Month: April 2019

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Chaze, Cardie, Marlee and Chipper, as seen from left to right, graduate into the “Beagle Brigade” and wear their uniforms for the first time.

Meet America’s newest, and cutest, federal officers: a band of rescued beagles known as Chipper, Marlee, Chaze and Cardie.

Chipper gives his trainer a celebratory kiss at the graduation ceremony.

Joseph Chopko, who helped train these dogs, explains it this way: You can’t bring in fruits, such as apples or oranges, because they can carry fruit flies. And Mediterranean fruit flies, an invasive pest, can devastate the citrus industry.

“There wouldn’t be enough natural predators to keep them in check,” said Chopko, a training specialist with the US Agriculture Department. “And the way they multiply, the devastation that happens on the fruit is dangerous.”

Another example is pork, which can carry African swine fever, Chopko said.

“If that meat gets into the United States, that could devastate the whole pork industry. We’re talking billions of dollars, not just in lost revenue, but also in lost jobs and eradication efforts.”

Cardie (middle) hugs her handler’s leg just before graduation.

Enter the beagle brigade.

This breed of dogs is picked for the task because their sense of smell is incredible. They also have a natural charisma.

“No one minds that a beagle is running around,” said Aaron Beaumont, a training specialist supervisor at the US Agriculture Department.

“They’re not intimidating, which makes them unobtrusive when inspecting traveling passengers.”
Only the most qualified pups pass the test to become officers.

Chipper

Chipper, Marlee, Chaze and Cardie were selected from nearly 200 candidates, Beaumont said. All four came from animal shelters.

“So many shelters are kill shelters, and the dogs might not get a second chance. We try to utilize the dogs that are out there and are already looking for a home and a job,” said Marguerite Stetson, who works for Customs and Border Patrol and who trained Chaze.

He’s just waiting for the right woman to come along …

by digby

I had a whole lot of progressives tell me in 2016 that they yearned to vote for the first woman president but they were just waiting for the right one to come along. It was about hewing to the right progressive issues, nothing personal. And there was certainly no sexism involved.

So why isn’t Elizabeth Warren doing better?

Here’s the latest of a long string of aggressively progressive plans and policies she’s laid out already:

Elizabeth Warren is calling to end the legislative filibuster, the first major presidential candidate to explicitly endorse ending the Senate’s longstanding 60-vote threshold.

The Massachusetts Democrat is set to make the announcement at the National Action Network on Friday, just two days after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) invoked the unilateral “nuclear option” to shave off debate time of presidential nominees. Now Warren says it’s time to “fight back.”

“I’m not running for President just to talk about making real, structural change. I’m serious about getting it done. And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate,” Warren will say. “So let me be as clear as I can. When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: we’re done with two sets of rules — one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.

She added: “That means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster.”

Of all the people running, she has been the boldest and the most detailed on issues and they are all unabashedly progressive.

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Someday, one of these nuts is going to succeed

by digby

Jeff Flake, the mild-mannered critic of President Trump who voted with his the vast majority of the time, describes what happens when you buck Dear Leader:

Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator for Arizona and a vocal critic of the Trump administration, has revealed he received a number of threats from supporters of the president before he left office this year.

In an interview with the Guardian, Flake described several examples of threatening messages and behaviour made against him and his family that he said were currently being investigated by law enforcement agencies in Arizona and Washington DC.

“I would have liked to have done one more term in the Senate, that’s probably all,” Flake said. “But its been at a heavy cost to my family. The sacrifices they’ve been [made to make], what they had to endure …”

Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, both as a candidate for office and as president, has often targeted Flake. The former senator had called for Trump to abandon his bid for the White House in 2016 after the release of a tape showing the reality star bragging about groping women’s genitals.

Last week, a man in Chicago pleaded guilty to a federal retaliation chargeafter leaving a threatening voicemail for an unidentified US senator after the hearings for Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Flake confirmed to the Guardian the message had been left for him after he delayed Kavanaugh’s hearing by pressing for a short FBI investigation into allegations the judge had sexually assaulted a number of women as a teenager.

