North America | DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina

"Living Along the Fenceline" in Jeju

Post Date October 06, 2011

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category DMZ-Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina In the News, Global Justice and Peace Movements, North America

The Stars and Stripes reports that “Naval base puts S. Korea’s ‘island of world peace’ in hot spot”:

JEJU ISLAND, South Korea — This country’s southernmost major island is a study in contrasts.

A popular tourist destination, Jeju boasts some of the world’s most beautiful scenery and is one of 28 finalists in an international competition for selection as one of the “New 7 Wonders of Nature.” Yet it’s also home to a number of cheesy tourist stops, including Jeju Love Land, a sexual theme park.

In 2005, the South Korean government officially recognized Jeju as the “island of world peace,” and then-President Roh Moo-hyun said he would do his best to make it a “center of peace in Northeast Asia.” But South Korea is now building a naval base on the island for the expressed purpose of enhancing its ability to police its vital shipping lanes and respond faster to any North Korean threats.

Critics suggest that once the base opens in 2014, the U.S. will use it extensively, with the goal of keeping an eye on China. That, they say, could make the “island of world peace” a target the next time hostilities erupt in the region.

[…]

The base could also prompt China to hasten the buildup of its naval firepower, further heightening tensions on the Korean peninsula, [Yang Mu-jin, a professor of politics and unification studies at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul] said.

The South Korean government has tried to downplay the social and political implications of the base and have even drawn comparisons to the U.S. military in Hawai’i as an example of good military-civilian relations:

“The project is not aimed at building a military-only base for war,” the ministry’s August report said. “It is targeted at preventing war by strengthening maritime sovereignty, realizing peace and supporting other naval warships of South Korea.”

Pointing to other “successful civilian-military harbor complexes” like those in San Diego and Hawaii, the defense ministry said the naval base and the island of world peace “both can coexist in (a) mutually complimentary manner.”

But in Hawaiʻi, we know that this is rubbish. The military has taken a terrible toll on local communities and the environment. It was the force that drove the regime change and occupation of the sovereign and independent Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. The South Korean Defense Ministry erroneously referred to “successful civilian-military harbor complexes” in Hawaiʻi. Pearl Harbor is not accessible for civilian use. Warning signs along the shoreline of Ke Awalau o Pu’uloa make it clear that despite Hawai’i’s otherwise strong shoreline public access laws, the water is off limits.

Meanwhile, the documentary film “Living Along the Fenceline”, which was screened at the 12th annual Women’s Film Festival in Jeju, exposes the social and environmental costs of military bases around the world, including Hawaiʻi. Director Lina Hoshino and Co-producers Gwyn Kirk and Deborah Lee attended the film festival. The Jeju Weekly reports:

One expat asked the most provocative question of the evening. He asked Ms. Kirk if she thought Jeju Island and its forthcoming naval base represented an inevitable pattern around the world for the creation of more military bases. Ms. Kirk answered she believed the US will inevitably want to build more bases if US imperialism continues to grow. She conveyed that if we can imagine a different kind of future that actively addresses climate change, use of resources, etc… then it is not inevitable. We need a change in leadership and attitude in the US and US allies, including South Korea, who should refuse to have a US military base in the country.

Answering another question, Ms. Kirk said today the United States government spends half of its tax dollars on the world military system, not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A grassroots campaign advocates spreading the money from the defense budget to other social programs including education, health care, care for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, and domestic violence shelters. Unfortunately, these programs are being cut because of the economic crisis. But, the military budget remains intact.

Secondly, Ms. Kirk said there is another campaign to educate people about the military worldwide. People are unaware about the US’s worldwide military presence and are often shocked by the actual number of bases. This film is part of this education campaign.

Ms. Kirk hopes the film inspires people to think about what a military base means in their communities. She said it is important for people to be clear what happens when a military base is installed in a new location. She said, “It is tempting to think military bases will bring jobs. The reality is military spending generates the fewest amount of jobs of any government spending.” The military is a capital intensive industry, not a human capital intensive industry. The same amount of money spent on a military base spent on education or health care would generate far more jobs.

Terri Keko’olani with Hawai’i Peace and Justice and DMZ-Hawai’i / Aloha ‘Aina is featured in the film.

Navy fires top officer at Bangor Nuclear Weapons Facility

Post Date August 23, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Puget Sound

Navy Fires Top Officer at Bangor Nuclear Weapons Facility

By Josh Farley
Friday, August 21, 2009

BANGOR – Capt. Timothy J. Block, the commanding officer of Bangor’s nuclear weapons facility, has been relieved of duty, according to a Navy spokesman.

Rear Adm. Stephen E. Johnson, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, removed Block on Friday because of “a loss of confidence in his ability to continue to lead,” said Cmdr. J.A. “Cappy” Surette, a spokesman at the Pentagon.

“An officer in command has a unique position of trust and responsibility, and has a key role in shaping morale, good order and discipline within the command,” Surette said. “Because of this unique position, his immediate superiors must have full confidence in the officer’s judgment and ability to command.”

Surette said there was no “specific issue or incident” that led to Block’s removal and that public safety was not jeopardized at the facility, which assembles, stores and places nuclear weapons on submarines.

He is the second SWFPac commander in six years to be relieved of duty for “a loss of confidence.” Capt. Keith Lyles – along with his executive officer, weapons officer and command master chief – was dismissed after failing a nuclear weapons inspection.

That inspection came six weeks after a ladder was inadvertently left inside a missile tube on the Trident submarine USS Georgia. As a nuclear missile was being lifted into the tube, the missile’s nose cone was punctured by the ladder and the lifting operation only stopped when the ladder was inches from the nuclear warhead.

The Nov. 7, 2003 incident, which occurred on the Bangor waterfront, was described by a local congressman who had been briefed on it as “serious” but not life-threatening.

Block was about a year into his three-year tour. He has been reassigned and his next duty station has not been determined, Surette said.

Navy Capt. Kevin Zumbar, deputy director of strategic systems programs based in the Washington, D.C., area, will assume command until a permanent replacement is found.

The Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific is home to about one-fourth of the nation’s nuclear weapons, according to a 2006 report by the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nuclear weapons watchdog group.

Source: http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2009/aug/21/pentagon-relieves-bangor-weapons-facility-commandi/

+++

Navy removes top nuclear weapons facility officer

The Associated Press

BANGOR, Wash. — The Navy dismissed the commanding officer of a Washington state-based nuclear weapons facility Friday, citing a loss of confidence in his ability to lead, the Pentagon said.

Capt. Timothy J. Block, who headed the Navy’s Bangor operation arming Trident submarines with nuclear warheads, was relieved of duty on by Rear Adm. Stephen E. Johnson, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, according to the Kitsap Sun.

A Navy spokesman told The Associated Press that no single incident led to Block’s removal. The spokesman would only comment anonymously because he felt he should not pre-empt his supervisor.

Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. J.A. “Cappy” Surette told the newspaper that public safety was not jeopardized and that no “specific issue” was involved.

Washington state’s Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor is home to nuclear submarines, ships and laboratories. The facility also assembles and stores nuclear weapons before outfitting the subs.

Block was about a year into a three-year stint. Surette says the captain has been reassigned but his next station has not been determined.

Navy Capt. Kevin Zumbar, deputy director of strategic systems programs based in the Washington, D.C., area, will take over command until a replacement is found.

Block is the second facility commander in recent years to be relieved of duty for “a loss of confidence.” Capt. Keith Lyles was dismissed after failing a nuclear weapons inspection in 2003.

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/AP/story/1197402.html

Wired on HAARP

Post Date August 05, 2009

Comments 2 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Alaska, Militarization of Society

This is an interesting description of the controversial HAARP program in Alaska. What struck me was the similarities to the issues we face in Hawai’i such as the UARC, missile defense and network centric warfare at PMRF, and the astronomy assault on Mauna Kea and Haleakala: high tech research that utilizes the military as the conduit for funding and applications, powerful senators who can earmark the funds, strange semi-religious justifications from the proponents of the project (e.g. “Stare up and listen to the wind in the guide wires,” says one unidentified Haarp scientist. “It’s as close to a religious experience as you’re ever going to get.”)

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Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames

By Noah Shachtman Email 07.20.09

Photo: CORBIS

“Stare up and listen to the wind in the guide wires,” says one unidentified Haarp scientist. “It’s as close to a religious experience as you’re ever going to get.”

Photo: João Canzani

HAARP Joint Services Program Plans and Activities: Air Force Geophysics Laboratory and Office of Naval Research, February 1990 (PDF)

Todd Pedersen had to hustle-the sky was scheduled to start glowing soon, and he didn’t want to miss it. It was just before sunset, a cold February evening in deep-woods Alaska, and the broad-shouldered US Air Force physicist was scrambling across the snow in his orange down parka and fur-lined bomber hat. Grabbing cables and electronics, he rushed to assemble a jury-rigged telescope atop a crude wooden platform.

The rig wasn’t much, just a pair of high-sensitivity cameras packed into a dorm-room refrigerator and pointed at a curved mirror reflecting a panoramic view of the sky. Pedersen had hoped to monitor the camera feed from a relatively warm bunkhouse nearby. But powdery snow two feet deep made it difficult to string cables back to the building.

As darkness closed in, Pedersen tried to get the second imager working-with no luck-and the first one began snapping pictures. A few minutes before seven, throbbing arcs of green and red light began to form on his monitor, eventually coalescing into an egg shape. Other shards of light shimmered, gathered into a jagged ring, and spun around the oval center. “This is really good stuff,” Pedersen cooed. This wasn’t just another aurora borealis triggered by solar winds; this one Pedersen made himself. He did it with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (Haarp): a $250 million facility with a 30-acre array of antennas capable of spewing 3.6 megawatts of energy into the mysterious plasma of the ionosphere.

Budget for Haarp’s high-altitude nuclear cleanup research (millions)
Source: Darpa Budget Estimates

Bringing Haarp to fruition was, well, complicated. A group of scientists had to cozy up to a US senator, cut deals with an oil company, and convince the Pentagon that the project might revolutionize war. Oh, and along the way they sparked enough conspiracy theories to make the place sound like an arctic Area 51.

But the shocking thing about Haarp isn’t that it’s a boondoggle (it’s actually pretty worthwhile) or that it was spawned by a military-industrial-petrochemical-political complex (a hallowed government tradition). It’s that, all too often, this is the way big science gets done in the US. Navigating the corridors of money and power is simply what scientists have to do.

In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received a simple radio signal sent from across the Atlantic Ocean-dot-dot-dot, again and again, the letter S repeated in Morse code. Leading scientists of the day had said such a transmission was impossible: Earth’s surface is curved, and radio waves travel in straight lines. The dots should have shot out into space. Instead, they traveled from Cornwall, England, to a 500-foot antenna Marconi hung from a kite in Newfoundland. A previously unknown, electromagnetically charged layer of the atmosphere was reflecting the signal back down to earth.

At any given moment, the sun is bombarding our planet with 170 billion megawatts of ultraviolet, x-ray, and other radiation. Those waves collide with atoms of air-nitrogen, oxygen, and so on-stripping away electrons like spring rain eroding a snowbank. The result: positively charged ions drifting free. At high altitudes, those ions are far enough apart that it can take hours for them to bind with a free electron. Called the ionosphere, these undulating bands of charged particles stretch from 50 to 500 miles above the earth-too high for weather balloons and, in large part, too low for satellites. Researchers who study it jokingly call it the ignorosphere.

