The Math of War and Waste

While Gov. Walker batters working people of Wisconsin and fingers them for Wisconsin's deficit of $6 billion he neglects to mention that $12 billion of that state's funds paid for the war in Iraq while $6 billion paid for the war in Afghanistan (costofwar.com/en/state/WI).

Our national bill for war is $1,167,300,000,000. Some of us – me included – can barely comprehend that staggering number. Added to that tragedy of my fiscal illiteracy in a capitalist nation is another, more important tragedy: large amounts of this money is simply wasted in war zones.

According to Zach Choate, an Iraq war veteran, Purple Heart awardee, current president of Baton Rouge chapter of Iraq Veterans against War (IVAW), war zones offer military personnel just about any consumer item found state-side. Barring the constant stress of seeing friends and civilians killed and the fear of being killed, off-hours in the war zone are spent at a shoppers home-away-from-home where troops wearing battle gear mosey around picking-and-choosing from military bases' well-stocked aisles. Dominoes Pizza might not deliver but troops nevertheless consume vast amounts of pizza, burgers, fries, apple pie, donuts, and candy washed down by gallons of soft drinks whiling away off-hours playing video games simulating war.

But only the miserly would criticize troops for wanting to keep up with their version of the Joneses who have the luxury to shop in malls back home. Besides, troops pay for these items out of their own pockets; consider the captive audience that is deployed, bored, and frightened troops and you find an excellent business model.

But then there's the model that is seldom mentioned, that generated by “following false intel.”

Choate explains, “An enormous amount of ammunition and fuel is wasted following false intel...plus wasted man-power hours and the waste of young lives killed on these missions. Add to that cost is the incalculable cost of bad faith and negative impression created in the minds of civilians who lose loved ones to military strikes based on that false intel.”

While Wisconsin's Gov. Walker – and those whose share his mindset – accuse teachers, fire fighters other public employees, and union members of taking more than their fair share in hefty annual salaries a quick look at the salaries of those other public employees, military personnel, puts things in perspective.

First, understand that the basic salary for an entry-level American private military contractor (training courtesy of the US military) is more than $8,000 per month or $100k per year.

According to an Army Times article on basic pay in 2007, an enlisted person with less than 2 years of service was paid $1,301.40 per month while a CO 1 with less than 2 years of service earned $2,469.30 per month. Add to that hardship duty pay from $50 - $150 per month; troops involuntarily spending more than 12 months in combat zones receive an extra $200 per month; imminent danger pay is $225 per month. (A four-star officer with 38 or more years of service tops out at $16,795.50 per month.)

But, surely, if anyone can claim the moral high ground it is Gov. Walker; after calling the salaries of other county workers “excessive” he voluntarily gave back slightly less than half of his annual salary, that is $60,000, until 2008 when he cut his give-back to $10,000 per year.

Then there is the hidden cost of that other waste, the waste of resources as human beings struggle for 'normalcy' after seeing the devastation of war.

In a recent Raising Sand Radio interview Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace presented the costs shared by those in his war in Vietnam and Choate's in Iraq: deaths, suicide, ongoing physical and health problems, homelessness, and violence within military families. If anything, current wars re-stimulate fears and feelings that many Vietnam war veterans kept dormant for years and they seek mental health care.

One thing that has changed is the ubiquitous use and availability of pharmaceuticals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Choate explained, “When I got back to the combat zone in Iraq after I'd been treated for wounds [sustained by an explosion] I had medication laid out and waiting for me: 120 Klonopin (or Clonazepam used alone or in combination with other medications to control certain types of seizures – Choate was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury), a few Xanax (Alprazolam used to treat anxiety disorders and panic attacks) and Lexapro (Escitalopram to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder). “If I wanted more all I had to do was ask the Physician's Assistant in our unit. Gunners I worked with used Ambien to help them sleep but they never slept anyway. I wouldn't trust anybody doped up on Xanax or Ambien but asking the PA is all it took to get drugs.”

Ferner summed it up. “We are all citizens of a republic and, as such, ultimately responsible as citizens.” Just as Gov. Walker cannot just point to hardworking people to shoulder the blame, continued Ferner, “we can not just point to Washington and complain about what's going on there while we go about our lives, pay our taxes, and allow this wasteful system to to go. No matter our walk of life, every one of us needs to look into our hearts then show up and speak out. We need not go along with the current wasteful policy of war. If we do we are complicit. These days, no one is able to say, 'I didn't know.'”

That Moment People say “No!”

by Susan Galleymore

Published in Commondreams, Feb 20, 2011
Listen to the radio interview with Mary Edith Bentley Abu Saba. (29 mins)

Fifty years ago six college students – two African American and four White – went to jail for sitting down at Patterson Drugstore lunch counter in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Their plans had been amorphous: “let's just talk to Mr. Patterson”...they were honor students after all, and talking surely would convince the owner/manager that racial segregation was wrong.

They had no plan when, red-faced and enraged, Mr. Patterson yelled into each of their faces giving them one last chance to vacate his establishment.

One of the group Mary Edith Bentley Abu Saba,twenty-one years old on December 14, 1960 said, “None of us moved. We just sat there. Actually, I couldn't move!”

Mr. Patterson called the police.

The police gave them one last chance to leave.

Still the students sat.

Behaviorists and scientists name this phenomenon “entrainment” – when separate objects vibrating at different speeds start to vibrate at the same speed.

