Baudet is wat hij zelf vervloekt: thuisloos

 
Baudet is wat hij zelf vervloekt: thuisloos

Thierry Baudet Een nieuw boek over de Forum voor Democratie-voorman brengt op voortreffelijke wijze Baudets persoonlijke, politieke en academische leven samen.

     Thierry Baudet in september 2019.                    Foto David van Dam

Conservatisme, schreef Henry Kissinger eind jaren vijftig, is het gevolg van maatschappelijke instabiliteit, ‘omdat in een samenhangende samenleving niemand zich conservatief zou hoeven te noemen’. Zou het conservatisme van Baudet voortkomen uit een instabiel bestaan? Of er op z’n minst door versterkt worden?

De grote liefdes en het grootste liefdesverdriet, de vele clubjes en netwerkjes en vrienden, maar ook de vele verloren vriendschappen, de ruzies, de conflicten, de hartstochtelijke ideeën en geflopte projecten, de hoge pieken en de diepe dalen: Baudet blijkt altijd zoekend en nooit thuis – dat is tenminste het beeld dat oprijst uit het zojuist verschenen boek Mijn meningen zijn feiten.

Het knappe aan het boek van de twee oud-Vrij Nederland-redacteuren Harm Ede Botje en Mischa Cohen is dat het dat allemaal laat zien. Het brengt op voortreffelijke wijze Baudets persoonlijke, politieke en academische leven samen. Dat is nodig, omdat de zoektocht van de politicus Baudet naar een oikos nou eenmaal niet los te zien is van het kind Baudet, dat zich na de scheiding van zijn ouders thuisloos voelde.

De auteurs Botje en Cohen hebben de verleiding weerstaan die met name in Baudets eerste Haagse jaren in sommige politieke journalistiek te bespeuren was: om hem als charmant curiosum te behandelen in plaats van als de radicale politicus die hij is. Zo iemand vraagt serieuze bestudering: wie is hij, en hoe zijn z’n ideeën gevormd?

Extreem-rechts

Het boek is dan ook veel van wat je van een politieke biografie wilt: ideeëngeschiedenis en –vorming, persoonlijke anekdotes die zijn politieke karakter inkleuren. Nu is Baudet ideologisch uitgesprokener dan veel andere politici (wat hem interessanter maakt dan de doorgaans vrij eendimensionale Nederlandse politici) en is ideologische archeologie bij hem makkelijker, maar toch.

Dat radicalisme wordt sinds zijn entree in Den Haag door media nogal eens als ‘flirt’ omschreven, zo van: Baudet flirt met rechts-radicale ideeën en denkers. Maar Cohen en Botje laten zien dat het meer een innige liefdesgeschiedenis is. Naast het conservatieve intellectualisme heeft Baudet al veel langer een niet louter uit intellectuele vrijzinnigheid voortkomende interesse in extreem-rechtse theorieën. Vandaar als twintiger al een bezoek aan de oude Le Pen, vandaar een diner met white nationalist Jared Taylor, vandaar tal van radicale uitspraken. Vandaar ook zijn er ver vóór de breuk met partijpenningmeester Henk Otten conflicten over die uitspraken en ideeën. Soms ging het om hoogoplopende ruzies over uitspraken die Baudet had gedaan, soms dreven mensen langzamer van hem af. Altijd was hij de hoofdpersoon en waren zijn denkbeelden het lijdend voorwerp.

Hij keert zich tegen erotische losbandigheid, maar iedereen die in zijn vrijgezelle jaren in Amsterdamse academische kringen verkeerde, kent de verhalen over zijn amper te temmen zucht naar vrouwen

In veel opzichten is Baudet ook wat hij vervloekt: een ontworteld mens. Maar tegenstrijdigheden kleuren zijn politieke en persoonlijke bestaan, leert deze biografie. Hij ment Viruswaanzinnigen met een megafoon voor de Tweede Kamer én heeft een conservatief wantrouwen jegens het menselijk vermogen de wereld ten goede te veranderen. Hij komt voort uit de intellectuele netwerken die hij zelf wil vervangen. Hij keert zich tegen erotische losbandigheid, maar iedereen die in zijn vrijgezelle jaren in Amsterdamse academische kringen verkeerde, kent de verhalen over zijn amper te temmen zucht naar vrouwen (studiegenotes zagen hem ook steeds weer voorbij komen op datingapps). Baudet is onthecht, maar bejubelt de worteling. Hij noemt Roger Scrutons conservatieve filosofie van verlies als inspiratie, maar zoekt tegelijkertijd juist de (eind)overwinning.

