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Pentagon Dirty Bombs Hit Home
It’s Not Just Iraq

By Steve Taylor

sing the war in Iraq as cover, the Pentagon has launched a deadly new assault on the nation’s health and on the environmental laws that protect us and our planet from toxic pollution and ecological disaster.

The Department of Defense is again demanding sweeping new exemptions from critical public health and environmental laws, despite the fact that the exemptions are not even necessary for the Pentagon to achieve its own goals. Already rejected once by Congress, the exemptions would expose hundreds or thousands of communities to military-generated poisons and would hasten the extinction of endangered species and lead to the death of large numbers of whales and other marine mammals.

At the beginning of March, the Pentagon released its proposed National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, which contains five new exemptions covering millions of acres of military lands and waters and vast arrays of military activities. The Department of Defense and its allies in Congress are pushing hard to pass these exemptions in the next few weeks while the country is at war and military popularity is high.

Organizing for Accountability
Communities, veterans and tribes poisoned by military toxins began trying several years ago to hold the U.S. government accountable for the damage it does to our environment and our families in the name of national defense. Grassroots organizing, combined with administrative and legal actions by national environmental organizations, led to significant victories that forced the Pentagon to spend large amounts of money and time addressing toxic contamination and pollution.

Open burning and detonation of munitions at the Sierra Army Depot in California. Photo: Military Toxics Project

In 1992, the Federal Facility Compliance Act removed the Pentagon’s immunity from federal hazardous waste laws and gave communities new tools to force military accountability for environmental and human health damage. Since then, communities, states and Environmental Protection Agency regions have brought actions against the Pentagon at the Massachusetts Military Reservation under the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; at Fort Richardson, AK, under the Clean Water Act; in the Marianas Islands under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; at Fort Ord, CA, under the Superfund law; and at a number of sites under the Endangered Species Act. Case by case, the activists forced the Department of Defense to stop toxic exposures, investigate and clean up contamination, and allow public involvement in decision-making.

Like most polluters, the Department of Defense reacted to those environmental victories by running to Congress. The Pentagon initially demanded restoration of its exemptions from the laws. Last year, a coalition of the hardest-hit communities and national environmental organizations beat back a Defense Department push for broad new exemptions; now the department has launched a comprehensive attack on the laws and regulations and their enforcement. An internal department briefing paper calls for a new legislative push combined with “equally aggressive pursuit of regulatory and administrative clarification.” The memo outlines a three-year campaign to win new military exemptions from both environmental and public health laws through legislation and regulatory rollbacks.

The campaign kicked off in March with the Pentagon’s FY 2004 Defense Authorization bill, which contains specific exemptions from five federal laws: the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs hazardous waste; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, called the Superfund law, which governs cleanup of toxic sites; and the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

• The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is the primary U.S. law governing solid and hazardous waste; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act—the Superfund law—governs investigation and cleanup of sites contaminated with hazardous and toxic substances. The Defense proposal would exempt military munitions—including chemical weapons—and the toxic contamination they generate from virtually any federal or state oversight at all at “operational” ranges (a vague Pentagon term that includes dozens of ranges that have been closed for decades) and at hundreds of other sites as well. If the Pentagon proposals become law, contamination by munitions-related toxins such as perchlorate, explosives and heavy metals could build up for years or decades and poison soil, air and groundwater before the Environmental Protection Agency or states could take any action.
• The Clean Air Act requires states to analyze pollution and develop plans to comply with federal air quality standards. The Pentagon proposal attempts to exempt the military permanently from conforming to federal or state air quality implementation plans for a broad range of activities. The Pentagon proposal would actually define dirty air as clean air by allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to approve areas as if they had attained Clean Air Act standards, even though the areas have not attained those standards, if the reason for the failure is military-generated air pollution.
• The Endangered Species Act provides a critical safety net for species in danger of extinction by preserving “critical habitat” essential to the survival of those species. The Defense proposal would block the designation of critical habitat on any military lands for which the department has prepared an Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan. However, those plans do not contain scientific standards for the protection of wildlife and have been shown to be inadequate to protect species.
• The Marine Mammal Protection Act is our nation’s leading statute for the conservation of whales, dolphins, sea otters and other vulnerable marine species. The Pentagon’s proposal would (a) create a major loophole in the law’s definition of “harassment,” allowing a range of military activities that disrupt and harm marine mammals; (b) eliminate the requirement that any killing of marine mammals be limited to “small numbers”; and (c) create broad exemptions allowing the military to bypass the law’s review process entirely.