For decades, researchers who wanted to bother with the ignorosphere did what Marconi had done-they built an emitter, pointed it straight up, and watched to see what would happen next. Those researchers learned that the ionosphere contains plasma, charged gas clouds that are more common in stars than on Earth. They saw that regions of the ionosphere expand and contract depending on their position over the planet, the tilt of Earth toward the sun, and the time of day. (At night, for instance, one of the ionosphere’s layers disappears entirely.)

But by the 1980s, US atmospheric radio science had dead-ended. “We had become a very small field, and we wanted to try to revive it,” says Konstant Papadopoulos, a plasma and space physicist at the University of Maryland. “We needed a modern facility.”

Papadopoulos, now a white-haired, deeply tanned 70-year-old who goes by the name Dennis, had worked on and off with the government since he left his native Athens in the 1960s. He knew his way around the federal science-funding machine. Many of his fellow ionospherists had similar experience swaying the folks with fat wallets. So this loose band of radio scientists began a campaign of persuasion in support of a new research center. “We’ll sell it,” Papadopoulos remembers thinking. “We’ll sell it in good faith, but we’ll sell it.”

One of the first ideas came mid-decade from Bernard Eastlund, a physicist working for oil-and-gas conglomerate Atlantic Richfield. Arco had the rights to trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under Alaska’s North Slope. The problem had always been how to get that gas to the port at Valdez. Eastlund had a better idea: Use the gas onsite to fuel a giant ionospheric heater. Such a facility, he wrote in a series of patents, could fry Soviet missiles in midflight or maybe even nudge cyclones and other extreme weather toward enemies. That’s right: weaponized hurricanes.

Arco’s executives presented the idea to Simon Ramo, one of the godfathers of the US intercontinental ballistic missile program. Ramo passed it on to the under secretary of defense, who in turn gave it to the Pentagon’s advanced research arm, Darpa, and the DOD’s secretive science advisory board, code-named Jason. Tony Tether, director of Darpa’s strategic technology office, gave Arco a contract to conduct a feasibility study. Arco brought on board none other than Dennis Papadopoulos as a consultant.

Papadopoulos wasn’t very impressed. Eastlund’s tricks wouldn’t work even if the site were in the right place along Earth’s magnetic field-which it wasn’t. But the ad hoc coalition of radio scientists did like the idea of setting up a new heater in Alaska. In those upper latitudes, the ionosphere intersects with Earth’s magnetic field and becomes scientifically interesting.

Luckily, the senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, enjoyed a reputation for inserting projects into the federal budget to benefit his home state, most notoriously a $223 million bridge from the town of Ketchikan to, well, not much of anyplace. In 1988, the researchers sat down with Stevens and assured him that an ionospheric heater would be a bona fide scientific marvel and a guaranteed job creator, and it could be built for a mere $30 million. “He provided some congressional money, some pork money,” Papadopoulos says. “It was much less than the bridge to nowhere.” Just like that, the Pentagon had $10 million for ionospheric heater research.

Now the scientists had some startup cash, but they also needed hardware-and for that, they had to enlist the military. In a series of meetings in the winter of 1989-90, the field’s leading lights, including Papadopoulos, pitched the Navy and the Air Force. Haarp, they asserted, could lead to “significant operational capabilities.” They’d build a giant phased antenna array that would aim a finely tuned beam of high- frequency radio waves into the sky. The beam would excite electrons in the ionosphere, altering that spot’s conductivity and inducing it to emit its own extremely low frequency waves, which could theoretically penetrate the earth’s surface to reveal hidden bunkers or be used to contact deeply submerged submarines.

That last app caught the military’s attention. Communicating with subs thousands of miles away, under thousands of feet of ocean, requires ultralow frequencies, and that requires whomping-big antennas. To do it, the Navy had built an array in the upper Midwest that transmits its signal through bedrock, but its construction required razing 84 miles’ worth of hundred-foot-wide path through wilderness, including a national forest. It drove local environmentalists crazy. But who would protest an ephemeral antenna in the sky?

Of course, the scientists said, you’d need a brand-new, state-of-the-art ionospheric heater to see if any of this was even feasible. The Pentagon somewhat reluctantly went for it-and began using Stevens’ earmarked cash to fund the appropriate studies.

Haap’s array can beam up to 3.6 megawatts of energy into the sky.
Photo: Joao Canziani

In 1992, the Navy handed out a $21.6 million contract. The deal didn’t go to an established engineering outfit or defense firm. It went, instead, to Arco, for which Papadopoulos was a consultant.

For more than a year, planning proceeded largely out of public view. Then, in 1993, an Anchorage teachers’ union rep named Nick Begich-son of one of Alaska’s most important political families-found a notice about Haarp in the Australian conspiracy magazine Nexus.

When Begich was 13, a Cessna carrying his father, a Congressional representative, disappeared. Neither the plane nor its passengers were ever recovered. Over the years, Begich became obsessed with uncovering mysteries. Between gigs as a gemologist, miner, school supervisor, and Chickaloon tribal administrator, he regularly lectured on government mind-control technology. So you can imagine his reaction when he began looking into Haarp: the weather-control patents, the Pentagon proposals for long-range spying, the oil company schemes. Senator Stevens had even suggested that the ionosphere could end our dependency on fossil fuels. “At any time over Fairbanks,” Stevens said on the Senate floor, “there is more energy than there is in the entire United States.” Begich had hit the conspiracy jackpot.

In 1995, he self-published a book, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He started giving speeches on Haarp’s dangers everywhere, from UFO conventions to the European Parliament. Marvel Comics, Tom Clancy, and, of course, The X-Files made the facility an ominous feature of their narratives. A Russian military journal warned that blasting the ionosphere would trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip Earth’s magnetic poles. “Simply speaking, the planet will ‘capsize,'” it warned. The European Parliament held hearings about Haarp; so did the Alaska state legislature.

Begich told his audiences that Haarp was a high-powered weapon prototype. Forget spying underground with low-frequency waves-Haarp was so strong it could trigger earthquakes. And by dumping all those radio waves into the ionosphere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide portion of the upper atmosphere into a giant lens. “The result will be an absolutely catastrophic release of pure energy,” he wrote. “The sky would literally appear to burn.”

The military’s response only amped up the conspiracists. When program managers swore that the facility would “never be used for military functions,” Begich would trot out military reports touting satellite-blinding research plans or then-secretary of defense William Cohen’s suggestion that “electromagnetic waves” could alter the climate and control earthquakes and volcanoes remotely.

Begich’s agitating didn’t delay the project too much. (Government research projects slip deadlines and bust budgets just fine on their own.) But by 1999, when Haarp’s first 48-antenna array was finished, the project’s cost was on its way to tripling the original feasibility study estimate, and the military was getting antsy. Sure, the initial experiments had been scientifically impressive, detecting ionization in the atmosphere caused by a gamma ray flare from a neutron star 23,000 light-years away and finding bunkers 300 feet below the earth’s surface. But the Pentagon wanted to know when its overpriced conspiracy-magnet would produce that battle-ready technology they’d been promised.

The Haarp team was caught in an expectations trap. In theory, the Pentagon should spend a lot of money on basic research. That’s how you come up with the Internet and stealth jets. But in practice, the generals and Congress want science that’s useful now. Papadopoulos understood this instinctively: You have to sell it. Looking at the sleep cycles of fruit flies? Why, that might someday lead to indefatigable supertroops! Building nanometer-long hinges? You’re developing artificial muscles that could let soldiers leap buildings! But it was tough to make that kind of case for Haarp. “It’s like, I talk to my mom and she says, ‘When are you gonna build something?'” says Craig Selcher, Haarp program manager for the Navy. “Mom,” he answers, “I’m trying to unlock the secrets of the universe!”

So the ionospherists formed a panel to find a new purpose for Haarp. Tether, who funded the original Arco studies and had consulted on the project, was named chair.

Months later, the group had its rationale, and it was ambitious to say the least: post-nuclear space cleanup. By the late ’90s, Cold War fears had been replaced by worries that a rogue state could get a nuke. If Pyongyang set off a bomb in orbit, it would fry crucial satellites. Theoretically, ultralow-frequency waves in the ionosphere would knock the particles out of their natural spin, sending them tumbling down into the lower atmosphere to be harmlessly reabsorbed. The Pentagon loved the idea. But it would need a lot of testing-which could only be done at Haarp. “You could actually see the lightbulb flick on,” says Ed Kennedy, a former Haarp program manager. “This was something Haarp could actually help solve.”

Haarp’s Mission

The heart of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program is an ionospheric heater that shoots electromagnetic energy into Earth’s atmosphere. Five generators pump out 2.9 megawatts each; 180 antennas convert the electricity into high-frequency radio waves and send them into the ionosphere, which turns them into low-frequency waves. Why? Research. An energized ionosphere could be used for all sorts of cool stuff.

Communication
Haarp can bounce signals off the ionosphere with wavelengths long enough to penetrate deep into the ocean and communicate with submarines.

Protection
Researchers are testing whether ionospheric waves could nudge H-bomb-generated electrons out of the magnetosphere, shielding orbiting satellites.

Atmospheric Research
At about 125 miles up, Haarp’s waves can energize free electrons, which collide with neutral atoms to produce a glow like the aurora borealis.

Surveillance
How low-frequency waves are absorbed and reflected by the earth can reveal what’s underneath-including hidden bunkers.

Illustration: Rafael Macho

Of course, the facility would need 180 antennas and a lot more money. But as the panel was winding down in 2001, cash stopped being a problem. Tether became head of Darpa, taking charge of nearly $2 billion a year for research. He put together a deal for the Air Force, Navy, and his agency to fund Haarp’s construction-with some congressional pork, of course. Again, Arco’s construction subsidiary (by then renamed and sold to giant defense contractor BAE Systems) was selected to handle most of the hardware, a $35.4 million job that would balloon to $118.5 million. And Papadopoulos still had his separate military funding for ionospheric heating research. In a field as small as radio science, it’s almost impossible to avoid such overlap. By 2007, Haarp was running at full strength. But it was still mysterious. Neither the public nor the press had been allowed inside since the array became fully operational.

The highway leading to Haarp dips and rises like a sine wave. Two hundred miles northeast of Anchorage, the Tok Cutoff bobs over the Gulkana and Gakona rivers, past trailer homes and rusting pickups. A black spruce forest stretches to a volcanic peak on the horizon. Even for Alaska, this is lonely land. At mile 11.3, there’s a junction with an unmarked driveway. It ends at a gate topped with spikes. “Warning,” a sign announces, “US Air Force installation. It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the installation commander.”

Tomorrow, for one day only, the military will grant the public access to Haarp for the first time since 2007. Today, I’m getting a sneak peek. I say my name into a call box. The gate draws to the left. Ahead, against the slate-gray sky, resting on a small hill surrounded by trees, is a windowless six-story building: Haarp’s control and power center. Inside, five 3,600-horsepower diesel-electric generators, each powerful enough to drive a locomotive, produce the energy that Haarp channels into the heavens.

