DOD Woe: Pentagon’s War on the Earth
ANGLO AMERICA,
14 March 2016
Tom H. Hastings, PeaceVoice –
TRANSCEND Media Service
We are
waging war. We are the Nation of War. We destroy. We kill. Everyone fears us.
Fewer and
fewer admire us.
But our
fighting forces—and their attendant industries which manufacture the bombs,
bullets, and ballistic delivery devices—also wage a war on the clean air, clean
water, and clean soil many Americans falsely regard as protected by legislation
fought for by those trying to protect our environment.
Recent
reports from around the country show the party most likely to toxify our land
is our own military. These are just a small fraction of the reports from the
past couple of weeks:
·
California: New model homes are open
for viewing in a beautiful canyon west of Los Angeles despite the land there
being “stained with radioactive and toxic chemical waste.”
·
·
New Hampshire: The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention is stepping in to monitor the health and toxic exposure
of those living near or on the Portsmouth, New Hampshire former US Pease Air
Force base after tests showed terrible contamination.
·
·
Kentucky: There is an ongoing effort to
clean up the site of the uranium enrichment facility in Kentucky, the Paducah
Gaseous Diffusion Plant. It is costing hundreds of millions of dollars and the
feds are slowly trying to get back a bit of it from responsible parties with
settlements, the most recent a $5 million deal with Lockheed Martin for its
contamination of the site.
·
·
Maryland: The Army is claiming immunity from its killer pollution from Fort
Detrick, with the Army as defendant in a class action law suit claiming
numerous wrongful deaths from the site where toxins, biological weapons,
radiological materials and hazardous waste contaminated the area for decades.
US Attorney U.S. Attorney “Rod Rosenstein, representing the Army’s interests,
asked Monday that the case be dismissed. In online court documents, Rosenstein
argued that the government has no particular duty to respond to hazardous
substances and the Army can use its own judgment to decide whether to clean
up.”
·
·
Louisiana: A private contractor will burn 16 million pounds of M-6 propellent, the largest burn
of explosives in the history of the world, at Camp Minden in April and May.
·
·
New York: Fort Drum is contaminated.
Proposed remedies would inject other chemicals into the groundwater to try to
neutralize the “chlorinated
volatile organic chemical (CVOC) groundwater plume.”
The Pentagon
is relentless in seeking immunity from federal
environmental protection laws. One wonders, since the list of environmental
disasters created by the military and its contracting producers would extend to
multiple current issues in every single US state and dozens of foreign
countries with US bases, with friends and protectors like these, who needs
enemies?
____________________________________
Tom H.
Hastings directs PeaceVoice, a program of the Oregon Peace Institute.
This article
originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 14 March 2016.
Anticopyright: Editorials
and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated,
translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and
link to the source,TMS: DOD Woe:
Pentagon’s War on the Earth, is included. Thank you.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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