05/22/15 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more war in the Middle East?
Or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full-spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at councilforthenationalinterest.org That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, kiddos, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is Dar Jamal, writing now at tomdispatch.com.
Of course, he's the author of Beyond the Green Zone and the Will to Resist.
And we run a hell of a lot of Tom Dispatch stuff under Tom's name at antiwar.com, including this one.
Dar Jamal, The Navy's Great Alaskan War.
Welcome back, Dar.
How you doing, man?
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
Yeah, yeah, good to talk to you too, man.
And, you know, it's kind of funny.
It seems like, and I don't really know, but maybe we've talked about this, but it seems like you're really trying to take a break from the wars, man.
You've been through a lot reporting on Iraq War II for so many years, and so you've come home and really kind of moved to covering the environment, but it seems like the Pentagon's following you around, dude.
They're following all of us around.
That's the problem.
There's no escape from the long arm of the U.S. military.
It's pretty incredible.
All right, so this one is Destroying What Remains, How the U.S. Navy Plans to War Game the Arctic.
Before we get to that, I remember hearing claims anyway back when, based on what, I don't know, that, you know, where they were ranking the worst polluters on the planet, and the Pentagon was in first place and the rest of the U.S. government was in second place, and then after that were, I guess, other nations, the Chinese or the Indians or the Russians or something.
But do you have, is there any kind of good numbers about that that you know of?
I don't have those off the top of my head other than to know the generalities that you just spoke of, the most important one being that people remember that the Pentagon is the single largest user of fossil fuels on the planet and the single largest emitters of CO2 on the planet.
That may be what I was thinking of, but I guess maybe I was just kind of lumping in, you know, and whatever other catastrophes and, you know, as Kelly Vallejos points out, just pounding the Iraqi desert sand with bombs for 25 years, that drums up a lot of nasty stuff up into the air, a lot of weird heavy metals and, you know, little molecules of things that had been, you know, deeply settled and not a threat.
That alone is poison in a way.
No, that's exactly right.
And I've actually written about that in the past, you know, kind of in the wake of the D.U. reporting that I've done in the white phosphorus, but really talking about this toxic legacy that the U.S. military leaves everywhere it goes.
I mean, what a lot of people don't understand, you know, we're going to be talking about Alaska today.
You know, people think, oh, Alaska, the last great frontier, it's this beautiful, vast, pristine land.
The military has over 2,600 toxic waste dump sites in Alaska alone.
So that gives people an idea.
2,600?
Yeah.
Pardon me, I had a cough anyway, but I also kind of would have spit out my coffee if I had some.
I ran out.
But yeah, no, that's incredible.
So now what kind of toxic waste is that?
Is that nuclear waste or just other kinds of poisons?
Anything from like old paint and rusting barrels beside rivers to toxic munitions to just garbage.
I mean, that has heavy metals in it.
I mean, it's, you know, the entire spectrum.
I don't think there's anything nuclear.
I mean, I could be wrong.
I hope I'm not.
I don't think there's nuclear waste, but certainly all the kinds of heavy metals and other types of fuels.
I mean, for example, in some of the propellants, and I mentioned this in the article that we're going to talk about, in some of the propellants of their missiles, there's literally cyanide.
So even the Navy's own environmental impact statements mentions, yeah, when these munitions are used, a certain amount of that propellant that doesn't burn goes into the water.
And, you know, there's therefore cyanide being introduced into the food chain.
So that gives you an idea.
I mean, you know, and we talk about fuels, just basic gasoline or oil.
I mean, people forget that oil is a hazardous material.
And when you store old oil in rusting drums out in the middle of nowhere in Alaska, eventually it's going to be introduced back into the environment and the food chain.
So that gives people an idea.
Yeah, and, you know, I could kind of imagine a conservative objection that, hey, listen, you know what, we still have to have a military and they have to train in order to keep us safe and this and that, except that, of course, all this is training for enforcing world empire.
None of this has to do with defending the United States.
That has no state adversaries on the planet.
Well, that's exactly right, Scott.
And, you know, another counter to that argument is because I've been running into that a lot.
I've been writing now.
I mean, it's kind of becoming my beat now.
At least one of my beats is following the domestic military expansion.
And I run into that all the time, like, you know, look, the military has to train, et cetera, et cetera.
And I would I would say, yes, OK, they need to train.
I understand that, but they need to follow the law and they need to do so.
And if they're going to train, they need to follow their own, you know, really actually follow the NEPA process and really do environmental impact statements and really involve the public in the decision making about what they're going to do, when and how and, you know, do it above ground and follow the law, because literally what they're doing is is not following our own domestic law.
