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August 7, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
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
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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
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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August
7, 2002
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US
Navy Killing Children
in Nevada?
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Last June, Adam Jernee died from acute lymphocytic
leukemia, a remorselessly fast-moving cancer of the blood. He
was 8-years old and had fought the cancer for more than two years
of his short life.
Adam and his father lived in Fallon,
Nevada. This small ranching town of 8,000 people in the Carson
Desert 50 miles east of Reno may have the highest per capita
rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. The children of Fallon
are more than 100 times more likely to be stricken with leukemia
then children elsewhere in country.
Last week, another Fallon child was diagnosed
with leukemia. That makes 17 kids from Fallon who have been contracted
leukemia since 1997. Adam is the second child to have died within
the past year. In September, Stephanie Sands succumbed to the
cancer after battling it for two years. She was 21.
Cancer isn't the only problem. Kids and
adults in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County are coming
down with a myriad of other rare diseases, such as Myelodysplastic
Syndrome and aplastic anemia. These diseases also relentlessly
attack the bone marrow.
The kinds of cancers and other illnesses
that have cropped up in the Fallon area are almost certainly
caused by some kind of exposure to toxic chemicals. The source
of that poison almost certainly sits a few miles outside the
town of Fallon--somewhere on the 240,000-acre Fallon Naval Air
Station, one of the Navy's largest bombing ranges, and home of
the Top Gun fighter pilot training school.
But good luck to getting the Navy to
take responsibility or even look very hard to find out what the
problem might be. Years have passed and the Navy has done next
to nothing, except deny culpability and try bully anyone who
demands answers from naval brass. Apparently the Navy doesn't
even care if the cancers are killing children of its own officers.
The Navy has known about high levels of cancer among the children
of Fallon workers and Navy officers since at least 1991; yet,
the Pentagon has done little except try to conceal information
on levels of pollution at the base and to stiff-arm investigators.
"Our frustration level is very high,"
says Brenda Gross, who 6-year old son has been sick with leukemia
for two years. "This should have been found and stopped
a long time ago. But you can't get anything out of the Navy."
Local residents think they know the answer:
jet fuel spills and fuel dumping by Navy aircraft. JP-8 jet fuel,
a combination of kerosene and benzene, is a known carcinogen
and has been linked to leukemia and other bone marrow diseases.
The Navy has summarily ruled out jet
fuel as a cause of the Fallon cancers, but records from the state
of Nevada show that the Fallon air base has at least 26 toxic
waste sites, 16 of them contaminated by jet fuel. Most of the
Fallon area is playa, a dry lakebed over shallow groundwater.
According to the Geological Survey, several distinct plumes of
jet fuel have entered the water table beneath the air base.
Nearby residents charge that Navy fighter
pilots routinely dump excess fuel into the desert prior to landing
at Fallon. The Navy says this is a rare occurrence, with emergency
fuel dumps happening about three times a year. However, Navy
records show that in a single instance a few years ago more than
800 gallons was dumped into the Carson playa.
In 2000 alone, according to the Navy's
own statistics, Fallon-based fighters and bombers consumed 34
million gallons of jet fuel, much of it pumped in on a jet fuel
pipeline, which runs from Sparks, Nevada to Fallon. Locals and
environmentalists say that the pipeline regularly leaks the poisonous
gas into the desert.
Publicly, the Navy contends that the
pipeline spills are minor and inconsequential, averaging less
than 45 gallons a year. But two whistleblowers at the air base
told Navy investigators that more than 30,000 gallons of fuel
had leaked from the pipeline and from a truck in 1988 and 1989
alone. Initially, the Navy dismissed the allegations. But later
admitted that there had in fact been two major spills.
While Navy officials claim that the jet
fuel is not the cause of the Fallon cancers, they admit that
there's been no independent monitoring of jet fuel inventories
at the base, even though federal officials demanded an oversight
system in 1989.
There have been persistent rumors that
Navy contractors have been dumping fuel at the base in order
to increase fuel purchases. Because of the lack of oversight,
the Navy has almost no idea how much fuel it has on the base
or where it goes. In 1990, the base commander, Cpt. Rex Rackowitz,
admitted that he couldn't account for the whereabouts of more
than 350,000 gallons of fuel.
Another source of jet fuel contamination
of Fallon area water are the three old underground storage tanks.
A report filed with Congress two years ago revealed that underground
saltwater has seriously corroded the 45-year old tanks (each
with a capacity of more than a half million gallons) and noted
that the tanks lack any kind of overfill and leak protection.
"I lean toward the base as the cause,"
says John Posey, a former aircraft mechanic at Fallon, whose
daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in 1990. "Jet fuel
dumping, radar and electronic emissions, jet fuel spills. All
that is dangerous stuff."
Despite the rising cancer rate and the
deaths, the people of Fallon have gotten few answers from state
and federal government. The parents of sick kids feel they are
being stonewalled. "I think there's a potential cover up
here," said Richard Jernee, Adam's father. "I don't
have faith in any of these people. How many kids have to die
before we get to the truth?"
The jet fuel spills may well be one source
of the cancers. But another study suggests that there may be
a more ominous explanation. A 1994 survey of groundwater in the
Fallon area by the US Geological Survey showed that 31 or 73
drinking water wells showed high concentrations of radioactive
minerals. It was only revealed to the public last September by
a former USGS staffer who thought it might have a bearing on
the Fallon illnesses.
The radiation may in part come from depleted
uranium expended by bombs and missiles at the Fallon bombing
ranges. Navy statistics show that more than 7 million pounds
of ordinance is dropped on the Fallon bombing ranges, including
the notoriously cratered B-20 site, every year.
Now the Navy wants to move some of its
Vieques bombing training missions to Fallon. It recently renewed
its 20-year lease on the B-20 bombing range and acquired another
50,000 acres of BLM lands for target practice. "The Cold
War is over," says Kalynda Tilges of the Reno-based Citizen
Alert. "The Navy is ignoring the consequences of its pollution,
and the nation continues to throw money into a big, black hole."
Fallon isn't the only airbase with a
leukemia cluster. Seven children have recently been diagnosed
with childhood leukemia in Sierra Vista, Arizona, adjacent to
the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
"When are these people going to
do something real?" says Floyd Sands, whose daughter Stephanie
died of leukemia last year. I haven't seen them do anything real
so far."
So much for Bush's bluster about Iraq
being an international demon-state for poisoning its own people.
Today's
Features
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
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