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Thumbs-Down For Durnford Is
Grotesque Attack On Environmentalism |
|
By
Yoichi Shimatsu |
| Wednesday, 21 September 2016, goes down as the darkest hour, a total
eclipse for justice in Canada and the environmental cause throughout the
Northern Hemisphere. The guilty verdict against Dana Durnford is a perversion of legal norms that condemns the Canadian Government to being the Great Banana Republic of the North in slavish servitude to the global nuclear industry and its own uranium-mining profiteers. The greatest beneficiary of this heinous court decision are Japanese investors in Canadian uranium and nuclear, including TEPCO and Hitachi-GE, which are the very source of the radioactive death curse along the western coast and in the atmosphere of North America and across the Arctic region. While the sentence of three years probation may seem lenient, it is an overt attempt to muzzle his criticism in regard to the effects of the Fukushima radioactive releases, crimp any donations for his scientific research, and has a chilling effect on the anti-nuclear cause and the larger environmental movement, along with dampening the concerns of affected residents in Western Canada. The long-dragged out legal proceedings, followed now by probation, are part of a strategy of intimidation against the Canadian public living under a nuclear cloud of denial of cancer and other radioactivity-linked disorders. Three years is a critical duration in time, ending as it will on the cusp of the radioactive 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The summary verdict against Durnford for his robust criticism of pro-nuclear lobbying disguised as marine science now reduces well-informed environmental opinion to the banned category of a hate crime. Do residents of Canada no longer have any right to express their anger at lawless corporate felons and their academic lackeys for unleashing radioactive isotopes that threaten the health of every child and any adult who works outdoors? Should we not voice stern warnings against the nuclear violators in the strongest possible terms to stop the wanton destruction of Arctic mammals like the polar bears and reindeer, annihilation of marine species from algae to whales, and the deprivation of livelihood for fishing communities and Native American tribes? Is righteous denunciation of mass poisoning by radioactivity now a heinous crime, or should it be our common moral duty to demand punishment for eco-criminals? The court sided with the environmental criminals, fraudsters to be exact. Strong language is sometimes necessary due to the very principles of an environmental movement that does not and will not use physical violence, even against the worst violators. This unbearable restraint is shown by park rangers in Africa who do not use gunfire against elephant poachers, and even by the most militant marine-life defenders who have not deployed firearms against law-defying Japanese and Icelandic whaling vessels. While environmentalists should not be launching violent action as judge, jury and executioner, that ethical injunction does not forbid loud demands that ivory poachers and illegal whalers should get a taste of their own medicine from elephant guns and harpoons. Fukushima has done immensely more destruction to the animal realm, as proven by Durnford, than hunting. Justice should be swift and stern, and not a tangled web to protect the eco-criminals. Mere harsh words versus deadly blasts of gunfire, harpoon cannons and radioactivity killing defenseless species, are we all to be jailed for advocating the continued existence of life on Earth and for demanding harsh punishment for the perpetrators of extinction? Anyone who’s ever seen the John Huston movie “The Roots of Heaven” about the ivory trade can understand moral rage against brute extermination of species that have no protection under so-called laws written by killers and exploiters and permitted by politicians on the take. The only protection left for the biological realm depends on our human defiance of the inhumane rules to save the innocents from disappearing forever. Attacking the victim A genuine constitutional system makes its legal judgment on the basis of actions not mere words, otherwise every producer, director and scriptwriter of action movies should be prosecuted for promoting images of killing and mayhem. Did the Vancouver prosecutor show hard evidence of an actual attempt against the plaintiffs’ lives by the disabled Durford? Not a shred of hard evidence could be shown, and to the contrary it was the defendant who was repeatedly threatened by the nuclear industry’s thugs and trolls. It was Durnford who suffered an assault while he was sitting in a wheelchair and more recently on his drive to a court hearing when deliberate sabotage of the front wheel bearings nearly crashed his car. The nuclear lobby behind the plaintiffs are involved in a heinous series of crimes and threats against Dunford, reminiscent of the threats that led to the Karen Silkwood murder. Since those online volleys of innuendo and overt threats did not involve any personal grudge, the real violence is being done at the behest of the nuclear industry and Canada’s uranium-mining sector, which shamelessly supplies reckless nuclear-weapons outlaws like Pakistan and Israel. It is Official Canada that is guilty, and therefore covers its indecency by persecuting a lone anti-nuclear crusader. Deprived of the right to legal defense In one of the worst examples of courtroom intrigue, Dunford was denied his legal right to an attorney after his court-appointed defense lawyer refused to represent him, a shocking violation of basic civil rights in a so-called Western democracy. As a physically impaired marine diver on disability (who devoted his scare personal resources on researching Fukushima radioactivity in Canadian coastal waters), the defendant was in no financial position to hire a high-powered defense attorney and could not find a pro bono lawyer in all of Canada despite a long search. The collective refusal by the legal community to defend an environmentalist is a resounding discredit to law as it is malpracticedi in Canada. A defendant would have better legal representation in North Korea or Zimbabwe than in than in the frozen moral interior of the Banana Republic of the North. Missing evidence from court proceedings Had the Vancouver district court accorded Dunford his legal