Echokamer

Wel blijft één belangrijke ideologische tegenstrijdigheid onbenoemd. Hoe kan hij zowel Burkeiaan zijn als Gramsciaan? Baudet heeft een conservatieve scepsis over politieke utopieën, vertelde hij eerder dit jaar in Rome. Maar hij wil ook de ideologische hegemonie veranderen. Hoe verenigt dat conservatieve wantrouwen in het vermogen van mensen om de wereld ten goede te veranderen zich met zijn geloof in een volkswil, die zich bijvoorbeeld via referenda moet uiten? Als de mens te imperfect is en de Verlichting een tragedie, waarom dan toch ook zo’n geloof in de mens?

De zoekende jonge academicus is een serieuze landelijke politicus geworden, die in dat proces alle deuren naar (zelf)twijfel heeft dichtgegooid en zich heeft opgesloten in een echokamer van het eigen gelijk. Er is geen ruimte meer voor kritiek, voor scepsis, voor debat, er is alleen de zelfbevestiging van het eigen geloof.

In Forum voor Democratie, tonen Cohen en Botje, heeft Baudet het veilige thuis gevonden dat hij zolang zocht. Hier geen tegenspraak, zijn ideeën zijn wet. Dit thuis laat hij zich níet afpakken.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/22/baudet-is-wat-hij-zelf-vervloekt-thuisloos-a4016999

As election day nears, what final dirty tricks could Trump turn to?

 

As election day nears, what final dirty tricks could Trump turn to?

Donald Trump at the final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, on 22 October. Photograph: Jim Bourg/EPA

Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly

Sat 24 Oct 2020 08.30 BST

Days before the election, Hunter Biden emails dropped with a roll call of Trump associates involved in ‘discovering’ them – and experts say it probably isn’t the last of the dirty tricks

O

n 28 October 2016, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, dropped a bomb into the middle of the presidential race. With just 11 days to go until election day, he announced that his agents were investigating a newly discovered batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server.

The highly irregular intervention led nowhere, but it was enough to wreak havoc in the final stretch of the contest, putting Clinton on the defensive and giving Donald Trump an artificial leg-up. To this day, many Democrats – and Republicans – are convinced it played a substantial role in Trump’s unexpected victory.

Twenty days before election day 2020, the Trump campaign dropped what it hoped would be a similar bomb into the middle of the current race. On 14 October, the New York Post (owner: Rupert Murdoch) splashed with the screaming headline “Biden Secret Emails”.

The paper alleged that a laptop had been discovered at a computer repair shop in Delaware, the home state of the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. On its hard drive, the Post said, were stored personal emails from Biden’s son Hunter Biden that pointed to inappropriate conflicts of interest between the younger Biden’s business interests in Ukraine and the elder’s diplomatic work as then vice-president.

It was a case of Clinton emails redux. Like the 2016 saga, the Hunter Biden emails were flimsy in their contents and, in this case, of dubious provenance.

The cast of characters involved in “discovering” the laptop was like a roll call of some of Trump’s most discredited associates. At the center of the ploy were Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has been charged with fraud and money laundering related to the border wall with Mexico; and Rudy Giuliani, who has questions of his own to answer over his blush-inducing appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

How the Hunter Biden story came to be put together from inside the New York Post also raised eyebrows. The New York Times reported that the journalist at the Post who wrote most of the account refused to attach his name to it because of doubts over the credibility of the material.

