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WMR has learned from a senior Democratic congressional source that the Bush family, most notably former President George H. W. Bush, is reaping windfall profits from the transfer of title of public federal and state lands to private hands. The elder Bush, according to our sources, has a vested financial interest in land title companies that specialize in the transfer of public lands to private interests. The revelations represent the first evidence that the elder Bush has benefited from the transfer of public lands to private hands in a giant scheme to defraud federal and state governments, as well as the American taxpayers and Native Americans.

"'Under the Radar': Outgoing Bush White House Hiked Likely Penalties Borne by Taxpayers By Inking Deals With Over a Dozen Utilities; 170 Groups in All 50 States Release Principles Urging an Upgrade in Spent Reactor Fuel Storage Safety to Withstand Equivalent of '9/11 Attacks' Between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and 21 proposed nuclear reactors covered by agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration with more than a dozen electric utilities, the United States already has agreed to store enough spent (used) reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories, according to documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Given that the U.S. is back to square one for the first repository, U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook for potentially tens of billions of dollars in penalties that would have to be paid to utilities if the 21 proposed reactor projects proceed. This new information about the daunting scale of the challenge that faces the United States in disposing of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors comes one day before the first meeting of the Obama Administration's "Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future." In addition to highlighting the serious consequences of the eleventh-hour deals stuck by the Bush White House, experts also focused public attention on the fact that the recently cancelled Yucca Mountain repository -- even if it were open today, 35 years after the process to create it started -- would already be filled to its legal limit of 63,000 metric tons of commercial waste by this spring. A second repository the same size would be filled with the 42,000 additional metric tons of spent fuel yet to be produced by existing nuclear reactors and the 21,000 metric tons that would be produced by the 21 proposed reactors covered under the Bush-industry agreements."

First came the 11th-hour bid to relax clean air standards for power plants near the nation's national parks, then a battle backing power plants over nearby aquatic life that wound up before the Supreme Court, and now the Bush administration is pushing for a rule to block Congress from limiting uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. What's next, a Taco Bell atop Mount Rushmore? The latest bid by the lame-duck Bush administration to roll back environmental regulations was announced late last week when U.S. Interior Department officials said they would move forward with a rule that would eliminate a provision that directs the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw lands from possible mining when Congress declares emergency conditions exist. The new rule would fly in the face of a June 25 emergency congressional resolution that required the Interior Department to withdraw a million acres of federal lands near Grand Canyon National Park from the permitting process for uranium mining.

Half the story has been told. On Tuesday the Washington Post reported that Bush is creating civil service positions for loyal appointees, in order to make it hard for Obama to get rid of them. Bush has also, for some time now, been terminating large numbers of employees in the federal government, people known as whistleblowers, people suspected of disloyalty. Some of the higher profile cases are well known.

About a year ago, according to reports by the fawning Mainstream Media, President Bush and Secretary Rice were "hanging their legacy hopes" on the expected to be "successful" outcome of the so-called Six-Party (China, Russia, Japan, United States and the two Koreas) talks, which began way back in 2003, shortly after Bush had forced North Korea to withdraw from the Treaty on Non-Proliferation and then launched his war of aggression against a virtually defenseless Iraq. What would constitute a "successful" outcome? Well, for Bush-Cheney-Bolton-Rice, it would mean getting everyone - especially the North Koreans - to miraculously reestablish the situation on the Korean peninsula as it existed on January of 2001, when President Clinton left office.

A federal judge ordered the US Justice Department to release significant portions of statements former vice president Dick Cheney made to the FBI about the Valerie Plame case. The judge dismissed objections brought by the previous George W. Bush administration to the release of records about the leak of Plame's name to the media, which compromised her position as a covert CIA officer. The Bush administration had claimed it could withhold the documents because their release could hamper the cooperation of White House officials in future probes. The public interest group that filed the lawsuit in 2008 stressed "the particular urgency to inform the public about the role vice president Cheney played in the leak of Mrs Wilson's covert identity, and the basis for the decision not to prosecute him."

A federal judge ordered the US Justice Department to release significant portions of statements former vice president Dick Cheney made to the FBI about the Valerie Plame case. The judge dismissed objections brought by the previous George W. Bush administration to the release of records about the leak of Plame's name to the media, which compromised her position as a covert CIA officer. The Bush administration had claimed it could withhold the documents because their release could hamper the cooperation of White House officials in future probes. The public interest group that filed the lawsuit in 2008 stressed "the particular urgency to inform the public about the role vice president Cheney played in the leak of Mrs Wilson's covert identity, and the basis for the decision not to prosecute him."

An inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq war kicked off Tuesday with top government advisers testifying that some Bush administration officials were calling for Saddam Hussein's ouster as early as 2001 - long before sanctions were exhausted and two years before the U.S.-led invasion. Critics hope the hearings, which will call ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and are billed as the most sweeping inquiry into the conflict, will expose alleged deception in the buildup to fighting. However, they won't establish criminal or civil liability. As the inquiry began, a small group of anti-war protesters gathered near Parliament. Three wore face masks of George Bush, Blair and Prime Minister Gordon Brown - their hands and faces covered in fake blood. "Five years we've waited for this, and finally we're getting somewhere," said Pauline Graham, 70, who traveled from the Scottish city of Glasgow to see the hearings. Her grandson Gordon Gentle, 19, was killed in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2004.

An inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq war kicked off Tuesday with top government advisers testifying that some Bush administration officials were calling for Saddam Hussein's ouster as early as 2001 - long before sanctions were exhausted and two years before the U.S.-led invasion. Critics hope the hearings, which will call ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and are billed as the most sweeping inquiry into the conflict, will expose alleged deception in the buildup to fighting. However, they won't establish criminal or civil liability. As the inquiry began, a small group of anti-war protesters gathered near Parliament. Three wore face masks of George Bush, Blair and Prime Minister Gordon Brown - their hands and faces covered in fake blood. "Five years we've waited for this, and finally we're getting somewhere," said Pauline Graham, 70, who traveled from the Scottish city of Glasgow to see the hearings. Her grandson Gordon Gentle, 19, was killed in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2004.

n a last-ditch effort to avoid regulating widespread perchlorate contamination of drinking water, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is calling for yet another blue-ribbon study of the toxic rocket fuel component and widespread pollutant. While the work of the National Academy of Sciences is highly respected, the EPA leadership's attempt to have NAS conduct a new review of perchlorate has to be seen as nothing more than an effort to dodge the issue and buy time for the defense, aerospace and chemical industries, which have been lobbying aggressively to avoid millions in perchlorate clean-up costs. "We know enough about perchlorate's thyroid-disrupting properties to understand that our government has to address this danger immediately," said Dr. Anila Jacob, Senior Scientist with Environmental Working Group (EWG). "EPA has fought every call for a safety standard for perchlorate in drinking water, prompting Congress to introduce measures compelling the agency to do so. Now, with less than two weeks left in power, the Bush team has come up with a last-minute ploy - another study that will amount to a delaying action."

President George W. Bush on Wednesday signed legislation that will allow the United States and India to open up nuclear trade, saying the two countries are "natural partners." His action will pave the way for the details of the agreement to be signed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee in Washington on Friday.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is saying the same things about Yucca Mountain that President Bush once did, and Nevadans should not be fooled. "That's what George Bush said, remember, and he'd been president for a couple of weeks when he decided science wasn't so important and jammed it down our throat," the Senate majority leader said in an interview.

"Published reports indicate that the Obama Administration will announce on Tuesday, February 16, approval of a "conditional" taxpayer loan guarantee to the Southern Company for construction of two new nuclear reactors at its Vogtle site in Georgia. "If the reports are correct, this would be a repudiation of Obama's own campaign statements against subsidies for nuclear power, and the implementation of the worst energy policy excesses of the Bush Administration and failed presidential candidate Sen. John McCain," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a national organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland. NIRS pointed to a video of then-candidate Obama telling voters on December 30, 2007 that he opposed taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R52J2D5QQU. During the election campaign, McCain called for construction of 45 new reactors in the U.S. by 2030. "Last time I checked," Mariotte said, "McCain lost the election. It's astonishing that his misguided and rejected energy policies live on. It is safe to say that no one voted for Obama in order to give taxpayer money to wealthy nuclear corporations." The Department of Energy's loan guarantee program for reactor construction was established by Congress at the urging of the Bush administration in 2005. In 2007, Congress authorized the program to provide $18.5 Billion in loan guarantees for new reactors. In late January, President Obama proposed nearly tripling the program to $54 Billion. "Few realize that the DOE's program extends beyond simple guarantees. In some cases at least, the loans will come directly from the taxpayers through the little-known Federal Financing Bank (FFB). Thus the taxpayers will be put in the awkward and highly risky position of both providing billions of dollars in loans to giant nuclear corporations and promising to repay the loans if the companies default," explained Mariotte. "With the Congressional Budget Office pre