Every few hundred yards along the road, the forest is cleared and fenced off into 150-square-foot plots. Each contains instruments ranging from enigmatic to just plain odd. Four golden crosses are planted in one, to help a radio receiver measure ionospheric absorption. In another is a white telescope dome and a gray tangle of poles used to observe the ionosphere’s properties. Above the barbed wire of a third clearing, I can see a wispy, twisted skeleton of wire and fiberglass.

But the most striking sight at Haarp is the facility’s largest array: 180 silver poles rising from the ground, each a foot thick, 72 feet tall, and spaced precisely 80 feet apart. Every pole is topped with four arms like helicopter rotors; metal and Kevlar wires connect the poles to one another, to the earth, and to a wire mesh suspended 15 feet above the ground. The result is an aluminum cat’s cradle, calibrated to the millimeter, that spreads out over 30 acres. Geometric patterns form and reform in every direction, Athenian in their symmetry. It looks like a bionic forest. A cemetery for a cyborg army. Or an infinite nave in a futuristic outdoor church. Even the scientists get rhapsodic when they describe the array. “You stare up at the stars and listen to the wind in the guy wires,” Kennedy says. “It’s as close to a religious experience as you’re ever going to get.”

The ultraprecise calibration allows the array to broadcast a beam as narrow as 5 degrees of sky or as broad as 60. All told, the facility can pump 3.6 megawatts through its phased-array radar into the sky, accelerating electrons and heating the ionosphere-all within a tightly controlled set of parameters. Marconi used the ionosphere, unwittingly, to reflect and carry radio signals; Haarp can stimulate the ionosphere to create anything from direct current to visible light, spanning 15 orders of magnitude on the electromagnetic spectrum. “The science used to be purely observational, with no knobs to turn,” Navy researcher Selcher says. “Now you can apply the scientific method.”

During a few weeks in October 2008, for example, the site hosted 31 investigators conducting 42 different sets of experiments-imaging ionospheric irregularities, examining the “ion outflow from high-frequency heating,” creating artificial northern lights. Physics students flock to Haarp in the summer. Ionospheric papers are back in the scientific literature. Even the space-based nuclear clean-up experiments are teaching us lessons about the Van Allen radiation belts. Online, the tinfoil-hatted chatter about Haarp drones on-it’s blamed for everything from Katrina to last year’s earthquake in Sichuan, China. But after decades of pushing, radio scientists finally have the experimental facility of their dreams.

Yet Haarp’s future is unclear. Defense budgets are shrinking, and the facility costs $10 million a year to operate. Haarp’s patron at Darpa, Tony Tether, has left his job. The project’s godfather, Ted Stevens, was defeated in the 2008 Senate election by the mayor of Anchorage: Mark Begich, Nick’s little brother. “I’ll have his ear,” Nick promises.

So the radio scientists may have to look for funding again, which probably means a whole new set of rationales. You can imagine how the conspiracy crowd will react. And the scientists, in their eagerness, can end up feeding the paranoia. Papadopoulos, for example, says he wants to do another round of subterranean surveillance experiments. “Personally, I believe it can reach 1,000 kilometers. It can’t reach Iran, if that’s your question,” he laughs. “But if I put Haarp on a ship, or on an oil platform, who knows?” Not that he has concrete plans for such tests in Alaska, let alone in the Persian Gulf-though he does mention a facility in Puerto Rico as a possibility.

But he has already said enough. Papadopoulos just wants to do science. But for suspicious minds, the implications are there: With just a bit more funding, a few more experiments, Haarp can still be a place haunted by sinister agencies with three-letter initials and spectral lights that appear in the sky and then vanish without a trace.

Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (wired.com/dangerroom) wrote about Net-centric warfare in issue 15.12.

Source: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-08/mf_haarp?currentPage=all

Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups

Post Date July 28, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Militarization of Society, Puget Sound, Spying and surveillance, War and Peace

Democracy Now! Broadcast Exclusive: Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups, Activist Friends Stunned

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. “This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, Olympia-based activist with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance. He submitted the Freedom of Information Act request that revealed his friend and fellow activist “John Jacob” was actually military spy John Towery.

Drew Hendricks, Olympia-based activist with Port Militarization Resistance. Also worked with John Towery, aka “John Jacob,” on activist causes before Towery’s exposure as a military spy.

Mike German, National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He was an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from 1988 to 2004.

Larry Hildes, Bellingham-based attorney and National Lawyers Guild member who has represented Washington state-based activists with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in criminal and civil cases.

Eileen Clancy, Founding member of I-Witness Video who has documented government surveillance of activist groups for years. Her group was targeted by police raids last summer during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate – $25, $50, $100, More…

ANJALI KAMAT: We begin with a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive. Peace activists in Washington state have revealed an informant posing as an anarchist has spied on them while working under the US military. The activists are members of the group Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance, which protests military shipments bound for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before his true identity was revealed, the informant was known as “John Jacob,” an active member of antiwar groups in the towns of Olympia and Tacoma. But using documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, the activists learned that “John Jacob” is in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at the nearby Fort Lewis military base.
The activists claim Towery has admitted to them he shared information with an intelligence network that stretches from local and state police to several federal agencies, to the US military. They also say he confirmed the existence of other government spies but wouldn’t reveal their identity.
The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now!, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. The statement says, quote, “John Towery performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community, and it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media.” Fort Lewis also says it’s launched an internal inquiry. We invited John Towery on the broadcast, but he didn’t respond to our interview request.
In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we’re now joined in Seattle by the two activists who exposed John Towery as a military informant. Brendan Maslauskas Dunn counted John Towery, or “John Jacob,” as a close friend. But he discovered Towery’s identity after obtaining government documents under a Freedom of Information Act request. Brendan is an Olympia-based activist with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance. We’re also joined in Seattle by Drew Hendricks. He is an Olympia activist with Port Militarization Resistance who worked closely with John Towery, aka “John Jacob.” This is their first broadcast interview since coming forward with their story.
Brendan, let’s begin with you. Just lay out how you found out about this military spy.
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: Well, thanks for having us, Amy.
I actually did a public records request through the city of Olympia several months ago on behalf of the union I’m in, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the records request I did, I had asked for any documents or emails, etc., that the city had, especially in discussions or any kind of communications between the Olympia police and the military in the city generally, anything on anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, Students for a Democratic Society or the Industrial Workers of the World. I got back hundreds of documents from the city.
One of the documents was an email that was sent between personnel in the military, and the email address that was attached to this email was of John J. Towery. We didn’t know who that was, but several people did a lot of research to find out who that was, and they identified that person as being John Jacob.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was your first reaction? Who was John Jacob to you?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He was-he said he was an anarchist. I met him over two years ago through community organizing and antiwar organizing I was involved with in Tacoma and Olympia with other anarchists and other activists.
And he was really interested in Students for a Democratic Society. He wanted to start a chapter of Movement for a Democratic Society, which is connected to SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance, with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was-you know, knew a lot of people involved with that organization.
But he was a friend of mine. We hung out. We gave workshops together on grassroots direct democracy and anarchist struggle. I mean, he was a friend. A lot of people really, really did like him. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me this week when all of this was determined.
ANJALI KAMAT: And, Brendan, what did John Towery, who you used to know as “John Jacob,” say to you when you confronted him?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: Well, after it was confirmed that he was in fact John Towery, I knew he wouldn’t call me, so I called him up the day after. This was this past Thursday. And I called him up; I said, “John, you know, what’s the deal? Is this true?” And he told me; he said, “Yes, it is true, but there’s a lot more to this story than what was publicized.” So he wanted to meet with me and another anarchist in person to further discuss what happened and what his role was.
So, when I met him, he admitted to several things. He admitted that, yes, he did in fact spy on us. He did in fact infiltrate us. He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which, as you mentioned earlier, was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies ranging from municipal to county to state to regional and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis.
So he admitted to other things, too. He admitted that the police had placed a camera, surveillance camera, across the street from a community center in Tacoma that anarchists ran called the Pitch Pipe Infoshop. He admitted that there were police that did put a camera up there to spy on anarchists, on activists going there.
He also-one other thing he spoke of-I don’t know if this is true. I mean, honestly, I don’t know what to believe from John, but he said that the police in Tacoma and Olympia had been planning for a while on raiding the anarchist Pitch Pipe Infoshop and also the house I lived in with several other activists in Olympia. And they had approached John several times, saying, you know, “Do they have bombs and explosives and drugs and guns and things like that?” which is just disgusting to even think that they would suggest that. They’re just trying to silence us politically. They’re going after us for our politics and for our work, you know, around Port Militarization Resistance and around antiwar organizing. And, of course, John told them, no, we didn’t have any of those stuff. He told them the truth.
But he also mentioned that there were other informants that are among us.
AMY GOODMAN: Brendan, we’re going to break. Then we’re going to come back to this discussion. I really want to talk to Drew Hendricks about John’s involvement in IT, in the technical aspects, the coordination of the LISTSERVs.
Today, a Democracy Now! exclusive, an exposé on a military spy in peace groups in Olympia, Washington. Brendan Dunn is our guest, Olympia activist with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance. He discovered that his friend, fellow activist “John Jacob,” was actually a military spy. And Drew Hendricks will be joining us in a minute, talking about his involvement. John Towery, their friend, “John Jacob.” Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Today, a national broadcast exclusive. A military spy in the ranks of antiwar activists in Olympia, Washington.
We have a number of guests. We’ve just been speaking with Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, Olympia activist with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance. He discovered, through an FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request, that his friend, fellow activist “John Jacob,” was actually working with Fort Lewis base in Washington state, was a military spy in his organizations.
Drew Hendricks is with us, as well, in Seattle, also an Olympia activist with the same groups, Port Militarization Resistance. He worked with John Towery, his real name-“John Jacob” is how they knew him-before the exposé that has now coming out.
Drew, tell us how you met John and how he was involved in the organizations.
DREW HENDRICKS: I first met John in September of 2007, and he approached me as somebody who claimed to have base access, which turned out to be true. He did admit that he was a civilian employee for the Army. And what he was offering me were observations and inside knowledge of operations on Fort Lewis.