The defendant, 58-year-old James Dean Blevins Jr, said on the voicemail: “I am tired of him interrupting our president, and I am coming down there to take him and his family out,” according to prosecutors.

But, said Flake: “That’s only one of several threats.”

Flake revealed that an unidentified man carrying a rifle scope had recently arrived at three locations in Arizona associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, looking for the former senator, a devout Mormon.

According to Flake: “It was a man living out of his car. He told someone he had just attended a Trump rally.” He added: “He showed up at another event two weeks ago.”

The Mesa police department in Arizona confirmed they had been assisting Flake and his family during an investigation that was being handled by federal authorities. The US Capitol police declined to answer questions.

Flake also said his family had received “several” other threats that “haven’t been tracked down yet”.

“Threats where they list my kids and their addresses, links to beheading videos,” Flake said.

Flake announced in 2017 he would not recontest his seat in the US Senate, partially citing the inflammatory rhetoric and discriminatory policy of the Trump administration.

Flake is just one of a number of high-profile critics of Trump to receive threats or other forms of violence from his supporters.

In March, Cesar Sayoc Jr, a fanatical supporter of Trump, pleaded guilty to 65 felony counts after mailing pipe bombs to a dozen Trump critics, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Trump’s nuttier followers take him very seriously. His reckless rhetoric eggs them on.

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Fun and fascism, FTW

by digby

Trump calls on Congress to “get rid of the whole asylum system” because “it doesn’t work.”

“Frankly, we should get rid of judges,” he adds. pic.twitter.com/5s8kI9mbHR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2019

Trump says it’s fun for him to joke about Joe Biden even though he brags about grabbing women by the pussy. Because he’s an inveterate asshole.

Also, he wants to “get rid of judges.” Because he’s an instinctive fascist.


Update:

Oy.

Biden joked about it today too. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

These old guys are just … past it, I’m afraid.

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Going in a “tougher direction” on immigration

by digby

This is odd:

The White House on Thursday withdrew the nomination of a longtime border official to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration grapples with a massive increase in Southern border crossings that are straining the system with no easy solution, according to people with knowledge of the move.

The paperwork on Ron Vitiello was sent to members of Congress Thursday, the people said, and the decision was unexpected and met with confusion. Vitiello had been scheduled to travel with President Donald Trump to the border on Friday, but was no longer going, one official said. He will still remain acting director, they said.

One Homeland Security official insisted it was nothing but a paperwork error that had later been corrected. But other, higher-level officials said the move did not appear to be a mistake, even though they were not informed ahead of time.

The people had direct knowledge of the letter but were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Vitiello was nominated to lead ICE, the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law in the interior of the U.S., after more than 30 years in law enforcement, starting in 1985 with the U.S. Border Patrol. He was previously Border Patrol chief and deputy commissioner U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the patrol.

Trump obviously has something up his sleeve but as I write this, we don’t know what it is. He said at his press avail on the lawn this morning that he’s “going in a tougher direction.” Maybe it will be Kris Kobach who has been mentioned as a new “immigration Czar.”

I don’t know who would be “tougher” but maybe Richard Spencer is available?

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A president being “manipulated” and then abusing his power to cover it up isn’t ok either

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump’s new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, “We need you, Leon” — assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush’s administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn’t going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn’t a case of someone who’d spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr’s been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

I characterized Barr’s initial four-page summary of the Mueller report as an elegant little political document and it was. It elicited exactly the response he and the White House wanted. He validated Trump’s slogan, “No Collusion, No Obstruction” while cleverly obscuring the fact that there is obviously much more to that story. After a couple of weeks of careful parsing and reconsideration of the implications by the press and various experts, Barr has now lost control of the storyline. He is promising to deliver the full report after he redacts whatever he deems necessary, but because of the game he’s been playing, there is no longer much trust that he’s acting in good faith.

Unlike Ken Starr’s investigations of the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, the Mueller team didn’t use friendly members of the press to pressure witnesses and try their cases in the court of public opinion. In fact they said nothing at all outside the courtroom. But now that the investigation is over and the attorney general has taken it upon himself to summarize their conclusions they have reportedly begin to express their distress about how he’s handled that.

