by Juan Wilson on 1 November 2006
We will meet at Nawiliwili Park in Lihue
at 1:30pm on Saturday, November 4th
The following
is the text of a presentation I expect to make on Saturday during
the Drive-In Caravan demonstration against the Hawaii Superferry.
See next article below for more information on the demonstration.
My words have developed out of an op-ed piece published recently by
the Garden Island News.
It is expected
that Randy Iwase, the Democratic candidate for governor, and Gary
Hooser, Hawaii State Senator, will be keynote speakers.
Aloha
to you - friends of Kauai,
I remember back in 1971, during the Vietnam War, a Cobra attack
helicopter and a Huey troop carrier landed in the parking
lot next to the Kauai Store (now the county office building).
They were newly designed aircraft then, and a great draw as
part of a military public relations effort. Young people,
including me, got to climb all over them and even sit in the
pilot’s seats.
Will we have a similar event in 2007? Will the Superferry
bring a contingent of US Army Stryker vehicles to Kauai so
they can drive up to Kukui Grove Mall as part of a military
recruiting effort? Will our children be climbing over these
weapons platforms as if they were playground equipment? I
hope not and in a minute I’ll tell you why.
But first, there has been two positive recent court events
that may lead to much needed Environmental Impact Statements
concerning the Stryker Brigade on the Big Island and the Superferry
docking at Kahalui Harbor. However, that alone is no assurance
that either will prove effective in deterring these projects.
I think that linking the two projects as a single military
effort and examining their combined dangers is the key to
stopping both.
If the Superferry gets going, and the US military gets to
use it to carry the Stryker Brigade, there is a clear danger
to the public and our environment posed by the spread radioactive
uranium 238 contamination from island to island. How?
The Stryker is a eight wheeled, 20 ton assault platform that
can carry the 105mm cannon and the 25mm Bushmaster machine
gun. Both guns are designed to fire Depleted Uranium (DU)
rounds. DU is radioactive uranium 238. It is very effective
in a projectile and does two things.
It delivers a huge kinetic impact of white hot uranium to
a target. This destroys the target. The uranium projectile
is disintegrated into a windblown powder that gets into the
soil and contaminates nearby equipment and personnel. It also
conveniently gets rid of a wad of “low level”
radioactive waste from an atomic power plant or nuclear weapons
program. As you probably know, there is no safe place to put
this stuff - and selling it to the the military to be fired
somewhere else is a win-win situation for the Department of
Energy. As such, DU munitions are an environmental impact
that keeps on giving and giving.
Why worry about Depleted Uranium? Just ask any Gulf War One
veteran. In 1991, the US allies fired almost a million depleted
uranium rounds (or some 2700 tons). Today, about a third of
those veterans are on disability. Many of the surviving vets
claim they have been permanently disabled by widespread use
of depleted uranium. Moreover, thousands of Iraqi civilian
deaths have been attributed to DU poisoning. Birth defects
here and in Iraq have also been reported.
After the first Gulf war Colonel Doug Rokke was the director
of the Pentagon's depleted uranium clean-up effort in Iraq.
Once in the field he found that an effective clean-up was
unachievable and he was poisoned by DU himself. Rokke now
agrees with the Untied Nations that the use of Depleted Uranium
constitutes a 'war crime'.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority report said that some 500,000
people will die before the end of this century, due to radioactive
debris left in the desert of Iraq. The contamination of the
modern battlefield with radioactive uranium 238 is an intractable
problem with a 4.5 billion year half-life.
The military denies that it has used DU munitions in Hawaii,
but DU weapons debris has been discovered at Schofield Barracks
and documented by the Associated Press. Will these weapons
ever be fired on our islands in the future?
Even if they are not, we will have a significant problem with
vehicles contaminated with uranium 238 when they return from
Iraq (or other theaters of war). No one has demonstrated any
clean-up effort that is sufficient to eliminate the risk to
military personnel or the public by exposure in a DU contaminated
environment.
Weapons platforms that use DU munitions include M113 Armored
Personnel Carriers, the Apache Attack Helicopter, the Cobra
Gunship Helicopter, and 155mm towed Howitzer canons. The Superferry
is designed to carry all of them in its cargo bay.
The builder of the Hawaiian Superferry is Austal USA. They
have constructed other Westpac Express ships that are virtually
identical to the Hawaiian Superferry that conform to the same
military specs.
Some are used to ferry US Marines, and their equipment, between
Okinawa and other Japanese islands. These Westpac Superferries
are painted up to look like civilian ships, making them more
palatable to the Japanese, who have been sensitive about US
occupation of Okinawa since WWII. Is any of the cargo on Okinawa’s
Westpac Express ever contaminated with DU? Will the Hawaiian
Superferry ever be?
Keep in mind that the board of the Superferry corporation
is chaired by John Lehman (Reagan Secretary of the Navy 1981-87),
a veteran of the neo-con Heritage Foundation and Project for
the New American Century. He has been joined on the board
by several associates from his investment consulting firm,
Lehman Inc. Interestingly, one board member, John Shirley,
has been a consultant to Lehman and has 34 years of experience
in senior positions at the Navy Division of Naval Nuclear
Reactors.
Pacific Business News reported on March 26, 2005, that with
Lehman’s expertise, the Superferry plans to operate
Westpac Express service, essentially to carry military equipment
and ferry vehicles from Oahu to the Big Island on a daily
basis. Lehman told PBN that “This logistical plan will
make it easier for soldiers to train when the Stryker Brigade
comes to Hawaii. The brigade will be stationed on Oahu and
conduct training exercises on the Big Island.”
After battle simulations on the Big Island, will military
cargo and vehicles be inspected for traces of radioactivity
before they are loaded onto the Superferry? Will the Superferry
itself be inspected for radioactivity after carrying military
shipments? Where will any required clean-ups be done? Dockside?
It seems prudent to expect the possibility of the spread of
uranium 238 contamination of Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big
Island by battlefield equipment transported on the Superferry
for the Stryker Brigade.
In addition, we need to know if a Superferry, operated by
the Navy, under its protocol for Westpac Express (and not
civilian operating procedures), will be subject to US and
international marine law regarding avoiding ocean mammals.
From what we now know of the Navy’s RIMPAC war games
that took place off Kauai in 2004 and 2006, it is unlikely
that Navy plans on complying with such regulations. In fact
the Navy is now seeking to use the more dangerous Low Frequency
Active Sonar in Hawaiian waters. This is particularly deadly
to ocean mammals. Will the Superferry be equipped with LFA
sonar for Navy use?
The cynical view is that the Superferry can become part of
the Navy’s Westpac Express fleet on the cheap... at
least cheap to the Pentagon. The people of Hawaii will be
footing the bill for the harbor improvements. The investors
(friends of Lehman Inc.) have federal and state guarantees
on their money. Even if the civilian operation goes belly-up,
the Navy can still lease the ships for a song and not have
to deal with Matson or Young Brothers anymore.
We need a Superferry EIS that includes Navy Westpac Express
operations in order to assure the people of Hawaii that the
Superferry will not be a vector contaminating our islands
with radioactive uranium and destroying the lives of sea mammals
with lax Navy operation protocols. Thank you for your time
and attention.
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