The lead byline on the story, Emma-Jo Morris, recently worked as a producer on the Fox News Show of the Trump loyalist Sean Hannity. The second byline, Gabrielle Fonrouge, had little to do with the article and only learned her name was on it after it was published, the Times reported.

Such machinations over a controversial story are nothing new within the Post’s newsroom, a former employee of the paper told the Guardian. “When I saw that Hunter Biden piece I had flashbacks to how shitty that place was. That’s happened to me there. I’d wake up and think, ‘I didn’t write that story,’” the journalist said.

The Hunter Biden story was a transparent effort to replicate the undoubted success of the Clinton emails hit of 2016. But as a work of political dirty tricks, it was too obvious to impress many.

“It’s blatant and it’s desperate,” was the assessment of Elaine Karmack, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It was also tired. “The Hunter Biden allegations were fully aired during impeachment. If you want a real October surprise you have to come up with something new,” she said.

If it failed to hit its mark, the Biden ruse did at least flag up the lengths to which Trump and friends are prepared to go to hang on to presidential power. Karmack predicted that more dirty tricks are yet to come.

We have 10 days to go, who knows what else they could cook up

Elaine Karmack

“We have 10 days to go, who knows what else they could cook up. You have a president who has his back against the wall and is acting increasingly bizarrely,” Karmack said.

John Weaver, the chief strategist to John Kasich during his presidential battle with Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016 and now co-founder of the anti-Trump group of disaffected former Republicans, the Lincoln Project, urged the nation to brace itself for a wild ride in the final days. “The next two weeks are going to see dirty tricks on a scale we can’t imagine, nor would we want to.”

Weaver pointed out that dirty tricks in American politics are as old as the nation. They can be traced all the way back to the 1796 contest.

In that race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, vying to replace George Washington as president, Alexander Hamilton, acting on behalf of Adams and their Federalist party, adopted the pseudonym of Phocion. He then wrote a scurrilous article in the Gazette of the United States accusing Jefferson of having an affair with a female slave.

If that sounds bad, it was as nothing compared with what we are witnessing today, Weaver said. “What we are seeing from Trump is on a scale, and in the crossing of norms and willingness to blatantly make things up out, and the mean-spiritedness of it, on another level. Even when Hamilton and Jefferson were going after each other they had respect for the new institutions they had just helped put in place – there’s no respect for any institution now.”

Hunter Biden is just the thin end of the wedge. The Trump coterie have also been trying to reheat the grotesque “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that did the rounds in 2016 claiming that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a pedophile ring – this time with the Bidens the focus.

The lie was aired this week by the Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo and alluded to by Trump when he refused to denounce the cult conspiracy theory QAnon in an NBC News town hall.

The litany of dirty tricks pans out from there. They come in all shapes and sizes: doctoring digital material to create misinformation is a favorite. Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases official in the US, found himself at the receiving end of that technique in a Trump re-election ad that crudely took his words out of context to make it appear he was endorsing the president.

For Karmack, the most insidious dirty tricks this cycle have targeted the election process itself. Trump has repeatedly and falsely depicted the US voting system, and mail-in voting in particular, as being riddled with fraud; in fact the amount of substantiated fraud is infinitesimally small.

Ballot drop boxes where voters are encouraged to put their absentee ballots suspiciously began popping up in Los Angeles and other parts of California. They turned out to have been the work of the local Republican party which was duly ordered by state officials to remove them on grounds they are illegal.

“Disinformation about how to vote is the worst dirty tricks I see,” Karmack said. “Voting is already confusing in the pandemic, and if you add more confusion to that then efforts to suppress the vote could be successful in places.”

Time is being wasted on Hunter Biden, QAnon and all this other circus activity

John Weaver

While Trump and his allies are busily stepping up their efforts at distortion, an important contrast with 2016 is that there is much less sign of the tactics working this time around. The FBI has so far resisted White House pressure to do another Comey and announce an investigation of the Bidens, much to Trump’s fury.

The media too has shown itself to be much more disciplined in dealing with Trump’s fireball of lies and misinformation. The Hunter Biden story was handled with care by most outlets, in stark contrast to the breathless treatment of the Clinton emails four years ago.