I let him know that I wasn’t willing to have any classified information from him and that I wasn’t engaged in espionage. I was looking for open source information and looking for insight into movements of military materials over the public roads, so that people other than myself could orgnize protests or organize blockades, as they might see fit, and it wasn’t appropriate for me to be involved in their plans. It was only appropriate for him let me know things that I could confirm from open ground, from public spaces. He abided by those rules, for the most part.
And he did not reveal his role to me that he was actually part of a force protection cell, that he was actually reporting to DES fusion and part of the intelligence operation of Fort Lewis. He wasn’t admitting to me that his reports were going to Washington Joint Analytical Center, which is a function of the Washington State Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Intimidation-I’m sorry, Investigation.
But he did provide what he purported to be observations of operations on Fort Lewis, and he was involved with the group for a few months before I mistakenly and stupidly, in retrospect, trusted him with co-administration of our LISTSERV, our shared means of talking to each other over electronic media.
AMY GOODMAN: And the LISTSERV involvement, how much control he had over who was involved in your groups, Drew?
DREW HENDRICKS: Well, he could tell from that access who all was subscribed to the LISTSERV. He couldn’t control who was coming into or out of meetings, but he could find out who people were, if they were subscribed to the LISTSERV. And he did challenge some people who were attempting to get to the LISTSERV for their credentials, for people who could vouch for them being people who were not law enforcement or people who were not military intelligence who were coming into that activity. He wasn’t in control of what messages people could send, but as an administrator on RiseUp, he could have unsubscribed people, and there were some people that were disruptive that he did unsubscribe, in a way that the other LISTSERV administrators, for the most part, agreed with.
He wasn’t found to be abusing his authorities as a LISTSERV administrator directly, although he probably reported that list upwards in his chain of command or his chain of employment. And that served a significant chilling role for him as a military employee. He’s a civilian employee, but he is a former military-enlisted person. And so, he understood, or should have understood, that what he was doing was legally inappropriate. I’m not a lawyer, but in my opinion and from the history I’ve read, what he was doing was rather extraordinary, from the histories that I’ve read.
ANJALI KAMAT: I want to bring three others into this discussion. Joining us from Washington, DC is Mike German. He’s the National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He previously served as an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from 1988 to 2004.
Also joining us here in New York is Eileen Clancy. She’s a founding member of I-Witness Video, a video collective that has documented government surveillance of activist groups for years. Her group was targeted by police raids last summer during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
And on the line with us from Bellingham, Washington is Larry Hildes, an attorney and National Lawyers Guild member who has represented Washington state-based activists with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in criminal and civil cases.
Larry, I want to go to you. Can you talk about your involvement with this and on what bases you have represented these activists?
LARRY HILDES: Absolutely. Good morning, by the way.
Yeah, I’ve been-I got involved-there was a sit-in at the gate of the Port of Olympia back in May of 2006 to protest use of the port for military shipments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s been a wonderful experience. I have represented these folks through several rounds of criminal cases throughout Pierce and Thurston Counties, Tacoma and Olympia. And now we are suing, based in part on spying, in conjunction with the Seattle office of the ACLU.
And it got strange fairly early. We were in trial in March of 2007, arguing that these folks were not guilty of criminal violations for sitting at the gate, when they weren’t allowed into the port itself. The prosecutors kind of hinted that there was-that they had inside information that they shouldn’t have had. And the fourth day of the trial, as it’s clear that we have the jury, prosecutor’s office came out with a confidential jury analysis sheet that my office had done, that was circulated only on the internal attorney-client LISTSERV that was exclusively for the defense team, and announced that this was all over the internet and got a mistrial.
And we’re trying to figure out in the courtroom what’s going on here. Never seen anything like this. We know it’s not on the internet. And the person who set up the LISTSERV-so we’ve got LISTSERV stuff going on even before Mr. Towery’s involvement-person on the LISTSERV discovers that there’s two people who we never heard of, who they had not subscribed, he had not allowed onto the list. Those two turned out to be Tacoma police officers. And we’ve now found that the Tacoma police knew that this document was going to be revealed, knew it would probably be a mistrial, and was speculating-and knew exactly when it would be and was speculating what the effects would be. So, the spying started early.
It was very clear that they treated these folks-the worst thing they’ve ever done is acts of civil disobedience, peacefully, nonviolently trying to stop military blockades by standing in front of tanks and Strykers-that they were treating this like a very, very serious situation. So we knew that early. And it’s become clear that there was a lot of spying going on throughout this process. We kind of knew that this was coming.
Right now I’m defending a group of demonstrators who were arrested in Olympia in November of ’07, allegedly trying to block a troop convoy or a Stryker convoy from coming out of the port to go back to Fort Lewis to be repaired and sent back to Iraq again. And the police reports talk about-the incident commander talks about the fact that they had Army intelligence sources reporting to them detailed discussions that were going on in private meetings that Port Militarization Resistance was having, where they were discussing tactics and strategies. And based on that information, they decided that our clients from that action, who were sitting in an empty road outside of a closed gate, with no military vehicles in sight, were intending to blockade traffic and were arrested for attempted disorderly conduct, a charge we’ve never seen in our lives.
So we started trying to find out what’s going. We got the judge to agree to sign subpoenas, which were immediately refused by the head of the civil division of the US attorney’s office in Seattle, Brian Kipnis, saying they had no standing and they weren’t going to respond, and ordered the Army not to give us this information. So-
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about this US attorney. And also, isn’t he the attorney who prosecuted Ehren Watada-
LARRY HILDES: That’s exactly-
AMY GOODMAN: -the first officer to say no to going to war in Iraq, refusing to lead young men and women there for a war he felt was immoral?
LARRY HILDES: That’s exactly right, Amy. He handled the Ninth Circuit appeals and stood up in the courtroom and said, “OK, he’s had his appeal. Now we need to go forward. He needs to be prosecuted. We want a second court-martial,” and continued to argue that. And the day that the decision came-Ninth Circuit decision came down saying, “No, this was double jeopardy; you can’t do this,” he said, “Well, we’re going to prosecute him on the remaining claims anyway,” which, of course, has not happened.
He was also involved in a number of the Guantanamo cases and has been arguing that evidence of torture shouldn’t come out, because it would reveal confidential information about how Guantanamo was set up. So, his role has been, throughout this, to obstruct.
I sent him a letter saying, “OK, now we have this information. I ask for your help in investigating this, because this is a crime.” Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1887, it is a crime for the US military to become involved in civilian law enforcement. And they’ve chipped away at it, but it’s still a crime. I got a letter back now telling me I have to ask the Army. I got this yesterday, saying, “You have to go through channels with the Army.” I’ve gone through channels with the Army, and the Army has told me they’re not allowed to talk to me, because he told them not to. So we’re going back and forth with this guy.
He has been in the US attorney’s office throughout much of the Bush administration. And apparently his job is to obstruct and punish those involved in protesting the war and those protesting torture. Interesting character. I had never heard of him before this. Apparently has a close relative-there aren’t that many Kipnises, but there are some-who runs a security firm that specializes in analysis of national security issues. So it’s a cozy little family network there. So-
ANJALI KAMAT: I’d like to turn to Mike German and bring him into the conversation, National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, DC. Mike German, what’s your response to all of this?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I think his analysis is exactly right. This is a pretty clear violation of Posse Comitatus. Now, what the military would argue, and has argued, is that they have a right to engage in force protection, which obviously, in its normal understanding of that term, is a defensive sort of capability, i.e. they can put guards at the gates of military bases and protect from threats from without. But they seem to have been, since 2002, considering that as an offensive capability, where they’re actually sending operatives out to spy on community activists, which is, of course, prohibited and something that, you know, the First and the Fourth Amendment become engaged.
And, you know, this is something that we found out through a FOIA back in 2005 the military was engaged in through a group called the Counterintelligence Field Activity. And they had a database of activists called Talon that, again, collected this US person information that the military has no business collecting. And that was shut down. But unfortunately, you know, they just created a new mechanism. This appears to be the fusion centers and these fusion cells that they’re using that, they seem to think, give them a method of circumventing Posse Comitatus and the restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean, Mike, by fusion centers.
MIKE GERMAN: About two years ago, me and a colleague at the ACLU started investigating a lot of federal money going to what were called intelligence fusion centers. And I was only two years out of federal law enforcement at that point, and I had never heard this term, so I became concerned. And what these centers are is multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers that involve state, local and federal law enforcement, as well as other government entities-you know, a lot of times there are emergency services type of entities, but actually can’t involve any government entity-but also involve oftentimes the military and private companies.
So we produced a report in November of 2007 warning of the potential dangers that these multi-jurisdictional centers had, because it was unclear whose rules applied. Were we using federal rules? Were we using state rules? Local rules? And what was military and private company-what rules govern their conduct? So we put out this report in November of 2007. At that point, there were forty-two fusion centers. By July of 2008, we had found so many instances of abuse, we put out an updated report. At that point, there were fifty-eight fusion centers. Today, the DHS recognizes at least seventy-two fusion centers. So these things are rapidly growing, without any sort of proper boundaries on what activities happen within them and without really any idea of what it is the military is doing in these fusion centers and what type of access they have to US person information.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn back for a moment to the two activists in Olympia. They’re speaking to us from Seattle today, first time they’re speaking out nationally, Brendan Dunn and Drew Hendricks. Just give us a sense, Brendan, of why you got involved in activism. People might be listening and watching right now and wondering, “I’ve never even heard of Port Militarization Resistance,” or perhaps the new Students for a Democratic Society, based on the old. What’s your background, Brendan?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: Well, I guess I really started to get involved with activism and organizing-it was in high school, but it wasn’t until after high school, when my friend’s brother was shot and killed by the police in Utica, New York. His name was Walter Washington. And the community developed a response to that, and, you know, that’s what really started to get me thinking and actively organizing. That’s really when I got involved.
I moved to Olympia a little over three years ago. Since then, I’ve been involved with a lot, with Students for a Democratic Society. And, you know, the more police repression I’ve learned about or experienced and just repression, generally, that it’s moved me in a more radical direction. That’s when I started to pick up anarchist politics and organizing.
So I’ve been involved with Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance-just makes sense to me, because the military-this is one of the most highly militarized areas of the country, if not the world, western Washington is. And it just makes sense to me that if we want to throw a gear in the war machine, the best way to do it is in our own backyard, our own towns. And in our case, it’s in the Port of Olympia, the Port of Tacoma, the Port of Grays Harbor in Aberdeen. And that’s where direct action makes sense and community struggle makes sense.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Drew Hendricks, your involvement in Port Militarization Resistance, known for trying to stop some of the-for example, the Stryker vehicles from being sent to Iraq?
DREW HENDRICKS: Yes. My primary activity with Port Militarization Resistance is as a coordinator for intelligence collection, so that people have the time that they need to make good decisions about what it is that they’re going to do. I’ve taken one direct action myself against said activity early on in the end of May 2006. I blocked a couple of gates shut overnight and was arrested during that action and found and put in jail for a few hours. But for the most part, my role has been to collect information and disseminate it to the people who need to know, so that they can make timely decisions.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this conversation. We are doing a national exposé today on a person who worked in the military spying on peace groups in Washington state. His name-well, they thought his name was John Jacob. His name is John Towery. We asked that he come-we wanted him to come on the broadcast, but he didn’t respond to our request. We also asked the military to join us; we read the statement earlier, yes, admitting that John Towery worked with them. We’ll continue this conversation in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We bring you this exclusive on peace activists in Washington state revealing an informant posing as an anarchist has spied on them while working under the US military-the activists, members of the group Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance, which protests military shipments bound for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, this is Democracy Now!, and we urge you to go to our website at democracynow.org, where we’re video and audio podcasting, where you can see the documents that they got under Freedom of Information Act.
Anjali?
ANJALI KAMAT: The government documents also show that intelligence officers from other government and military agencies inquired Olympia police about the Washington state peace activists. In an email to an Olympia police officer from February 2008, Thomas Glapion, Chief Investigations/Intel of New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force, writes, quote, “Good Morning, first let me thank you for the effort. To the contrary you were quite the help to me. You are now part of my Intel network. I’m still looking at possible protests by the PMR SDS MDS and other left wing anti war groups so any Intel you have would be appreciated…In return if you need anything from the Armed Forces I will try to help you as well,” end-quote.
Now, we contacted the McGuire Air Base, and they also denied our interview request. They released a short statement saying only, quote, “Our force protection specialists routinely research local and national groups in response to potential risks and threats to Air Force installations and to ensure the safety of our personnel,” end-quote.
Another declassified email from February 2008 comes from Andrew Pecher of the US Capitol Police Intelligence Investigations Section in Washington, DC. The email is also addressed to an Olympia police contact. It says, quote, “I am just droppjng [sic] in to see if you had a problems with the below action that we had talked about a few weeks ago. Any information that you have would be helpful. Thank you!!” end-quote. The “action” Pecher refers to is the “Northwest DNC/RNC Resistance Conference,” an event that was held at Evergreen State College to prepare for protests at last summer’s Democratic and Republican conventions.
I want to go to Brendan Maslauskas Dunn. Brendan, how did you find this information? When you first saw this information, can you talk about your reaction?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: Well, when it all surfaced through the public records requests, I wasn’t surprised. I guess I had been expecting this, especially with the level of activity that activists have been involved with in Olympia, in the last few years, especially. But, I mean, it still was a shock. I didn’t know it was that extensive. I guess that’s why it was a shock to me.
I didn’t know that the Air Force from New Jersey was interested in activities that activists in Olympia were involved with. And I didn’t know that the Capitol police in Washington, DC was trying to extract information from people in Olympia, as well.
So I always suspected that there was surveillance going on. It was obvious it was going on locally from local agencies and local police agencies. I had no idea how widespread it is. And I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have no clue what’s below the water.
AMY GOODMAN: Eileen Clancy, I’d like to bring you into this conversation. You have long been documenting police and federal authorities’ activities in antiwar and peace protests at the conventions in 2004 and then 2008. You, yourselves, at I-Witness were targeted. You were detained by police. The places that you were setting up video to video police actions on the streets were raided by the police in St. Paul. Your reaction to what you’re listening to and watching today?
EILEEN CLANCY: Well, I have to say, I think this is one of the most important revelations of spying on the American people that we’ve seen since the beginning of the Bush era. It’s very clear that there’s no such thing as one spy, especially not in the Army. So-and it’s very clear that this problem is national in scope, in that sort of casual manner that these folks are interacting with each other.
It’s really like in January 1970. Christopher Pyle, who was a former US Army intelligence officer, revealed in Washington Monthly that there was an extraordinary program of spying by the Army on political protest groups. And he said that-well, what was written in the New York Times was that the Army detectives would attend some of these events, but the majority of material that they gathered was from police departments, local governments and the FBI. And at that time, they had a special teletype, pre-internet, that connected the Army nationwide and where the police could load up their information on this stuff. They also published a small book that was a blacklist, which is similar now to the terrorist watch list, where the police share information about activists with maybe no criminal basis whatsoever. And at the time, in January 1970, Pyle said that there was a hope to link the teletype systems to computerized databanks in Baltimore, Maryland, which, of course, is the general area of the National Security Agency, which does most of the spying for-it’s supposed to be foreign, but apparently they do domestic spying, as well.
So this now, what we have here-and after these revelations, there was a Church Committee. There was a great deal of investigating that went on. And while a lot of it was covered up, the military was pushed back for a while on this front. But because now we have the capability of gathering an extraordinary amount of information and holding onto it and sharing it, through the internet and through other means, we really have this 1970s problem amped up on steroids, twenty-first-century-style. And this had been going on for a while.
Something terrible has been going on in the Pacific Northwest in terms of police spying. There are other documents that had been revealed-the Tacoma police, Homeland Security, meetings, minutes. And you can see that one of the essential problems with this kind of model and the fusion center model is that in the same meeting, they’re talking about a Grannies Against the War group handing out fliers at the local mall, and they’re talking about new information about what al-Qaeda is going to do. It’s a model that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and it’s a model that’s based really on hysteria.
When you see those pictures that were just shown on the screen, pictures of people with no weapons standing in the middle of a road with giant Army vehicles in front of them, you know, it’s clear that the protest is of a symbolic nature. There’s no violence involved on the part of the activists. It’s a traditional sit-in type of protest. The idea that the Army, the Navy and the Marines would become hysterical at this threat, I mean, it is the Army, it’s the Navy, it’s the Marines. And when-that’s the reason the Army shouldn’t be involved in this, because the job of an army-and they’ll tell you this-is to kill people and break things. The motto of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team that’s housed at Fort Lewis, that this force protection cell was trying to protect, their motto is “strike and destroy.” They’re really built for one thing, and it’s certainly not policing. It’s certainly not dealing with community activist groups, Grannies Against the War, or local activists in Olympia.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about Rush Holt, the New Jersey congressman-we’re talking about McGuire Air Base, actually, in New Jersey-who has just in the last weeks been calling for a Church-like, Pike-like investigation of the intelligence community, starts by talking about the CIA. He’s raised this with the Washington Independent, with the Newark Star-Ledger, even raised it on Lou Dobbs a few days ago. And the significance of something at this level of the Church Committee hearings that investigated spying-Sy Hersh exposed it decades ago in a major article in the New York Times. Mike German, at this point, the significance of something like this? And do you think we would see this under President Obama?
MIKE GERMAN: I would hope so. You know, when we first came out with our report on fusion centers and warned about the military presence, you know, people told us that that wasn’t something we needed to be concerned about. And, you know, so this is a very important revelation, that there is actual evidence of abuse, that hopefully will open the eyes of the people who are responsible for overseeing these types of activities. And I believe something like a select investigative committee to investigate such activities is certainly called for. And, in fact, Representative Barbara Lee had introduced back in April a bill that would allow a select committee to investigate national security policy and practices. So, we’re hoping that this will bring support to that effort.
AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to ask Brendan Dunn about the evidence of other spies in your organization. In fact, didn’t John-“John Jacob,” now known as John Towery, who worked at Fort Lewis-didn’t he tell you about others that he actually wanted out of the organization sometimes and called the military to get them out?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, that’s his story, at least. He admitted that there were a few other informants that were sent.
He had a weird story, which, you know, we know isn’t true, based on the public records and the documents that we have in our hands, that he was, you know, forced into this position to spy on us, that he didn’t do it for pay, that he only reported to the Tacoma police and wasn’t connected to the military whatsoever. I mean, it’s a good cover story to, you know, let the military free and blame it on a bunch of Keystone cops in Tacoma, but there was actually another email I got through the records request that was sent between a couple Olympia police officers, and they had mentioned something about their Army guy that was working for them and something else about someone in the Coast Guard that was also perhaps, still perhaps, currently acting as an informant.
AMY GOODMAN: We also, in doing research on John Towery, have information, addresses that he had at both Fort Drum, Upstate New York, and also in Brussels, which we associate with NATO. Is there any understanding or knowledge you have of this, either Brendan or Drew? Did he talk about this in his past?
BRENDAN MASLAUSKAS DUNN: This is actually the first I’ve heard of it. I’m actually surprised, because I used to live near Fort Drum. I used to go to school near Fort Drum before I moved out to Olympia. So this is news to me. I’ve never heard anything.
AMY GOODMAN: Right now, in figuring out how you go forward, I wanted to bring Larry Hildes back into this conversation. Information about one activist actually having a locator put in his car to figure out where he was going from one protest to another, can you tell us about Phil Chin, Larry?
LARRY HILDES: Yes, I can. And we’re actually suing about this in conjunction with the Seattle ACLU now. Mr. Chin was on his way to a demonstration at the Port of Aberdeen. It was going to be a peaceful march, not even any civil disobedience. His license plate was called in, and Washington state patrol sent an attempt-to-locate code-we didn’t know what an attempt-to-locate code was until this-saying, “There are three known anarchists in this car, in this green Ford Taurus. Apprehend them, and then let the Aberdeen police know.”
So he gets pulled over for supposedly going five miles an hour under the speed limit in heavy traffic and charged with DUI, despite the fact he hasn’t had anything to drink, hasn’t done any drugs, total-every single test comes up absolutely negative, except for the fact that he had trouble standing on one foot because he had an inner ear infection. The lab tests come up negative. And they still go forward with this, until we move to dismiss and ask what this attempt-to-locate code is. And we find out that it’s-we’ve got the tape, the dispatch tapes of them calling in this car with the three known anarchists-by the way, none of whom was Phil. But on the dashboard of the car that takes him away is a picture of Phil’s other car.
ANJALI KAMAT: Eileen Clancy, we just have a minute left. What does this, all of this information that’s come out, what does this do for activists? Does it create a climate of fear? What you, who have been spied on, who have had so much experience with this-what are your final words?
EILEEN CLANCY: I think people should try not to be afraid. They should consider what these fine activists have done here, which is done an extraordinary public service by putting this information out. This could be one of the key revelations of this era, if this is followed up on. It’s very important that people be aggressive about this. And thank goodness they did it.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us, Eileen Clancy of I-Witness Video; Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union; Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild, based in Bellingham; and the two activists who have exposed this story through their Freedom of Information Act request, Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, Olympia-based activist, and Drew Hendricks, as well. Thank you both very much for being with us.

Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/28/broadcast_exclusive_declassified_docs_reveal_military

Dahr Jamail: Kill the Indian. Save the Man.

Post Date July 05, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category American Empire, Hawaiian Sovereignty, Land, Culture & Human Rights, Iraq, North America, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

Kill the Indian. Save the Man.

Thursday 02 July 2009

by: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Manifest Destiny

In 1845, an American columnist, John O’Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.” Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had the right to claim “the whole of Oregon.”

And that claim is by the right of our Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent that Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The westward expansion did not originate with O’Sullivan’s theory. In 1803, the United States acquired 23 percent of its existing territory through the Louisiana Purchase. Seeing land as a source of political power, the government began to actively pursue aggressive expansion of its territories through the 19th century. The idea of Manifest Destiny was one component of the process which captured the popular imagination. This was further fueled by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the West attracting Easterners acting on their conviction in their right and duty to expand.

The Mexican-American conflict generated massive casualties, and when it was over, the US controlled all of New Mexico and California, and more of the territory of Texas. When Texas was annexed in 1846 as the 26th state, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote, “We have not one particle of right to be here.”

Acclaimed historian Howard Zinn told Truthout, “The Mexican War, presented as something we were doing because Mexicans had fired on our soldiers … no, we were going to Mexico because we wanted to take forty percent of Mexican land. California, Arizona, Nevada … all of that beautiful land in the Southwest that was all Mexico. I’ll bet there are very few Americans today who live in that area and know that it belonged to Mexico. Or they may ask, how come all these names? How come Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Santa Ana, how come?”

Perhaps Americans seriously believe that the US was preordained by God to expand and exercise hegemony over all that it surveys? After all, our 25th president, William McKinley, (1897-1901) declared that “The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”

In the Sandwich Island Letters from Hawaii, Mark Twain exhorted his country folk sardonically, “We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”

North America

John Trudell of the Santee Sioux comments on the use of mainstream Christianity by the United States as a tool to dominate and colonize large tracts of the continent. Talking to Truthout at Venice Beach, he said that a religious perception of reality as projected by the US, replacing a spiritual perception of reality like that held by most indigenous peoples, “… leads to insanity and incoherence. It leads to self-destruction. It eats into the spirit of the being.”