Those scared students entrained. And their story is a metaphor for what is happening today, from the Middle East to Wisconsin, as people come together as one to protest the lack of dignity with they are treated.

The police arrested and handcuffed the group – later known as the Patterson Six – and took them to jail.

It is yet to be seen how long and how far will progress the resistance across the globe. In this case, entrainment – unlike “group think” – depends on how each person gauges the personal and political consequences.

Bentley had had other things to do that day. “I needed to practice for an important music recital. I also was busy planning my wedding for the day after I graduated. So when my friend Rebecca Mays Owen approached me at noon about going for coffee I made her promise that I'd be back on campus by five o'clock.”

Instead, Mary Edith Bentley and Rebecca Mays Owen of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, James Hunter and Terrill Brumback of Lynchburg College, and Barbara Thomas and Kenneth Green of Virginia Theological Seminary and College spent the next three hours in jail, segregated by race and gender.

To his credit, the president of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Dr. William Quillian, Jr., never wavered in his support for the students. He posted $1,000 bond for each of them. But “civil rights” were dirty words in that part of the country at that time and the students' photographs and story were plastered over the front page of newspapers throughout the South, then the nation. Quillian was under tremendous pressure from the college board and the community to condemn and expel Bentley and Owen. He resisted.

Jim Holt was the lawyer for the Patterson Six. His presence in the court room disturbed the judge who had never faced an African American in that role before. Anytime Holt praised the students' actions,the judge banged his gavel to redirect the defense saying, “we need not go down that road.”

The judge was astonished when Holt and the defendants refused to appeal their 30-day sentence and chose jail instead.

Bentley Abu Saba laughed as she told the story in a recent Raising Sand Radio interview, “I was ready for jail. I had a change of underwear and my toothbrush in my pocketbook. We may have been naïve [about the power of talking to those in power] but we understood that six honor students spending 30 days in jail would have a great impact.”

And it did. Lynchburg streets and courtroom were crowded with angry, shouting Southerners, many of whom carried weapons improvised from bicycle chains.

Yet Bentley never had second thoughts about what she'd done. “On the contrary: I felt proud of myself. I learned about an inner strength that I never knew I had.”

All episodes of resistance have consequences. For Bentley in the microcosm of Lynchburg, Virginia the Episcopal minister retracted his invitation to play her final music piece on the church's new, state-of-the-art organ. The Methodist minister refused his church for her wedding when he learned she'd invited African American guests. It took eight years to de-segregate – by race and gender – Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Fifty years later, Bentley and Hunter, the two surviving members of Patterson Six, are feted.

The full consequences of resistance in the Middle East and Wisconsin may not be fully understood for years. But, expect the unexpected as people act as one, as they entrain. As New York Times reporter Nick Kristof wrote from Bahrain recently:

... activists are unbelievably courageous. I’ve been taken aback by their determination and bravery. They faced down tanks and soldiers, withstood beatings and bullets, and if they achieve democracy – boy, they deserve it.

While people from vastly different cultures, languages, and background may not agree on how civil rights, democracy, and dignity look they all know how a lack of dignity feels. Clearly they have had enough of that feeling. With cries of “No more! Enough!” they're ready to go down a different road, one where “entrainment” has a different name: People Power.

A Veteran in America: Trying to Find the Way Home

A Veteran in America: Trying to Find the Way Home

by Susan Galleymore

(Published in War Times)

Jason Moon's mother tells him that as a young child he loved writing songs and that during long car trips he'd share his songs with her. Today, he's writing songs again. But for more than five years following his return from a year-long tour of duty in Iraq, he could barely write a line.

Moon deployed to Talil Airbase with the Wisconsin National Guard in 2003. In March 2008 he was ready to testify at the four-day long Winter Soldier hearings held in in Silver Spring, Maryland. His would be one of more than 200 eyewitness accounts of injustices perpetrated by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He planned to tell of direct orders to “run over any children that got in the way of military vehicles.”

Moon's three-year-old son looked like the Iraqi children and the order was as shocking to Moon then as it would be the Americans who heard it later.

“People accused me of lying...or said our unit was a bad apple.”

Nowadays there are countless assertions of this order being carried out.

“Recently I heard that our unit was even involved in one such event and that the Civil Affairs unit went to the parents of the girl who'd been killed and, at gun-point, forced them to sign off on accepting $200 for her death.”

Moon broke down the day before he was to present his testimony. Instead of attending the hearing, he checked himself into a hospital where he shuffled around “without shoelaces in my shoes.”

This suicide watch was the beginning of a long – and continuing – journey searching for a life Moon feels is worth living.

“My question is: how do they [the military and the population it serves] expect people to be in an environment where violence and killing is encouraged, accepted, and often rewarded then, when we come home and respond with the same mentality, we're put in prison. The juxtaposition of these two worlds as a soldier tries to readjust and tries to deal with the results of what he or she was asked to do” – that which was okay there and then and is not okay here and now – “can make a veteran feel crazy.”

Deployed troops long to return home. Yet, “When we come back it is not so wonderful after all. Since such a small percentage of our population understands – or wants to understand – the real issues [associated with war] troops and veterans must deal with it alone.”

The isolation only increases as civil society pays attention, not to the ongoing wars and the plight of the troops who fight them but to the latest news crisis, the economy, political corruption, unemployment, bankrupt state and city budgets, turmoil in Egypt spreading to other countries....

