Hanford Site: West Coast Radiation Crisis

By Yoichi Shimatsu 5-23-13

The radioactive particles billowing out of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant caught the officers and crew of the USS Ronald Reagan unawares. The gargantuan vessel is equipped with radiation sensors that can identify the spectrum of isotopes from civilian accidents up to all-out nuclear warfare. Although the vessel was cruising at a presumably safe 80 nautical miles from the meltdowns, the shipboard alarms started to buzz wildly.   Carrier Row, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, where the Fukushima-contaminated USS Ronald Reagan was refitted over an 18-month period.   Reconnaissance helicopters roared back to the mother ship, which then carved an arc through the chill waters of the Liman Current. The pride of the U.S. Navy was fleeing the coast of Japan like a wounded whale from a shiver of hungry sharks. The USS Reagan’s support role for Operation Tomodachi sustained far more injuries than any of the 9th Carrier Group’s exercises off the Korean Peninsula. The crews of three helicopter suffered high exposure levels, and sailors operating the ventilation controls have since come down with severe radiation-related symptoms.   A railroad bridge crossing the Columbia River was traversed by the train that transported radioactive waste from the USS Ronald Reagan to the Hanford Site.   Fukushima radiation seeped beyond soft tissue into hard steel. Below the flight deck, nuclear isotopes in the air flowed into the air vents and below-deck ducts, while radioactive seawater surged through its turbine pumps and tubes that suck in seawater for the desalination system and to cool the vessel’s twin nuclear-power reactors. The artificially produced freshwater for washing and drinking aboard ship was soon toxic.    The detection of war-grade plutonium residues sparked rumors of a nuclear strike on Fukushima in undeclared war by an unidentified power. Meanwhile a blanket of censorship was imposed over the condition and whereabouts of the USS Ronald Reagan, which at that moment could have possibly been the first casualty of World War III. Not until months later did confidential leaks emerge from U.S. nonproliferation experts disclosing secret transfers of highly enriched plutonium from Texas blended into mixed-oxide fuel rods for Fukushima Reactors 3 and 4.   Wanapum Hydropower Dam, 30 miles upstream from Hanford, was mysteriously dusted with radioactive isotopes   Over the two years since the March 2011 meltdowns, the radiation-stricken carrier vanished from the sailing schedule, leaving other naval behemoths to take over its missions in the South China Sea, Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. Then this spring, the vessel reappeared in San Diego as if nothing had happened.    Casey Jones, Watch Your Speed    The story behind the USS Ronald Reagan’s long absence from active duty was revealed by a Navy long-timer perched at a bar outside the Bremerton Naval Shipyard in Seattle.   A guard post at Hanford Site keeps out uninvited visitors.   After flushing its pipes while transporting sailors’ cars to Alaska, the carrier was docked for decontamination and refitting along Bremerton’s “Carrier Row”. From early autumn 2011 until mid-March 2013, a period of 18 months, shipyard workers replaced irradiated air ducts, pumps, pipes, gaskets, hoses and electronic controls sensitive to radiation. The work gangs were ordered to prevent release of any contaminated liquid into Puget Sound in compliance with a prior Environmental Agency pollution complaint issued in 2010.    (My dosimeter readings at Bremerton and at several points in Puget Sound confirmed the absence of radiation leakage from the USS Reagan. Frequent sightings of dead Dungeness crabs with floppy legs, however, suggested mortality caused by chemical toxins, probably surfactants used for cleaning the carrier and possibly heavy-metal compounds, possibly chrome, to deter barnacles from the hull.)   A backhoe and steel ring are hauled to Hanford’s leaking 200 storage tank area.   The vast pile of radioactive scrap and barrels of liquid waste were then loaded onto a freight train that rumbled out of the shipyard to a final resting place. Its destination was and still is undisclosed to the news media, the public and state officials. The terminus of that old rail track, say the shipyard workers, is Hanford Site.    Mapping the Terrain    Moral outrage at the disposal of the military’s radioactive hardware in a Department of Energy (DOE) facility supposedly under decommissioning was pushed to the back of my mind by the astonishing natural beauty of the Cascade Range. The four-hour drive from Seattle to Hanford offers a first-hand study in ecology. The lacework of inlets and rocky islands of Puget Sound was carved by glaciers during the Ice Age, when the sea was much lower. Those rivers of ice originated in the Cascades, a sawtooth chain of basalt pillars, remnants of ancient volcanoes. Its ridgeline divides Washington State into two major eco-zones, the temperate rainforest of the Pacific coast and, on the leeward side, arid lands stretching toward the Rockies.   