This week’s show:

• U.S. Pakistan Policy “Threatening Another 9/11″ – an interview with Fred Branfman
• Government and media cover up of the BP oil spill – an interview with Hugh B. Kaufman

Fred Branfman

Fred Branfman has written a dozen articles warning that U.S. policy towards Pakistan is a national security disaster, including two recent Salon pieces entitled “The Petraeus Projection, The CIA Director’s Record Since The Surge“. Branfman is best known for having exposed the CIA’s secret war in Laos.

Quote: “Short-sighted U.S. policy is creating a national security disaster in Pakistan. The U.S. policy of trying to win in tiny Afghanistan by extending its war-making into giant, nuclear-armed Pakistan — including drone strikes, cross-border raids, illegal U.S. ground assassination and forcing the Pakistani Army to wage scorched-earth offensives … threatens the greatest U.S. foreign policy disaster since its support for Iran’s Shah, including another domestic 9/11. …U.S. policy has led to an increase in the strength of militant groups in Pakistan, vastly increased the ranks of potential anti-U.S. suicide bombers in both Pakistan and the West, and increased the possibility of an anti-U.S. military coup. And, most significantly, as former U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson has secretly warned, it has vastly increased the possibility of materials from Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile — the world’s fastest-growing and least stable — falling into terrorist hands. U.S.-Pakistan policy, largely designed by David Petraeus, had led over 69 percent of Pakistanis — over 125 million people — to regard the U.S. as their ‘enemy,’ and is thus sowing a whirlwind which threatens disaster in coming years. The U.S. badly needs to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, end the drone strikes in Pakistan, and vastly increase its economic aid to Pakistan — particularly helping to extend its electricity grid, its top domestic priority — to reduce the threat of terrorism. Present U.S. policy is vastly increasing the threat of another 9/11 on American soil.”

Branfman’s previous articles include “Unintended Consequences in Nuclear-Armed Pakistan“.

Hugh B. Kaufman

Hugh B. Kaufman is presently a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER). Kaufman was a leading critic of the Federal government’s decision to use massive amounts of the toxic dispersant Corexit, on oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico after BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20, 2010. Prior to joining the EPA in the beginning of 1971, he was a Captain in the US Air Force. He helped write all the Federal laws regulating the treatment, storage, disposal, and remediation of solid and hazardous waste. For four decades he has been the EPA Chief Investigator on numerous contamination cases, including Love Canal and Times Beach.

In 1976, when he was Chief Investigator on Hazardous Sites, he came up with the idea for a major Government Emergency Response and Clean-up Program called “Superfund,” that was enacted in 1980. Beginning in 1997, he served as Chief Investigator for EPA’s National Ombudsman. In that role, he conducted numerous Federal investigations (which included public hearings) around the country on EPA’s response, clean-up, and remediation at hazardous sites. In this role, he led the investigation that uncovered the EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cover-up of the environmental effects of the collapse of the World Trade Center after the terrorist acts on September 11, 2001.

Mr. Kaufman is an engineer, holding both Bachelors and Masters degrees in that field from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has testified numerous times before Congress as an expert on solid and hazardous waste and Federal response to releases of hazardous materials.

Links:

More about Hugh (Sourcewatch)
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