Numerous news outlets have confirmed that members of Mueller’s team say that Barr has mischaracterized the evidence of obstruction of justice, which by all accounts is substantial.

They have also told associates that they carefully prepared summaries for different sections of the report, assuming they would be released to the public. Those summaries should not require all this concern from Barr about redactions. This certainly comports with many experts’ assumptions about how such a report would be organized. While Barr and the Justice Department are now saying that the summaries are labeled as containing grand jury and other confidential information, therefore requiring careful review and redactions, many professionals have suggested that’s just pro forma.

I think we all knew that the question of obstruction was going to be a problem for President Trump, simply because so much of it was happening right out in the open. But according to NBC News, it’s not just that issue that has the Mueller team agitated. The “collusion” case is also being somewhat misrepresented. The special counsel decided not to charge Trump or his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government in its election interference, but that is far from the whole story. Members of the team say that “the findings paint a picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation.”

I have long been willing to believe that Trump and his minions were simply so unethical, corrupt and uninformed that they were easy marks for the Russian election sabotage campaign. We know that they behaved idiotically when Russians approached them. Donald Trump Jr. writing an emails saying, “if it’s what you say, I love it!” upon hearing that Russian emissaries want to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” is not the language of a sophisticated conspirator. It’s almost as if they were testing to see if Junior was even sentient. But that doesn’t get him or Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort or Donald Trump himself off the hook. This isn’t a game. Trump is president of the United States.

Trump and his team were almost certainly compromised by the lies they told about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. Trump knew that could be revealed at any time and his obsequious behavior toward Vladimir Putin the could easily be interpreted as bowing to an unspoken threat. Trump is conversant in blackmail threats, as we all know. We also know that he pays up when he deems it necessary.

Mueller found that none of this was prosecutable and it is vital we find out why he reached that conclusion. But to say that there was nothing there amounts to sweeping some of the worst judgment calls in the history of presidential campaigns under the carpet. And that’s really saying something.

These were outrageous decisions regardless of the criminal liability or lack thereof. I’m not sure if rank stupidity and reckless greed qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors but we should probably know the whole story before deciding about that. Even if Trump and his close advisers were suckered by the “Russian election interference activities” it’s quite clear that once Trump realized that the FBI and the intelligence community thought he might have done something illegal, he tried to cover it up. If that’s so, it’s not William Barr’s place to make the decision about criminal obstruction of justice. If the Department of Justice has concluded that it cannot charge a sitting president with a crime, it cannot clear one of wrongdoing either. It’s up to the Congress to decide what to do about Donald Trump. It seems as though the Mueller investigators agree.

Requiem for the downward-mobile
by Tom Sullivan

An Aspen Institute report on the human impacts of the next wave of automation adds to the anxieties already roiling these dis-United States. The Aspen Institute (AI) warns that artificial intelligence (also AI) will have a far more disruptive effect than the last wave of automation from which displaced workers never really recovered.

Against the backdrop of continued jobs growth, this threat is all but invisible. Yet, Axios reports:

Already, Aspen’s Alastair Fitzpayne tells Axios, workers displaced in prior technological cycles “have experienced profound downward mobility” in new jobs at much lower pay and benefits.

Job retraining and other federal supports for displaced workers were so much cold comfort to people retraining for work that paid less and left them worse off than before. The report’s executive summary warns, “Artificial intelligence and other new technologies may lead to deeper, faster, broader, and more disruptive automation” that retraining programs may mitigate even less.

Aspen warns that the next wave may not follow the historical script. Fewer jobs may be created than destroyed:

• In an interview, Fitzpayne, a co-author of the Aspen report, said no one knows how many new jobs will be produced, where they will be created, or how much they will pay.
• The points are important because most studies play down the real possibility that the automation age could go very wrong, for an extended period, for large swaths of workers and their communities.
• Workers who lost their jobs in the wave of manufacturing layoffs in the early 1980s, for instance, were still earning 15%-20% less in their new work 20 years later, according to the Aspen report.

