The most efficient organized criminal operation on the planet

We have grown accustomed to the tyranny at the Federal level. The CIA is the most efficient organized criminal operation on the planet. The spy tactics of the NSA would make the East German Stasi green with envy. With the NSA watching our every move, nobody should feel safe for fear of being branded an enemy of the state. Even journalists are feeling the brunt of the new found bravado of the globalists. The systematic murders of journalists such as Andrew Breitbart and Michael Hastings for getting “too close” are stark reminders that our republic democracy is a facade and has degenerated into a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Talking about the CFR used to bring on the tin foil hat comments. Now this criminal organization and its minions are fully exposed as evidenced by Hillary giving her Secretary of State Farewell Address to the organization on January 31, 2013.

Where the Federal government and the existence of their confederate secret societies such as the Council on Foreign Relation and the Trilateral Commission, were once denied, they are now fully admitted to and championed as the true rulers of this country.

Trilaterals Over Washington



Pat Wood, Co-Author of Trilaterals Over Washington

I remember back in 1979 when I was give the bookTrilaterals Over Washington which was co-authored by Anthony Sutton and Patrick Wood, that I was horrified that such a small group of men could control such vast resources and do so much harm to humanity. My admitted surprise speaks to my level of ignorance at that time. I was a budding researcher at the time and I had a ravenous appetite to learn more about these Constitutional usurpers. What I discovered was that Sutton and Wood’s book was largely a standalone piece. Of course there was the classic None Dare Call It a Conspiracy, by Gary Allen, and there was that one article in 1977 in Atlantic Monthly which mentioned the Trilateral Commission, but debunked the conspiratorial angle.

The media was postured in such a way, in that day, that if anyone mentioned the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, you were marginalized and ridiculed. Today, we are witnessing a complete reversal in government secrecy as it relates to their participation in global tyranny and the installation of a police state surveillance grid.The destruction of this country is totally being done in stealth, but things have changed.

Why Are the Misdeeds of the CIA Out In the Open?

Indeed, the veil of NWO secrecy has been stripped away. The CIA is admitting past transgressions from as far back as 60 year ago when modern Iranianhistory took a critical turn when the CIA backed coup overthrew the overthrew the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. True to their mafia nature, the CIA never admits to anything. Does this mean that they are turning over a new leaf and are submitting to a new era of agency transparency and accountability? Not really, when the CIA admits to their complicit behavior of running drugs for guns in the Iran-Contra Affair and setting up the cocaine gangs and started the drug war in LA in the 1980′s to fund and facilitate Iran Contra, I might take their “open disclosure intentions” more seriously. And when the CIA admits its role in the murder of JFK, then I might begin to cut some slack to what has been the most virulent organized criminal organization in the world. And when CIA director Brennan, admits to having award winning journalist Michael Hastings murdered, then maybe I will take a serious look at considering that the CIA is entering into a new era of openness.

Did Obama Actually Fulfill One of His Campaign Promises?
Some would argue that there is a new era of transparency that is emanating from Washington D.C. and that Obama is finally making good on his campaign promise to oversee the most transparent organization in the history of the country? Not in a pig’s eye. We are not witnessing a new age of accountability, we are watching the unveiling of in-your-face tyranny.

Fear and Intimidation Is the Objective
Didn’t you get the message that tyranny is out of the closet and is being placed firmly in the faces of the American public? The globalists are sending a clear message, “Fear Us!” Their intent is to frighten and intimidate the public into believe that resistance is futile.

Close your curtains, NSA Director, Keith Alexander, is watching and listening to you.

Recently, the NSA revealed that they spied upon innocent Americans by intercepting an unspecified number of emails. Of course, the NSA said that this was an “accident.” The accident aspect of the story is not believable, however, the objective was achieved with the revelation; “Be afraid America, very afraid, we are watching everything you do.”

Nowhere is the in-your-face-tyranny more prevalent than in the today’s law enforcement agencies as we have witnessed the militarization of the police which are now designed to harass and intimidate.

The Overt Militarization of the Police
As we witness the unfolding of the extreme militarization of the police, the American public is increasingly being subjected to heinous, Gestapo and KGB types of crimes being committed against innocent American citizens.

