Fukushima Crisis Continues, Was Worse Than First Reported

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

01 September 14

obody in the world knows how to dispose of radioactive waste safely and permanently. That's a given. The Japanese central government is presumably aware that anything it does with still the unmeasured but vast amount of radioactive waste from Fukushima's six nuclear power generators will be temporary. Leaving it in place is not an option. So Tokyo announced on August 29 that the Fukushima waste would be stored for 30 years in Fukushima prefect, in an "interim facility" to be built probably in nearby Okuma or Futaba (now evacuated).

"We've screened and confirmed safety and regional promotion measures as offered by the state," Fukushima prefect governor Yuhei Sato said when announcing the decision. The temporary plan was proposed by the environment minister in late 2013, an offer few thought the Fukushima officials could refuse.

The negotiated terms of the plan include a government lease of about 4,000 acres (16 square km) from some 2,000 landowners around the Fukushima site. No leases have yet been signed. The terms also include government subsidies to the prefect of $2.9 billion (301 billion yen) over thirty years, as well as a personal visit with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo for Governor Yuhei.

According to Kyodo News, the Japanese government has made the same kind of promise governments around the world have made and failed to keep, ever since the first nuclear waste was generated. Tokyo has "vowed to secure a site outside the prefecture for final disposal of the radioactive waste after the 30-year period, although the site has not been decided."

Kyodo News also reported that 88 plaintiffs – Fukushima residents at the time of the March 2011 meltdowns – have sued the Japanese government and the prefect government for damages for governmental failure to protect children from radiation. Each plaintiff seeks $9,600 (100,000 yen) in compensation: "They said in a written complaint that the central and prefectural governments failed to promptly release accurate data of radiation levels in the air after the nuclear crisis was triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, neglecting their duty to prevent residents' radiation exposure as much as possible, and exposed children to unnecessary radiation."

Plutonium levels from Fukushima may be relatively low in the Pacific

The same day the plan to store Fukushima's radioactive waste next door to the Fukushima nuclear complex was announced, the MarineChemist blog on Daily Kos reported on measurements of plutonium in the Pacific Ocean made in April 2014. The conclusion from those measurements, made within about 90 miles (150 km) of the Fukushima plant, was that the triple meltdown at Fukushima had not added measurable amounts of plutonium to the ocean near the site. As the study put it: "Our results suggested that there was no significant variation of the Pu [plutonium] distribution in seawater in the investigated areas compared to the distribution before the accident."

That sounds like good news. But all it really means is that the added plutonium from Fukushima, so far, may be relatively trivial in comparison to the already-elevated level of plutonium contamination from nuclear weapons testing more than fifty years ago. The isotopes most relevant, Plutonium-240 and Plutonium-239, have half-lives of 6,500 years and 24,100 years respectively. The half-life is the time it takes for half the amount of a radioactive element to become benign.

And plutonium is but one part of the radiation load. There are thousands of nuclides and isotopes. Some have a half-life of almost no time at all. Many others, including those released by Fukushima – cesium, strontium, tritium, iodine, tellurium – have half-lives measured in years, decades, and centuries, during which time they remain dangerous, albeit decreasingly. (According to a report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology in 2013, the amount of radioactive cesium from Fukushima measured in central Europe in 2011 was under-reported by orders of magnitude.)

The Pacific study apparently ignored everything but plutonium in its study of ocean radioactivity. It also ignored all radioactivity in the rest of the Pacific Ocean, all the areas more than 90 miles from Fukushima.

The worse news is that there is little or no reliable, systematic, continuous measurement of radiation levels anywhere, not just related to Fukushima. Nor is there any honest, comprehensive, serious study of the effects of the radiation that's not being measured. Independent scientists have sharply criticized this failure to gather reliable data in what amounts to a pattern of global denial. The Nobel Prize-winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War issued a report in June sharply criticizing the United Nations' work on Fukushima. The physicists said that the UN's optimistic assumptions had no credible basis in current research. Even stronger criticism was reported in the August 22 London Times:

The United Nations is deliberately ignoring evidence of genetic damage caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to international scientists who point to signs of mutations in animals, birds and plants. Members of the US-based Chernobyl and Fukushima research initiative have denounced a recent UN report on the 2011 disaster in Japan which, they say, fails to take proper account of symptoms as diverse as spotty cows, infertile butterflies, and monkeys with low blood cell counts.

National and international agencies continue to behave as if ionizing radiation weren't that big a deal, as if they still operated in a world where radiation was officially measured in "sunshine units," as if they still operated in the pre-1945 world where background radiation was stable or decreasing. That world is gone. Background radiation, the more or less inevitable level of exposure humans can expect, on average, is increasing – only slightly, to be sure, but also inexorably.