But “technology is not destiny,” Aspen cheerfully offers. With the right policy choices, we can choose to create an economy that works for everybody, etc., etc. For example, by encouraging employers to adopt a more “human-centric approach” to delivering the bottom line. And by supporting displaced workers through “retraining, reemployment services, and Unemployment Insurance to help displaced workers transition to new jobs and careers.” It’s in employers’ best interest “to grow and retain the best workers,” Adam Roston, CEO of BlueCrew staffing tells Axios.

Forgive my skepticism.

Progressive rock star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests new technology might be liberating, but with a caveat:

“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” Ocasio-Cortez said, putting the anti-1-percenter firmly on the side of the optimistic 52 percent of technologists.

But something else she said got less attention, and spoke more to the pressing issue: The “reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

A more durable one than our devices, sadly. The question in the adoption of any new technology, including the legal technology underlying shareholder capitalism is, as Humpty Dumpty said of words, “which is to be master—that’s all.” We are just too busy buying the newest shiny thing to ask it or to consider the human costs.

The cultural stigma attached to job loss is also profound, and change-resistant. Conservatives are not about to celebrate jobless people having more time to create art and enjoy the world we live in.

The yawning wealth gap between the Haves and the Have-nots is not healthy for any society. That we must adopt new technology or die is not a human-centric impulse, but an economic one reflective of homo corporatus not homo sapiens.

The merciless logic of shareholder capitalism and acceptance of the inevitability of technological change means — for all the bluster about free markets and freedom — humans are just along for the ride and no longer in control. Not really. Efficiency is more important. Like freedom reduced to an abstraction, it’s not efficiency in service to human beings, just efficiency for efficiency’s sake.

Comedian John Mulaney’s “Horse Loose In A Hospital” bit dropped into my lap this week about two years late. A commentary on how out of control the Trump era feels to normal people, it is a comedic triumph.

One joke reflects how people unconsciously value efficiency in the abstract:

Sometimes, if you make fun of the horse, people will get upset. These are the people that open the door for the horse … I go, “Hey, how come you open the door for the horse?” And they go, “Well, the hospital was inefficient!”

It’s Friday. After that, you’ll need a good laugh:

Update: [h/t Tarkloon for corrected obvious typo]

A clever reason to get Trump’s taxes

by digby

I’ve been hard on Richard Neal for dragging his feet on the tax return question but I think I was unfair. This is actually very clever. He’s wrapped his request for the returns around Trump’s fatuous insistence that he’s being audited, apparently for every year since the beginning of time, so he can’t release them:

But being under audit does not preclude Trump from releasing his tax returns — he could go ahead and release them anyway. There’s also precedent for a president releasing his tax returns while under audit — Richard Nixon did it. What’s more, part of what Democrats are looking to do in requesting Trump’s tax returns is find out if the IRS is properly vetting them.

The IRS’s administrative manual lays out guidance for processing the tax returns of the president and vice president and says they are subject to “mandatory examinations” by the agency. The IRS isn’t legally bound to audit the returns but is supposed to. What we don’t know is if it’s ignoring that guidance, or probing the returns the sufficient amount.

Neal pointed that out in his letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on Wednesday, explaining that one of the purposes of his request is to conduct oversight of “the extent to which the IRS audits and enforces the Federal tax laws against a President.”

“The IRS has a policy of auditing the tax returns of all sitting presidents and vice-presidents, yet little is known about the effectiveness of the law,” Neal said in a statement about the request.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s pre-presidential tax returns are being audited, and his claims that they are could be fake. But the 2017 and 2018 returns, if the IRS is following its own procedures, are supposed to be audited.

An IRS spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment on Neal’s request.
We already kind of know what the IRS commissioner thinks about Trump’s tax returns

The IRS commissioner is a presidential appointee, meaning Trump tapped Rettig for the job he has right now. Part of what Democrats want to find out is whether, as a political appointee, he’s unbiased in doing his job.

“Is the IRS capable of auditing the president is a legitimate question,” Joseph Thorndike, a tax historian and director of the Tax History Project, told me when discussing the process for requesting Trump’s tax returns earlier this year.