All the while US troops continue to deploy – some have served as many as six deployments – and veterans continue to confront their demons long after their military service ends.

What makes Moon's story especially poignant is his relationship to his son. The growing boy saw his father as a hero with whom he wanted to play the game of “good guys versus bad guys”.

It was excruciating. The boy was too young for lectures about the gritty realities of war. His father told him, gently, that even the 'bad guys' have mothers, are sons like he is, and that “people don't come back to life after they're killed.”

But Moon's body had its own way of surviving the pressure: it shut down. “When my son wanted to play war I became as tired as if I'd been drugged and I'd fall asleep.”

Later, when they played together, “I'd find myself telling my 7-year-old how to flank a fighting position, or how to do covering fire, or correcting his battle strategies!”

There is a parallel in Jason Moon's experiences as a father and as a veteran. For explaining war to a child is like explaining the deep effects of war to an adult who has never experienced war. Neither has the capacity to understand how troops are trained to kill. Neither imagines the horrors combat troops see every day. Neither grasps how war affects human beings. Neither really wants to understand.

Only those who know war know the pleasure – and the pain – of returning home where the vast majority of fellow citizens care nothing for one's extraordinary experiences.

Despite centuries of war, there is no successful strategy that helps veterans re-integrate into a comfortably ignorant, binary world.

Many veterans like Jason Moon live day-to-day as they continue internal dialogs about the worthiness of their lives. But Moon is writing songs and playing music again. Lyrics from the album title:

The child inside me

long dead and gone

somewhere between

lost and alone

trying to find my way home...

Moon's first CD in a decade describes his journey. It is a sign of hope, not only for the songwriter but also for the homeless veterans with whom Moon works. Moreover, proceeds from sales benefit this work. (Listen to three cuts from his CD in a recent Raising Sand Radio interview: www.raisingsandradio.org).

Susan Galleymore is author of Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror, host and producer of Raising Sand Radio, and a former “military mom” and GI Rights counselor. Contact her at susan@raisingsandradio.org.

“Making things right by people”

By Susan Galleymore
(Also published by Commondreams, Jan 17, 2011)

A scene in the film The Good Shepherd shows a conversation between an Italian-American grandfather and Central Intelligence Agent Edward Wilson.

“We Italians, we have family. What do people like you have?”

Wilson smiles. “We own the country. The rest of you are just visitors.”

Examples of Wilson's mindset aired on Fox News after the memorial for Arizona's shooting victims. Commentators found University Professor Dr. Carlos Gonzales, of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, “very strange” and that he blessed “one too many things”. Brit Hume opined that “by the time it was over [Gonzales] had blessed the reptiles of the sea and prayed to the four doors of the building. While I'm sure that is an honorable tradition with his people, it was most peculiar.”

How “very strange” and “most peculiar” would this country's “owners” and Fox News commentators find the other “visitors” – Native Americans – and their prophecies?

A Mohawk prophecy declares:

After seven generations of living in close contact with the Europeans, the Onkwehonwe would see the day when the elm trees would die...the animals would be born strange and deformed, their limbs twisted out of shape. Huge stone monsters would tear open the face of the earth. The rivers would burn aflame. The air would burn the eyes of man. The Onkwehonwe would see the day when birds would fall from the sky, the fish would die in the water, and man would grow ashamed of the way that he had treated his mother and provider, Earth. Then the People would rise up and demand that their rights and stewardship over Earth be respected and restored.

Fortunately, indigenous youth concern themselves more with action than reaction. In the San Francisco Bay Area, members of Oakland's youth group Seventh Native American Generation – SNAG (1) – act on this prophecy. Last year co-founders Ras K'dee and Shadi Rahimi contacted their counterparts in Palestine then traveled there with small delegation to meet, dance with, learn from, and share a mutual vision to respect and restore Earth.

As K'dee explained, “Cultural exchange is one way people heal, learn to cope, and become resilient.”

While each group researched the other's indigenous roots and history the deepest learning came from meeting face-to-face and experiencing Palestine's day-to-day reality.

Discussions ranged from experiences living under occupation and colonization to growing up in marginalized reservations and refugee camps, facing prejudices, acknowledging the moment when each realized that s/he was different from the mainstream, and recognizing that s/he had to struggle in ways others their age did not.

Exile from their birthright affects both communities too. Native American families were broken through the US government's once-endemic boarding school system. Palestinian families break when fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers are exiled from their land or disappear into Israeli prisons.

Yet, K'dee said that celebrating serendipity in traditional dance and story-telling “allowed us all to connect with one another and the Earth.”

Then there is their crucial commonality of access, or lack thereof, to natural resources...and the “monsters [that] tear open the face of the earth.”

Water

One Native American delegate arrived at Dheisheh Refugee Camp, south of Bethlehem, three days before K'dee and greeted him, “We've been without water since I got here. Welcome to the rez!”

This delegate had grown up on an American-style reservation and lack of water – and electricity – while distressing, was familiar.

Dheisheh, in fact, had been without water for 45 days. Emblematic of their chronic water problems, Dheisheh's school children, offered a choice of improvements funded by the international community – including a new soccer field, a basketball court, or other sports gear and equipment – chose a water filtration system. For, when they received it at all, West Bank's and Gaza's groundwater is often contaminated with Israel's industrial waste and with sewage and seawater from bomb-damaged sewer systems.