A bulldozer starts to excavate a trench for the military’s nuclear waste. Earlier burial sites can be seen in the background.   The eastern slope of the watershed creates hundreds of streams that merge into the Columbia River, which quenches apple orchards and the green pastures for Angus cattle, dairy cows and bison. The mighty current is slowed by a series of hydropower dams before hitting its lower reaches at Portland, Oregon.    Under a high bluff at Wanapum Dam, about 30 miles northwest of Hanford, my dosimeter readings climbed to 0.16 microsieverts. Downstream, the findings were much lower. When the air is bone-dry, how can evaporated wastewater from leaking tanks at Hanford move so far upstream against the prevailing wind? Why are there no traces of its passage up the gorge? I take mental note of this baffling riddle before moving on.    Nuclear Boneyard   A plutonium processing reactor   Endless flows of water and hydropower are the necessary utilities for the production of nuclear weapons, and the Columbia provides these in abundance to Hanford Site, founded in 1943 under the Manhattan Project. Ringed by rosy red hills peppered with fingers of black basalt and clumps of sage, the first impression of Hanford basin is one of awe at Nature’s raw power rather than fear of a grim manmade Mordor. Technology’s supreme force shrinks against such grandeur; its fabrications scattered like the Mad Hatter’s overturned teacups and sugar cubes alongside the Columbia.    Yet one of those fly specks down there, inside the facility’s 586 square miles (1,517 sq. km) area, is the world’s first plutonium-production reactor. Hanford 100B provided the implosive force for the Trinity test blast and for Fat Man, the hydrogen bomb that annihilated Nagasaki in August 1945. Nagasaki, so much like Puget Sound, with its cathedral, shipyards, parks, saloons and Victorian era facades . . . vanished like dream in a flash of blinding light.   To the right of the power line is a 100 series reactor.   After passing under its rusty bridges in the hills, here on dry pale ground, I spot the railroad track pointing toward the 200 West Area. On lonesome roads outside and inside the vast facility, long-bed trucks haul yellow bulldozers and back hoes, the grave diggers for dead machines. The earth-movers are fitted with glass-enclosed air-filtered cabins, the thinnest of protective shields for the drivers.    In rows of trenches inside that dusty tract are the guts of the USS Ronald Reagan along with the nuclear reactors from 117 decommissioned submarines. The reactor cores are left uncovered so that Russian satellites can verify reductions in America’s strategic arsenal. A retired nuclear-plant operator explains how those reactor cores, too heavy and bulky for the train, are instead transported by barge up the Columbia River. At Port Benson, adjoining Hanford Site, the load is rolled aboard a land carrier with 16-wheel axles and hauled at 5 miles per hour to the nuclear graveyard.         The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton is the only facility that dismantles America’s fleet of aging nuclear submarines. The fuel from the scrapped reactors is sent by rail to a federal storage facility near Idaho Falls. Little is known about the movements of naval cargo because several maritime lanes in Puget Sound are protected by armed guards on speed boats, Navy SEAL divers prowling underwater and surveillance dolphins equipped with electronic sensors and GPS tracking devices. Fishermen, clam diggers and recreational sailors know better than to mess with this security force.    There is no legal mandate to inform Washington State communities of passing reactor-toting barges because the Navy designates the cargo as “low level” waste. Local residents who are curious about these shipments will not find the route map posted at their docks or bridges, so here it is, courtesy of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility:    “The route begins at the (Bremerton) Shipyard and goes though Rich Passage, past Restoration Point, and northerly though Puget Sound. The barge will then move west through the Strait of Juan De Fuca, past Cape Flattery, before turning south and going along the Washington Coast. As the barge makes its way to the mouth of the Columbia River it will not enter the area near the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary known as the Area to Be Avoided.  The barge will then go up the Columbia River following the regular shipping channel that is used for commercial cargo. The ocean tugs turn over the barge to river tugs on the lower Columbia. The river route passes through the navigation locks at the Bonneville, Dalles, John Day, and McCanry dams, until finally reaching the Port of Benton. “ Portlanders are hereby informed that radiation is coming and going, upstream and downstream. It’s been happening since 1986 and will continue indefinitely.    Hearts Afire A point of light is flickering from inside one of the older thermal power plants. Next to a No Entry sign, my travel party passes a pair of binoculars for a closer look. It is not sunlight reflected off a window pane. Incredibly, there’s a massive fire blazing inside the nuclear plant. Flames are blowing out of the open door, which is at least two stories tall and wide enough for several trucks. No black smoke is being emitted, nor do the flames diminish in intensity. Alarms are not blaring and there are no firefighting sirens. Therefore, it must be a gas fire, deliberately set.    