Clean water continues to flow into the Fukushima plant, where it is irradiated by the melted down reactors' nuclear waste. Radioactive water flows continuously into the Pacific at the rate of about 107,600 gallons (400 tons) per day. Efforts by the plant's owner/operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), to mitigate this pollution have, so far, achieved little.

Court rules TEPCO liable for damages in woman's suicide

In the first such ruling by any court, Fukushima district court ruled on August 26 that TEPCO was responsible for causing one of at least 130 suicides linked to the March 2011 meltdowns. As a result of the regional radiation contamination, Hamako Watanabe, 58, was forced to evacuate from Yamakiya with her husband and their children. The government assigned parents and children to different locations. The family lost its livelihood and its home. In July 2011, Hamako Watanabe set herself on fire and killed herself. In May 2013, her surviving family sued TEPCO for $900,000. The court awarded them about $490,000. Previous, similar suicide lawsuits had been settled through pre-trial mediation. After this decision, TEPCO issued an apology:

We apologise from the bottom of our hearts again that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident is causing much inconvenience and concern to Fukushima prefectural residents and many people. Also, we offer our sincerest prayers for the late Mrs Hamako Watanabe's soul. We will closely examine the content of the ruling and continue to respond sincerely.

Fukushima Effects More Lingering than Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Now it turns out that the multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were worse than originally reported after the March 11, 2011, shutdown of the six-reactor complex (one of the 15 largest in the world). Even after viewing underwater robot video footage of the collapsed reactor interior in May 2011, according to Japanese officials, "Experts believe that the fuel rods, not visible in the clip, were left largely undamaged despite the disaster."

That was not true.

By November 2011, the official story changed: Fukushima Unit 3 suffered "only" a partial meltdown, involving about 63% of the reactor's core, according to TEPCO. Unit 3 contains mixed oxide (MOX) fuel that is about 6% plutonium. The core of 548-566 fuel assemblies with 63 fuel rods each (more than 35,000 rods) is estimated to weigh about 89 tons. Radiation levels inside the reactor have remained lethal since March 2011.

On August 6, 2014, more than three years after the accident, on the 69th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, TEPCO announced that its revised assessment was that 100% of the reactor core had melted down and pooled at the bottom of the concrete containment vessel. There, TEPCO now believes, the molten fuel rods have penetrated about 68 cm (about 27 inches) into the concrete bottom of the vessel, but the mass remains contained.

In the Fukushima Unit 1 meltdown, TEPCO estimated in November 2011 that the core had had penetrated about 65 cm into the concrete bottom of the containment vessel.

The concrete bottoms of the containment vessels at Fukushima are about 7.6 meters, according to TEPCO. If the core has penetrated 65 cm, then there is still about 90% of the containment holding the melted fuel. But no one knows for sure at the moment.

Early preparations to begin the cleanup of Unit 3 went awry on August 29, when a remotely-operated crane was lifting the operating console of a fuel-handling machine into place to begin removing debris covering the fuel rods. The crane dropped the 880 pound (400kg) console into the unit 3 fuel pool, according to TEPCO. Cooling water has kept the fuel pool relatively stable for more than three years. TEPCO reported no injuries and no radiation release as a result of the accident. Shortly after the crane dropped the console into the fuel pool, there was an offshore earthquake of about 5.0 magnitude, but it caused no further damage.

Radioactive water buildup; rice paddies and monkeys contaminated

American media (perhaps world media) continue to under-report news about Fukushima, providing almost no reliable, continuous coverage for assessing a critical event that has potentially global consequences, even though it's unfolding minute-to-minute. The failure of governments to address the spread of radiation, and its intensity, creates an information vacuum. Rather than doing their own reporting, most mainstream media report only anecdotally, or not at all. This allows scare-mongers to take a serious, ongoing crisis and make it apocalyptic (for example, "How the Entire Pacific Is Polluted and Can Kill All Sealife").

In a limited effort to provide some perspective, here are a few summaries of recent reports of some of the ongoing difficulties at Fukushima:

Thousands of gallons of radioactive water are currently held in hundreds of Fukushima holding tanks that are reaching full capacity. On August 7, TEPCO announced its plan to release most or all of this water into the ocean, but said it would first "purify it with a state-of-the-art cleaning system." The plan has not yet received any permits. Japan Times reported on August 31 that TEPCO had given up this cleanup plan for Unit #1, although TEPCO officially says the cleanup process will be completed by the end of fiscal 2014.