The analogy he uses in order to illustrate the spiritual impact that religious, administrative and corporate colonization has upon indigenous people is graphic and poetic. He says, “This is a form of mining. It is like a technological form of mining the energy of the planet and we are forms of that energy. That’s the ‘being’ part of us. The human form is made up of metals, minerals and liquids of earth. All things of the earth have ‘being.’ We know they can take the bone, flesh and blood out of the earth that is uranium and put it through a mining-refining process and convert its being into a form of energy, and we know they can do it with fossil fuel. And we know that when they do these things it leaves behind poisons and toxins. And they – and I’m just going to call them the industrial ruling class – but they mine the ‘being’ part of human through programming the human when the human is born to believe their obedience. So the human being that enters this reality is put in with all this distortion that is based upon there being something wrong with them and fear comes real quickly. And when you mine the being part of human, fear is the toxin left behind from that mining. And this programming begins at birth. And the way we’ve been picked apart, we end up as human beings having this tendency to feel powerless. And it’s everywhere…. This powerlessness feeling is pretty prevalent on this planet. ”

An acclaimed poet, national recording artist, actor, and activist, Trudell was a spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971. He also served as chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), from 1973 to 1979.

Steven Newcomb, a Shawnee/Lenape Native American and author of “Pagans in the Promised Land – Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery,” has written: “It’s a little known fact that the Catholic Church issued a number of papal edicts in the fifteenth century that set into motion patterns of colonization that became globalized over many centuries. In the documents “Dum diversas” (1452) and “Romanus Pontifex” (1455), for example, issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal, the pope “authorized” the king to send men to the Western Coast of Africa and “to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” all non-Christians, “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and to “take away all their possessions and property.” Such patterns of thought and behavior became institutionalized in law and policy, and the patterns are still operative against indigenous peoples today under the concept of “the State.”

An effective means to institutionalize this process was to indoctrinate Native American children at highly religious boarding schools run by the Department of Interior. The children were severed from their families on reservations with the ostensible aim of saving them from poverty.

The original boarding school idea came from Gen. Richard Henry Pratt who formed the Carlyle Indian School in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, in 1878. He wrote in “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260-271, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Systematically, his school and its later extensions stripped away tribal culture. Students were forced to drop their Native American names, barred from speaking in their native languages and forbidden to wear long hair. Punitive measures and torture were rampant.

Pratt’s conviction of moral superiority can be gathered from his views on slavery, “Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race – seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible – probable – citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.”

Brazil

Marcos Terena, of the Terena people in the Pantanal region in Matto Groso do Sur, Brazil, was recently visiting the United Nations in New York City. Terena, a key participant in the creation of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, told Truthout, “Big agribusiness is commercializing our corn, yucca, potatoes and other seeds. Oil companies are also in indigenous territory and causing all kinds of destruction.”

He spoke of Parkinson’s disease, cancer, heart attacks and mental disorders, all sicknesses new to the Terena Spiritual leaders who have no means to cure them. They believe with good reason that these ailments have come into their midst with the advent of Western companies and accompanying pollution and contamination.

Terena’s words hit home: “In 1992, in our communities, there was no need for psychiatric hospitals. Now these sicknesses are arriving to us as well. I tell our spiritual leaders that the white people also don’t know how to treat these sicknesses. We are also worried about you who live in the US.”

Ecuador

Forty-three-year-old Moi Enomenga is a leader of the Huaorani, an indigenous group of hunters and gatherers that have inhabited the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon for millennia, with no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950’s. Numbering approximately 3,000 individuals, they maintain a traditional lifestyle.

In 1992, the western oil company Maxus Energy Corporation, based in Dallas, Texas, showed up in his area, prompting Enomenga to organize a protest. He later traveled to the US to rally for support. In his absence, the president of Ecuador and the head of the oil company flew to his community and got them to sign an agreement that allowed the oil company to begin work. The modus operandi seems to be a replica of deals made in the earlier century with Native American groups, though not for oil. Members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools were bribed to facilitate the deal.

This caused much fighting between the indigenous communities, but did eventually lead to their reunification and they have since begun to work together again to resist the exploitation of their land with some help from outside. Since then, they have been fighting a constant battle.

After initial conflict over the matter, the indigenous communities did eventually reunite and start resisting the exploitation of their land. It has been a constant battle and to gather support for it. Enomenga, who is also ecotourism coordinator, has traveled extensively throughout the Amazon and the world.

At a recent interview in New York, he spoke with Truthout: “There are three thousand of us Huarani. We are one people, we all speak the same language. The more we unite, the stronger our voice will be. We can be an example for the rest of the world if we can achieve a little bit more.”

He says, “First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don’t have what they need to live, because the Americans don’t respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop.”

Enomenga recounts his history to explain how the struggle of his people mirrors his own, “Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn’t have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother’s side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn’t move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can’t be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”

He has indeed done this, by working nonviolently to oppose the ongoing colonization of his land and people with success enough to draw some attention and a movie has been made of his efforts. Nevertheless, the painful effects of the missionaries and colonists are experienced daily, and he narrates them:

“About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don’t want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived…. I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don’t want them to. The missionaries lie. I don’t believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest.”

Unfortunately, not everybody does. The colonists have never believed the forest, land, buffalo, lakes, and the ocean to be the right of indigenous populations.

In 1872, John Gast created an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny called American Progress. The painting shows the US, personified as Columbia, floating through the sky holding a school book, stringing telegraph wire as she travels, leading civilization westward with American settlers while the Native Americans and wild animals flee.

Kenya

The chairman of the Maa Civil Society Forum in Kenya, Ben R. Ole Koissaba of the Massai People, says, “Before the white man came we were the rulers of East Africa, both Kenya and Tanzania, but because of the kind of land God gave us, the kind of resources God bestowed upon us, there was envy and greed.”

He described to Truthout how the Massai were dispossessed of all the land and livestock that was their way of life and their lifeline. “For the colonists to be able to rule over us, they had to introduce an education system that demonized our (own) education system. They brought in a new concept. The “I” – “me” – “myself” – kind of stuff. That’s the first thing.”

He has personal experience of the religious impact of the belief borne in Manifest Destiny, “If it was not for the church, the world would not have been colonized. I am a living example. I was doing my masters at the University of Leeds in the UK. I wrote a story about how the church marginalized me as a Massai. They came with a gun in one hand to rule and a bible in the other to close my eyes. I blame the church wholly for what we are. They discontinued me from my masters at Leeds. They discontinued me from my education just because I said the truth.”

Koissaba explains to us how the spirituality of his people differs completely from that of most mainstream Christians in the United States, “Ours was not a Sunday God. For the Massai, God was everything. The first milk from the cows is thrown to the East, West, North and South. You sacrifice that. When you look at the sky you see God. When you look at the ground you see God.”

Western missionaries used the double-pronged fork of Christian education to rob the Massai of their religion so that their resources could be robbed. “Some of our best schools are missionary schools. As a way of colonizing our minds they had to put us in these institutions. They skin us, they remove what we are, they put us in some new thing so we sing their tune.”

Iraq

The term Manifest Destiny ceased to be used in a political context in the early 20th century. However it would seem that the idea continues to impact political actions overseas in the 21st century, if nothing else, to camouflage serious economic and political violations that the United States indulges in, across the globe.

Historian William E. Weeks noted three key themes that the advocates of Manifest Destiny emphasized at the time. These themes are just as applicable today for supporters of the US Empire and corporate globalization:

1. The virtue of the American people and their institutions; 2. The mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the US. 3. The destiny under God to accomplish this work.

On reading an article posted earlier on Truthout about the cultural impacts of the Iraqi occupation, Commander Edward C. Robison, of the U.S Navy told us in an email, “I read your article and agree with it strongly. It was my experience that the Army was working directly as a point of doctrine to defeat the Iraqi culture and history as a major component of their strategy to fight the insurgency.”

His experience in Iraq from February 2007 until August 2007 only underscores the impression that the concept of Manifest Destiny remains embedded in the minds of many Western colonists: “I was assigned to the II MEF Forward as a Reconstruction Officer under the G5 directorate. I was detailed to Al-Asad to work with RCT2 in western Al Anbar province. Because of this I travelled throughout the province and dealt with a large variety of Iraqis and the full spectrum of the Iraqi Government. I worked closely with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to stand it up and get it functioning.

“In my work I tried hard to emphasize using Iraqi solutions, working within the Iraqi culture and social structure. This concept seemed very novel to those above me, but they saw the success it was achieving. I argued with the State Department “experts” about how to get agriculture functioning again. They said we needed to teach the farmers how to use irrigation, and I reminded them that irrigation was invented in Iraq. There was a very strong attitude in the Bush State Department and military that anything Iraqi or Arab was inherently inferior and had to be replaced.

“I heard repeatedly from ‘experts’ that never went into the field about all the cultural problems about Iraqis. How they were lazy, poorly educated, won’t mainta?n anything, can’t be trusted and much more. There was a continuous diatribe against the culture from people detailed there to help them. They had no appreciation of the culture and most hated the Iraqi people and saw them as enemies.

“There were only a few of us that saw the Iraqis as intelligent, creative and capable. I found that like people here the Iraqis lived up to our expectations. If we expected them to accomplish something, they did. When the expectation was failure, it usually failed. I have believed for a long time that the best thing was for us to pull out completely and allow an Iraqi solution to occur. There may be an increase in violence for a short time, but in the end things will be better than they are now.”

For this hope to bear fruit, a strong collective force of similar American voices will have to rise and thwart the destructive march of American Manifest Destiny on the planet.

———

(Bhaswati Sengupta also contributed to this report.)

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist and author of two books: “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq” and the recently released “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film “Justify My War,” which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Coppola has worked in Iraq as well as on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Source: http://www.truthout.org/070209A

Dahr Jamail: Destroying Indigenous Populations

Post Date June 20, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category American Empire, Depleted Uranium, Hawaiian Sovereignty, Land, Culture & Human Rights, Iraq, North America

Truthout Original

Destroying Indigenous Populations

Saturday 20 June 2009

by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877.

Charmaine White Face, an Oglala Tetuwan who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is the spokesperson for the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council (TSNTC), established in 1893 to uphold the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. She is also coordinator of the voluntary group, Defenders of the Black Hills, that works to preserve and protect the environment where they live.

“We call gold the metal which makes men crazy,” White Face told Truthout while in New York to attend the annual Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations in late May. “Knowing they could not conquer us like they wanted to … because when you are fighting for your life, or the life of your family, you will do anything you can … or fighting for someplace sacred like the Black Hills you will do whatever you can … so they had to put us in prisoner of war camps. I come from POW camp 344, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. We want our treaties upheld, we want our land back.”

Most of the Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution.

“Nothing grows in these areas – nothing can grow. They are too radioactive,” White Face said.

Although the Black Hills and adjoining areas are sacred to the indigenous peoples and nations of the region, their attempts at reclamation are not based on religious claims but on the provisions of the Constitution. The occupation of indigenous land by the US government is in direct violation of its own law, according to White Face.

She references Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The spokesperson for the TSNTC declares, “We need our treaty upheld. We want it back. Without it we are disappearing. They might have made us into brown Americans who speak the English language and eat a different kind of food, and are not able to live with the buffalo like we are supposed to, but that is like a lion in a cage. You can feed it and it will reproduce, but it is only a real lion when it gets its freedom and can be who it’s supposed to be. That’s how we are. We are like that lion in a cage. We are not free right now. We need to be able to govern ourselves the way we did before.”

Delegations from the TSNTC began their efforts in the United Nations in 1984 after exhausting all strategies for solution within the United States.

