Fukushima and 9/11

3/11/11 Meets the Events of September 11, 2001

by Anthony J. Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge

Two Ground Zeroes

There are now two ground zeroes marking the most prominent features of the twenty-first century’s geopolitical landscape. The first ground zero is, of course, the site of the three pulverized World Trade Center Buildings. All of these WTC monuments to the commercial power of the once-mighty American Empire were brought down to earth through controlled demolitions executed on a massive and unprecedented scale.  The lies and crimes of 9/11 opened the way for the 9/11 Wars, aggressions that have visited on many branches of the human family the multiple evils of genocide, mass displacements, illegal torture and the increasingly deep incursions of the global police state.

The second ground zero erupted on 3/11/11, March 11 2011, on the island nation of Japan. So far Fukushima Nuclear Power Station #1 seems to lie at the core of the ongoing catastrophe engendered by a combination of almost unimaginable l

evels of human-created risk converging fatally with the Sendai earthquake and tsunami. At this stage, however, there is no way of knowing for sure what other ticking time bombs of uncontained radioactivity might be counting down towards criticality in a country known for the propensity of its elites to obfuscate inconvenient truths.

What trust can we place in the filtered reports we have been receiving from a polity hosting such a dense and many-faceted array of nuclear installations? Some of these facilities in Japan no doubt host top-secret experiments and operations of the kind that have been hallmarks of the nuclear industry ever since the Second World War when Fat Man and Little Boy were concocted by the Manhatten Project’s bomb-making wizards.[i] The scientists and engineers employed by the US government’s Manhatten Project gave birth to the era of Nuclear Russian Roulette that began in 1945 and continues to this day.

Before the gun-to-the-head went off for the third time in recorded history at Fukushima, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected to mass murder, terrible sicknesses and unending generations of deformed offspring. They were subjected to very quick jolts of the very same plagues that are spreading throughout the world from the new nuclear holocaust whose ground zero is the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station #1.

The pace of the movement of the silent nuclear plague makes its impact less-immediately-obvious than the bomb blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this time the scale of the nuking of civilians is many orders of magnitude higher than the atomic holocausts of 1945. By calculating the massive accumulations of fissionable materials piled up strategically to fuel for years and decades to come the uncontrolled and voracious nuclear fires currently ablaze at Fukushima, Bob Nicols has calculated in VT that we are looking at a slow-motion catastrophe. According to Nicols, it contains the potential to deliver on humanity radioactive contamination equivalent to that created by 2,000 500 kiloton atomic bombs. A 500kt bomb, Nicols notes, is 33 times more powerful than the atomic device dropped on Hiroshima.

Nicols unforgettably observes, “it is as if the entire world is At War! The dreaded all-out nuclear war that would happen if Russia or the United Stated accidentally “Pressed The Button” is going on right now; it is a done deal. Imagine that! The same thing as detonating 2,000 big Atomic Bombs and not even one BOOM! Not a shot fired… No giant forest fires, no burning cities creating their own hellish, uncompromising firestorms. None of that; but, every bit of the radioactive contamination such an Atomic World War would create; and probably more. For unbelievably, there are more Japanese reactors about to blow. It’s a chain reaction.”[ii]

The Lies and Crimes of Fukushima and 9/11

The continuities and discontinuities animating the mass media’s depiction of 9/11 and the Fukushima catastrophe are striking. In the days following 9/11, pictures of the exploding Twin Towers were repeated again and again on TV. The effect was to deepen the traumatizing psychological impact on populations being prepared to fund, staff and back the illegal US invasions and occupations of Eurasia. Where the images of the exploding Twin Towers in New York were drilled into public consciousness especially by media venues owned by military companies such as Westinghouse and GE, there were very few TV replays of the videos recording the controlled demolition of WTC 7. This forty-seven storey, steel-frame tower fell to the ground in seven seconds through the course of maximum resistance. WTC 7 came down at 5:20 pm, several minutes after the propagandists at the BBC had already announced, live on-air, the destruction of the doomed building. Somebody in the 9/11 spin doctoring unit appears to have pressed the “send” button a few moments too early.[iii]

The images documenting the classic controlled demolition that brought down WTC 7 neatly into its own footprint have been aggressively suppressed by the mainstream media. A good example of the censorship was provided in November of 2005 by MSNBC, a subsidiary of the media cartel that for much of its career was owned by GE. As I explain in considerable detail in my article, “From Hiroshima to Fukushima, 1945-2011,” GE has been from the inception of the nuclear industry a major manufacturer of nuclear weapons. It is also the company that designed and manufactured three of the reactors in various stages of meltdown at Fukushima #1.[iv]

In preparation for his appearance on MSNBC’s “The Situation with Tucker Carlson,” Dr. Steven Jones forwarded the show’s producers a video of the seven-second collapse of Building 7. Steven Jones was then a senior professor of physics at Utah’s Brigham Young University and the author of the seminal scholarly paper, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” In spite of Professor Jones repeated on-air requests to Carlson to run the tape of the controlled demolition of Building 7, the relevant images were not televised.[v] Thus the pictures that Danish Chemistry Professor Niels Harrit and many others have described as “the smoking gun of 9/11” were held back from entry into broad public consciousness.[vi] To this day many consumers of the media conglomerates’ toxic mind food remain unaware that three, not two, WTC towers fell to the ground on 9/11. WTC 7 was not hit by any airplane.

