FALLOUT - The Cold-War Casualties

"A little-known casualty of the Cold War?  U.S. nuclear workers" PBS NewsHour 12/11/2015

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SUMMARY:  More than 33,000 men and women who worked at nuclear facilities have died from related illnesses, and more than 100,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping build the country's nuclear stockpile.  That toll had never fully been revealed until a year-long investigation by McClatchy News.  Jeffrey Brown speaks to McClatchy's Lindsay Wise.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  McClatchy's team found the federal government had never fully revealed the true toll of what happened to men and women working at nuclear facilities.

Back in 2001, the government set up a compensation fund for some of those workers.  The investigation found that more than 33,000 of them have died from related illnesses.  That’s more than four times the number of Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

And there were more than 100,000 Americans diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping to build the country’s nuclear stockpile over the decades.

Lindsay Wise is one of the leading reporters on the McClatchy team.  She joins me now.

And welcome to you.

I want to fill in the picture first.  What kind of work and workers were most impacted, most exposed?

LINDSAY WISE, McClatchy Washington Bureau:  Well, these were workers at plants, more than 300 plants all over the country.

They did everything from pipe fitting and production work, blue-collar work, to nuclear physicists and scientists.  And we even found in our database some CEOs who ran the contracting companies that managed the plant.

JEFFREY BROWN:  You refer to this as a hidden legacy.  It’s a little known casualty of the Cold War, but how much was known?

LINDSAY WISE:  Well, this is what I found so interesting working on this project, which was that I feel like when we talk about the Cold War and the history of the Cold War, we often talk about it as though it was a war without any casualties, without any American casualties.

And what we were able to do at McClatchy is we obtained a database from the Department of Labor for the compensation program, and we were able to crunch the numbers and analyze the data, and find the number of people who had applied and then been compensated for illnesses and died.

And so that told us that there were people who gave their lives as part of the Cold War.

SYRIA - The ISIS Chechen Commander

"In Syria, Russia may fight an Islamic State commander it’s battled before" PBS NewsHour 9/17/2015

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SUMMARY:  Abu Omar al-Shishani, an Islamic State military commander in Syria, is an ethnic Chechen who fought against Russia as part of the Georgian army in 2008.  How did he become one of the top figures in IS?  Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner speaks with Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy Newspapers, who has just written an exhaustive profile of Shishani.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  New reports surfaced today that the U.S. and Russia will begin military-to-military talks about Syria, even as Vladimir Putin moves to bolster his old ally Bashar al-Assad.  But will Russia also be fighting a man they have battled before?

Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports.

MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour):  The man is Abu Omar al Shishani, the Islamic State military commander for the Northern District of Syria, seen here last August as the group pursued its lightning march across Northern and Central Iraq.

ABU OMAR AL SHISHANI, Islamic State (through interpreter):  It is time for the sons of the Islamic State to defend the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and defend our imam, who the world gathered against with all its strength.

MARGARET WARNER:  Unlike most I.S. fighters, he was speaking Russian.  His real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili.  He’s an ethnic Chechen reportedly born 30 years ago in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, to a Christian father and Muslim mother.  Tapped as a special forces soldier in the Georgian army, he fought fiercely against the Russian army when the two countries went to war over the province of South Ossetia in 2008.

Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy Newspapers has just written an exhaustive profile of al Shishani, with startling new information.  I spoke with him via Skype from his bureau in Northern Iraq.

How significant a military figure is al Shishani in ISIS?

MITCHELL PROTHERO, McClatchy Newspapers:  If he’s not the overall military commander for the Islamic State, he’s definitely in charge of the Northern Syrian Front, which is one of the most active and serious.