Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry has sent a plane to Syria for citizens willing to leave the war-torn country, a spokeswoman said Sunday.

"An Il-76 plane took off for Latakia on Sunday morning. The plane will carry both Russians and citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) from Syria," emergencies ministry spokeswoman Irina Rossius said.

The Games were then awarded to Whistler, B.C., which also pulled out the following year after a change of government led to a similar rejection of public financing for the Games' infrastructure.

This compelled the IOC at a late hour to turn to Innsbruck, Austria, which had previously hosted the Winter Games in 1964, and still had the infrastructure in place to repeat the role.

Fukushima is 150 miles north of Tokyo by air, which is relatively the same distance between Portland or Seattle and Richland, WA. And frankly, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission has also been BSing the public for years about the very real threat posed to the region by Hanford. So, what's the difference? Hanford just hasn't failed completely -- yet.

Seriously, if you haven't already, you should take advantage of the excellent posts at Lawfare, which can be found here.

But here's the real problem/issue, and it was expressed quite well by Alan Grayson in an op ed in the NYT:

THE documentary record regarding an attack on Syria consists of just two papers: a four-page unclassified summary and a 12-page classified summary. The first enumerates only the evidence in favor of an attack. I'm not allowed to tell you what's in the classified summary, but you can draw your own conclusion.

On Thursday I asked the House Intelligence Committee staff whether there was any other documentation available, classified or unclassified. Their answer was "no."

The Syria chemical weapons summaries are based on several hundred underlying elements of intelligence information. The unclassified summary cites intercepted telephone calls, "social media" postings and the like, but not one of these is actually quoted or attached -- not even clips from YouTube. (As to whether the classified summary is the same, I couldn't possibly comment, but again, draw your own conclusion.)

Over the last week the administration has run a full-court press on Capitol Hill, lobbying members from both parties in both houses to vote in support of its plan to attack Syria. And yet we members are supposed to accept, without question, that the proponents of a strike on Syria have accurately depicted the underlying evidence, even though the proponents refuse to show any of it to us or to the American public.

[snip]

 But by refusing to disclose the underlying data even to members of Congress, the administration is making it impossible for anyone to judge, independently, whether that statement is correct. Perhaps the edict of an earlier administration applies: "Trust, but verify."

[snip]

My position is simple: if the administration wants me to vote for war, on this occasion or on any other, then I need to know all the facts. And I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'm not an expert on international law, treaties, conventions, etc., and neither are you.  I don't have the background or education or experience to cherry-pick language from any of these documents to prove we have the right to attack, and neither do you.

But whether we do or we don't have the right to do it, shouldn't we be sure that attacking is the right thing to do in the first place?  I listen to John Kerry, and I'm getting that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that we're being bamboozled again - and can there be any good reason why members of Congress are not being afforded all of the information they need to make such a serious decision?

I'm not saying that it's okay for people to be killed with chemical weapons - but I don't much like that they're being killed with conventional ones, either - and there's been no alarm, no argument, no full-court press to punish Syria for the 100K+ deaths that have occurred in the civil war.

Syria is not an island, sitting alone where an attack doesn't affect any other country, or the dynamic between and among allies and enemies - so if we're going to start raining down missiles that will, inevitably, kill and injure more people and destroy more infrastructure, I think it's imperative - as a world leader - to make sure we're doing the right thing for the right reasons.

And world leader or not, this administration has a responsibility to its own people, and needs to be accountable to them, and feeding them propaganda to get the green light to act isn't how I would define "accountable."

It shouldn't be too much to ask, and yet - members of Congress are literally begging for information that is being refused to them.