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U.S. Military Toxins: The Gift That Keeps on Killing
The toxic air echoes with the Vietnam War’s Agent Orange fiasco. Victims of that war’s dioxin suffered for years before the United States took limited responsibility – but only for its troops, and not for the countries it poisoned.
The military’s history of pollution is long and largely unmitigated by legislation, treaties or lawsuits. It stretches around the world, from bases in the Philippines to Okinawa, Kuwait to Canada, and to numerous U.S. sites as well.
Once upon a time–before 9/11 turned conspiracy theories into a self-righteous boom industry–Area 51 was an amusing Mecca for a dedicated band of tinfoil-hat nutters who fantasized about alien anal probes and insisted that the government was hiding space aliens on a secret Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.
But a real and more nefarious plot was the military’s exploitation of lax regulation and worker confidentiality agreements to use Area 51 as a secret dumping/burning ground for the toxic waste shipped in from other bases.
As deaths mounted at Area 51, workers–and their widows–sued, producing evidence that the military had regularly filled football-field-sized trenches with 55-gallon drums of hazardous waste, doused them with jet fuel and set them ablaze. The lawsuit foundered on the shoals of “national security” secrecy. The military got away with murder.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12578/u.s._military_toxins_the_gift_that_keeps_on_killing