The Barack Obama administration claims that construction of a second Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Qom began before Tehran's decision to withdraw from a previous agreement to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in advance of such construction. But the November 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate on Iran's nuclear program tells a different story. The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran's nuclear facilities mounted by the George W. Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

The Barack Obama administration claims that construction of a second Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Qom began before Tehran's decision to withdraw from a previous agreement to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in advance of such construction. But the November 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate on Iran's nuclear program tells a different story. The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran's nuclear facilities mounted by the George W. Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

Former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales misled Congress when he claimed the CIA in 2002 approved information that ended up in the 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq's alleged effort to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program, a House committee said Thursday. The committee also expressed skepticism about claims by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that she was unaware of the CIA's doubts about the claim before President George W. Bush's speech. Iraq's alleged attempt to buy uranium was one of the justifications for the Bush administration's decision to go to war. The claim has since been repudiated. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in a memo that its investigation showed the CIA had warned at least four National Security Council officials not to allow Bush, in three speeches in 2002, to cite questionable intelligence that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium. The sentences were stripped out of those speeches, but made it into the State of the Union address.

The Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Department of the Interior, in early December eliminated a regulation that gave two congressional committees the power to require the secretary of interior to set aside public lands from uranium mining and other extractive activities. The action, coupled with renewed federal interest in uranium mining, is causing concern for some Western tribes. In effect, the Bush administration's decision could open up public lands in and around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining. The aftereffects of such developments could have devastating effects on the health of tribes in and around the Grand Canyon, according to environmentalists and health and legal experts.

President George W. Bush Tuesday signed a document allowing measures to boost international monitoring of nuclear activities to come into force in the United States, US officials said. Bush signed the "instrument of ratification of the protocol additional to the agreement between the United States of America and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)" to implement such nuclear safeguards, a White House statement said. The protocol was signed by the United States and the IAEA on June 12, 1998 and approved by the Senate on March 31, 2004.

The US is prepared to help other countries develop nuclear energy, including by "assisting with the necessary financing," President Bush told the International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference in Vienna Monday. Bush's message was delivered as part of more extensive remarks by US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who also said, "We must make the development of a global commercial nuclear infrastructure a priority." Bodman also called on other IAEA member states to establish an international fuel bank that would begin operations by the end of the year. The fuel bank's goal would be to provide an incentive to countries with new nuclear power programs to refrain from pursuing indigenous uranium enrichment programs.

A charter member of George W. Bush's infamous "axis of evil" on account of its nuclear-weapons program, arms sales and brutal human-rights record, North Korea was unsurprisingly targeted by Bush for regime change from the start. That Kim Jong Il - a man the American President once called a "pygmy" - has not only survived, but emerged in the twilight of the Bush era with an agreement eerily similar to the one he signed with Bill Clinton over a decade earlier, makes for a remarkable tale.

On August 25, 2008, the Nuclear Energy Institute released a fact sheet for press at the Democratic National Convention claiming that "Nuclear power plants and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are not linked." This statement assumes that sensitive nuclear technologies will not spread. However, the Bush administration's current proposal to resume reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership has increased the risk that nuclear energy will result in more nuclear weapons-usable material in the United States and abroad. The Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) proposes that the United States would separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel through reprocessing. GNEP envisions that "receiver" countries would voluntarily give up nuclear enrichment and reprocessing technologies and, in exchange, and would send their nuclear waste to "supplier" countries for reprocessing. In practice, GNEP is a proliferation risk, exorbitantly expensive, and not a solution to the growing nuclear waste problem in the United States

The Bush administration's landmark nuclear-cooperation agreement with Russia is unlikely to gain passage before President George W. Bush leaves office, the latest sign of how Russia's offensive in Georgia has roiled the international scene

A Senate spending panel has cut President Bush's 2009 budget request for Yucca Mountain by more than $100 million. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota says that instead of the $494.7 million Bush proposed, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water agreed Tuesday to $386.5 million.