Recently, in Phoenix, stunned neighbors watched as mentally disturbed Michael Ruiz, who was having a mental heath episode on the roof of his apartment building, was choked and tasered while one of the assailing cops chanted the familiar refrain: “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” The assailing cops then shackled Ruiz’s hands and feet, and dragged him down the stairs without supporting his head. Ruiz’s unsupported head struck every one of the concrete stairs on the way down. By the time Ruiz reached the parking, he was murdered by the shock troops of the Phoenix Police Department. Ruiz was declared brain-dead at nearby St. Joseph’s hospital. The police attempted to cover up their thuggish behavior by confiscating all the cell phones and cameras that they could find. However, these criminal police did not get all of them.




Alejandro Gonzalez surrendered in San Jose on January 10, 2011. The 22-year-old was the suspect in a non-fatal shooting that had taken place on New Year’s Day at a local bar called the Mucky Duck.

A multi-agency SWAT team invaded the home of 31-year-oldRogelio Serrato, Jr. Serrato, who was known as Roger to friends and family, and was not a suspect in the shooting. He was thought to have been harboring Gonzalez, which he was not. The police swat team threw in a flash grenade to his home, thus setting the house on fire and Serrato subsequently was killed.



Roger Serrato and son.

Monterey County agreed to a $2.6 million settlement with Serrato’s family, which was paid by the county’s insurance carrier and absolves the sheriff’s office of legal responsibility while praising the actions of the arresting officers.



Who will ever forget the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing? The show of force following the event was unwarranted and unprecedented as the police were given a script to follow by the Federal government and local officers performed their martial law “Federalized” duties with notable distinction.

Even My Efforts Have Drawn Scrutiny From Criminal Elements
I have been investigating the presence of Russian troops in Alaska, Tennessee, Kentucky and California. My efforts have drawn scrutiny as the new level of intimidation is being visited upon me for my effortsDave, Last month I talked to you on the phone and we were disconnected twice. As I know you are aware it was the ears of those who watch that disconnected us. Most of my communications by any means is usually intercepted, delayed or is sent back to me and never makes it to the receiver. I bring this up to you as I was talking to someone who knows me. This person told me they received a text message that identified it as coming from me and received several of them. They then received a telephone call from my number and claimed to be me and of course this person knew this was not true as they know my voice. Why i bring this up is during the course of the conversation whoever was calling commented that they wanted to talk to them about "Dave Hodges". The only way that my number and your name would come up was from when we talked. There is some extremely guarded stuff going on at mclb in yermo. Thought i would share this with you, eyes and ears.

This is clearly a thinly veiled warning designed to intimidate me. For the record, I am not suicidal and I do not drive at high rates of speeds.

Conclusion
The police are the country’s most dangerous street gang. One significant distinction between police and their private sector counterparts is that street gangs don’t expect to receive commendations when they kill innocent people. However, it is not tyranny without an endgame. The fear and intimidation being perpetrated by law enforcement is by design. Why do they want us to be so fearful? They want us to be fearful, very fearful. What do they want us to be afraid of? The answer to that question is contained in the part of part of this series.

The Common Sense Show

Sudan deadly floods affect 300,000 people

More than 300,000 people across Sudan have been affected by floods that have killed nearly 50 people in August, the World Health Organization has said.

It said the region around the capital Khartoum had been particularly badly hit and was experiencing the worst floods in 25 years.

One of the major risks to health was the collapse of more than 53,000 latrines, the WHO added.

A UN official in Sudan described the situation as "a huge disaster".

In a report, the WHO said that 48 people had been killed and 70 injured in the floods. It warned of increasing trends of malaria cases in the past two weeks.

Meanwhile, Sudan Interior Minister Mahmoud Hamed put the confirmed death toll at 53, according to the AFP news agency.

The WHO also said property had been damaged in 14 of Sudan's 18 states.

Mark Cutts, the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, told AFP last week the world body was ready to help those affected by the disaster.

He added that this was despite the fact that UN humanitarian operations "have been severely underfunded" this year.