Land

Until the mid-1940's Palestine was populated with thriving villages that, today, exist only in memory and impotent deeds to patches of rubble and cacti. Yet delegates noticed large portions of unused land that either still lies fallow or has been converted to Israel's national park system.

According to Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem – and with the assistance of giant Caterpillar bulldozers – “Some half a million Israelis...liv[e] over the Green Line: more than 300,000 in 121 settlements and about one hundred outposts, which control 42 percent of the land area of the West Bank, and the rest in twelve neighborhoods that Israel established on land it annexed to the Jerusalem Municipality. (2)

Palestinians crowd into ever-shrinking villages and refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza. According to the Municipality of Gaza, population density there is 9,982.69/km² – one of the world's most densely populated zones.

The Israeli company Elbit erects the security barrier wall in Israel. Homeland Security hired Elbit to erect the wall along the U. S. Mexico Border.

In the US – total area of the 50 states is 2.3 billion acres – the Federal Government has title to about 650 million acres, or about 29 percent. Native (“Indian”) lands make up about 2 percent of the country's area. (3)

Until 1769, the San Francisco Bay Area was home to somewhere between 7,000(4) and at least 26,000(5) Ohlone (also known by the exonym Costanoan).

Once identified by eight linguistic regions – Awaswas, Chalon, Chochenyo, Karkin, Mutsun, Ramaytush, Rumsen, Tamyen – in more than 50 villages around San Francisco Peninsula, Santa Clara Valley, East Bay, Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey Bay, and Salinas Valley, today, descendents of the Ohlone are not recognized by the same Federal Government that dispossessed them.

Lack of federal recognition makes it difficult for Native American groups who are federally recognized to work with the Ohlone. Moreover, it de-historicizes the descendants of the Ohlone and means they have no land therefore little chance of a base upon which to re-create their socio-cultural history.

K'dee, a Pomo, said, “As a child, I heard in class that all my people are dead – that, in general, all Indians are dead. Sometimes that felt psychotic since I regularly attended Pomo ceremonies with my Pomo family.”

People

Native Americans, Ohlone descendants, and Palestinians are determined to survive and thrive.

Early spring, 2010, Tony Cerda, the current Tribal Chairman of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribal Council, told a small audience watching the Humaya Dancers in San Francisco, “Next time someone tells you that there are no more Ohlone People you tell that person that you saw Ohlone dance here today.”

New year 2011 brought the world the Gaza Youth Break Out manifesto:

...We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, Fatah, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.

There is a revolution growing inside of us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a way of canalizing this energy into something that can challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope.

...We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH...pain..tears...suffering...control...limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

We want three things...to be free...to live a normal life...peace. Is that too much to ask? We are a peace movement consistent [sic] of young people in Gaza and supporters elsewhere that will not rest until the truth about Gaza is known by everybody in this whole world and in such a degree that no more silent consent or loud indifference will be accepted.

We... start by destroying the occupation that surrounds ourselves... break free from this mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect.. We will carry our heads high even though we will face resistance...work... to change these miserable conditions we are living under...build dreams where we meet walls. (6)

The Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area – the Muwekma – reaffirm their existence:

Makin Mak-Atuemi Muwekma-mak ic Eki’_i _i’nmatci-mak! (We will make things right for our People and dance for our children!)

This country's “owners” and Fox News may find Native traditions “very strange” and “most peculiar” but these traditions continue to enrich our extraordinarily diverse and courageous planet each day.

Footnotes

1. Seventh Native American Generation – SNAG: www.snagmagazine.com.

2. B'tselem comprehensive report, 2010: http://www.btselem.org/English/Publications/Summaries/201007_By_Hook_and_by_Crook.asp-based \

3. US Dept. of Transporation: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/1999cpr/ap_e/cpxe_2.htm

4. American anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber.

5. US Professor Sherburne F. Cook. The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970: “Not until the population figures are examined does the extent of the havoc become evident.” From 1769 to 1800 the population dropped to about 10% of its original numbers; by 1848 it dropped to about 3,000.

6. Gaza Youth Manifesto: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2011/01/gazas-youth-manifesto-for-change/.

The US Navy: War Games under Americans' Radar

(Similar article under the header "Gaming the System: Dumping the Navy Way" published in Counterpunch Sept 30) 

During the Bush Administration – it continues under Obama – the Department of the Navy (DON) divided the coasts and oceans into a series of “testing range complexes” (TRC) driven by five-year plans to conduct warfare exercises. They already conduct these tests in the Atlantic (and recently announced a notice of intent to expand this area), the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific.

Additionally, after the public comment period ends on October 11, 2010, the Navy will conduct a plethora of war exercises along 122,400 nautical miles of air, surface, and subsurface space in Northern California, Oregon, and Western Washington.

To be sure, such testing is in accordance with Title 10, Section 5062 of the US Code that provides:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped primarily for prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea...responsible for the preparation of Naval forces necessary for the effective prosecution of war...with Integrated Joint Mobilization Plans...to meet the needs of war.

Perhaps people take war games for granted because such testing is provided for in this Code (fewer conspiracy theories if information is public?). But this information is not trickling down to the people it will affect. If anything, DON appears cagey about how it informs the public about its intentions.

Treat 'em rough...and tell 'em nothing

Rosalind Peterson is president and co-founder of Agriculture Defense Coalition (ADC). In a recent Raising Sand Radio interview (www.raisingsandradio.org) she said, “In Mendocino County (CA) there was a one-by-one inch ad in local papers of the smallest communities that the Navy could find in northern California, Oregon, and Washington. In Oregon they advertised in tiny communities with a total of about 250 people each. They didn't publicize in the capital, Bend, or Portland or other, larger cities at all.”