Like the infrequently televised images of Building 7 falling to the ground, the images of the exploding reactor sheds at Fukushima #1 were quickly relegated to obscurity by the mainstream media. The aim was clearly to disappear the violent explosions at Fukushima down the same memory hole of public ignorance and amnesia surrounding the collapse of Building 7. The goal was and remains to help mislead the public towards the view that the main dangers of the ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima were relegated to the past during the first few weeks of the continuing debacle. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hiding and Displaying Images of Exploding Buildings

While the scale of the catastrophe continues to grow day by day, it similarly becomes more evident with each passing news cycle that the notoriously corrupt company, TEPCO, is completely unequal to the task of bringing this global public health catastrophe under control. In an article entitled “Time for the Rich to Leave Tokyo,” a reference to the slogan on a placard carried in a recent anti-nuke demonstration in Japan, Richard Wilcox points to the gross incoherence of a proposed remedy for the enormous ongoing releases of radionuclides from the ailing nuclear power station.

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Wilcox writes, “Any intelligent layperson who considers the technical aspects of the disaster will be at a loss as to how the plant operators will be able to restore the cooling system, which may be badly damaged, to reactors that themselves may be unrepairable or in various states of melt-down. If the nuclear fuel in the reactors has melted through to the floor, what would be the point of setting up a cooling system to a dysfunctional reactor and a pool of melted fuel? No one in the government clearly answers these questions nor has the international community come forth with a possible solution.[vii]

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As TEPCO trifles with the lives of the 120 million citizens inhabiting Honshu Island, it is becoming increasingly clear that the seriousness of this crisis extends far beyond the understanding and competence of the enfeebled Japanese government. The disparity between the magnitude of the catastrophe and the limited capacities of Japan’s instruments of state illustrate graphically the extent to which the Japanese government has been rendered almost completely subordinate to the corporate feudalism cultivated by imperial Washington during the Cold War. So monumental are the lethal consequences of this massive and unprecedented event that the stupendous failure of the international response to the global catastrophe is becoming a crime of omission that, measured along a scale of preventable deaths, is fast becoming comparable to the crimes of commission committed, say, at Auschwitz or in Rwanda.

Accordingly, the infrequently televised pictures of the exploding containment structures at Fukushima, but especially shed #3, will continue to impose dire ramifications on humanity probably every bit as serious as those that continue to unfold from the geopolitical outgrowths of the exploding Twin Towers. When containment structure #3 burst high into the atmosphere it threw up into the air a whole storage pond packed tight with spent nuclear fuel rods, including plutonium-laced assemblies now scattered to Kingdom Come. Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to science. As this pulverized plutonium penetrates all levels of the food chain it will, as surely as night follows day, induce epidemics of cancer in host organisms including human beings.

As I explain in “From Hiroshima to Fukushima, 1945-2011,” the locating of the pools for spent nuclear fuel rods ON TOP of the Mark 1 reactors designed by GE goes back to the manufacturing in the early 1950s of the first nuclear submarines. The confined structure of nuclear submarines required Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and his team of pioneering nuclear engineers to juxtapose tightly the various mechanisms involved in the most dangerous industrial processes known to humanity.[viii]

What defense can there be, however, for projecting a design drawn from nuclear submarines in the 1950s to the operations of a system that since 2010 has been fuelled by plutonium-bearing MOX rods? What defense can there be for extending to the corporate designers and operators of this nightmare of professional malfeasance at Fukushima the government gift of limited liability now on full public display for those attentive enough to cut through the spin, censorship, and diversions of the mainstream media? This class of media spin doctors passing themselves off as professional journalists includes many on the staffs of not only at the for-profit info-entertainment cartels. It also includes many on the pay rolls of those Crown corporations that peddle government and corporate agendas in, for instance, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia.