TEPCO is currently impounding roughly 100 million gallons (almost 400,000 tons) of radioactive water on the Fukushima site. Another 100,000-plus gallons (400 tons) of fresh water is being irradiated daily. The system TEPCO has been using is effective at reducing only the amount of strontium in the water, not any of the other radioactive substances.

TEPCO's plan to build an ice wall to contain radioactive water has not been going well, the company acknowledged on August 5. Engineers have yet to overcome the difficulty in freezing highly toxic, radioactive water already pooled on the site. Refrigeration rods emplaced in April failed to freeze the water. They were removed after three months.

Now TEPCO is putting ice in the trenches filled with some 11,000 metric tons (almost 350,000 gallons) of water contaminated with radioactive materials, including uranium and plutonium. Although TEPCO has dumped in 58 tons of ice, the water has yet to freeze. The company plans to try dry ice next.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has urged TEPCO to solve this problem before the radioactive water starts spilling into the ocean. According to authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka on August 6, "The biggest risk is the trench water. Until that matter is addressed, it will be difficult to proceed with other decommissioning work…. It appears that they are getting off track."

TEPCO has yet to make significant progress in controlling groundwater that flows into the site clean and is then contaminated as it flows through and out. The company has not attempted to divert water around the plant site, as recommended by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID). The water problem is complicated by basic ignorance of realities: TEPCO does not know the exact locations of the three melted reactor cores, nor does it know the precise routes of water entering or leaving the site.

Muon imaging technology and tracking detectors may help TEPCO find the melted cores. On August 8, Decision Sciences International Corp. (DSIC) announced that it had a contract to:

design, manufacture and deliver a detector and tube arrays that fit into the power plant building. The detector will be part of Toshiba's overall Fukushima Complex project to determine the location and condition of the nuclear fuel inside the plant….

Muon imaging technology makes use of cosmic ray muons to determine material density and type of material scanned…. Muon tracking detectors detect and track muons as they pass through scanned objects. Subtle changes in the trajectory of the muons as they penetrate materials and change in direction correlate with material density. Nuclear materials such as Uranium and Plutonium are very dense and are relatively easy to find.

Rice paddies outside the Fukushima evacuation zone have been contaminated with radioactive material, according to a July report from Japan's agriculture ministry. The ministry suspects that the contamination (especially Cesium) came, at least in part, from the removal of radioactive wreckage around Fukushima's Unit 3, When the debris was moved, apparently, radioactive dust trapped beneath it was exposed and blew away. TEPCO did not immediately inform the public of the ministry's findings.

Since at least 2013, the Japanese government has allowed farmers to grow rice in evacuation zones in Fukushima prefect, as close as 6 miles from the nuclear complex. The rice is sold commercially. Farmers use potassium fertilizer in an effort to reduce the amount of cesium absorbed into the rice. The government has said it would test all Fukushima rice for radioactivity before allowing it to go to market.

Wild monkeys living 43 miles away from Fukushima have detectable levels of radioactive cesium, while wild monkeys living farther away had no detectable levels of cesium, according to Scientific Reports on July 24. The contaminated monkeys also have lowered counts for both white and red blood cells, counts that indicate a damaged immune system. Professor Shinichi Hayama, at the Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University in Tokyo, told the Guardian that:

… during Japan's snowy winters the monkeys feed on tree buds and bark, where Cesium has been shown to accumulate at high concentrations.

"This first data from non-human primates – the closest taxonomic relatives of humans – should make a notable contribution to future research on the health effects of radiation exposure in humans," he said….

"Abnormalities such as a decreased blood cell count in people living in contaminated areas have been reported from Chernobyl as a long-term effect of low-dose radiation exposure."

Japan to spend at least $3.7 billion storing dirt contaminated by radiation from Fukushima. $3.7 billion is the amount announced to begin a project that has no end date. On August 8, Japan's environment minister, Nobuteru Ishihara, announced the grant made to local governments, to help them move their contaminated dirt to national government storage centers that have yet to be built.

South Korea will return radioactive scrap metal to Japan, the Korean nuclear safety commission announced on August 10. The commission has radiation detectors at all major ports. According to Yonhap News Agency, "Miniscule traces of Cesium-137 were detected in about 20 kilograms of scrap metal, which are being kept at a quarantine facility." The total shipment was 20 tons.

Multiple reports of "radioactive cars" from Japan include news of countries including Jamaica, the Netherlands, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia detecting them and returning them to Japan. Russia reports a sharp decline in radioactive objects seized by customs since 2011. In April 2011, the European Union established a "safe" level of radiation (above background radiation) for all ships coming from Japan. This level is slightly lower than the "safe" level of radiation exposure Japan has set for the Fukushima region. The European limit is non-binding and may or may not be implemented by individual countries at their ports.