BBC

Russians Inspect Missile Defense Base in California

Russian officials this week carried out a secret inspection of the U.S. strategic missile defense base in California as part of the New START arms treaty, according to Obama administration officials.

The inspection of five missile defense interceptors is allowed under the 2010 arms accord. The treaty requires cuts of U.S. and Russian deployed strategic warheads to 1,550.

A defense official said the visit was a treaty verification visit hosted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

A State Department official declined to comment on the inspection but confirmed it was related to New START. “Implementation activities under New START are confidential,” the official said.

However, Thomas Moore, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee professional staff member, said the inspection of the base was a controversial part of U.S. and Russian arms talks leading up to New START that was ratified by the Senate in December 2010.

The United States had opposed including the five Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) silos in the treaty inspection terms, said Moore, a specialist on arms control issues.

The Russians refused, and because the five silos had been converted from offensive intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, negotiators settled on a single inspection, Moore said, adding that he believed this week’s Russian review was that inspection.

Russia had demanded including the five silos in New START inspection provisions to monitor the conversion of long-range launch tubes into missile defense shooters.

“Russia gets one exhibition visit in the first three years of New START and one more if it ever wants to look at them again, for a total of two inspections,” Moore said. ”But this first one has to be the only one where they get to confirm the distinguishing features that set these five silos apart from a launcher of an ICBM.”


Ground Based Interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Russian officials carried out a secret inspection of the base this week / Boeing

The treaty prohibits converting any additional ICBM silos at Vandenberg to missile defense silos, and the five current GBI silos, built prior to the treaty, were “grandfathered” into the accord.

“The administration agreed with Russia to provide assurances to Russia that the converted ICBM silos ‘remain incapable’ of launching strategic offensive arms [and] record the distinguishing features that set a GBI-converted intercontinental silo apart from a pure intercontinental silo,” Moore said.

The Russian visit from Aug. 18 to Aug. 23 is the only time the Russians will be allowed to look at the GBI silos to confirm that they have not been converted back into ICBMs.

Moore said the visit does not appear to be part of the Obama administration’s effort to show more transparency toward Moscow as a way to placate Russian opposition to missile defenses, especially in Europe.

“Even if this administration was contemplating some more transparency measures for our missile defenses, these five silos at Vandenberg are a settled matter,” he said. “Moscow gets to confirm what we think makes these silos distinct launchers of GBIs, nothing more, nothing less, and only one time.”

Russia issued a unilateral statement in April 2010 saying that its adherence to the New START treaty would be based on “no qualitative or quantitative buildup in the missile defense system capabilities of the United States.

The Senate conditioned its approval of New START in a resolution that specifically rejected the Russian statement on missile defense. It also said the treaty would not impose limits on missile defense deployments beyond the curb on converting additional ICBM or submarine-launched missiles into missile defense launchers, not including the five at Vandenberg.

The Pentagon currently operates two long-range missile defense interceptor bases at Vandenberg and Fort Greely, Alaska. A third base, for the East Coast, is being studied in response to intelligence assessments that Iran will have a missile capable of hitting the United States by 2015.

The missile defense system, which includes satellite and ground- and sea-based radar and sensors, has been activated several times in recent years in response to North Korean long-range missile tests.

The two western-oriented missile defense bases are focused on countering long-range missiles from North Korea.

The Pentagon in March announced that it will add 14 additional long-range interceptors in Alaska following reports that North Korea has fielded at least six road-mobile ICBMs that can hit the United States.

The 14 new interceptors would be added to the 26 currently deployed in Alaska.

The visit by the Russians is likely to prompt concerns on Capitol Hill from Republicans opposed to the administration’s efforts to share missile defense technology with the Russians.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) revealed in May during congressional testimony from Vice Adm. James D. Syring, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, that the administration has sought to declassify sensitive missile defense technology that could be shared with Moscow.

As a result, Brooks drafted legislation that would prohibit the Pentagon from releasing classified missile defense know-how to the Russians, specifically advanced hit-to-kill missile defense interceptor technology.

Brooks said at the time that the admiral’s comments were “confirmation that the administration is actively discussing the declassification of our life-saving missile defense technology [and] further affirms the importance of enacting legislation to prevent our critical weapons technology from falling into unreliable hands.”

