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Sen. Ron Wyden says “violations” of the National Security Agency’s program of bulk collection of telephone call data have been “more troubling than the government has stated.” Read More: Senator calls telephone surveillance violations ‘more troubling’ than NSA admits – Investigations.
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Underground tanks that hold a stew of toxic, radioactive waste at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site pose a possible risk of explosion, a nuclear safety board said in advance of confirmation hearings for the next leader of the Energy Department.
State and federal officials have long known that hydrogen gas could build up inside the tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, leading to an explosion that would release radioactive material. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board recommended additional monitoring and ventilation of the tanks last fall, and federal officials were working to develop a plan to implement the recommendation.
The board expressed those concerns again Monday to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and had sought the board’s perspective about cleanup at Hanford.
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It spends billions of dollars to clean up the 586-square-mile site neighboring the Columbia River, the southern border between Washington and Oregon and the Pacific Northwest‘s largest waterway.
Federal officials have said six underground tanks at the site are leaking into the soil, threatening the groundwater, and technical problems have delayed construction of a plant to treat the waste for long-term safe disposal.
Those issues are likely to come up during confirmation hearings next week for Energy Secretary-nominee Ernest J. Moniz. The fears of explosion and contamination could give Washington and Oregon officials more clout as they push for cleanup of the World War II-era site.
Central to the cleanup is the removal of 56 million gallons of highly radioactive, toxic waste left from plutonium production from underground tanks. Many of the site’s single-shell tanks, which have just one wall, have leaked in the past, and state and federal officials announced in February that six such tanks are leaking anew.
“The next Secretary of Energy – Dr. Moniz – needs to understand that a major part of his job is going to be to get the Hanford cleanup back on track, and I plan to stress that at his confirmation hearing next week,” Wyden said in a statement Tuesday.
The nuclear safety board warned about the risk of explosion to Wyden, who wanted comment on the safety and operation of Hanford’s tanks, technical issues that have been raised about the design of a plant to treat the waste in those tanks, and Hanford’s overall safety culture.
In addition to the leaks, the board noted concerns about the potential for hydrogen gas buildup within a tank, in particular those with a double wall, which contain deadly waste that was previously pumped out of the leaking single-shell tanks.
“All the double-shell tanks contain waste that continuously generates some flammable gas,” the board said. “This gas will eventually reach flammable conditions if adequate ventilation is not provided.”
All of the tanks are actively ventilated, which means they have blowers and fans to prevent a buildup of hydrogen gas, and those systems are monitored to ensure they are operating as intended, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
By The Huffington Post News Editors
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans took the floor on Wednesday, launching an historic filibuster in an attempt to extract an answer from the White House to a simple question: Does the administration believe it has the legal authority to kill an American citizen on American soil with a drone strike?
It’s a question that seems fairly nonpartisan on its face, but a second one occurred to those watching the C-SPAN broadcast late into the morning: Where are all the Democrats?
Republicans, from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to filibuster-leader Rand Paul (Ky.), spoke for more than 12 hours. But only one Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke in support of Paul during that time. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) tweeted support, but otherwise progressives who might have assumed to have been supportive were absent, leaving members of the GOP as the sole defenders of civil liberties. The White House was equally silent.
A spokesman for Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden says the senator will ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate a monitoring and maintenance program for underground waste tanks at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.
Six underground radioactive waste tanks at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site are leaking, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday.
Inslee made the announcement after meeting with federal officials in Washington, D.C. Last week it was revealed that one of the 177 tanks at south-central Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation was leaking liquids. Inslee called the latest news “disturbing.”
The tanks, which already are long past their intended 20-year life span, hold millions of gallons (liters) of a highly radioactive stew left from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Department of Energy said earlier that liquid levels were decreasing in one of the tanks at the site. Monitoring wells near the tank have not detected higher radiation levels.
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. The government spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The cleanup is expected to last decades.
Central to cleanup is the construction of a plant to convert millions of gallons (liters) of waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The $12.3 billion plant is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule.
Inslee and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber have championed building additional tanks to ensure safe storage of the waste until the plant is completed. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said earlier this week that he shares their concerns about the integrity of the tanks, but that he wants more scientific information to determine it’s the correct way to spend scarce money.
Wyden noted the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site — and the challenges associated with ridding it of its toxic legacy — will be a subject of upcoming hearings and a higher priority in Washington D.C.
The U.S. Department of Interior is investigating whether mining companies are skirting royalty rules as they increase exports of coal to Asia, but no violations have yet been issued, federal officials disclosed Friday.
The investigation is focused on companies that use affiliates or brokers to sell coal from mines in the Western U.S. to customers in Asia.
That’s when the parent company pays government royalties based on the mine price, then the affiliate ships the fuel overseas where it’s sold for many times the original price.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a letter to two U.S. senators released Friday that he’s asked the agency’s Office of Inspector General to look into whether such actions have violated federal law.
Salazar wrote that one federal coal lessee is under investigation for possible criminal violations. But no specifics were offered and it was uncertain if that involved coal shipped overseas.
Salazar was responding to concerns raised by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. They’ve warned that as coal exports grow, taxpayers could lose many millions of dollars annually if royalties are unfairly calculated.
Last month, the senators jointly called for Salazar to look into whether the industry’s practices violate federal royalty rules.
Audits of coal sales are ongoing, Salazar said, and a special task force of state and federal officials is reviewing coal sales and contracts from 2009 and 2011. Typically, the agency audits coal sales three years after they have taken place.
In a joint statement, Murkowski and Wyden said they were “pleased with the formation of a task force to ensure coal companies have paid their fair share when coal is mined on public lands and sold overseas.”
Salazar said the issue underscores the need for reforms in how royalties are calculated, and said his agency is pursuing changes that would make the process more transparent.