Homeland Contamination

There is uranium all around the Black Hills, South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Mining companies came in and dug large holes through these lands to extract uranium in the 1950’s and 1960’s prior to any prohibitive regulations. Abandoned uranium mines in southwestern South Dakota number 142. In the Cave Hills area, another sacred place in South Dakota used for vision quests and burial sites, there are 89 abandoned uranium mines.

In an essay called “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” political activists Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke state that former US President Richard Nixon declared the 1868 Treaty Territory a “National Sacrifice Area,” implying that the territory, and its people, were being sacrificed to uranium and nuclear radiation.

The worst part, according to White Face, is that, “None of these abandoned mines have been marked. They never filled them up, they never capped them. There are no warning signs … nothing. The Forest Service even advertises the Picnic Springs Campground as a tourist place. It’s about a mile away from the Cave Hills uranium mines.”

The region is honeycombed with exploratory wells that have been dug as far down as six to eight hundred feet. In the southwestern Black Hills area, there are more than 4,000 uranium exploratory wells. On the Wyoming side of the Black Hills, there are 3,000 wells. Further north into North Dakota, there are more than a thousand wells.

The Black Hills and its surroundings are the recharge area for several major aquifers in the South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming regions. The crisis can be gauged from the simple description that White Face gives: “When the winds come, they pick up the [uranium] dust and carry it; when it rains or snows, it washes it down into the aquifers and groundwater. Much of this radioactive contamination then finds its way into the Missouri River.”

She informs us that twelve residents out of about 600 of the sparsely populated county of Cave Hills have developed brain tumors. A nuclear physicist has declared one mine in the area to be as radioactively “hot” as ground zero of Hiroshima.

Red Shirt, a village along the Cheyenne River on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, has had its water tested high for radiation and local animals have died after consuming fish from the river.

After three daughters of a family and their mother died of cancer, a family requested White Face to have the municipal water tested. The radiation levels were found to be equal to those inside an x-ray machine. Little wonder then that the surviving sons and their father are afflicted with the disease. People procuring their grain and cattle from the region are advised to be extra cautious.

One cannot but feel the desperation of her people when White Face bemoans, “It’s pure genocide for us. We are all dying from cancer. We are trying not to become extinct, not to let the Great Sioux Nation become extinct.”

The Ogala Sioux are engaged in ongoing legal battles with the pro-uranium state of South Dakota. They are aware of the unequal nature of their battle, but they cannot afford to give up. White Face explains how “… Our last court case was lost before learning that the judge was a former lawyer for one of the mining companies. Also, the governor’s sister and brother-in-law work for mining companies [Powertech] and a professor, hired by the Forest Service to test water run-off for contamination, is on contract with a company that works for the mining company. When I found out the judge was a lawyer for the mining company I knew we would lose, but we went ahead with the case for the publicity, because we have to keep waking people up.”

Other tribes, such as the Navajo and Hopi in New Mexico, have been exposed to radioactive material as well. Furthermore, the July 16, 1979, spill of 100 million gallons of radioactive water containing uranium tailings from a tailing pond into the north arm of the Rio Puerco, near the small town of Church Rock, New Mexico, also affected indigenous peoples in Arizona.

Her rage and grief are evident as White Face laments, “When we have our prayer gatherings we ask that no young people come to attend. If you want to have children don’t come to Cave Hills because it’s too radioactive.”

The exploitative approach to the planet’s resources and peoples that led to these environmental and health disasters collides with White Face’s values: “I always say that you have to learn to live with the earth, and not in domination of the earth.”

Nuking the Colonies

The US government practices another approach. In occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, the uranium that has caused genocide of sorts at home has proceeded to wreak new havoc.

Two Iraqi NGO’s, the Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) and the Conservation Center of Environment and Reserves in Fallujah (CCERF) have extensively documented the effects of restricted weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU) munitions, against the people of Fallujah during two massive US military assaults on the city in 2004.

In March 2008, the NGO’s were to present a report titled “Prohibited Weapons Crisis: The effects of pollution on the public health in Fallujah” to the 7th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council

Muhammad al-Darraji, director, MHRI and president, CCERF, was to present the report with an appeal, “We are kindly asking the High Commissioner for Human Rights to look at the content of the report in accordance with the General Assembly’s resolution 48/ 141 (paragraph 4) of 20 December 1993, to investigate the serious threat (to the) health right in Fallujah and Iraq, and to relay the results of this investigation to the Commission on Human Rights to take the suitable decisions.”

Attached to the aforementioned is another report co-authored by Dr. Najim Askouri, a nuclear physicist trained in Britain and a leading Iraqi nuclear researcher and Dr. Assad al-Janabi, director of the Pathology Department at the 400-bed public hospital in Najaf. Their report includes a section on the “Depleted Uranium Crisis” from Najaf, 180 miles from where DU was used in the First Gulf War.

Dr. Najim begins the report by noting that Coalition Forces, mostly US, used 350 tons of DU weapons in about 45 days in 1991, primarily in the stretch of Iraq northwest of Kuwait where Iraqi troops were on their retreat. Then, in 2003, during the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad, the US used another 150 tons of DU. He says that cancer is spreading from the conflict area as a health epidemic and will only get worse. The cancer rate has more than tripled over the last 16 years in Najaf.

According to Dr. Najim, “When DU hits a target, it aerosolizes and oxidizes, forming a uranium oxide that is two parts UO3 and one part UO2. The first is water soluble and filters down into the water aquifers and also becomes part of the food chain as plants take up the UO3 dissolved in water. The UO2 is insoluble and settles as dust on the surface of the earth and is blown by the winds to other locations. As aerosolized dust, it can enter the lungs and begin to cause problems as it can cross cell walls and even impact the genetic system.”

One of Dr. Najim’s grandsons was born with congenital heart problems, Down Syndrome, an underdeveloped liver and leukemia. He believes that the problems are related to the child’s parents having been exposed to DU.

Detailing a skyrocketing rate of cancer and other pollution-related illnesses among the population of Fallujah since the two sieges, the report states, “Starting in 2004 when the political situation and devastation of the health care infrastructure were at their worst, there were 251 reported cases of cancer. By 2006, when the numbers more accurately reflected the real situation, that figure had risen to 688. Already in 2007, 801 cancer cases have been reported. Those figures portray an incidence rate of 28.21 [per 100,000] by 2006, even after screening out cases that came into the Najaf Hospital from outside the governorate, a number which contrasts with the normal rate of 8-12 cases of cancer per 100,000 people.

“Two observations are striking. One, there has been a dramatic increase in the cancers that are related to radiation exposure, especially the very rare soft tissue sarcoma and leukemia. Two, the age at which cancer begins in an individual has been dropping rapidly, with incidents of breast cancer at 16 (years of age), colon cancer at 8 (years of age), and liposarcoma at 1.5 years (of age).” Dr. Assad noted that 6 percent of the cancers reported occurred in the 11-20 age range and another 18 percent in ages 21-30.

“The importance of this information confirms there is a big disaster in this city…. The main civilian victims of most illnesses were the children, and the rate of them represents 72 percent of total illness cases of 2006, most of them between the ages of 1 month and 12 years…. Many new types and terrible amounts of illnesses started to appear [from] 2006 until now, such as Congenital Spinal cord abnormalities, Congenital Renal abnormalities, Septicemia, Meningitis, Thalassemia, as well as a significant number of undiagnosed cases at different ages. The speed of the appearance these signals of pollution after one year of military operations refers to the use of a great amount of prohibited weapons used in 2004 battles. The continued pollution maybe will lead to a genetic drift, starting to appear with many abnormalities in children, because the problems were related to exposure of the child’s parents to pollution sources and this may lead to more new abnormalities in the f uture. According to the security situation with many checkpoints and irregular cards to allow the civilians to enter or exit the city until now, all this helps to continue the terrible situation for this time. Therefore, we think that all these data is only 50 percent of the real numbers of illnesses.”

The Sioux tell their youth to avoid their radioactive native lands if they wish to procreate and prosper. Those in Iraq have no option but to lead maimed lives in their native land.

On February 4, 2009, Muhammad al-Darraji sent President Barack Obama a letter, along with the aforementioned report. A few excerpts are presented here:

“We have the honor to submit with this letter our report on the effects on public health of prohibited weapons used by the United States during its military operations in Fallujah (March-November 2004). It was our intention to present the report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations on 4 March 2008, but both security and political reasons played a significant role in making this task impossible. The report, now in your hands, contains vast evidence and documentation on the catastrophic and continuous pollution in Iraq (to prevent) which nobody has taken any real action to help the victims or clean up polluted places. Some months ago, and in June 2008, I sent this report directly to some US congressmen. Two of them went to my town, Fallujah, and visited the general hospital to investigate the claims contained in our report. No substantial result came out of this visit. In February 2009 one of my colleagues, who worked in the hospital’s statistical office and helped gather information about the pollution, was killed by unknown individuals. The blood of my friend is the driving force that led me to write to you directly in order for you to release the facts for which my friend paid with his life. Therefore, we are kindly asking you to look at the content of the attached report and to investigate the serious threats to the right to life of the inhabitants of Fallujah and other polluted places in Iraq, as well as to publicly release the results of this investigation under right of information about what really happened in Iraq.”

The president has yet to respond.

———

Jason Coppola and Bhaswati Sengupta contributed to this article.

Source: http://www.truthout.org/062009Y?print

11 arrested blocking Stryker deployment from Washington

Post Date May 05, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category 'A'ole Stryker, Global Justice and Peace Movements, Puget Sound, War and Peace

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009168374_protest04m.html

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 – Page updated at 03:37 AM

11 arrested near Fort Lewis trying to block Strykers headed for Afghanistan

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times science reporter

Eleven people were arrested Saturday night trying to block a convoy of Stryker military vehicles from Fort Lewis in protest of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the members of Port Militarization Resistance, an anti-war organization with chapters in Tacoma and Olympia, were cited for disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment.

Some were jailed, but all of those had been released by Sunday afternoon after posting bail.

Tacoma police attempted to head off the protest by blocking the entrance to the Port of Tacoma dock where vehicles and equipment from the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division Stryker Brigade Combat Team were being loaded onto ships for deployment to Afghanistan.

But the protesters moved their operations away from the Port, targeting the armored personnel carriers as they pulled out of the gate at Fort Lewis, and at an exit off Interstate 5 that leads to the Port.

The activists either stood or lay down in the road, said spokesman Shyam Khanna. Though their actions only briefly delayed the convoy, Khanna said they helped draw attention to the Obama administration’s military buildup in Afghanistan.

“It shows we’re willing to make a real sacrifice to accomplish our vision to end the war,” he said.

Port Militarization Resistance tries to prevent the shipment of military gear through civilian ports. The cost of one 2008 protest at the Port of Tacoma, which ran 12 days, was estimated at $1 million for extra security.

“Our goal is to raise the economic cost of these military shipments, to the point where no port is willing to take them,” said Khanna, who spent 10 days in jail after a 2007 protest at the Port of Olympia.

He said the protests will continue the next several nights, as more Strykers and gear are moved off the fort.

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

ATSDR pulls report; will there be others?

Post Date April 29, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Ho’ola Hawai’i – Environmental Justice, North America

Note: ATSDR dismissed environmental health concerns in Lualualei, Pearl Harbor and the Depleted Uranium contamination at Schofield and Pohakuloa.

(1) ATSDR Withdraws Scientifically Flawed Public Health Document

(2) ATSDR pulls report; will there be others?