Washington Free Beacon

ECONOMIC CRASH WORLDWIDE STARTING

Identity management heads for the cloud

Traditionally, the task of managing users' digital identities has involved maintaining an on-premise identity management system. The system enrolls users, manages information about their identities and keeps track of what resources they are authorized to access. It authenticates users by prompting them to provide credentials, such as a username and password or smart card.

Once that information is verified, the system authorizes the user to access certain resources in accordance with the user's identity and role in the organization.

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which established the personal identity verification (PIV) card as a standard federal employee credential, has spawned numerous identity management systems at federal agencies.

Although in-house systems are still the norm, agencies have begun to explore cloud-based identity management. The Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, the first major test of the cloud approach, focuses on citizen access to agency resources and aims to provide an authentication service that spans all agencies. It will let people use third-party credentials to access multiple federal resources online, thereby freeing agencies from maintaining their own systems for authenticating users.

Naomi Lefkovitz, senior privacy policy adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said FCCX will help agencies avoid the expense of credentialing the same person multiple times, which also makes life easier for the user.

"Those are really the efficiencies — and the good customer experience — we are looking for," said Lefkovitz, who co-led the FCCX Tiger Team that identified the cloud system's requirements and technical architecture.

Cloud-based identity management could also be a boon for agencies that operate shared services and need to authenticate employees from multiple government organizations. The Interior Department, for example, issued a request for information earlier this year regarding a software-as-a-service (SaaS) identity management solution. The department's Interior Business Center, which provides human resources applications to some 40 agencies, would use the system to help its customers access those applications.

FCW

New radiation hotspots found near Fukushima tanks

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said Thursday it had found new radiation hotspots near tanks storing radioactive water, but no new leaks.

Around 300 tons of toxic liquid is believed to have escaped from one of the tanks that hold polluted water, some of which was used to cool the broken reactors. During inspections Thursday of around 300 other tanks of a similar design, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said while no more holes had been found, two areas were a cause for concern.

“We have confirmed two spots where radiation doses are high” near two other tanks, a company statement said.

But the levels of water in these two tanks have not changed since they were pressed into service to store contaminated water and the ground around them was dry, it added.

The inspections were prompted by the discovery of a leak that the company said may have carried radioactive materials out to sea, with the country’s nuclear watchdog voicing concerns that there could be similar leaks from other containers.

On Wednesday, nuclear regulators said the leak represented a level-three “serious incident” on the UN’s seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), raising the alert from level one, an “anomaly”.

The quake and tsunami-sparked meltdowns at the plant in March 2011 were ultimately categorised as level seven on the INES scale. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 is the only other incident to have been given the most serious ranking.

TEPCO has said puddles of water near the holed tank were so toxic that anyone exposed to them would receive the same amount of radiation in an hour that a nuclear plant worker in Japan is allowed to receive in five years.

The absence of a volume gauge on the 1,000-ton tank made detecting the problem more difficult, experts say.

Scientists say levels of radiation in the ocean in several spots along the Fukushima coast had been recovering.
“It is too early to estimate the impact of the latest leak,” said Masashi Kusakabe, researcher at Marine Ecology research Institute.

“All we can do is to continue monitoring levels of marine radiation very carefully,” Kusakabe said.

Jota Kanda, an oceanographer and professor at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, said: “It is inevitable that some water has reached the sea. So far its impact on the marine environment is limited, but it will be a different story if more leaks happen.”

TEPCO—which faces huge clean-up and compensation costs—has struggled to cope with the after-effects of the disaster.

More than two years after the meltdowns, it continues to be beset by difficulties, chief among which is how it should handle the vast amounts of water used to cool the broken reactors.

Around 1,000 tanks of varying sizes have been installed at the site to contain it, but experts warn this can only be a temporary fix.

A series of problems, and delays in announcing them to the public, have added to the impression that the huge utility is not on top of the clean-up.

TEPCO in July admitted for the first time that radioactive groundwater had been leaking outside the plant.