We actually have some insight into what Rettig thinks of Trump’s tax returns, including whether he should release them while under audit. The longtime tax attorney wrote for Forbes in 2016 that he wouldn’t advise Trump to release his returns.

“Is there any legal impediment to Trump publicly releasing his tax returns? Absolutely not,” Rettig wrote. “Would any experienced tax lawyer representing Trump in an IRS audit advise him to publicly release his tax returns during the audit? Absolutely not.”

We don’t know if Trump is actually under audit — the IRS could not be reviewing his presidential tax returns, and he could be lying about his pre-presidential tax returns being audited. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, in a hearing before Congress in February said he didn’t believe Trump was being audited. In fact, Cohen said that what made Trump nervous was the idea that releasing his returns like previous candidates would prompt extra scrutiny from the IRS.

“What he didn’t want is to have an entire group of think tanks that are tax experts run through his tax return and start ripping it to pieces, and then he’ll end up in an audit and he’ll ultimately have taxable consequences, penalties, and so on,” Cohen said.

If Trump’s returns are indeed under audit — whether those from before his term began or after— they’re likely being probed by the IRS’s “Wealth Squad,” a specialized group that is supposed to conduct audits on very rich taxpayers, which Trump claims to be. At Forbes, Rettig laid out the process the Wealth Squad follows in its work, meaning that theoretically, if Trump’s returns are being audited, he knows what to do. He also hypothesized what might be in the returns:

So, what is in Trump’s Returns? Likely information prepared by many very well-qualified tax professionals who were quite aware the general public might be looking at the returns at some future date. It’s unlikely an accurate overall financial picture will surface by simply reviewing his returns. He likely pays taxes at a lesser rate than many of us given the nature of his real estate and similar investments being subjected to lower tax rates than salaries earned by the rest of us. Certainly, his tax professionals have not advised him to overpay his taxes.

The IRS could be conducting a fair, complete audit of Trump’s tax returns while he’s president, before he was president, or not at all. That’s part of what Democrats are trying to find out. So when the White House gives the excuse that it’s not releasing Trump’s tax returns because of the audit, it might be inadvertently helping Democrats build their case.

It should be pretty easy to get an answer to this question. As far as we know, there’s no reason a person can’t release his tax returns if they are under audit. Richard Nixon’s taxes were under audit when he reluctantly agreed to release his under threat of the congress obtaining them. It ended up costing him half a million dollars in back taxes and fines. And that is obviously what Trump is afraid of.

As for finding out if the “wealth squad” is auditing the president’s returns as the IRS is required to do, keep in mind that the main reason the law was written back in 1924 was because there were suspicions that the IRS was doing Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon favors.

Turns out Neal is very well prepared to take this case to court if he has to. The parallels are obvious.

Update:

President Trump earlier this year asked Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to prioritize a confirmation vote for his nominee to be the chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, indicating that it was a higher priority than voting on the nomination of William P. Barr as attorney general, a person familiar with the conversation said.

White House aides insisted for months that the confirmation of the nominee, Michael J. Desmond, a tax lawyer from Santa Barbara, Calif., was a top priority after passage of the tax bill in 2017.

But the request by Mr. Trump, made to Mr. McConnell on Feb. 5, raised questions about whether the president had other motivations. For months, the president has seethed over vows by congressional Democrats that they would move to obtain his tax returns from the I.R.S. And this week, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, formally asked the I.R.S. for six years of the returns, using an obscure provision in the tax code to do so.

On Thursday, asked if he would direct the I.R.S. not to disclose his tax returns, Mr. Trump said Democrats would have to talk to his lawyers.

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Good old principled Rand Paul

by digby

Covering for Trump and flogging “lock her up.” And unlike Lindsey Graham, he isn’t even running for re-election:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked a resolution calling for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia probe be made public, marking the fifth time Republicans have blocked the House-passed measure.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for unanimous consent on Thursday to pass the resolution, which cleared the House in a 420-0 vote earlier this year.

“What we’re talking about is basic transparency, let’s make sure the full Mueller report is released to Congress … and then let’s make sure the American people see as much of this report as possible,” Warner said from the Senate floor.