South Korea continues to ban the import of fish from Fukushima prefecture and seven other prefectures around the site of the multi-meltdowns that have contaminated the Pacific Ocean continuously, at varying intensities, since March 2011.

The Unit 4 fuel pool, teetering about 100 feet above ground, has been about 77% emptied since the fall of 2013. Japan's NRA announced on August 6 that "1,188 out of a total of 1,533 spent and unirradiated [sic] fuel assemblies in the Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have been transferred to the Common Spent Fuel Pool on site," a safer location. Removal was suspended July 1 for legally required maintenance that is expected to last into early September.

Three former TEPCO executives should face criminal prosecution for their failure to take action to prepare the Fukushima plant to survive the likelihood of earthquake or tsunami, an 11-member independent judicial panel of Japanese citizens concluded on August 5. In 2013, the Tokyo prosecutor decided not to prosecute any TEPCO officials, saying the disaster was unforeseeable. The panel decision requires the Tokyo prosecutor to re-open the investigation and its decision is expected in about three months, when it will be reviewed by the panel.

TEPCO did not respond to warnings in 1990 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in a report first circulated in draft form in 1987. According to Bloomberg in March 2011, the NRC report reviewed reactors of the same design as those at Fukushima and "identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the ‘most likely causes' of nuclear accidents from an external event" – which is what happened at Fukushima 20 years later. Bloomberg added:

The 40-year-old Fukushima plant was hit by Japan's strongest earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and cooling systems knocked out by the 7-meter (23-foot) tsunami that followed. Lacking power to cool reactors, engineers vented radioactive steam to release pressure, leading to as many as four explosions that blew out containment walls at the plant 135 miles (220 kilometers) north of the capital.

While the appropriate measures that should have been implemented are still to be evaluated, more extensive waterproofing of the underground portion of the reactor could have helped prevent the cooling systems' failure, said [a nuclear researcher], who questions the use of nuclear power in Japan because of its seismic activity.

There were earlier warnings as well, as reported in March 2011 by BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis:

And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked – but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.

As one of the AEC scientists says in the film ["A is for Atom"]:

"We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn't have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn't admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good."

TEPCO built Fukushima on an ocean-front bluff, but lowered that bluff, making it some 30 feet closer to sea level, partly to build on bedrock as a defense against earthquakes, but also to save money on the cost of running seawater pumps. TEPCO built a seawall to protect Fukushima against tsunamis, but when TEPCO was warned that the seawall was too low to be effective, TEPCO did nothing.

The first priority of the nuclear industry remains to expand nuclear power, subtly suggesting that any problems are the fault of inadequate government regulation (which the industry generally resists as much as possible, because regulation tends to cost money, at least in the short term). This perspective shows up in statements like this one from the World Nuclear Association, a self-declared industry trade group: "An analysis by the Carnegie Endowment in March 2012 said that if best practices from other countries had been adopted by TEPCO and NISA at Fukushima, the serious accident would not have happened, underlining the need for greater international regulatory collaboration."

Given the decades of industry lies, deceit, and minimization, a more forthright analysis is that, for failing to follow best practices, even when warned of specific dangers, TEPCO and its executives should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment and negligent homicide.

Meanwhile, Japan's Environment Ministry has decided to raise the maximum "safe" level of exposure to radiation in the Fukushima clean-up region by more than 200 per cent above background radiation. And at Fukushima, almost all decommissioning work paused August 9 for a week-long summer vacation.

In Japanese, "Fukushima" means "Island of Good Fortune."

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Why America's "War on Terror" Failed

By Patrick Cockburn, TomDispatch

01 September 14

Washington blames the rise of ISIS on the Iraqi government. But it has created a situation where ISIS can flourish

here are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.

But U.S., Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria. If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary, since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a “moderate” Syrian opposition being helped by the U.S., Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis.  It is, however, weak and getting more so by the day. Soon the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and the only force that can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian army.

The reality of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well.  This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Using the al-Qa’ida Label

The sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core” al-Qa‘ida. This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called war on terror than the situation on the ground warrants.

In fact, the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about are those with the official blessing of al-Qa‘ida is naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa‘ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa‘ida in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told me that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the U.S.”

Jihadi groups ideologically close to al-Qa‘ida have been relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of U.S. policy aims. In Syria, the Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a “Southern Front” based in Jordan that would be hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and simultaneously hostile to al-Qa‘ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups would share their munitions, Washington was effectively allowing advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa‘ida in Syria.