This month it started pumping it out to reduce leakage into the Pacific and this week said 30 trillion becquerels of strontium and caesium, possibly cancer-causing substances, could have entered the ocean since May 2011 from this leak.

On Thursday, fishermen based in the north of Fukushima decided to suspend 15-month-old trial operations because of pollution fears, Kyodo news agency said.

From Japan Today

28 ACRE BAYOU CORNE, LOUISIANA SINKHOLE SWALLOWS 40 FT TREES WITHIN SECONDS

DELTA BRACING EMPLOYEES FOR OBAMACARE SHOCK?

Erick Erickson of RedState has a radio show in Atlanta, which is also the hub for Delta Airlines.  Erick says he’s been getting calls from Delta employees about a memo, originally sent from Delta management to the Obama Administration in June, which the company is now beginning to circulate among employees.  Coupled with warnings that “their healthcare will be radically changed because of ObamaCare,” this might be the first step in dropping the kind of Affordable Care Act bomb that so many other companies have been forced to detonate on their employees, most recently United Parcel Service.

Erickson calls the letter “stunning:”

According to Delta, in 2014 Obamacare will cost the company at least $38 million in direct costs and that is only the beginning. With added medical inflation, Delta claims “the cost of providing health care to our employees will increase by nearly $100,000,000 next year.” A $100 million increase thanks in large part to Obamacare and ancillary cost increases derived therefrom.

He included an excerpt from the letter:

The ACA requires large employers to pay an annual fee of $63 per covered participant in 2014. For Delta’s roughly 160,000 enrolled active and retired employees and their family members, this represents more than $10 million added to the cost of providing health care next year. As we discussed, this fee, which is meant to help stabilize the state exchanges as they get started, provides absolutely zero direct benefit to our participants. It is, essentially, a direct subsidy from us and our employees to those who participate in the exchanges.

Between ObamaCare’s mandated coverage for “children” of advanced age, and the individual mandate that will compel people to seek insurance who might otherwise have chosen to decline coverage, you can pour another $28 million worth of red ink on Delta’s books.  And the “Cadillac tax” is probably going to wipe out their pilots’ insurance plans in a couple of years.  This is all hitting a vital industry with notoriously thin (some would argue non-existent) net profit margins.  To politicians like Barack Obama, $100 million is pocket lint, but of course they’re spending other people’s money.

Meanwhile, the Nevada State AFL-CIO became the latest labor union to rebel against ObamaCare.  Having apparently grown tired of listening to whatever Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) uses for telephone hold music, the union passed a resolution on Wednesday “urging the President and Congress to uphold their promise for unions to keep their current healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act.”  In other words, they want Obama to use his new dictatorial powers to rewrite the law, just like he did for Congress, and let the AFL-CIO bail out of the health-care horror that is consuming the rest of America.

The Nevada AFL-CIO also decried the “unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act,” including “the destruction of the 40-hour work week, higher taxes,” and higher insurance premiums.  I hate to break to you, guys, but those weren’t “unintended” consequences.  The authors of ObamaCare lied to you about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming as a complete surprise to them.

Like all the other unions pestering their pet Democrats about ObamaCare, they foolishly believed Obama’s promise about keeping your plan if you liked your plan.  Perhaps they’ll realize that talking to Democrats is a waste of time, and passing resolutions amounts to hugging each other and sobbing.  The only people who can save you from ObamaCare are the Republicans who want to defund it, union workers.  And they could really use your vocal support right now, because not all of them have stiff spines.

Update: More ObamaCare fallout, courtesy of the Washington Times:  ”An influential Charlottesville, Va., money management team claims that Obamacare has forced many firms in Thomas Jefferson’s hometown to switch to part-time workers, and that one manager was told he’d be fired if he hired a 50th full-time worker, the number that triggers the costly health care system.”

The list of firms practicing this “economic self-defense” is said to include “almost all major franchises.”  The employers in question are keeping their plans quiet to avoid “backlash and boycotts.”

Update: The hits keep coming, as the University of Virginia announces it will drop coverage for spouses because of ObamaCare, much as UPS did yesterday.  Warnings about further benefit cuts due to the impending “Cadillac tax” were also given.