The sight of a structure’s innards on fire is dumbfounding. Nothing about this sort of incident has ever been reported in Hanford press releases. What could DOE be up to? Surfacing in my mind’s eye is a flashback of the dosimeter reading at the Wanapum hydropower dam. Hanford is being decommissioned, and the fastest way to clean out a thermal power plant used in the past to incinerate nuclear waste is to torch it. The invisible hot fumes lift the radioactive particles hundreds of meters into the desert sky, and then at nighttime an updraft carries the airborne waste up the Columbia gorge to Wanapum and beyond. Thus, the radioactive residues disappear as if by magic, and the monitors, inspectors and visitors remain none the wiser.    Atmospheric releases blowing out of Hanford are swirling up and down the Columbia gorge, unbeknownst to ranchers, apple growers, restaurant operators, school teachers and truckers along the riverbanks. Nobody on the outside is being warned of the threat. This is still the Wild West, where an outlaw gang like the DOE can kill everyone and anything that stands in their way.    Above the Aquifer     For plant workers, the most fearsome piece of equipment inside plutonium-processing and warhead-production facilities is the glove-box. Since the more delicate operations must be done by hand, glove-boxes have a window and fitted with a pair of holes for insertion from fingers to elbow. In both Fukushima and Hanford, the best way to test exposure levels in nuclear workers is to measure castoff gloves. At a roadside spot convenient for quick relief, a black work glove was lying on the gravel. It registered 0.28 microsieverts, meaning whoever urinated is a dead man walking.    By the 1960s, waste disposal became a major problem at Hanford due to the expanding number of 100 series reactors, along with plutonium processing centers and a power generation plant. Initially, the DOE planned to drill long-term storage caverns into Gable Mountain, a saddle-shaped mound of basalt on the plant’s north side between the Columbia River reactors and the plutonium-enrichment facilities.   The warning sign is posted at a waste disposal site adjoining a fast-flowing drainage ditch.   Geologists, working on the environmental feasibility report, found that Hanford Site sits atop the Pasco Aquifer, the source of well water for towns, ranches and fruit farms inside the big bulge of the Columbia. This discovery prompted the 1978 DOE study of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent repository of nuclear waste, but the proposed site was later abandoned due to political opposition from nearby Las Vegas interests.    The termination of Yucca Mountain led to an untenable situation at the 200 East Tank Farm. There, 177 rusted-out single- and double-shelled tanks “are far gone, past their 20-year lifetime,” said the plant operator. Tritium has been leaking onto the ground and in the air. A greater problem is that solid particles of plutonium and other radioactive elements are settling to the bottom of the wastewater tanks. When atoms are in close proximity, the release of neutrons from radioactive decay can result in a chain reaction.    DOE engineers are anxious about the possibility of an explosive chain reaction at the tank farm similar to the tritium blast that wrecking Fukushima’s Reactor 3. Tritium and deuterium, also known as heavy water, along with hydrogen gas, could blow the tanks apart, sending radioactive steam into the clouds. A much greater threat, said the plant insider, is a downward blast into the Pasco Aquifer, sending ripples of death through hundreds of miles of drinking water for local residents. Leakage from ruptured tanks into the Columbia would doom downstream communities, including Portland and its Silicon Forest industrial parks, anchored by Intel.   Grape vines are planted across the river from Hanford’s nuclear power complex.   To prevent this doomsday scenario, the DOE contracted the Bechtel engineering company to design as unmanned mixing system to prevent the precipitation of plutonium from the wastewater. The controversial design for the vitrification plant uses jet pulses through tubes, called turkey basters, to repeatedly remix the radioactive soup, keeping the radioactive particles in permanent suspension. The design is fraught with weak points that could easily burst under corrosion and high pressure. Cost overruns and construction delays have postponed completion from 2007 to 2022, which is probably much too late to head off a catastrophe.    DOE, the Pentagon and nuclear industry should admit the obvious: Hanford is broken and cannot be fixed. A radical alternative to storage at Hanford needs to be developed rapidly and a crash program will require vast sums of money and the political will to stop all nuclear operations from coast to coast. Permissiveness toward the nuclear industry is suicidal. A new energy policy must begin with zero tolerance for nuclear.     