Aides in California Senator Barbara Boxer's office seemed to know little, if anything, about the Northwest Training Research Complex (NWTRC) when ADC's Rosalind Peterson contacted them. A spokesperson said Boxer would “look into it.”

Peterson said, “If Senator Diane Feinstein and Congressman Thompson knew about it they did not notify their constituents along California's northwest coast.”

WAR GAMES

Pacific Northwest

The Navy acknowledges that some testing is highly classified therefore the tests are not shared with the public at all. Its 1,000 page NWTRC Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) notes that the tests conducted off the Pacific Northwest coast will “take” an estimated 11 million marine mammals, about 2.7 million per year. A “take” is “a significant disruption in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors”; death is implied.

The “take” for decimated fish and bird life and the life that supports them is not mentioned. Neither is the “take” for civilians in the zone conducting commercial and recreation enterprises during tests. Beyond directions to websites for “Long-range advance notice of scheduled activities” local fishing, cruise ships, boating, and daily aviation passenger carriers passing through test areas will not be informed on the days testing occurs.

These war games include “a total of 7,588 sorties...[of] fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (“drones ”), and naval vessels conducting exercises for 6,940 hours each year”¹ with mid- and high frequency sonar, underwater constructions and detonations, bombing, missile and torpedo missions with arsenals from Hellfire missiles to drones and the use of air-, land- and water-borne “hazardous materials” (defined as solid, liquid, semi-solid, or gaseous “substances that pose a substantial hazard to human health or the environment by virtue of their chemical or biological properties”).

The list – “not exhaustive” – of chemical byproducts from underwater detonations, explosives, degradation products, failure and low-order detonations, and components of training materials is extensive. Hazardous materials discharged overboard beyond 12 nautical miles include spent acid, alkali (“carefully neutralize, dilute and flush overboard...”); solvents; water with corrosion inhibitors; aircraft washdown waste water; and submarine missile tube waste water that includes heavy metals and cyanide.

Physical debris includes live and expended ordnance and casings, sunken vessels, and blasted underwater construction.

Vessels, aircraft, and military equipment used in these activities carry and use hazardous materials with directives to manage the storage, use, and proper disposal of materials that may be harmful to the environment.

The list of materials to “Containerize for Shore Disposal” includes batteries, hydraulic fluids, insecticides, pesticides, waste oil, sludge, oily solid waste, grease, propellents, PCB, and mercury in the form of fluorescent bulbs.²

Given the Navy's history, how and where are these materials disposed once “containerized”?

Out of sight, out of mind

The Navy has dumped explosives and vast amounts of other debris in the oceans for years. This is old news to NOAA, oceanographers, environmental groups, and the voiceless directly affected. NOAA has a map showing at least the last 60 years of the Navy's suspected dump zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Greg Gardner of South Beach, Florida reports in Indian River Magazine, “Closing Fort Pierce was a classic case of dump and run....To this day, ordnance washes up on Hutchinson Island beaches several times a year after heavy surf. ”

South Beach Mayor Bob Benton concurs. “They put trucks and tanks on barges and barges and dumped them in the Gulfstream....Tons and tons of Army hardware, hand grenades and bombs.”

Off the California coast drums and canisters leak radioactive material since the Navy dumped them after tests conducted at its San Francisco's Hunters Point facilities.

The ongoing Superfund site clean up of former Naval Air Station, Alameda – at a cost, to date, of $428 million – regularly reveals mysterious contamination zones, sunken vessels, and toxic burn pits. During a recent Navy-sponsored tour, local residents watched from the bus as Navy personnel measured radiation on the vehicle's tires with Geiger counters.

Yet the vast majority of Americans know little about the Navy's dumping and warfare activities. Should We, the People, not know that the Navy's ongoing five-year warfare test plans require only one EIS per TRC? And that any EIS can be extended without informing the public at all? And that these on-going activities affect our own and all other forms of life?

Howard Garrett, president of the Whidbey-based Orca Network’s board of directors, says this includes “almost everything alive in the ocean. Anything with an air pocket in their [sic] bodies.” The Navy says it will conduct fly-overs and set up watchers before performing potentially lethal sonar testing. “But, [for example] Orcas are by nature stealthy hunters. They traverse the entire Pacific Ocean, so they can be anywhere. They won’t be making noise so it will be extremely difficult for the Navy to know whether they are there before beginning testing.”

As goes the Pacific Northwest so goes the Atlantic

Meanwhile, as research and testing continues off US coasts, the Navy recently announced its intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Overseas EIS (OEIS) to evaluate:

...the potential environmental effects with military readiness training and research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) activities in the Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing (AFTT) study area. This covers approximately 2.6 million square nautical miles of ocean area, which includes Navy operating areas (sea space) and warning areas (airspace). While the majority of Navy training and many testing activities take place within operating and warning areas and/or on RDT&E ranges, some activities, such as sonar maintenance and gunnery exercises, are conducted concurrent with normal transits and occur outside of operating and warning areas.
(Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Notice of IntentAtlantic Fleet Training and Testing Notice of Intent )

That is, everything planned for the Pacific Northwest will be repeated – and improved – in the Atlantic.

