The obvious pride Krengel takes in saying that Goldstone "suffered greatly" resonates darkly with Pappe's own warnings about Israel's ongoing purges: 

"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of "delegitimizing" Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it."  

Despite Israeli proclamations of a victorious reversal, the specifics of the Goldstone report still hold, and will continue to shape international opinion - legal, political and civil - on Israel's occupation and siege of Gaza.  As Jonathan Cook notes:

"Israel would certainly like observers to interpret Goldstone's latest comments as an exoneration. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.

The report's original accusation that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes still stands, as does criticism of Israel's use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus, the destruction of property on a massive scale, and the taking of civilians as human shields. "

The report's findings were, despite its denunciations of Israel, always a conservative indictment.    On-the-ground human rights groups had gone much further than Goldstone in cataloguing and denouncing Israel's war crimes.   None are likely to follow Goldstone in reversing their findings.  Nor are the UN or any of the senior investigators who sat on Goldstone's panel.

Goldstone might win some 'rehab' points from Israel in the short-term, but his 'reversals' are likely to be seen as cowardly or fearful capitulation in the longer run.  

Again, one can recognise the context of fear and menace in which those retractions were made.  Yet, it's still, as Ilan Pappe says, a shameful u-turn for a man initially hailed and respected for putting duties of juridical truth before personal and emotional attachment to Israel.

John 

Additional: LA Times editorial casts doubt on Goldstone's retractions and asks him to provide real evidence for his 'new doubts' about Israeli criminality.

Libya's 'protectors' - liberal saviours and media cheerleaders

The liberal interventionists, it seems, are out in offensive force again as Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and a cheerleading media drag us into another calamitous war.

Some avowed left/liberal 'anti-imperialists' have also succumbed to the Faustian acceptance of US/UK missiles bombarding Tripoli and Gaddafi's own bunkers, invoking the spurious trade-off that it's the only way of protecting Libyan rebel civilians.

The prospect of many thousands more civilians, pro and anti-Gaddafi, dying as an inevitable consequence of Western bombing, gets conveniently lost in the calculus.

Non-intervention, so the interventionist argument runs, means abandoning anti-Gaddafi forces to certain slaughter - a 'moral abrogation'.

It's a convenient emotional appeal to the public from a military-political assemblage that holds little regard for any Arab face.  As the recent all-guns-blazing US attack on a rebel party gathering suggests, they are all, ultimately, expendable.

More bombing and murder will solve nothing.  But it's the knee-jerk endorsement of Western military 'solutions' by supposedly thoughtful liberals and a default-line media which serves to marginalise the basic realities and possible alternatives for Libya.

As a group of academics otherwise declare: 

"We strongly advocate creative strategies of solidarity with the Libyan people while underscoring that calls for coercive external intervention do not qualify. Indeed, it is possible that demands for Western support to the rebels may already have done more harm than good.  In the end, we argue for humility in imagining the role we might play in the course of Libyans' struggle. The international community is neither entitled to take the reins today nor dictate the post-regime scenario tomorrow."

Thus, one can support the movement to oust Gaddafi without advocating another Western campaign of mass killing to 'achieve' it.

In the wake of Iraq, Afghanistan and other Western 'liberations', could we ever presume to bestow upon such forces the mantle of humanitarian protector? 

Media Lens provide the relevant analogy:

"A serial killer with a long history of violent, greed-driven crimes might claim to be motivated by compassion in committing further violence. He might even act morally. But his actions could not possibly be based on any ‘moral right’. And the rest of the world would be entitled to argue that, given his record, he was the last person likely to achieve positive results."

As Ken O'Keefe also reminds us, any proclamation of liberal interventionism, particularly regarding the Middle East, should be treated with definitive derision.

Where are the calls for military intervention to protect the protesters in Bahrain and Yemen, or to isolate all those other Middle East dictators, notably Saudi Arabia, eager to see their fellow dictator Gaddafi fall?