He added that to warn future campaigns and candidates about potential election interference “we need to fully understand what the Russians were trying to do.”

Under Senate rules, any one senator can request that any bill or resolution be passed. But because it requires the signoff of every senator, any one senator can also block their request.

Paul objected because Warner wouldn’t agree to amend the nonbinding House-passed resolution to include provisions calling for the public release of communications between several Obama-era officials including former President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.

Paul argued that Congress still needs to figure out the “entire story” including the origins of the investigation into President Trump’s campaign and a controversial research dossier compiled against then-candidate Trump.

“I think it’s very important that we not turn our country into this back and forth where each successive party tries to use the apparatus of government to investigate the previous president,” Paul said.

“What we don’t know is was President Obama told that the evidence to get this investigation started was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign? We need to know that,” Paul continued.

Paul has warned that he would block the resolution backing the Mueller report’s release unless information about the opposition research dossier compiled against Trump was also released. He first blocked the House-passed resolution last week.

“It was so scandalous and so unverified and has turned out to be untrue, and yet this was the basis for the beginning of the investigation. This was the basis for doing something extraordinary,” Paul added on Thursday of the dossier. 

A 2018 memo from the House Intelligence Committee, which was controlled at the time by Republicans, found that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump campaign officials had improper contacts with Russia was triggered by information the bureau obtained about George Papadopoulos, a former adviser to the campaign.

All these principled libertarians, supposedly suspicious of government power, backing the President of the most powerful nation on earth’s self-serving corruption, betrayal and abuse of power either out of  hatred for Democrats or blindly clinging to the idea that “deep state” intelligence and law enforcement are, by definition, evil players in all circumstances.  It’s ridiculous. Trump has massive power and he’s using in ways that are just a threatening to individual freedom as the IC.

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So nuclear energy in the hands of Iran is a nightmare, in the hands of Saudi Arabia, it’s ok?

by digby

I get that we are talking about one country that is friendly to the US and on that isn’t, but honestly — more nukes in the Middle East? Really??

Saudi Arabia is within months of completing its first nuclear reactor, new satellite images show, but it has yet to show any readiness to abide by safeguards that would prevent it making a bomb.

The reactor site is in the King Abdulaziz city for science and technology on the outskirts of Riyadh. The site was identified by Robert Kelley, a former director for nuclear inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who said it was very small 30-kilowatt research reactor, not far from completion.

“I would guess they could have it all done, with the roof in place and the electricity turned on, within a year,” said Kelley, who worked for more than three decades in research and engineering in the US nuclear weapons complex.

The satellite photos show that a 10-metre high steel tubular vessel, which will contain the nuclear fuel, has been erected, and construction work is under way on the surrounding concrete building.

Kelley said the main practical purpose of the research reactor would be to train nuclear technicians, but it also marked the crossing of a nuclear threshold. Before inserting nuclear fuel into the reactor, Saudi Arabia would have to implement a comprehensive set of rules and procedures, including IAEA inspections, designed to ensure no fissile material was diverted for use in weapons – something it has so far avoided.

The reactor has been designed by an Argentinian state-owned company, Invap SE.

“This reactor should be operational by the end of the year roughly,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, Argentina’s envoy to the IAEA, confirmed. “It depends on a number of factors. Invap is in charge of design. They are directing all the operations. But the local engineering is being done by the Saudis.”

The emergence of the satellite images, first published by Bloomberg, comes in the midst of a struggle between the Trump White House and Congress over the sale of nuclear technology to Riyadh, after it emerged that the US department of energy had granted seven permits for the transfer of sensitive nuclear information by US businesses to the Saudi government.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the energy secretary, Rick Perry, have both stonewalled congressional committees demanding to know what the authorisations were for, and which companies were involved.

On Tuesday, the head of the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kristine Svinicki, and her fellow commissioners remained silent when repeatedly asked by Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, whether the commission had been consulted on the nuclear permits.

I just can’t imagine this will end well. We know Israel has nukes and that’s not the greatest idea in the world either. But putting more nuclear technology in the Middle East ratchets up the danger exponentially. This new Saudi regime is not exactly … dependable.

The Washington POst’s article here.

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