TRUE COST

ADC's Rosalind Peterson said, “Each one of these five-years-testing programs is immense...and very costly. We, the tax-paying public, will pay to replace all the bombs, missiles, and other arsenal used for these live fire exercises; we will pay heavily for the environmental degradation of ocean, land, and air; we will pay very heavily for the collapse of the marine mammal, fish, and bird populations. We don't realize that one set of activities has a wide-ranging set of consequences.”

The Navy Way

The NWTRC EIS Resource Section: Socioeconomics addresses cost from the point of view of how unobtrusive Navy testing will be and how little it will impact civilians and businesses.

It is important to note that there are no restricted areas in the NWTRC. Normal right of way for fishing boats and all other vessels is honored throughout the range complex. In fact, to prevent interference during the conduct of their activities, Navy ships and aircraft intentionally seek areas clear of all other vessel traffic for conducting their training.³

The Table of Annual Commercial Landed Catch and Value within Washington Waters (2007) carefully records every fish of economic significance – over four dozen, from northern anchovy that, for example, generated $35,883 that year, to Dungeness Crab, $54,479,797, to Sockeye salmon, $89,802, even to “Unspecified bait shrimp”, $219,648.

Then, “Due to the low level of Navy activities, and the lack of interaction between the Navy and commercial interests, there are no expected revenue losses in any offshore industry....”

Unsurprisingly, the EIS Socioeconomics segment concludes, “the Proposed Action would result in no significant impacts. Therefore, no mitigation measures are required.”⁴

A Better Way

Those focused on one-dimensional “national security” in terms of military might makes right – rather than a complex, multi-layered, integral system of living wonders that offer generative mysteries rather than threats – can be assured that the Navy, and the other branches of the US military, already has enough of our planet to conduct testing. It has been doing it for decades. It does not need – and should not have – even more of our precious, already-stressed, and shrinking planet.

Nevertheless, after three years and thousands of comments received by people and groups in the Pacific Northwest, Marianne Edain of Washington's Whidbey Environmental Action Network (WEAN) perhaps it up, “I feel like a flea facing an elephant.”

1) NWTRC EIS – Hazardous Materials. Table 3.3-1: Number of Activities or Training Items Expended Annually – All Alternatives. Footnote 2, page 3.3-6.

2) NWTRC EIS – Hazardous Materials. Table 3.3-6: Selected Hazardous Materials Discharge Restrictions for Navy Vessels. Page 3.3-17.

3) NWTRC EIS – Socioeconomics. Page 3.14-7.

Calls to End the False Security of Nuclear Weapons

(This article published in Commondreams, Aug 6, 2010)

Takashi Tanemori stands on a makeshift stage on the back of a truck parked at an intersection near Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Tanemori San's formal traditional Japanese dress and his silver hair riffles in the chill morning breeze. His voice is firm and clear over the roars of large trucks passing.

“I came to the United States forty years ago to avenge the death of my family killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”


In the pantheon of stories about that August 6, 1944 his is both unique and ubiquitous. His parents and his four-month-old sister died that day...along with 200,000 other Japanese.

Tanemori's surviving three siblings ranged in age from four to fourteen; he was eight. For years he fought rats for food scraps, slept anywhere he could, and longed for human comfort. At sixteen he attempted suicide..then he apologized to his father's memory for that “dishonorable act”...and then he vowed revenge. He traveled to the U.S. and was quickly interned in a camp where he had to pick Thompson Grapes. (“To this day,” he says, “I cannot eat grapes.”)
He became ill and was, first, diagnosed with pesticide-related food poisoning. When doctors learned he was Hibakusha (A-bomb survivor) he became, he says, “a guinea pig.” Despite the excruciating pain, doctors repeatedly had nurses hold down their young patient, take his blood, and tap his spinal fluid to test the results of radiation poisoning. When Tanemori, who spoke only Japanese, finally fought them off, he was moved to a psychiatric institution to undergo many doses of electro-therapy.

As Takashi Tanemori speaks, a passing truck driver shouts out. “Bullsh*t! F**k all that bullsh*t!”

This man is a son. Is he also a father? Does he know LLNL is the most sophisticated nuclear weapons research and design facility in the world? Or is he, like most of us, too busy to pay attention? Is he too busy working to pay the bills for the minutiae of his one, individual life...too busy to protest the overwhelming debt he – of us – incur to pay for the perils born at this lab...too busy to recognize his place in humanity's fragile interconnectedness?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targets for atomic experiments
Norman Solomon, author, and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, takes the stage. “The nuclear age was born in deception of the facts, of the human realities of these weapons... and in silence, avoidance, and through psychic numbing. These weapons are lied about constantly, by our leaders, by our news media, and by ourselves.”

Indeed, in 1979 Solomon researched the first official United States document that listed atomic targets. Titled “Announced United States Nuclear Tests,” at the top of that list is Trinity at New Mexico's Alamogordo Test Range; second is Hiroshima; third is Nagasaki.

Solomon tells us, “The moral opposition to the Nazi regime was grounded in opposing that genocidal mentality and opposing experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed consent. In a real sense, though, the history of the last seven decades has been that of experimentation on human being without their consent: the bombs dropped on the Japanese; the Native Americans sent into the radon ovens of uranium mines; the people of the Pacific and [Americans] downwind of nuclear test sites; tens of thousands of military personnel exposed at test sites; the fuel fabricators at Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats; workers at Los Alamos, Livermore, Nevada, Hanford and other places where radioactive revenues create huge profit for some – and abject misery for others.”