Where was the Western demand for a no-fly-zone over Gaza when 1400 Palestinians were being slaughtered by Israeli jets?  More Gazans, including children, have just been bombed and murdered.  Where's the emergency Security Council resolutions calling for their protection?

With the expedient backing of the Arab League, dictators and tyrants all, the West has now secured its tactical boot in the Libyan door.  And, as the showers of million dollar Cruise and Tomahawk missiles show, there will be no military end game short of mass civilian bloodshed and regime change favourable to Washington.

The only interests protected here will be the arms industry, oil companies and other venture investors eager to see the Blair-initiated 'deal in the desert' secured.

Media framing of Western involvement in Libya routinely pitches Gaddafi as the 'rogue tamed by good-guy Blair, but now needing to be punished for killing his own'.  Cameron is, thus, just doing his 'ethical best' now, following on from Blair's 'fine-but-failed' efforts.  Blair's role, and Cameron's support, in the genocide of Iraq, of course, forms no part of that 'ethical' narrative.

As with Britain's past arming of Saddam, George Galloway has, rightly, accused the BBC of going quietly along with the West in supporting Gaddafi this last decade, while he and many others on the left had been denouncing the Libyan dictator.

It's not a home truth the mainstream media appear keen on airing.  Stop the War has been all but ignored over Libya.  Pilger and notable anti-war others may be exposing the real hypocritical utterings and motives of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy et al, but it's the language of 'necessary intervention' and 'our forces' that gets all the major media attention.

Even the Guardian's Seumas Milne, in denouncing Western hypocrisy, has precious little to say about the liberal media's own language-contorting role in rationalising the war.

From Colonel Bob Stewart to David Owen, the voice of 'sensible intervention' gives soothing reassurance to a public fearing another foreign military disaster.    

Another current liberal media favourite performing this task is Rory Stewart, an ex-foreign office point man for the Middle East - the quintessence of the modern career Orientalist - and now Tory MP.

Stewart is eagerly paraded by liberal apologists as the deep and thoughtful voice of 'ethical interventionism'.  Having dutifully considered the "national security arguments" and "moral" objections to the West's actions, Stewarts's conclusions amount to this:

"We need therefore to work out how best to use the no-fly zone, while recognising how insecure and reckless we can be tempted to be."

"Insecure and reckless"?  "Tempted"?  Such diplomatic angst typifies the tortuous liberal deliberations on whether this 'intervention' can be morally validated.  For Stewart and his war-rationalising peers, the discussion may be laboured, but the outcome is predictably the same: the ultimate need for 'our best' military engagement.

Beyond all the soul-searching, reflective words on Britain's and the West's capacity for 'erroneous' foreign adventures, Stewart has nothing seriously damning to say about the UK's real political priorities and the relentless corporate imperatives that drive the conquest and control of such states in pursuit of oil, arms sales and other imperialist dividends.

Instead, we have to seek out other media commentary for credible understandings of Libya, assessments that don't take as their starting points presumptions of basic Western benevolence.  

One can only hope for a relatively quick and peaceful end to this conflict and the possibility of a true democracy for Libya.  It's, perhaps, a forlorn hope.  But any argument, from right or 'left', that believes in the quick-fix, or even long-fix, of Western intervention is more hopelessly misguided than the Criuse missiles now being fired in 'protective support' of the Libyan people.

John

Link update: some of the forces assisting the Libyan rebels.
More here.

Japan's disasters, natural and human

The astonishing natural tragedy of Japan's 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 30 foot tsunami has now been accompanied by another, much more human-constructed, terror as the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi continue to disintegrate and explode radioactive material.

The eventual scale of this nuclear disaster is, as yet, to be realised.  But, with an increasingly worst-case-scenario of core meltdowns, extensive atmospheric exposure and mass evacuations, the sheer folly of nuclear energy is there for all to see.  

It's usually only in hindsight, as with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that the 'obvious case' against nuclear plants gets serious attention.  And, as we're now seeing, elementary issues over the Japanese plants seem to have gone wantonly unaddressed.