If the mud that is being thrown at the wall isn’t sticking in the same way as it did then, it is possible that the underhand tactics will backfire for the increasingly beleaguered president. Every dirty trick that is pulled is a distraction from Trump’s core message on the economy.

“Time is being wasted on Hunter Biden, QAnon and all this other circus activity,” Weaver said. “Voters don’t care about that stuff, and Trump is stepping on his own re-election chances every minute he devotes to it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/24/trump-biden-dirty-tricks-presidential-election

 

Trump just quietly passed an executive order that could destroy a future Biden administration

‘Through this order, President Trump has declared war on the professional civil service by giving himself the authority to fill the government with his political cronies who will pledge their unwavering loyalty to him, not to America’

Andrew Feinberg

Washington DC

@AndrewFeinberg

d.d. 23-10-2020 

Donald Trump’s latest executive order could give him the power to mount a scorched-earth campaign which would cripple a future Biden administration.

In the event the incumbent president loses his re-election bid, this order could give him largely unfettered authority to fire experts like Dr Anthony Fauci while leaving behind a corps of embedded loyalists to undermine his successor, according to federal employment law experts.

The order, which the White House released late Wednesday evening, would strip civil service protections from a broad swath of career civil servants if it is decided that they are in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” — a description previously reserved for the political appointees who come and go with each change in administration. It does that by creating a new category for such positions that do not turn over from administration to administration and reclassifying them as part of that category.  The Office of Personnel Management — essentially the executive branch’s human resources department — has been charged with implementing the order by publishing a “preliminary” list of positions to be moved into the new category on what could President Donald Trump’s last full day in office: January 19, 2021.

The range of workers who could be stripped of protections and placed in this new category is vast, experts say, and could include most of the non-partisan experts — scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists — whose work to advise and inform policymakers is supposed to be done in a way that is fact-driven and devoid of politics. Trump has repeatedly clashed with such career workers on a variety of settings, ranging from his desire to present the Covid-19 pandemic as largely over, to his attempts to enable his allies to escape punishment for federal crimes, to his quixotic insistence that National Weather Service scientists back up his erroneous claim that the state of Alabama was threatened by a hurricane which was not heading in its direction.

Creating the new category — known as “Schedule F” — and moving current civil servants into it could allow a lame-duck President Trump to cripple his successor’s administration by firing any career federal employees who’ve been included on the list. It also could allow Trump administration officials to skirt prohibitions against “burrowing in” — the heavily restricted practice of converting political appointees (known as “Schedule C” employees) into career civil servants — by hiring them under the new category for positions which would not end with Trump’s term. Another provision orders agencies to take steps to prohibit removing “Schedule F” appointees from their jobs on the grounds of “political affiliation,” which could potentially prevent a future administration from firing unqualified appointees because of their association with President Trump.

“It's a two-pronged attack — a Hail Mary pass to enable them to do some burrowing in if they lose the election,” said Walter Shaub, who ran the US Office of Government Ethics during the last four years of the Obama administration and first six months of the Trump administration. “But if they win the election, then anything goes for the destruction of the civil service… [This could] take us back to the spoils system and all the corruption that comes with it.”

Shaub explained that at the core of it, a non-partisan civil service is one of the most basic anti-corruption measures that any government can implement “because they free federal employees to disobey illegal orders, be ethical, and resist fraud, waste, and abuse”.

“Taking those away creates a cadre of people who are either too intimidated by or loyal to a politician instead of the rule of law and the Constitution,” he said. “That’s the goal here.”

The head of the largest federal employee union, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley, decried the move in a statement on Thursday, calling it “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes”.

“Through this order, President Trump has declared war on the professional civil service by giving himself the authority to fill the government with his political cronies who will pledge their unwavering loyalty to him, not to America,” Kelley added. “By targeting federal workers whose jobs involve government policies, the real-world implications of this order will be disastrous for public health, the environment, the defense of our nation, and virtually every facet of our lives.”