Even as President Obama talks the talk – “pursuing policies to end the nuclear arms race” – he walks the walk of “modernization” that escalates that same arms race.
“This” says Solomon, “is The Big Lie ...that it is 'technological advance' when, really, it is 'technological suicide.'”

At the May 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference participating countries, including the U.S., agreed on a unanimous intent to seek abolition of nuclear weapons.

Yet, years ago Solomon's research included interviewing State Department officials who told him that it is the top officials of Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia labs that “fight tooth and nail to ensure that the U.S. Senate never passes the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty” (CTBT).

In keeping with The Big Lie, the Obama administration's budget for fiscal year 2011 – to “modernize the nuclear weapons complex” – authorizes the largest nuclear weapons budget ever: 14 percent larger than last year's budget and larger than the average budget during the Cold War – even adjusted for inflation. It includes building three new bomb plants: one at Los Alamos (NM) to enable plutonium production: one at Oak Ridge (TN) to build uranium secondaries; one in Kansas City (MO) for other weapons' components. These facilities enable the build of 80 entirely new nuclear weapons per year...at a cost of $80 billion over the next ten years. “Modernizing” the arsenal itself costs another $100 billion.

It took Tanemori San more than forty years to overcome his rage and his desire to avenge his family. Ironically, the warmth of another nurse touched him and, he says, “began to thaw out my heart frozen by hatred.” But it was his young daughter who issued the coup de grace to his unmitigated desire for revenge.
“Daddy, I know you came here to kill those who killed our family. But isn't there any other way? For the children of those you do not kill – just as they did not kill you in Hiroshima – will come after your children. Is that what you want?”

Tanemori San considered her question. And understood in his heart that the circle of violence only begets more violence. Perhaps We, the People ought more deeply to consider this as we hurtle towards an ever more deadly, expensive, and growing nuclear arsenal.

Rev. Martin Luther King talked about “guided missiles and misguided men”...and said that “a nation that, year after year, continues to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
On this day, outside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Norman Solomon tells that if we continue “to approach building nuclear weapons designed to inflict global nuclear holocaust we will get there.”

We do not want to get there.

Barack Obama, can you hear us now?

Listen to the radio show: "Obama, stop building nuclear weapons"

Confronting a Mindset: “Bombing Hiroshima was Right”

This article was published on Counterpunch, August 5, 2010

Imagine the power to erase, in nine seconds, more than 200,000 human beings and everything surrounding them within a two mile radius. Then imagine that power magnified many times over. Then understand that We, the People, are represented by those who are capable of destroying far more people and property in less time. For, according to President Bill Clinton and reiterated by Barack Obama, “nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of  the policies” of United States of America –  that protector of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Every day of the last sixty-five years since August 6 and August 9 when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have continued to design, test, develop, and stockpile ever more awesome nuclear weapons.
Researchers at the non-profit think tank Tri-Valley CAREs based in Livermore, California found that, contrary to their assumptions, Congress, the Pentagon, and the President do not commission such weaponry. “We found,” says Executive Director Marylia Kelly, “that [members of] the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory rather forcefully sell ideas for and promote weapons to the U.S. government. We'd always thought that the lab responded to the sorts of weapons these entities wanted but found the opposite is true. The weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore (CA) and Los Alamos (NM) really are the tap root of the nuclear arms race.”
It began during the Cold War...and, Kelly says, “this one-nation nuclear arms race has continued ever since. As long as these labs are unimpeded that tap root of continued weapons design and development will flourish.”
There are three main test facilities that simulate nuclear explosions and develop ever more sophisticated – and lethal – weapons. The Nevada Test Site has an underground sub-critical test facility. Los Alamos Laboratory has a new hydro test facility dedicated to the beginning stages of nuclear weapons' explosions. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has an ignitions facility that explores the physics of nuclear weapons with respect to the later stages of nuclear explosions.
This testing has, to date, cost the American tax payer more than $90 billion...and that does not take into account the cost of cleaning up the environment and addressing current and future health. Developing this ever-growing arsenal pumps out an ever-growing amount of mortally toxic material.
Lawrence Livermore tests estimate the radiation 'dose' - beyond the heat of the blast - released in Hiroshima deposited about one million curies. (One curie of radiation is 37 billion radioactive disintegrations per second; radiation has a half life of 28,000 years.)
Tri Valley CAREs documents that more than one million curies of radiation have escaped from this laboratory into surrounding communities. During tests performed at the lab's Site 300 – located in the hills between the cities of Livermore and Tracy – non-fissile depleted uranium replaces plutonium 239  (the fissile material in the core of a nuclear bomb) and is exploded on outdoor firing tables to atomize into the wind.
Not only is there  no workable, long-term, safe solution to deal with toxic materials – including  plutonium, tritium (the radioactive hydrogen of the hydrogen bomb), uranium, and cesium – clean up is endless. There are already tens of thousands of known Superfund and National Priorities List sites around the U.S.  According to EPA officials and the GOA's report, Superfund: EPA's Estimated Costs to Remediate Existing Sites Exceed Current Funding Levels, and More Sites Are Expected to Be Added to the National Priorities List
EPA regional officials estimated that from 101 to 125 sites – about 20 to 25 sites per year – will be added to the National Priorities List over the next 5 years...higher than the average of about 16 sites per year listed for fiscal years 2005 to 2009...At over 60 percent of the 239 nonfederal NPL sites with unacceptable or unknown human exposure, all or more than half of the work remains to complete the remedial construction phase of cleanup.... By the end of fiscal year 2009, EPA had expended $3 billion on 75 sites with unacceptable human exposure and $1.2 billion on 164 sites with unknown exposure....