Murkowski’s spokesman said Friday she would be open to changing royalty rules if needed, but was waiting for the issue to further unfold.
“It doesn’t appear there were any knowing or willful violations of the royalty law. That doesn’t mean they might not find violations,” spokesman Robert Dillon …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
John Brennan, now President Barack Obama‘s nominee to be CIA director, sat quietly around a conference table at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., during briefings about the capture and waterboarding of key al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah.
Former and current U.S. intelligence officials who were part of those briefings say Brennan, then deputy executive director of the CIA‘s administrative arm, did not raise objections to the interrogation practices in those forums. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the top-secret meetings publicly.
Brennan’s silence may have cost him his first chance to lead the spy agency. He withdrew his name from consideration in 2008 following a stream of complaints that he was tainted by his CIA service during the administration of President George W. Bush, when harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding came under fire.
But in his letter withdrawing his nomination, Brennan wrote that he’d been a “strong opponent” of the program. Throughout Obama‘s first term, Brennan added to the body of criticism of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in his role as Obama‘s counterterrorism adviser.
The same issue that caused him to withdraw from consideration to be the nation’s spy chief is likely to come up again this week as Brennan faces his confirmation hearings in Congress to be director of the CIA.
Brennan declined to be interviewed, as is customary ahead of confirmation hearings.
A senior administration official speaking on Brennan’s behalf said Brennan had “significant concerns and personal objections to many elements of the EIT program while it was under way. He voiced those objections privately with colleagues at the agency.”
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the nomination publicly, said Brennan spoke out after being named to his current job, where he was “in a position of influence over decisions such as how we handle interrogations, and he advised the president to ban such techniques.”
Brennan is likely to be quizzed on his desire to stop the CIA from conducting drone strikes on terror suspects and leave that to the military. He will also probably be asked about a growing feeling in Congress that the administration has too much authority to kill terror suspects, including U.S. citizens.
Some of the former and current U.S. intelligence officials said he was silent during the Bush administration because it wasn’t his place to object to a White House-approved policy that was run by another CIA department. Others said he could have objected to any subject raised at any briefing in keeping with CIA custom.
Brennan moved from his job as deputy executive CIA director in 2003 to become director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and then interim director of its next incarnation, the National Counterterrorism Center. When Bush’s second term began, Brennan left government to run The Analysis Corp., which provides counterterror analysis to government agencies, from 2005 to 2008. After Obama‘s election, he returned to the government payroll, in 2009, as the White House counterterror czar.
“Tactics such as waterboarding were not in keeping with our values as Americans, and these practices have been rightly terminated and should not and will not happen again,” Brennan said in an August 2009 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But Brennan’s previous public statements suggest he may have felt the program was both necessary, and useful, at the time.
Waterboarding is a technique in which interrogators typically wrap a cloth over a restrained suspect’s face and pour water on the cloth at timed intervals to simulate the sensation of drowning.
In a 2006 interview with the PBS program “Frontline,” Brennan said, “When it comes to individuals who are determined to destroy our nation, though, we have to make sure that we take every possible measure.”
In a CBS News interview in 2007, Brennan acknowledged that the practices came close to torture, but he seemed to defend them. “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists,” Brennan said. “It has saved lives.”
But in his first year in the Obama White House, Brennan offered a different view.
“Such practices not only fail to advance our counterterrorism efforts, they actually set back our efforts,” he said in the 2009 speech. “They are a recruitment bonanza for terrorists, increase the determination of our enemies and decrease the willingness of other nations to cooperate with us.”
One close associate of Brennan said his thinking evolved, as did that of many in the intelligence service. Panicked strategy sessions where CIA officers grasped at untried methods to speed up the intelligence cycle, under the pressure of the threat of another 9/11-style attack, gave way to the longer war. That second major attack did not materialize, and U.S. intelligence officials saw the news reports of harsh interrogation used against the U.S., fueling militant jihadist recruitment drives.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has signaled she will support Brennan’s nomination, but congressional staffers say both she and her Republican counterparts will ask Brennan to explain publicly if he objected to the interrogation program and how, and whether he believes it produced any useful intelligence.
Feinstein’s committee just produced a 6,000-page classified report on the interrogation program that says it did not.
The CIA program authorized intelligence officers to capture al-Qaida suspects and hold them around the world without charge, and interrogate them using techniques such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding,
The California senator wants the White House‘s support to declassify part of the document and let it become part of the argument against the program, congressional aides said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The administration and the CIA are both reviewing the report.
Feinstein has also demanded that the CIA share evidence backing up public statements that the program helped track down terrorist leader Osama bin Laden — proof she said her investigators could not find in the agency’s report.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee, also asked Brennan to react “to the report’s revelation that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House, the Justice Department and Congress.”
“This is about how Brennan will lead. What is he going to do about the fact that the White House and the Congress were lied to?” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “A commitment to disclosing that study will go a long way to showing he wants oversight.”
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., complained that Brennan would not go into the subject in a closed-door meeting with senators last week.
“He hadn’t reviewed the report at all,” but promised to review it before Thursday’s hearings, Udall said.
“I understand that he may not see it in his or the CIA‘s interests to criticize the very agency that he hopes to lead, but I see this as an opportunity for Mr. Brennan to correct the record.”
Among those listening closely to how Brennan explains his evolving statements to the senators will be CIA officers past and present, including those who helped craft the interrogation program.
John McLaughlin, who served as acting CIA director during Brennan’s CIA tenure, said if asked, Brennan won’t hold back or sugarcoat.
“John and I were discussing how to share a really difficult piece of news with the president,” McLaughlin said of a conversation with Brennan during their time at the CIA. “John said, ‘My dad always said the best policy is to tell the truth.’ So that’s what we did.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News