The Defense proposal was introduced despite widespread opposition by communities, states and other federal agencies. Over the past two years, 33 state attorneys general—along with dozens of local, regional and national environmental and public health organizations and communities affected by military contamination—have opposed the Pentagon’s demand for exemptions. The National Park Service warned that the Defense exemptions would cause “substantial degradation of natural resources.” EPA Administrator and former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman testified recently that she did not believe that environmental laws are having a deleterious impact on military training; and last June, the General Accounting Office reported that the Pentagon had not produced quantitative evidence that environmental laws were hampering its readiness for war and that the Department’s own reports showed that troop readiness remains high. The Defense Department proposed exemptions again this year without providing either a review of training capabilities and readiness or a plan to use existing waiver provisions as demanded last year by Congress.

What’s the Damage?
The Pentagon has a long history of first denying that its operations will endanger the health of military personnel and neighbors, then opposing protective measures demanded by communities after contamination is documented. Extensive toxic contamination both on and off Department of Defense facilities and the history of the Pentagon’s refusal to respect the health and environmental consequences of its operations demonstrate that it’s unlikely that the Pentagon will control or clean up after itself without independent oversight. But the Department of Defense seeks to block the use of the very tools that communities and states have employed to protect themselves in the face of its denials and stonewalling. It seems clear that at federal facilities in general, and Department of Defense facilities in particular, neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor communities will be able to protect environmental and public health without the means to enforce compliance.

The Pentagon is responsible for more than 28,500 contaminated sites that will cost at least $39 billion to clean up. Up to 16 million acres of land already transferred to other agencies and the public may be contaminated with unexploded ordnance and toxic munitions constituents. Department of Defense facilities account for 129 of the 165 federal facilities on the Superfund National Priorities List. The Department accounted for 71 percent of EPA enforcement actions against federal agencies in FY1997; in the same year, 79 of the 124 federal facilities reporting to the Toxic Release Inventory were military facilities.

More evidence for the need for independent oversight and accountability is found in reports of federal agencies’ rates of compliance with major environmental laws. In 1992, Congress completely and unequivocally waived federal immunity from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, making federal agencies subject to penalties for violations of that law. In contrast, federal facilities continue to be immune from penalties for violating the Clean Water Act. Federal compliance with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act has since risen dramatically (and actually rose above the compliance rate of non-federal facilities), while compliance with the Clean Water Act has plummeted.

Pentagon compliance with the Clean Water Act is even worse than for the federal government as a whole. In 1999, the EPA found that the Navy had violated its Clean Water Act National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit to discharge ordnance into waters around the island of Vieques 102 times in five years. The Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton in California accumulated more than 14,000 violations for water discharge and inadequate monitoring and reporting and spilled three million gallons of raw sewage into the Santa Margarita River and lagoon.

The Pentagon’s resistance to complying with environmental/public health laws is not limited to the Clean Water Act. The Department of Defense has:

• refused to pay penalties for violations of state requirements regarding underground storage tanks;
• challenged the EPA’s attempt to calculate penalties for Clean Air Act violations at military facilities in the same manner as for private facilities;
• opposed attempts by the EPA and states to require that the Department take responsibility for maintaining institutional controls (deed restrictions, fences and other tools used in place of complete cleanup) at contaminated sites;
• fought particularly hard against state authority to regulate cleanup of contamination at federal facilities; and
• attempted to assert its immunity from public health and environmental laws at every opportunity.

What You Can Do
The Department of Defense is pushing hard to move its exemptions through Congress in the next few weeks—and many environmental and health activists are working to persuade Congress to reject the demands. They urge people who care about the environment to call, fax or e-mail their representatives and insist that no individual and no federal department be declared above the law—quickly, before the Pentagon destroys its own country and half the animals on the planet along with the nations on its long list of enemies.

To get in touch with your representatives in Congress: Senate—www.senate.gov; House of Representatives—(202)224-3121 or www.house.gov; database of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of all members of Congress—www. visi.com/juan/congress. The Military Toxics Project, a Maine-based national network of neighborhood, veteran, environmental and peace groups opposing military contamination and pollution, has sample letters and extensive background materials available on the Department of Defense proposals and the impact they would have on communities. The project also puts out an e-mail action alert. You can reach it at P.O. Box 558, Lewiston, ME 04243; (207)783-5091; mtp@miltoxproj.org; www.miltoxproj.org.

Steve Taylor is a National Organizer for the Military Toxics Project in Lewiston, ME.