(3) US does about-face on Camp Lejeune’s tap water

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/april282009/astdr_release_4-28-09.php

Apr-28-2009 21:43

ATSDR Withdraws Scientifically Flawed Public Health Document

Salem-News.com

For years, Camp Lejeune community activists have claimed ATSDR’s 1997 report used flawed data to support its conclusion that exposure to the detected levels of volatile organic compounds would not pose a health hazard for adults.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – Today, the House Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC) applauded the withdrawal of the public health assessment of Camp Lejeune’s drinking water system by a federal agency, but questioned whether there were assessments for other sites that should also be withdrawn. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced this morning that it was withdrawing from its Web site the 1997 public health assessment at Camp Lejeune stating that it could no longer stand behind “the accuracy of the information concerning the drinking water exposure pathway evaluation.”

“This is a welcome step. But it took more than 10 years, pressure from Camp Lejeune activists, numerous press articles and Congressional hearings for this to happen,” said Miller. “Our military families have suffered needlessly because of ASTDR’s flawed work. But our hearings have revealed other sites for which questionable public health assessments were done.”

The Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee held two hearings based on concerns with ATSDR’s public health documents, ranging from its failures to appropriately access the dangers of formaldehyde in travel trailers used by survivors of Hurricane Katrina to its inadequate evaluation of exposures to depleted uranium by residents living near a depleted uranium plant in New York.

Chairman Miller called for the agency to review those other health assessments and withdraw those that could not stand up to a rigorous scientific review.

“Other steps are necessary to ensure that the agency’s future public health assessments are scientifically sound, achieve valid public health conclusions and are based on the most current set of data and information available,” said Miller. “Unfortunately, the Subcommittee’s investigation of ATSDR over the past year has found that is often not the case.”

For years, Camp Lejeune community activists have claimed ATSDR’s 1997 report used flawed data to support its conclusion that exposure to the detected levels of volatile organic compounds, including perchloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE), as well as other toxic chemicals, such as benzene, would not pose a health hazard for adults. It was difficult to review ATSDR’s findings because, as detailed in a Subcommittee staff report released last month, ATSDR had lost many of the critical scientific documents and data upon which the agency had based its 1997 public health assessment.

“Over the past year, the Subcommittee has been examining how ATSDR permits the production of such scientifically flawed documents in the first place, and, frankly, we haven’t come up with a credible answer,” said Miller. “I hope that the agency’s decision to rescind the public health assessment on Camp Lejeune is a sign that the leadership of ATSDR is now willing to acknowledge the agency’s past mistakes and take measures to protect the public’s health in the future. While this is an encouraging sign, the administration and Congress need to be vigilant in overseeing this agency so that it implements its goal of protecting the public’s health.”

For more information, including on the Committee’s work on ATSDR, please visit the Committee’s website.

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/munger/2009/04/atsdr_pulls_report_will_there.html

ATSDR pulls report; will there be others?

The House Science and Technology oversight subcommittee chairman cheered the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s decision to withdraw a 1997 public health assessment of Camp Lejeune’s drinking water.

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., said, “This is a welcome step. But it took more than 10 years, pressure from Camp Lejeune activists, numerous press articles and Congressional hearings for this to happen. Our military families have suffered needlessly because of ATSDR’s flawed work. But our hearings have revealed other sites for which questionable public health assessments were done.”

The House subcommittee issued a report last month that was strongly critical of the ATSDR’s work, including public health assessments.

The federal agency has done a number of public health assessments in Oak Ridge, based on a review of historic pollution discharges at the Dept. of Energy’s plants. But, to date, those reports have not identified any serious health impacts related to releases of radioactive and toxic materials at Y-12, ORNL and K-25.

While the Oak Ridge reports have been criticized for their lack of findings, I’m not aware of any review that found them scientifically flawed.

In the subcommittee’s press statement, Miller indicated that more attention needs to be focused on these health assessments.

“Other steps are necessary to ensure that the agency’s future public health assessments are scientifically sound, achieve valid public health conclusions and are based on the most current set of data and information available. Unfortunately, the subcommittee’s investigation of ATSDR over the past year found that is often not the case.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090429/ap_on_go_ot/us_toxic_tapwater_6

US does about-face on Camp Lejeune’s tap water

By RITA BEAMISH, Associated Press Writer Rita Beamish, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 29, 2009
Nearly 12 years ago, a federal report told Marines and their families that adults faced little or no increased cancer risk from drinking and bathing in chemical-tainted water at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune. That report – long challenged by skeptical veterans – no longer stands.

Federal health officials said Tuesday they were withdrawing their 1997 assessment of health effects from the water contamination because of omissions and scientific inaccuracy.

“We can no longer stand behind the accuracy of the information in that document, specifically in the drinking water public health evaluation,” William Cibulas, director of health assessment for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said at a meeting in Atlanta. “We know too much now.”

The agency, charged with protecting public health around toxic sites, said some parts of the document – dealing with lead, soil pesticides and fish contamination – remain accurate in characterizing the past environmental hazards.

But the water section, analyzing toxins that seeped into wells from a neighboring dry cleaner and from Camp Lejeune industrial activity, contained “troublesome” information, said Cibulas.

As many as 1 million people may have been exposed to water toxins over 30 years before the bad wells were closed in 1987, health officials now say. The Marines estimated the number at 500,000.

When former Marines took their stories last year to Congress, they were dubbed “poisoned patriots.”

Some people have interpreted the 1997 report as, “No way, no how, would any person who drank contaminated water at Camp Lejeune be expected to suffer any adverse health effects, be they cancerous or non-cancerous,” said Cibulas. “The science is just not that good for us to make that determination.”

Problems in the document included omission of the cancer-causing chemical benzene, despite high levels found in a well in 1984, said Cibulas.

Additionally, the contaminating solvents the report focused on have been characterized in newer science as even more potent, he added. Levels of one solvent, called TCE, measured higher than in any known public water supply, an ATSDR scientist said.

Cibulas also noted the report underestimated the extent of the contamination in base housing areas. The mistake, due to inadequate information from the Marines, was reported by The Associated Press in a 2007 investigation of the toxic water.

The health agency did not make any new conclusions, but pulled its flawed document from the Internet to redo its analysis with new science. People who want the still valid parts of the report now have to contact the agency in Atlanta.

The health officials are continuing a separate study into whether fetuses might have been harmed by the water. Agency scientists are conducting elaborate water models to get to the bottom of the contamination.

Tuesday’s unusual about-face came at a meeting of the health agency, part of the Health and Human Services Department, with its community advisory panel that works on follow-up to Camp Lejeune’s past water problems.

It comes at a sensitive time, after congressional investigators last month accused the agency of obscuring or overlooking potential health hazards at toxic sites. The agency’s director, Howard Frumkin, assured Congress he was working to improve on any shortcomings.

The Camp Lejeune report ambiguously stated both that adults faced no increased cancer risk from the water, and that cancer was not likely but that more study was needed.

It said children’s cancer risk was unknown, but it raised concerns about fetuses exposed to the water, citing studies elsewhere on leukemia and birth defects.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., said he hoped Tuesday’s development signaled “that the leadership of ATSDR is now willing to acknowledge their past mistakes and to take measures to protect the public’s health in the future.”

The reversal Tuesday was cold comfort for some former Marines.

Allen Menard believes his rare non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is linked to his time at Camp Lejeune in the early 1980s. “They knew about the benzene,” he said. “Why didn’t they tell us?”

According to the Navy’s legal office, which handles claims, 1,500 former Camp Lejeune residents have filed claims for $33.8 billion in damages. The military is waiting for conclusions from the study of fetal effects before deciding the claims.

Stryker soldier charged with pimping two teen girls

Post Date April 19, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Puget Sound, Youth and Militarization

http://www.thenewstribune.com/331/story/713069.html

Tacoma, WA – Saturday, April 18, 2009

Fort Lewis soldier charged with pimping

Prosecutors say Stryker infantryman used two teen girls as prostitutes

STACEY MULICK; stacey.mulick@thenewstribune.com
Last updated: April 18th, 2009 03:38 AM (PDT)

Pierce County prosecutors have charged a Fort Lewis soldier with promoting prostitution, alleging he directed two teenage girls to trade sex for money.

Sgt. Sterling Terrance Hospedales, a 25-year-old infantryman, also could face federal charges in connection with the continuing investigation, said Robbie Burroughs, a spokeswoman for the Seattle FBI office.

Hospedales was arraigned Thursday on two counts of first-degree promoting prostitution and was being held in the Pierce County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail. The Florida native is assigned to the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team and has been stationed at Fort Lewis since March 2005.

The case began with an investigation by the Pacific Northwest’s Innocence Lost Task Force, part of a federal initiative launched in June 2003. The local task force, with branches in Tacoma, Everett and Seattle, was established last summer.

A task force investigator came across information about a missing girl who might be in the Lakewood area. She was listed on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s Web site, Burroughs said.

The tip was investigated, then passed along to the Tacoma branch of the task force and to two Lakewood police officers on the unit.

“They took this information and ran with it,” Burroughs said.

Officers with the task force found the missing girl, 16, and a second missing girl, 17, advertising prostitution services on Craigslist, the online classifieds site, charging documents state.

Officers made a date with the 17-year-old girl and met her at a local fast-food restaurant. She was with the 16-year-old girl, whom Hospedales had flown to Seattle from Wyoming, the court documents state.

The girls were detained and interviewed, the court documents state. They indicated Hospedales was their pimp and had taken and posted nude photos of them on the Internet, according to the documents.

“The females reported that Hospedales takes any money that they earn and it is put in a safe or in a drawer in his bedroom,” the documents state.

The girls said they lived with Hospedales and had their “dates” on an air mattress in the living room. Officers served a search warrant on the apartment and found an air mattress, handcuffs and other items the girls had described.

Officers said they found several threatening messages from Hospedales on the girls’ cell phones, the court documents state.

Hospedales was arrested as he left his apartment and booked into jail early Wednesday. He had an envelope containing $882 and the 16-year-old’s birth certificate with him at the time, according to the court documents.

“Hospedales told police that he thought the girls ran off with another pimp, so he took the money out of his safe so they couldn’t steal it from him,” the charging documents state.
The documents provide no details about when the girls were interviewed and where Hospedales’ apartment is.

Fort Lewis officials are aware of the charges against Hospedales, spokeswoman Catherine Caruso said Friday. The Army typically waits until the criminal case in civilian court is completed before taking action against a soldier, she said.

Stacey Mulick: 253-597-8268
blogs.thenewstribune.com/crime
Originally published: April 18th, 2009 12:17 AM (PDT)

Obama wants to put federal nuclear weapons labs under the Pentagon

Post Date February 06, 2009

Comments 0 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Military-industrial-academic complex, New Mexico

According to an AP story carried here in the Marine Corps Times, Obama is considering placing the federal laboratories that developed nuclear weapons under the military. This would be a dangerous development.

The AP writes:

The Obama administration is considering moving the nation’s federal weapons complex, including New Mexico’s Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, under military control, ending decades of civilian oversight.

The article continues:

Civilian management stems from a World War II decision by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the top scientist on the secret Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic bomb and led to the founding of Los Alamos lab. Oppenheimer had the weapons designed by civilian scientists rather than military officers.

Read the full article here: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2009/02/ap_obama_labs_020409/