Virginia Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly, who chairs the House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing civil service issues, called the order “yet another attack on federal employees that addresses absolutely none of the issues that can hinder effective federal recruitment and hiring”. He added that he saw it as “a cheap ploy to let the Trump administration replace talent and acumen with fealty and self-dealing.” And Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, called the order “deeply troubling” and warned that it “has the potential to impact wide swathes of federal employees over the next few months without engagement from Congress, civil servants and other key stakeholders”.

“Being able to place any number of existing career positions into this new Schedule F not only blurs the line between politics and the neutral competency of the career civil service, it obliterates it,” he added.

A Republican source who served as a top federal personnel executive under previous Republican administrations offered a far more succinct review of Trump’s latest executive action: “It's just bad no matter how you view it.”

Administration sources say this latest directive is largely the brainchild of James Sherk, a top Trump aide whose work on the Domestic Policy Council has been largely focused on devising methods by which the Trump administration can undermine government employee unions and render toothless the civil service system. Such endeavors are longstanding goals of the American conservative movement, which has for years viewed the largely unionized, highly educated, racially diverse federal workforce as a hostile occupying army loyal to the more reliably pro-union Democratic Party.

But while past Republican presidents were willing to at least pay lip service to the advantages of having a skilled, professionalized and non-political federal workforce, advocates of gutting the civil service have found a willing ally in Trump, who has regularly attacked the federal workforce as a Democrat-aligned “deep state” that has worked to undermine his presidency.

Earlier this year, then-White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said the White House planned on taking steps to remove what he said were “people in the bowels of the federal government working against this president” and pursuing “their own selfish political agenda” rather than showing loyalty to Trump.

“It’s not a secret that we want people in positions that work with this president, not against him, and too often we have people in this government — I mean the federal government is massive, with millions of people — and there are a lot people out there taking action against this president and when we find them we will take appropriate action,” said Gidley, who left the White House in July and is now the national press secretary for Trump’s re-election campaign.

The administration’s disdain for career civil servants has only hardened under the pressure of running for a second term bid amid Covid-19.

Trump has reserved a special level of rage for scientists like Dr Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert. On a call with campaign staffers last week, the president reportedly complained that he could not fire Fauci because doing so would be a PR “bomb”.

But should he lose his re-election bid in just under two weeks, New Jersey Chief Innovation Officer Beth Noveck — an NYU professor who served as the first US Deputy Chief Technology Officer — said the order appears to be designed to enable him to exact revenge on Fauci and any other federal officials he blames for his loss.

“It's the twin danger of both firing Fauci and replacing him with Eric Trump's wedding planner permanently,” said Noveck. She compared the order to the fictional “infinity gauntlet” weapon made famous by the Avengers films, citing the way it could enable Trump to get rid of countless tenured federal workers with the stroke of a pen.

“There's definitely a ‘snap your fingers and get rid of half the civil service’ quality to this,” she added, noting that the order lays out vague and subjective criteria for determining whether an employee reclassified under “Schedule F” can be fired for “poor performance”.

Noveck added that such vagueness made it possible that Trump could use the “preliminary” list he has ordered OPM to prepare to cripple a Biden administration’s Covid plans by targeting Fauci and other scientists or the administration as a whole by removing large numbers of experienced workers.

“It's unclear whether this becomes… a blunt instrument in order to do some surgical removal of people they don't like, or whether they're going to actually attempt some sort of bloodletting or purge,” she explained.

As for the possibility that Trump could use the order to install scores of cronies to sabotage Biden, a former top Department of Health and Human Services official says it is already happening.

Dr Rick Bright — the former Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response who left government service after Trump officials demoted him for contradicting the President’s attempts to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic — said the Trump administration has already been seeding the government with unqualified loyalists.

“With an administration change, there are rules in place that say you really don't embed any people, especially in the last period of time, whether it’s a year or six months or so,” he said. “But what we've seen over the last three years is them embedding people all along. So when the [Trump administration] Schedule C's and their other political appointees all go away, there will still be this base of [Trump] people that are in the federal service.”