Reporting and Spin Doctoring on the Fukushima Debacle

The corporate criminals and welfare bums behind the Fukishima catastrophe include GE, Westinghouse, Hitachi, Toshiba, AREVA, Nippon Television Network and TEPCO? Similarly many officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization must be held accountable for allowing themselves to become instruments and extensions of the nuclear energy industry’s imperial ambitions.[ix] What information about this crisis is being withheld by the US Armed Forces, whose operatives have access to the many elaborate monitoring devices in space, on land and in the ocean’s underwater recesses. The information from this elaborate system of nuclear spy gear must be providing a detailed picture of the global effects of the Fukushima catastrophe, one producing continuing releases of massive quantities, together with wide arrays, of lethal radionucludes into air, ocean, stream and soil?[x]

The US Armed Forces is probably the only agency on the planet with the infrastructure, trained personnel and expertise to have any chance of bringing this global catastrophe under control. What will be the short and long-term implications for President Barack Obama if he continues to deprive humanity of the deployment of US troops, some of whom are specifically trained and equipped to deal with worsening cycles of nuclear malfunction and high levels of radioactive contamination? Does President Obama possess the inner fortitude to rise above his pitiful captivity as a well-rewarded lobbyist for the overlapping functions of the military and energy divisions of the nuclear industry? [xi] Without international intervention adequate to the task, the lies and crimes of Fukushima portend much more of the same in the future.

Just as the mainstream media was flooded after the events of 9/11 with pseudo-experts flogging the Global War on Terror as the necessary antidote for the all-purpose boogey man of al-Qaeda, so we are witnessing a similar phenomenon as the nuclear energy industry trots out on television and in print its well-paid stables of professional shills to reassure the public it has little to fear; that everything is returning to normal. But in the era of the Internet this tactic of deception can be countered. As in the early days of the 9/11 Truth Movement, Alex Jones transcended his sometimes-bombastic style of American chauvinism to develop cutting-edge analysis and interpretation of the Fukushima debacle.

One of the first guests of Alex Jones to speak to the nature of the Fukushima crisis was the BBC pundit Greg Palast. Palast is an American journalist given wide access to audiences on the BBC and in the Guardian newspaper in Great Britain. In an earlier incarnation Palast was, in his own words, “an investigator for the government on nuclear racketeering and fraud.” Palast explained how the fear of those genuinely responsible for the Fukushima mess seek to low ball estimations of the damage being created in the hope of averting legal liability and/or criminal culpability.  Palast explained, moreover, how he was being passed over by the mainstream media as a commentator on the disaster in spite of his insider’s knowledge of the nuclear power industry. Noting the broad and pervasive cover-up underway and the epidemic of cancers to come, Palast detailed how the initial reports of the Fukushima disaster as being less than Chernobyl but greater than Three Mile Island amounted to “completely nuts propaganda.”[xii]

Another veteran of the 9/11 infowars, Kevin Barrett, interviewed me on his regular radio show shortly after I released my initial long article and then my shorter follow-up piece entitled, “Racism, Cover-Up and Corporate Fraud in the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe.”[xiii] A pioneering academic investigator in the quest for 9/11 truth, Barrett was purged from his job as a university teacher by some enemies of academic freedom at the University of Wisconsin.

As with the lies and crimes of 9/11, venues of citizens’ investigation on the Internet have been providing alternative flows of news and views on the true nature of the second ground zero of the twenty-first century.[xiv] Prominent among those independent experts that refuse to tow the party line on the disaster are nuclear radiation expert Professor Christopher Busby,[xv] theoretical physicist Professor Michio Kaku,[xvi] as well as the controversial Australian physician, author and anti-nuke activist, Dr Helen Caldicott.[xvii] These three experts in their fields have earned their status as key individuals whose analysis deserves to be considered near the core of the necessary global debate on the nature of the changes that must take place in light of what we are learning about the Fukushima disaster.

Taking Note of the Discussions on the Fringes of Debate

Still on the fringes of the discussion are those with unproved theories that the Fukushima disaster was deliberately created to serve the interests of various configurations of power. One theory holds that the nuclear meltdowns are part of a contrived program of eugenic transformation to be carried out through massive depopulation. Another group is advancing the case that the Sendai earthquake and tsunami were purposely triggered by a rogue unit of the US military. Those exploring this possibility contend that a nuclear bomb was detonated on the floor of the Pacific with the goal of opening the way for dramatic changes in the geopolitical balance of power in one of the world’s most strategically-volatile regions.

Inevitably we shall see more and more questions concerning the relationship between earthquakes and experiments with electro-magnetic fields by top-secret branches of the US government through a controversial project known as HAARP.[xviii] Yet another line of analysis concerns the effects on nuclear installations around the world, including in Japan, of an Israeli system of cyber attacks known as Stuxnet. This Stuxnet system is said to have been developed initially to disrupt the software running parts of the Iranian nuclear energy program.