FROM WND

‘Egyptian Christians may face extinction,’ activist warns

An Egyptian activist jailed for ten months by the military following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 said that his countrymen will likely take to the streets again soon to topple the forces which removed the Islamist regime of Mohammed Morsi last month.

Speaking to the Times of Israel from the German city of Erfurt, where he is completing a Masters degree in public policy, Maikel Nabil, 27, said that — like the events of January 2011 — the ouster of Morsi on July 3 was “both a revolution and a coup.” He voiced concern about the mounting atmosphere of fear Christian Copts have experienced during and after the Brotherhood era, which has caused scores of them to flee the country.

“Some estimate that one third of Egypt’s 12 million Copts left the country over the past five decades, and that hundreds of thousands are leaving each year. They are being pushed out, and I fear they may even face a genocide and become extinct from Egypt,” Nabil said.

In this process, he asserted, the military has played as active a roll as the Muslim Brotherhood. As churches burned across Egypt in the wake of Morsi’s ouster, Nabil said the new regime opted for inaction in a bid to drive Christians out of Egypt.

“The military isn’t secular, it’s Islamic, though in a different way than the Brotherhood. It’s racist towards Christians, who are discriminated against within its ranks.”

“People in Egypt have wishful thinking; they believe the army will implement democracy and separation of religion and state. But people have already started to become disillusioned and they will continue to be disappointed in the future,” he said.

The army has also failed the loyalty test with the United States, he added. Despite billions of dollars in American military aid over the years, the Egyptian army rushed to China and Russia in search of support at the first sound of American criticism over its violent crackdown of pro-Morsi protesters.

“The aid to Egypt’s army hasn’t created any kind of loyalty towards the US,” he said.

With his arrest in March 2011, Nabil — an active member of the grassroots movement No to Compulsory Military Service – became the first political activist to be detained by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) which ruled Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster the previous month. Charged with “insulting the military” on his blog (which unusually contained a Hebrew section), Nabil went on a four-month hunger strike and was finally pardoned by the military in January 2012 following international pressure.

Commenting on the release of Hosni Mubarak from prison on Thursday, Nabil said that the Egyptian uprising was not about Mubarak the person but was rather a struggle for freedom and democracy.

“The majority of Egyptians think about the future, not the past, so Mubarak is not the question,” he said. “Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, Tantawi or Morsi are all essentially the same. The differences between them were very small in terms of the democratic freedoms they allowed.”

Nevertheless, a dramatic shift took place over the past year in Egyptian public opinion, Nabil opined. Egyptians moved from considering the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas legitimate political players to viewing them as “fascists and terrorists.”

Asked whether he feared the return of the Mubarak era, Nabil said he’s “not sure whether returning to that regime is good or bad.”

Spending the entire year of Morsi’s rule in Germany gave Nabil pause to consider the personal price he had paid for his principles. While still hoping to return to Egypt next year following the completion of his studies, Nabil is pessimistic. Mostly, he is critical of Egypt’s revolutionary groups, including the April 6 Youth Movement, which he says “ignored his suffering” and cut political deals with the SCAF.

“They instrumentalized human rights, and I paid the price,” he said.

From The Times of Israel

“Tepco Has Lost Control”

After a self-imposed gag order by the mainstream media on any coverage of the Fukushima disaster (ostensibly the last thing the irradiated Japanese citizens needed is reading beyond the lies of their benevolent government, and TEPCO, and finding out just how bad the reality is especially since the key driver behind Abenomics is a return in confidence at all costs), the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history is once again receiving the attention it deserves. 

This follows the recent admission by TEPCO of the biggest leak reported at Fukushima to date, which forced the Japanese government to raise the assessment of Fukushima from Level 1 to Level 3, even though this is merely the catalyst of what has been a long and drawn out process in which Tepco has tried everything it could to contain the fallout from the exploded NPP, and failed. And today, in a startling and realistic assessment of Fukushima two and a half years after the explosion, the WSJ finally tells the truth: “Tepco Has Lost Control.”

Here is how the mainstream media, in this case the Wall Street Journal, catches up with a topic covered extensively in the “alternative” media for the past several years:

“This is what we have been fearing,” said Shunichi Tanaka, chair of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, answering questions about the leak at a news conference. “We cannot waste even a minute” to take action.

