|
CounterPunch
September
20, 2002
Toxic Wastes
and the New World Order
They're
Filling Up the World with Garbage
by
MITCHEL COHEN
Part One
Fourteen years ago, the soon-to-be infamous barge,
the Khian Sea, left the territorial waters of the United States
and began circling the oceans in search of a country willing
to accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash.
First it went to the Bahamas, then to
the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and
the Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered to
protest its arrival. No one wanted the millions of pounds of
Philadelphia municipal incinerator ash dumped in their country.
Desperate to unload, the ship's crew
lied about their cargo hoping to catch a government unawares.
Sometimes they identified the ash as "construction material";
other times they said it was "road fill"; often they
said it was "muddy waste." But environmental experts
were generally one step ahead in notifying the recipients; no
one would take it. That is, until it got to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed
dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a permit for the "fertilizer,"
and four thousand tons of the ash was dumped onto the beach in
the town of Gonaives.
It didn't take long for public outcry
to force Haitian officials to suddenly "realize" they
weren't getting fertilizer. They canceled the import permit and
ordered the waste returned to the ship. But the Khian Sea had
already slipped away in the night leaving thousands of tons toxic
ash on the beach. (1)
For two years more the Khian Sea chugged
from country to country trying to dispose of the remaining 10,000
tons of Philadelphia ash. The crew was even ordered to paint
over the barge's name -- not once, but twice. Still, no one was
fooled into taking its toxic cargo. A crew member later testified
that the waste was finally dumped into the Indian Ocean.
The activist environmental group, Greenpeace,
pressured the U.S. government to test the "fertilizer"
abandoned in Haiti. After much wrangling, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency finally did so. The EPA and Greenpeace found
it contained 1,800 pounds of arsenic, 4,300 pounds of cadmium,
and 435,000 pounds of lead, dioxin and other toxins. But no one
would clean it up.
The cost of the cleanup at Gonaives had
been estimated to be around $300,000. Philadelphia had a $130
million budget surplus at that time, which would have been more
than enough to cover the costs. But Philadelphia lawyer Ed Rendell
-- then mayor of that city and now Chairman of the Democratic
National Committee -- refused to put up the funds.(2) Joseph
Paolino, whose company (Joseph Paolino and Sons) had contracted
to transport the waste ash with Amalgamated Shipping, the Khian
Sea's owner, refused as well.
In July of 1992, the U.S. Justice Department
-- under pressure from environmental groups throughout the world
-- finally filed indictments against the two waste traders who
had shipped and dumped the 14,000 tons of Philadelphia incinerator
ash. Similar indictments were brought against three individuals
and four corporations who illegally exported 3,000 tons of hazardous
waste to Bangladesh and Australia, also labeled as "fertilizer."
Strangely, none of the waste traders were charged with dumping
their toxic cargo at sea, nor even with falsely labeling it as
fertilizer and abandoning it on the beaches of Haiti, Bangladesh,
and Australia. They were charged only with lying to a grand jury.
NOTES
1. Rachel's Environment & Health
Weekly #595, April 23, 1998. For background information on the
Khian Sea waste barge, please see the section entitled Project
Return to Sender at www.essentialaction.org.
2. Ibid.
Mitchel Cohen
is the editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of The
Greens/Green Party USA.
He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
Today's Features
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|