While this kind of investigation still belongs on the margins of debate about what is really going on, almost nothing in these times of Peak Oil can be completely ruled out as a possible expedient of elite grabs for riches and domination of people, profits and natural resources. It will no longer do simply to extend automatically to those that conduct their business at the pinnacles of worldly wealth and authority the benefit of the doubt in every instance of real or imagined criminality. In light of the massive and ongoing cover-up surrounding the events of 9/11, Wall Street’s continuing frauds and swindles swirling in and around the financial bailouts, as well as the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, we have no cause for complacency that those who commit the highest order of international crime will be held accountable for their actions.

9/11 and Fukushima in the Growth of

the Tahrir Square Global Freedom Movement

The increasingly transnational unwillingness to accept any longer the transgressions of unaccountable power brokers in, for instance, the lies and crimes of both Fukushima and 9/11 are part of what I call the Tahrir Square Global Freedom Movement. In an article in VT Allen A. Roland tries to capture the essence of this uprising as part of what he describes as “ a class war between the People and the Corpocracy.” Roland postulates that “the epicenter of the Middle East people’s revolt is the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel, which is a constant and humiliating reminder to the Arab world that they are servants of a global elite who maintain their oppressive regimes through military power and economic control.”

Roland then moves his focus to the anti-authoritarian upsurge in his own continent. He argues that “the epicenter of the blossoming people’s revolt in the United States is the 9/11 conspiracy where Dick Cheney created a shadow government committed to corporate welfare and beholden to the global elite.  That is when the Republic began its death throes and the corpocracy emerged from the Twin Towers’ ashes—where it controlled and still does control the masses through fear, demonizing and fabrications with the ultimate big lie being the 9/11 cover up story.”[xix]

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See the movie Earth into Property: An Exploration of Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism.

For me Roland’s contention rings true that different interpretations about the contested meanings of 9/11 lie near the heart of a simmering class war.  From my own experience in the academy and as an author and media pundit, I can observe that so far it is far more expedient for aspiring journalists, professors, politicians and business executives to adopt the official line on 9/11. As Professor Niels Harrit proclaimed in my discussion with him and his wife, Pernille Grumme, in Edmonton Alberta, it is a “bad career move” to show professional interest in the contested interpretations of 9/11.[xx]

While actual elites together with wanabee elites continue to do business based on the largely unconsidered assumption that the Islamic zealots of al-Qaeda embody the world’s most menacing problem, millions upon millions of more sensible folk have come to the correct conclusion that we have been fed a pack of lies to justify the privatized profiteering of the fraudulent Global War on Terror. This understanding has reached critical mass and cannot be turned back however zealous the attempts of Cass Sunstein’s team of cyber warriors to infiltrate and subvert the social networking media of the huge and many-faceted 9/11 Truth Movement. After proposing that the so-called “truthers” should be made targets of the same sort of tactics directed at those on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list in his oversight of the FBI’s covert COINTELPRO operations, Sunstein was elevated to the job of President Obama’s chief agent of [Dis]information and [De]regulatory Affairs.[xxi]

As we can see every day, the sycophants that tend to fill the most important jobs in the mainstream media continue to interpret daily events based on the increasingly ridiculous notion which starts with the unproven contention that Osama bin Laden and an independent band of ruthless Islamic terrorists single-handedly changed the world on 9/11 with their flash attacks on an innocent and unsuspecting enemy. While this thoroughly discredited interpretation continues to hold sway as a kind of sacred myth that must be maintained as an idol of US patriotism and pro-Israeli versions of militarized Judeo-Christian supremacy, there are very few public intellectuals willing to defend the official-sanctioned conspiracy theory in its details. Moreover, those that do so are clearly second-rate thinkers incapable of moving beyond the function of paid propagandists.

Only the likes of Jonathan Kay and Michael Shermer will put themselves on the line in defense of an unsubstantiated view of history promoted with various dribs and drabs of psychobabble condemning as mentally ill those who deviate from their own adherence to the lies and crimes of 9/11.

The whole problem of maintaining a basis for the public mythology of 9/11 is now rendered even more tenuous by the lies and crimes of Fukushima. It will require enormous continuing efforts of disinformation, diversion and censorship to hide the fact the ongoing crisis at Fukushima exposes the real extent of the excessive deregulation and disempowerment of public government. This Reaganesque excess of dereglation and privatization extending even to the potential death machines of nuclear power plants has stripped us all of even the most rudimentary forms of security in the essentials of life derived from clean food, clean air and clean water. What is to be said of initiatives in so-called national security that deprive world citizens of global security in public health?

With crisis also comes opportunity. Perhaps the grotesque monstrosity of even deregulated and privatized nuclear power plants, whose terrible implications are now on full public display at Fukushima, will be sufficient to mobilize and further internationalize public resistance to the corpocracy that rules us. Perhaps the lies and crimes of both Fukushima and 9/11 will be exposed in a fashion that lends added energy, integrity and verve to the expanding forces of the Tahrir Square Global Freedom Movement.

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