Behind the leak is a more serious problem: During the past few months it has become clear that Tepco has lost control over the flow of water at the plant and that the problem is escalating, nuclear experts say.

Every day, the utility has to find a place to store around 400 tons of contaminated water that it pumps out of the radioactive reactor buildings, and Wednesday it warned that it is fast running out of space. Storage tanks set up on the fly during plant emergencies have started springing leaks, and Tepco can’t replace them with sturdier ones fast enough. Groundwater-contamination levels are spiking at the seaward side of the plant, and water is flowing into the ocean past a series of walls, plugs and barriers that have been flung up to impede its passage.

What does “losing control” mean in practical terms?

That lack of control is a big liability, said Kathryn Higley, a specialist in the spread of radiation and head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics at Oregon State University, who spent a week in Fukushima earlier this year.

“You have to find ways to control water coming through the site,” Ms. Higley said. “With any sort of accident, you want to control the timing of what’s released and when it gets released.”

So far, the levels of radioactivity that have escaped to the outside remain relatively low, but some experts warn they may not stay that way—particularly as equipment ages and the heavy-duty work of dismantling the damaged buildings and removing the melted fuel rods proceeds. The radioactivity of the water in the most recent leak was so high that workers couldn’t get close enough to search for the cause until the remaining fluid in the tank was removed.

Tepco said it doesn’t think that water has flowed into the sea but can’t say for sure. Some of the flooded reactor basements are similarly too hot to approach, and it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are, or in what state.
The last statement bears repeating: “it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are.” Well as long as TEPCO is 100% confident there are no uncontrolled chain reactions taking place… Then again hundreds of tons of coolant must be cooling something.

“In the future there might be even more heavily contaminated water coming through,” said Atsunao Marui, head of the groundwater research group at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a member of a blue-ribbon panel set up in May to figure out ways of managing the radioactive water. “It’s important to think of the worst-case scenario.”

Indeed the “worst-case scenario” is an appropriate topic because as covered here over the weekend, it involves the potential death of millions of largely oblivious Japanese citizens. As for the long overdue mea culpa by a nationalized TEPCO, which also speaks for the entire Japanese government, it sounds hollow at best and makes one wonder what else is left unsaid.

Mr. Marui and others say the biggest reason for the scramble now is that Tepco—and the government bodies that oversee it—weren’t planning far enough ahead and waited too long to respond to problems they should have seen coming long ago.

“They’re only responding after the fact—they’re not thinking ahead,” said Hajimu Yamana, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University who earlier this month was named chair of a new institute charged with helping develop measures to tackle the longer-term work of dismantling the plant. “As an expert, I was watching it with frustration.”

“We have not remained idle, but we admit that we have been reactive,” Zengo Aizawa, Tepco executive vice president for nuclear public relations, said at a news conference Wednesday, during which the company was grilled about the leak. “We are very, very sorry for causing concern.“

The concerns are piling up. Earlier today Reuters reported that TEPCO “admitted to new spots of high radiation had been found near storage tanks holding highly contaminated water, raising fear of fresh leaks as the disaster goes from bad to worse.”

In an inspection carried out following the revelation of the leakage, high radiation readings – 100 millisieverts per hour and 70 millisieverts per hour – were recorded at the bottom of two tanks in a different part of the plant, Tepco said.

Although no puddles were found nearby and there were no noticeable changes in water levels in the tanks, the possibility of stored water having leaked out cannot be ruled out, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.

The bottom line, and what has become painfully clear, is that Japan simply can’t fix the problem. Even China has now figured it out.


China said it was “shocked” to hear contaminated water was still leaking from the plant, and urged Japan to provide information “in a timely, thorough and accurate way”.

What is strangest of all is that the Japanese people are far less concerned about the government’s cover up. Oh well: they have their distractions – like a plunging currency, and (transitorily) soaring stock market, in nominal terms of course.

Finally the following four charts from the WSJ provide a full breakdown of the current state of play at the devastated nuclear power plant.








FROM INFOWARS