“Many of those who were brought in,” Bright said, are “friends and family” of Trump administration officials who initially showed up as contractors: “And then the next thing you know, they’ve changed their business card and their email address and they’re federal employees.”

Although Trump and his advisors have often struggled with a steep learning curve when it comes to the arcane rules and regulations which govern the federal bureaucracy, both Noveck and Shaub said the order’s dense language was meant to deliberately obscure the purpose of it. They believe it is a sign that Trumpworld is finally getting the hang of manipulating the government it leads to its own ends.

And while Connolly and other critics of the move presented the harm it would do as “potential,” Shaub said the 90-day clock appeared deliberately timed to give Trump a way to fire a parting shot at his successor should he lose next month. He also suggested that, given the White House’s stated intent to purge disloyal civil servants, there might already be a list of people to fire waiting for use.

“I think there's a very realistic chance that they could have everything ready to go and cause harm,” he said, “and in the case of a new administration standing up, their actions may not be noticed by the people who can fix it until the harm has really taken effect.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-executive-order-civil-service-biden-election-schedule-f-b1255692.html

 

Fukushima reactor water could damage human DNA if released, says Greenpeace

Environmental organisation says ‘dangerous’ levels of carbon-14 exist in water that could soon be released into Pacific ocean

Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Fri 23 Oct 2020 05.34 BST

Workers stand near storage tanks for radioactive water at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Photograph: Aaron Sheldrick/Reuters

Contaminated water that will reportedly be released into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains a radioactive substance that has the potential to damage human DNA, a Greenpeace investigation has said.

The environmental group claims the 1.23m tonnes of water stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant contains “dangerous” levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14, in addition to quantities of tritium that have already been widely reported.

The publication of the report Stemming the Tide 2020: The reality of the Fukushima radioactive water crisis comes days after Japanese media reported that the government was close to giving its approval to release the water into the Pacific ocean, despite objections from local fishermen who say the move will destroy their livelihoods.

“We cannot postpone the issue forever,” the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, said this week. “We would like to make a decision responsibly as soon as possible.”

While most attention has been focused on tritium – which cannot be removed by the on-site filtration system used by the plant’s operator Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] – Greenpeace Japan and Greenpeace East Asia said that radioactive carbon contained in the stored water would also be discharged.

Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,370 years and becomes “incorporated into all living matter”, the report said.

“It concentrates in fish at a level thousands of times higher than tritium. Carbon-14 is especially important as a major contributor to collective human radiation dose and has the potential to damage human DNA.”

The Japanese government and Tepco refer to the water – which becomes tainted when it is used to cool the plant’s tsunami-damaged reactors – as “treated water” and give the impression that it contains only tritium, it added.

Tepco’s advanced liquid processing system removes highly radioactive substances from the water but is unable to filter out tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that nuclear power plants routinely dilute and dump along with water into the ocean.

Greenpeace said it had confirmed with Tepco that the system was not designed to remove carbon-14.

“Nearly 10 years after the start of the disaster, Tepco and the Japanese government are still covering up the scale of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi,” said Shaun Burnie, author of the report and senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany.

“They have deliberately held back for years detailed information on the radioactive material in the contaminated water. They have failed to explain to the citizens of Fukushima, wider Japan and to neighbouring countries such as South Korea and China that the contaminated water to be dumped into the Pacific ocean contains dangerous levels of carbon-14.

“These, together with other radionuclides in the water will remain hazardous for thousands of years with the potential to cause genetic damage. It’s one more reason why these plans have to be abandoned.”

Japan’s government is expected to announce a decision on the water’s fate next week. Media reports said the project would begin in 2022 at the earliest and take decades to complete. The water at Fukushima Daiichi will be diluted inside the plant before it is released so that it is 40 times less concentrated, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said.

Pressure for a decision has been building as storage space on the nuclear plant site shrinks, with Tepco estimating all of the available tanks will be full by the middle of 2022.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/fukushima-reactor-water-could-damage-human-dna-if-released-says-greenpeace