And theoretically, as you know, here's a good laugh.
But theoretically, since, you know, we control the military, if this is in theory a democracy, then they should at the very least be following domestic law with their training and they're not.
All right.
Well, so now be more specific on that point, then, as we get into this article here.
What exactly do the laws mandate and how severely are they being broken here?
Well, the basics of them are without getting too into the bureaucratic specifics that would, you know, make people run from their radios or computers listening to this in some.
There are laws set up in the United States that a bureaucracy that the military has to follow in order to go through a process like, for example, here where I live on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, they have to go through the Forest Service and require permits to do training that they want to do out on the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula.
They want to do electromagnetic warfare training there.
So they have to contact the Forest Service and go through a specific set of guidelines that the Forest Service has to set up, which means, OK, you have to conduct your own environmental impact statement, make it public, hold public meetings, bring the public into this, give the public the right to comment.
Ask questions, bring forth any concerns, and then you have to address those.
That's just one example.
There's several safeguards like that set up that the military has to do.
And so instead of doing that, what their plan has been, and I wrote about this in a broader article a ways back about the broader domestic military expansion that's happening like Jade Helm down in Texas in the southwest, but writing about how what the military does is they do kind of this faux attempt at following that process.
So they have to alert the public.
So they'll put a pamphlet up in a post office on a bulletin board.
So technically they've alerted the public, and then they'll have their little public meeting, which then nobody comes to because nobody knows about it, and they'll have guys show up, and they'll have all their propaganda out on some tables in a public library, for example.
And then so they can say, yeah, hey, we informed the public, and then we're doing our exercise now.
Nobody voiced any opposition.
So that's just one example of how they circumvent the law and really the democratic public process and bringing people into the fold and doing things the way they're supposed to do it.
Right.
Well, and it just goes to overall government contempt for even the theory or even the pretension anymore.
I guess the pretension.
They'll go with the pretension, but they just really hate the idea that it's supposed to be a rule of law, not men.
It's not enough power to get to administer the law or get to enforce it or act it out or carry it out in whatever way.
They've got to break it too.
Otherwise, they're just not happy, never satisfied unless they're going beyond what they're allowed.
Well, the whole point of what I think, and I know we're jumping ahead of ourselves because we haven't even really talked much about the Navy in Alaska yet, but I think what people need to understand is the military, the way they're behaving at home, they're not running around killing civilians like they did in Iraq.
As far as the total disregard for law, the total disregard for what the public thinks or is concerned about, whether it be jet noise or environmental impacts or things like this, they don't give a darn.
They just don't care, and they're thumbing their nose at people, and they're just going ahead and doing their stuff anyway.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we've got to take this break, Dar, but hang tight right there.
When we get back, we'll get more specific in the case of the Pentagon's war against the people and property of Alaska.
The great state of Alaska.
Twice as big as Texas, really?
Two and a half times.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to The Thing here, man.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm with Darja Mail, author of this great new article at TomDispatch.com, The Navy's Great Alaskan War.
And he already said they got 2,600 toxic waste dumps in Alaska.
The military does.
God knows what other national government departments are doing in that land.
And now, so this article, man, you really get into what's going on here.
And I think this ought to be a challenge to conservatives and their opinions about property rights and eminent government ownership of land versus private ownership of land.
And I think conservatives need to ask themselves whether you're all really just a bunch of communists or whether you actually believe in private property.
But anyway, so listen close to what our friend Darja Mail has to say about what they're doing in Alaska here.
Go ahead, Dar.
So basically in about three weeks from right now, the military has plans to bring a whole bunch of warships up to the Gulf of Alaska, and they have access to an area.
It's an exercise called Northern Edge, and it's basically wargaming in preparation for getting up into the Arctic once the Arctic ice starts completely melting out in the summers, which the Navy estimates could be as soon as next year.
The way things are melting out up there, it looks like they could be right, that we start seeing ice-free periods of the summer that will just expand over time.
And so they're wargaming in the Gulf of Alaska, and so that means this Northern Edge exercise is going to take place over an area of 8,429 nautical miles.
So it's a massive area in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska.
It contains critical habitat for all five wild Alaskan salmon species and over 350 other species of marine life.
That includes a whole lot of different kinds of whales, at least one of which is highly endangered, the North Pacific right whale, as well as dolphins and sea lions.
Bearing in mind that this area is, like I said, with the salmon, it's also happening right smack in the middle of salmon fishing season.