The name al-Qa‘ida has always been applied flexibly when identifying an enemy. In 2003 and 2004 in Iraq, as armed Iraqi opposition to the American and British-led occupation mounted, U.S. officials attributed most attacks to al-Qa‘ida, though many were carried out by nationalist and Baathist groups. Propaganda like this helped to persuade nearly 60% of U.S. voters prior to the Iraq invasion that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and those responsible for 9/11, despite the absence of any evidence for this. In Iraq itself, indeed throughout the entire Muslim world, these accusations have benefited al-Qa‘ida by exaggerating its role in the resistance to the U.S. and British occupation.

Precisely the opposite PR tactics were employed by Western governments in 2011 in Libya, where any similarity between al-Qa‘ida and the NATO-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was played down. Only those jihadis who had a direct operational link to the al-Qa‘ida “core” of Osama bin Laden were deemed to be dangerous. The falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in direct contact with al-Qa‘ida was forcefully, if tragically, exposed when U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded by Western governments and media for their role in the anti-Gaddafi uprising.

Imagining al-Qa’ida as the Mafia

Al-Qa‘ida is an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case. For a five-year period after 1996, it did have cadres, resources, and camps in Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently, al-Qa‘ida’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. At the center of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This has resulted in using untrained but fanatical believers as suicide bombers, to devastating effect.

It has always been in the interest of the U.S. and other governments that al-Qa‘ida be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting image for the public because organized groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.

Osama bin Laden’s gathering of militants, which he did not call al-Qa‘ida until after 9/11, was just one of many jihadi groups 12 years ago. But today its ideas and methods are predominant among jihadis because of the prestige and publicity it gained through the destruction of the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq, and its demonization by Washington as the source of all anti-American evil. These days, there is a narrowing of differences in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless of whether or not they are formally linked to al-Qa‘ida central.

Unsurprisingly, governments prefer the fantasy picture of al-Qa‘ida because it enables them to claim victories when it succeeds in killing its better known members and allies. Often, those eliminated are given quasi-military ranks, such as “head of operations,” to enhance the significance of their demise. The culmination of this heavily publicized but largely irrelevant aspect of the “war on terror” was the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011. This enabled President Obama to grandstand before the American public as the man who had presided over the hunting down of al-Qa‘ida’s leader. In practical terms, however, his death had little impact on al-Qa‘ida-type jihadi groups, whose greatest expansion has occurred subsequently.

Ignoring the Roles of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

The key decisions that enabled al-Qa‘ida to survive, and later to expand, were made in the hours immediately after 9/11. Almost every significant element in the project to crash planes into the Twin Towers and other iconic American buildings led back to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a member of the Saudi elite, and his father had been a close associate of the Saudi monarch. Citing a CIA report from 2002, the official 9/11 report says that al-Qa‘ida relied for its financing on “a variety of donors and fundraisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia.”

The report’s investigators repeatedly found their access limited or denied when seeking information in Saudi Arabia. Yet President George W. Bush apparently never even considered holding the Saudis responsible for what happened. An exit of senior Saudis, including bin Laden relatives, from the U.S. was facilitated by the U.S. government in the days after 9/11. Most significant, 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report about the relationship between the attackers and Saudi Arabia were cut and never published, despite a promise by President Obama to do so, on the grounds of national security.

In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the U.S. and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube, and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shia as heretics. These calls came as al-Qa‘ida bombs were slaughtering people in Shia neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: “Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism as Foreign Policy?” Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.

Pakistan, or rather Pakistani military intelligence in the shape of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was the other parent of al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and jihadi movements in general. When the Taliban was disintegrating under the weight of U.S. bombing in 2001, its forces in northern Afghanistan were trapped by anti-Taliban forces. Before they surrendered, hundreds of ISI members, military trainers, and advisers were hastily evacuated by air. Despite the clearest evidence of ISI’s sponsorship of the Taliban and jihadis in general, Washington refused to confront Pakistan, and thereby opened the way for the resurgence of the Taliban after 2003, which neither the U.S. nor NATO has been able to reverse.

The “war on terror” has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The U.S. did not do so because these countries were important American allies whom it did not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous market for American arms, and the Saudis have cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential members of the American political establishment. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180 million and a military with close links to the Pentagon.

The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa‘ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the U.S., closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures normally associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture, and domestic espionage. Governments wage the “war on terror” claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.

In the face of these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not been defeated but rather have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa‘ida was a small, generally ineffectual organization; by 2014 al-Qa‘ida-type groups were numerous and powerful.

In other words, the “war on terror,” the waging of which has shaped the political landscape for so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed. Until the fall of Mosul, nobody paid much attention.