How could the Japanese authorities ever have permitted the concentration of so many coastal-sited reactors knowing the perennial threat of regional quakes and tsunamis?

Where are so many nuclear refugees now expected to go as the exclusion zone extends further and further from the plant?

If the dangers of nuclear energy seem all-too-evident to an alarmed public, the argument for abandoning it has still not been accepted by some 'environmental realists' who see nuclear as the only viable option to the bigger calamity of carbon-inflicting climate change.

While recognising the extent of Japan's nuclear disaster, and what might yet be learned from it, notable green advocate Mark Lynas insists that any wholesale criticism of the nuclear industry "may not be entirely fair."

"The majority of the world’s nuclear plants are not situated in seismic areas which present a threat along the scale of that faced by earthquake-prone Japan. Those which may be affected by tsunamis are likely even fewer in number. Moreover, the Fukushima plant is 40 years old and was due to be mothballed in February – it was given an extended license, just as has happened in the UK, Germany and many other countries – because no-one could agree on newer, safer designs at the same time as power shortages loomed."

This argument over nuclear location may be partially valid.  But it still doesn't make any other nuclear plant assuredly safe.  Just remember Windscale.  Nor does the age limit of Fukushima and the prevarications over its extended life, always based on economic expediency, provide much in the way of mitigation.

Lynas's associate, iconic activist George Monbiot, maintains a similar, if still qualified, defence of nuclear energy (just updated with an additional clause denouncing the siting of nuclear plants in such volatile places).

It's a position which Greenpeace and many others within the green movement convincingly reject - and regret, given the particular influence of Monbiot and Lynas as popular environmentalists.

What seems beyond doubt, even to these eco-veterans, is the potential catastrophe now unfolding and the glaring incapacity of humans to deal with nuclear emergencies.

And with this official desperation comes the official lies and subterfuge.  Little wonder we're now seeing a global government effort, as in France and Germany, to offset public anxiety and distrust.

As Michael McCarthy notes in the Independent:

"The reason is an industry which from its inception, more than half a century ago, has taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that happens, cover-ups and downright lies often follow close behind. The sense of crisis surrounding Japan's stricken nuclear reactors is exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an emergency, public trust in the promoters of atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, in Japan – pick your country – people have not been told the truth (and have frequently been told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures."

While the Japanese authorities may be doing all they can to stem this crisis, the nuclear industry in Japan have displayed: 

"an identical culture of nuclear cover-up and lies. Of particular concern has been the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Asia's biggest utility, which just happens to be the owner and operator of the stricken reactors at Fukushima.

Tepco has a truly rotten record in telling the truth. In 2002, its chairman and a group of senior executives had to resign after the Japanese government disclosed they had covered up a large series of cracks and other damage to reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period."

It's an endemic trait within the industry.  As McCarthy neatly puts it: "Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a birthmark".

Like the radioactive carcinogens now seeping from Fukushima, the detection of corporate greed around the nuclear business is increasingly evident.

In the US, a mercenary nuclear lobby has preyed on hyped public fears over energy supplies, utilising big-business-leaning legislators to help bend government regulators to its will:

"Add to that the ongoing concern about peak oil, energy costs related to foreign fuels and the environmental problems associated with petroleum/coal energy sources and the shameless lobbyists for nuclear power have never had an easier task getting their product online."

However:

"That may have changed in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.  With the event at that plant, the world was once again graphically reminded of the dangers of nuclear power.  The question is, can we the citizens of the planet, successfully mobilize against a corporate effort to impose this expensive, inefficient, dangerous and ultimately deadly form of power generation?"

Meanwhile, the people of a decimated and radioactive Japan are reliving past horrors, trying, in their amazingly quiet and dignified way, to contemplate the forces of natural catastrophe and the fallout from those built on misguided human design.

There are viable, alternative technologies.  Perhaps the Japanese tragedy might stimulate radical new movements for an end to nuclear madness.  

John

*  Some more here on TEPCO's shocking record of negligence and secrecy.