So fishermen in Kodiak and Cordova and a lot of other Southeast Alaskan towns are up in arms about this.
And in fact, just last weekend, there were over 170 fisherboats from the port of Cordova that came out and had a flotilla.
AP covered it, it got a lot of international coverage.
No shocker here, it got almost no coverage here in the United States, outside of up with some of the local media in Alaska.
But the Navy's plans also, people are so enraged because they are permitted to use 352,000 pounds of what they call expended materials, a huge percentage of those being live munitions, missiles, bombs, torpedoes.
They're going to be using active and passive sonar.
Needless to say, that's not going to have good positive effects on salmon migrating through the area.
The Navy's own so-called environmental impact statement estimates 182,000 takes, which is a direct take is a direct death of a marine mammal or the disruption of essential behaviors like breeding, nursing or surfacing, which ultimately leads to a death as well.
And that's over the five year period which their war games are planned on being conducted.
Stop right there for a second and elaborate, please, if you could.
Explain how it is that sonar, what the hell has that got to do with hurting anybody?
Well, for example, I think most people are aware of the fact that whales and dolphin and migrating fish like salmon, they are impacted in the water by sound waves.
Their bio-navigational abilities are going to be impacted, it confuses them.
And so, for example, anytime you see a big stranding of porpoises or whales, whether it's down in New Zealand or down on the coast of Southern California, oftentimes the Navy is to blame because they've been blasting, they have sonar weapons also and they've been doing sonar testing and sonar weapons testing.
And then, oh, if a pod of whales or dolphins just happens to be going by, they get hit and then all their bodies wash up on shore.
And so, in fact, the NRDC just last month, I'm sorry, earlier this month, actually a federal court found the Navy guilty for basically causing over 9 million instances of harm of whales and dolphins and other marine life from blasting sonar off the coast of Southern California.
So, it's well documented that using active and passive sonar has negative impacts on marine biological organisms.
And now, I don't really know enough about this, but I think I remember seeing on the Discovery Channel or some kind of thing, Dar, that what we're talking about here, too, that people need to understand is 21st century sonar, badass sonar.
That's an entirely different level of power and quality than what people are thinking of from old movies or whatever.
So, it's not just the boop, boop sound or something.
They are blasting the brains right out of these animals.
No, that's exactly right.
I mean, there are underwater sonar weapons testing ranges even right up here in Puget Sound, right off the coast nearby where I live.
There's underwater munitions testing.
And they have certain areas where the Navy's already permitted to be doing this kind of thing.
And exactly, the sonar that they're using, I mean, they've weaponized it.
It's not like the submarine movies where, you know, there are these little pings and things like this and these little sound waves.
We're talking about levels of sound waves that have the ability to literally explode the eardrums of whales and dolphins.
And you can easily find photos of that online.
That's well documented also.
Right.
And again, not to be chalked up as necessary evil, just evil.
But anyway, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I wanted, you know, maybe a little bit of explanation there because I'm not sure if, you know, people understand how that works, that a little sonar ping is going to destroy sea populations like that when, in fact, you almost couldn't overstate it.
Well, right.
And, you know, another aspect of this is I talk with a commercial fisherwoman, and she's also a native woman and a member of one of the tribes in Cordova.
And she said, look, put it into perspective.
What people don't understand about fisheries is, like, this is how this entire part of that state even exists.
Like, without the fishing industry, they're just going to go away.
And that includes the native tribes.
And so she asked the question that I think puts this in context.
She says, you know, would we allow the Navy to bomb farmland?
Why are we allowing them to bomb this fishing area?
Because it's basically the fisher's equivalent to farmland.
Why would we allow them to bomb it and introduce toxic munitions and cyanide and heavy metals into a place where we're trying to get our food, let alone pristine wild-caught salmon?
Hey, what about depleted uranium?
Yeah, that too.
You know, so it begs the question, if someone describes themselves as a conservative, what are they conserving?
Right, exactly.
And I think that's the whole thing, man, is environmentalism has too much of a kind of Greenpeace sort of brand name on it or whatever.
But you could just as easily sell it as, you know, rifle totem conservation, you know, as a kind of conservative kind of a thing.
Conservatism is supposed to be about preserving the best of what we've got in our society, supposedly, right?
That's true.
Or is it just about worshipping the military state?
Oh, okay, that's different.
All right.
Great work, as always.
Thanks so much for your time on the show, Dar.
Good talking to you.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Take care.
See you next time.
Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at DarrensCoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for The Future of Freedom, featuring founder and president Jacob Hornberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.