Historical amnesia
If We, the People, are unaware of this ongoing pollution so, too, have we lost sight of our history. How many Americans understand that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had almost nothing to do with the end of World War II? Rather, these horrific deeds positioned the U.S. so that we would not have to share influence with the Soviet Union and Asia; the A bombs were used to intimidate the Soviets for the post-war period.
The Emperor of Japan understood by 1944 that the war was lost. He changed governments and the mandate of the new Japanese government was to negotiate a peace treaty with the U.S. with a fundamental condition that the Emperor remain on the thrown and avoid a trial as a war criminal.
General, later President, Dwight D. Eisenhower opposed dropping the A bomb. “Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Admiral William D. Leahy, Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against the Japanese...already defeated and ready to surrender. ...in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was taught not to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying woman and children.”
J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that, while, experts continue to disagree on some issues...critical questions have been answered [among them that] “alternatives to the bomb existed and that [President] Truman and his advisers knew it.”
Yet, powerful forces within the U.S. continue to fight against the American people understanding this history. In 1993 the Smithsonian, for example, suggested the launch a major exhibit as an opportunity for people to understand more deeply the effects of the atomic bomb and to surface the circumstances surrounding its use. Controversy ensued for two years and included twenty-four members of Congress sending a letter on August 10, 1994 to the Smithsonian expressing “concern and dismay” that the planned exhibit portrays Japan “more as an innocent victim than a ruthless aggressor” in World War II.
The Smithsonian canceled the greater exhibit on January 30, 1995 and began work on a completely different plan, one that displayed only the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the bombs.
When even that trimmed down, more palatable exhibition finally closed in May 1998, it had drawn almost four million visitors. Imagine if the original exhibit had gone ahead as envisioned. Four million Americans would better understand how deeply enmeshed we are in war as a nation and a society. Perhaps then we would face real facts...and remove our sense of legitimacy in preparing for nuclear holocaust.

Voices in the wilderness
As Direction of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and AFSC'ss National Disarmament Coordinator Dr. Joseph Gerson advances U.S. and international movements for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the ratification of the limited “New START” treaty. He served as co-convener of the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review International Planning Committee, a network of 25 leading disarmament organizations created to help ensure a successful NPT Review Conference.
During this service a U.S. senator's aide told Gerson that “the Bombing of Hiroshima was Right.”
“ This,” he says, “just reflects enormous ignorance” sixty-five years after the cataclysmic events in Japan.  “The reality is that each thermo-nuclear weapon today has the capability to kill far more people than were killed at Auschwitz. Yet, such genocidal, if not omnicidal weapons are the cornerstone of U.S. policies. It is in every American's interest to understand this element in our society and to transform it.”
The opportunity is there. For the last 55 years there has been an annual international conference to commemorate what were, says Gerson, “war crimes and the memory of the victims of those war crimes..and to press for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
In a recent Raising Sand Radio interview Dr. Gerson told of his first visit to Hiroshima twenty-five years ago. “I fully engaged with the pain of what happened there and with the ongoing damage, including genetic, from radiation.”
While there, however, he did not dream at all. After he returned to the U.S.  his dreams resumed and, at first they were crowded with images of cinders and destruction. But, “The “waking image I had was of the colors and angles of the peace cranes – symbols of peace and affirmation of life.”
The letter versus the spirit of the law
The U.S. signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Essential elements of this, one of the seminal treaties of the 20th century, are that:
1) non-nuclear nations - excepting Israel, Pakistan, and India - commit not to obtain nuclear weapons;
2) nuclear nations promise they would a) provide technology and recognize the inalienable right of all nations to produce nuclear power for peaceful purposes and b) engage in good faith negotiations to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
When non-nuclear nations see the nuclear nations ignore this second promise (Article 6) they suggest it undermines their commitment when they are threatened by nuclear nations. So, despite President Obama's rhetoric, the May 2010 conference saw the U.S. beat back the non-aligned and other non-nuclear nations pressing for a mandate that nuclear nations negotiate to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
As signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (the Senate has never ratified the CTBT) the U.S. abides by the letter of the law by following the moratorium on above-ground testing. It does not, however, abide by the spirit of the law when it tests nuclear weapons' components, simulates explosions, and extrapolates the results to develop yet more deadly weaponry.
During May's review conference the Arab League initiated a demand – followed by the non-aligned nations – toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Israel balked. Dr. Gerson said that the Obama Administration in not particularly interested in this either although if finally agreed to the demand in order to advance Obama's larger strategies and to avoid the collapse of the conference. Israel finally agreed and is now named in the document.

Glimmers of hope
While it is dispiriting to see how little progress has been made toward a nuclear weapons-free earth in the sixty-five years perhaps one can take comfort in such micro increments. If Israel is finally named in the latest treaty document – despite the deep consternation within that country and within the American community for whom Israel can do no wrong – perhaps there is a glimmer of hope.
Moreover, Hiroshima is, today, a beautiful, modern city. And the Japanese – a community that knows deeply, genetically, the reality behind nuclear warfare – have a deep commitment to life and a peaceful world. Perhaps there is hope for humanity....