The Pentagon Is Actively Poisoning Americans Across The US And It’s 100% “Legal”
By Rachel Blevins
ActivistPost.com
JULY 28, 2017
The idea that a government is actively poisoning its citizens may sound like the perfect propaganda plot to send the mainstream media into a feeding frenzy, and to make American neoconservatives beg for the invasion of a sovereign nation—unless it is happening in the United States.
The Department of Defense and its contractors are currently using at least 61 active military sites across the country to “burn and detonate unused munitions and raw explosives in the open air with no environmental emissions controls,” according to a series of bombshell reports from ProPublica that give insight into the largest source of pollution in the country: The Pentagon.
One of those sites is located at an army ammunition plant in Radford, Virginia. The town consists of around 17,000 people, and it is home to an elementary school that “has been ranked by researchers as facing some of the most dangerous air-quality hazards in the country.”
The rate of thyroid diseases in three of the surrounding counties is among the highest in the state, provoking town residents to worry that emissions from the Radford plant could be to blame. Government authorities have never studied whether Radford’s air pollution could be making people sick, but some of their hypothetical models estimate that the local population faces health risks exponentially greater than people in the rest of the region.
Congress banned American industries from using “open burns” to dispose of hazardous waste in 1984, with the land disposal restrictions program for the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency was instructed to specify “either concentration levels or methods of treatment for hazardous constituents to meet before land disposal.”
However, ProPublica noted that lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors “a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste. That exemption has remained in place ever since.”
In the United States, outdoor burning and detonation is still the military’s leading method for dealing with munitions and the associated hazardous waste. It has remained so despite a U.S. Senate resolution a quarter of a century ago that ordered the Department of Defense to halt the practice ‘as soon as possible.’ It has continued in the face of a growing consensus among Pentagon officials and scientists that similar burn pits at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sickened soldiers.
The Rest…HERE
