As the Syrian crisis continues to play out according to the brackets of a chemical weapons agreement, one thing is certain. Politicians inside the beltway persist in contributing to the discussion. From the Left, the situation in Syria is a tragedy but falls short of a warrant for American intervention. From the Right, the crisis has cried out for U.S. action since protests began two years ago. Amidst this political back-and-forth, however, one salient group remains in the background, if not ignored altogether. This group is defined by academics who have actually studied the matter at hand.

Whereas politicians used to be consulted through the mainstream media in order to gain valuable information, they have now become ends in themselves. A congressman or congresswoman who appears on any news program is now merely offering his or her opinion regarding Syria. Should the United States intervene in Syria? Politicians spent a great deal of time appearing in several venues to offer their perspective on this question.

The Guardian is about to face investigation by the British Government. The London-based newspaper has been at the forefront of the global surveillance controversy since their journalist Glenn Greenwald published in its pages Edward Snowden's revelations last June. Supported by Prime Minister David Cameron, a parliamentary committee is due to launch an inquiry to determine whether the Guardian's publication of Snowden's leaked documents was a threat to national security.

In a functioning democracy it is expected that a free press would come to the defence of a fellow news outlet facing governmental interference for publishing information about a matter of public interest. Britain has prided itself on having some of the oldest and strongest press freedoms in the world. Yet for all that, the powerful media barons in the UK have all fallen in step with the government's line on security: that the Guardian has helped terrorists.

Most Americans probably take the right to travel for granted until this right is lost or curtailed. Passports are, of course, required for most international travel. When our group (Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley) recently traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden and present him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, we depended upon our fundamental right to travel.

The intelligence whistleblower whose integrity we honored, however, has been deprived of that right. Vindictive U.S. officials revoked the passport of Snowden, whose disclosures have informed and educated the people of the United States and the world about secret surveillance and massive data-gathering that the NSA and other government agencies are engaged in within the U.S. and around the world.

If you’ve already signed the RootsAction petition urging that Snowden’s passport be restored, please forward this email to people you know and urge them to do the same. If you haven’t yet signed the petition, you can add your name by clicking here.

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently released a flurry of deeply flawed reports on drone murders. According to the U.N.'s special rapporteur, whose day job is as law partner of Tony Blair's wife, and according to two major human rights groups deeply embedded in U.S. exceptionalism, murdering people with drones is sometimes legal and sometimes not legal, but almost always it's too hard to tell which is which, unless the White House rewrites the law in enough detail and makes its new legal regime public.

When I read these reports I was ignorant of the existence of a human rights organization called Alkarama, and of the fact that it had just released a report titled License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law. While Human Rights Watch looked at six drone murders in Yemen and found two of them illegal and four of them indeterminate, Alkarama looked in more detail and with better context at the whole campaign of drone war on Yemen, detailing 10 cases. As you may have guessed from the report's title, this group finds the entire practice of murdering people with flying robots to be illegal.

We are in desperate need of documentary filmmakers at Fukushima.

The Japanese government is about to pass a national censorship law clearly meant to make it impossible to know what’s going on there.

Massive quantities of radioactive water have been flowing through the site since the 3/11/11 earthquake/tsunami.

At thousand flimsy tanks hold still more thousands of tons of radioactive water which would pour into the Pacific should they collapse.

An earthquake and two typhoons have have just hit there, flushing still more radioactive water into the sea.