US military burn pits built on chemical weapons facilities tied to soldiers' illness

[unhappycamper]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/16/us-military-burn-pits-chemical-weapons-cancer-illness-iraq-afghanistan-veterans

Though the US government disputes it, new evidence shows a link between service in Iraq and Afghanistan and cancers and untreatable bronchial illnesses

US military burn pits built on chemical weapons facilities tied to soldiers' illness
Lauren Walker
Tuesday 16 February 2016 09.18 EST

In 2007, shortly after vice-president Joe Biden learned that his eldest son would be deployed to Iraq, the then-presidential hopeful turned to a modest crowd at the Iowa state fair and admitted that he didn’t want Beau to go. “But I tell you what,” he said, his family lined up behind him. “I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years and so how we leave makes a big difference.”

Beau arrived in Iraq the following year, and spent the next several months serving as a Jag officer at Camp Victory, just outside of the Baghdad airport, and Joint Base Balad, nearly 40 miles north of Baghdad. Though he returned home safely in September 2009, he woke up one day a few months later with an inexplicable headache, numbness in his limbs and paralysis on one side of his body. Beau had suffered a mild stroke. His health deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Less than two years later, he died at the age of 46.

~snip~

From the moment the US launched its campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon ordered the use of open-air burn pits to dispose of the wars’ massive volume of waste. The military relied heavily upon these sprawling ditches, which burned around the clock to consume the tens or even hundreds of tons of junk generated daily. By May 2003, according to Hickman, there were more than 250 burn pits at US bases peppered across the two nations.

The Department of Defense has long recognized that burn pits pose a substantial danger, especially to the environment. Waste management guidance in 1978, for instance, said that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, like incinerators. But the department charged ahead anyway and hired contractors like Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) to manage the pits. And up until 2009, the military didn’t have comprehensive standards in place governing what could or could not be burned. Centcom and the Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment regarding the standards or lack thereof.

[PatrickforO]

1. Why am I not surprised?

Keep funneling our tax money to companies like KBR. That's all this is - just neoliberal privatization and deregulation.

Our tax dollars at work!

[democrank]

2. "Though the U.S.government disputes it..."

As someone who watched the government`s decades-long denial of the awful effects of exposure to Agent Orange and as someone who recently lost a beloved Vietnam Vet to the devastating results of exposure to Agent Orange, my heart breaks for these soldiers who were exposed to burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It will be a long, long fight.

[democrank]

3. Kick

for the soldiers

[MisterP]

4. they disputed Agent Orange and leishmaniasis, whitecoats for hire thundering up and down

that this was like crystal-gazing or ball lightning

then it was quietly buried