rights, it would have been possible to subpoena key witnesses and obtain documents that could prove his innocence against a spurious complaint. As an example, co-plaintiff Jay Cullen is a native of Peterboro, Ontario, which is a company town controlled over the past half-century by the Hitachi-GE (GEH) nuclear fuel-assembly plant. Whether he is related to a GE-H executive secretary named Miss Cullen and the circumstances of her appointment by one or more Japanese managers may well be relevant to the case against Durnford. Is bribery of Canadians in British Columbia by Hitachi-GE, which were responsible for the meltdowns of Fukushima’s reactor 1 and 3, involved in this witch hunt? The other plaintiff Ken Buessler is a researcher with a suspiciously sketchy curriculum vita at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). Based in Massachusetts, WHOI was founded and continues to be funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The Fukushima nuclear crisis resulted in lawsuits against the U.S. Navy for injuries due to Fukushima radioactivity sustained by the crew of the supercarrier USS Ronald Reagan. The Navy has fought against its own sailors in U.S. court, an act of treason by a government against its citizens. Dr. Buessler’s record prior to the Fukushima disaster is blank, indicating a role in secret military research and his capacity as an ONR sock puppet. The U.S. Navy’s main interest is in maintain the fleet of nuclear submarines armed with sub-launched nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, and toward that objective the University of Victoria (UVic) receives substantial grants from ONR and its associated institutes for conducting clandestine military-related communications and surveillance projects along Canada’s Pacific Coast. “Coincidentally”, the legal strategy against Durnford was devised by the law faulty at UVic, which comes under the Vancouver jurisdiction. The long hostile arm of the “neighbor to the south” is once again evident in the Durnford case. Radioactive Canada The two plaintiffs are not credible complainants, and any fair-minded competent judge would have thrown the case out of court. However, mentally colonized Canada does not come under the Rule of Law, certainly not when it is applied to the nuclear and uranium-mining sectors. Canada is the world’s largest uranium exporter, a commerce that has already led to the radioactive leak from a shipment at Ballantyne Pier in Vancouver Harbour less than two months before the 2011 Fukushima reactor meltdowns. The suppressed records of nuclear cover-ups in Canada could easily fill the shelves of the Toronto public library. Since the 3/11 disaster, Canada has been awash in radioactive precipitation and drift from Fukushima along the North Pacific Current. The net result as proven with abundant underwater photographic evidence gathered by the long-experienced commercial divier Durnford is the loss of more than 2,000 marine species, with less than 200 major types remaining at some shoreline locations. The collapse of the salmon fisheries and wipe-out of Dungeness crabs can be confirmed at the seafood counter at any supermarket. The destruction of marine mammals is so far gone that beached whales are no longer reported in the news media. Inland, too, Durnford has conducted research trips showing the rapid melting of glaciers due to fallout and the extermination of birds and insects on an unprecedented scale. Canadian wildlife and marine species are being massacred by Fukushima fallout as TEPCO continues to do nothing to stop that deadly flow in Japan’s undeclared nuclear war against the West. There is no other possible explanation, and so we must face the hard facts unlike the paid-off imbeciles making judgment based on ignorance and denial in that sterile courtroom. Hate crime or righteous outrage? Official Canada has vigorously supported the Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s demands to deport European emigres, such as the Hungarian policeman Lazlo Csizsik-Csatáry, to face the death penalty in Eastern Europe or Israel for their alleged role in the mass murder of Jews during World War II. Is it a hate crime to accuse someone of being a former Nazi, a charge tantamount to a death sentence in Israel or any former Warsaw Pact nation? Not in Canada, which deported the accused to their certain doom. So why then is it a hate crime to verbally oppose the pro-nuclear lobby, particularly those individuals aiding the cover-up by TEPCO and Hitachi, which are responsible for rising human cancer rates, heart failures and thyroid disorders along the West Coast and Rockies region, along with incalculable destruction of wildlife and marine species? For the environmental movement, and I do not mean here brazen eco-fraudsters and greenwashers like nuclear apologist David Sukuzi, who toured Northern Japan after the Fukushima disaster as a VIP guest of Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (the Japanese police-intelligence agency and propaganda bureau formerly known as the Home Ministry). Among the unsavory donors to the David Suzuki Foundation are the OPG utility that operates 3 nuclear power plants in Canada and Toyota, the electric car leader that cosponsored the Kyoto Summit (which drafted the Kyoto Protocol on climate change) with the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in support of nuclear energy as a “clean, safe and cheap” alternative to coal and future power source for automobiles. The cost of that deceptive folly is the ongoing environmental disaster, including the Arctic ozone hole and fragmentation of the polar ice sheet, which are far in excess of any prediction about climate change. Scientific fraud comes at a heavy price for humanity. The rigged prosecution in Vancouver has proven one thing only: That beyond a shadow of doubt, Canada’s authentic ecology hero is Dana Durnford, who has emerged as a role model for global environmentalism. Friend, colleague and brother, I salute you for those intrepid oceanic research voyages and for your boundless courage in defense of all of the worlds’ precious species, great and small including our own. Life will triumph, eventually, thanks to your personal sacrifices and deep knowledge of the sea. Let us all stand together with you to protect life on this fragile planet. Yoichi Shimatsu is a forensic journalist and former editor with The Japan Times group. |
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