Carol Van Strum is a contributing writer at Planet Waves.
by CAROL VAN STRUM
As we have been reporting throughout February, the U.S. Navy has declared dominion over all waters and air space along the Pacific coast from the Canadian border to northern California and inland to Idaho. With either totally incompetent or deliberately deceptive notice to coastal residents and state legislators, the Navy announced this move in a nearly invisible Environmental Impact Statement.
Coastal Oregon residents, learning by word of mouth of the Navy's plans, raised enough hell to alert Oregon's Congressional delegation, which – with increasingly outraged letters to the Secretary of the Navy – forced the Navy to concede, very grudgingly, to a half-hearted delay.
Oregon's legislators should not be the only ones raising questions about Navy activities. For one thing, the Navy's planned playground extends well into northern California waters, as well as air space. Moreover, the Pacific Northwest "Training Range Complex" is only one of many such extensions of Navy dominion.
During the last two years, the Navy has issued nearly identical environmental impact statements for Training Range Complexes in waters off of:
Southern California
the Mariana Islands
the Hawaiian Islands
Jacksonville, Florida
Cherry Point, North Carolina
the Gulf of Alaska; and others
Thus the navy is assuming command over land, sea and air encompassing the entire Atlantic coast, Pacific coast, Alaska, and Pacific islands.
In addition to lies about the environmental consequences of Navy war games circumnavigating the continent, the Navy nowhere reveals the exhorbitant costs of its high-tech toys and testing or training exercises. Nor, significantly, does it reveal the costs of keeping its expansion of territory under the radar of public opinion. Certainly the behavior of one of the public relations companies hired by the Navy to publicize the Pacific Northwest EIS – KATZ & Associates of San Diego – has either been grossly incompetent or intentionally obfuscatory. Nowhere has the Navy revealed how much it paid – and is paying – KATZ and Associates to prevent the public from learning about its plans. Nor do we know how much the Navy has paid to keep its other regional expansions secret.
While the nation's economy collapses, the Navy spends recklessly on war games that further jeopardize coastal resources nationwide. If ever there were a time to assert civilian control of the military, it is now. At the very least, Congress should force the Navy to withdraw its phony environmental impact statements and halt all testing and training activities until those activities and their true costs and effects are honestly identified.
The public comment period for the Pacific Northwest EIS has been extended until March 11, but the Navy is unlikely to budge without either a Supreme Court order or mass uprising or Congressional action. People should therefore be hounding their legislators to demand accountability.
THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD BE ASKING OUR LEGISLATORS:
- How much is all this -- both the EIS productions and all the enhanced war games costing?
- In a time of recession, why are we wasting billions of dollars on expensive high tech weapons that will do nothing to protect us from box cutters, hijacked planes, or anthrax envelopes?
- Why do we need enhanced war games -- aren't they getting enough real-time practice in the Persian Gulf?
- Why haven't we successfully negotiated with the nation-states bordering the Indian Ocean to give the Navy some practice dealing with a real live "enemy," the Somalian pirates? Working out & implementing effective strategies for dealing with a REAL LIVE problem seems much more cost effective than playing WWII style war games.
- How many years and how many thousands of pounds of depleted uranium has the Navy been dumping, into our territorial waters & Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)?
- Does the Navy have ANY idea of the present & future environmental & public health impacts of those levels of extremely long lived pollutant?Why haven't any of the cookie cutter EISs even considered the potential very significant impact?
- What is the estimated amount of total chemical munitions currently dumped or lost on the seafloor or nearshore bottom, in the Puget Sound, seacoasts, and bays & inland waters of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, US possessions and/or protectorates?
- What toxic or potentially toxic compounds are known or can be reasonably expected to leak from those munitions or ordnance & why aren't the effects ever considered in the EISs?
UPDATED: (removed references to Canada) The military has been operating unmanned drone aircraft over Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan,with a notable excess of civilian casualties. Now the Navy wants to practice with them right over our shores and our airspace: what will be the Navy's acceptable level of civilian casualties here at home?