Grape vines are planted across the river from Hanford’s nuclear power complex.   Turn Out the Lights The music’s over for the nuclear industry. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have savaged the myth of cheap and safe power from atom-splitting. Hanford takes this fiasco a step further by implicating the military in nuclear skullduggery. Despite its bloated defense budget, the Pentagon is misappropriating the fiscal resources of the DOE, which must dispose of nuclear-contaminated military hardware. Funds that could otherwise be allocated to replacing the storage tanks at Hanford are being spent on burying submarine reactors. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is facing a radioactive mess of waste, fraud and mismanagement.   A housing development reflects fatal problems in local zoning ordinances.   The ominous situation at the Hanford rust belt is the result of a false sense of national security. Nuclear weapons have been ineffective as an instrument for global stability since their inception. Nuclear deterrence has failed to prevent outbreaks of war and terrorism, and the Cold War would have ended sooner without warheads. Instead of preserving the peace, the nuclear arsenals of the major powers have only spurred on proliferation by minor regional players.    However fast or slow the pace of future nuclear drawdown, the problem of long-term storage remains a formidable challenge, now that Yucca Mountain is nixed. The search for a safe site for a nuclear-waste repository should have started yesterday. The federal government controls millions of acres in sites that have outlived their usefulness, for example, military zones like Fallon test range or Area 51. The Pentagon should use its own turf to store its waste instead of dumping on the hard-pressed DOE. The cost of the relocating naval reactors should be deducted from the inflated military budget and not from the shrinking pockets of taxpayers. Ozone Loss Led to Climate Chaos    If the threat from Fukushima isn’t enough to bear, lethal radioactive releases from Hanford and San Onofre, along with Indian Point and the Napoleonville sinkhole, should motivate Americans to political action against the nuclear lobby and its sycophants. National security and, much more, the very existence of American society and the continent’s natural environment, are coming apart from the effects of high-energy particles in the jet stream, which cause ozone depletion over the Northern Hemisphere. The consequences include the recent tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma, and an epidemic of winter twisters, derecho storms, flooding and drought.     The ribs of a wild faun indicate dangerous radiation levels in coyotes.   The harmful influence of carbon dioxide on global weather, as exaggerated by supporters of TEPCO and the Tennessee Valley Authority, is a convenient ruse to divert attention and funding from the immediate task of shutting down nuclear power.    An end to nuclear tyranny is directly linked to the revival of genuine democracy. A sinister and cynical force within America’s political establishment, economic elite and scientific elect is desperately trying to prevent Americans from recovering this nation’s foundational values of civic duty, ethical responsibility and common sense. Any physicist, engineer, bureaucrat, president or monarch who persists in uttering ultra-absurd nonsense in defense of nuclear power should be hauled away to a padded cell for deprogramming and decommissioning. If anything is going to be buried, it should be that deceiving pack of con artists and scoundrels.    With so many burned-out reactors and morally warped scoundrels to deal with, let’s hear what Nick Santoro (Joe Pesci) of Casino has to say: “A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried there. You gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you’re talking about a half-hour to 45 minutes of digging. And who knows who’s gonna come along at that time? Pretty soon you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fricking night.”    Quick Reads of the Technical Details   Cattle manure along the Hanford fence show extreme levels of radiation ingestion.   The Columbia River, once a life-giver for the Pacific Northwest, has become the bringer of death on an unimaginable scale. Testing of radiation levels in its waters is not being done by any government agency. My dosimeter readings at the Hanford and on the mid-reaches of the Columbia cannot be a substitute for a wider monitoring program, but they do point to the rising threat of nuclear contamination.    Even with scientific Geiger counters, the testing of water remains an elusive task. Gamma rays are reflected in water, throwing off readings by as much as 20 times lower than the actual level of contamination. Thus, the only way for a layman to make estimates in the field is by measuring biological accumulation in plants and animals.    Dosimeter readings on the bluffs northwest of Hanford showed low levels, due to the prevailing wind and lack of airborne moisture.    At a riverine chokepoint on the north bend between Reactors D and H, a wide variation in readings, from 0.08 to 0.28 microsieverts, with the highest in sage, indicated different rates of water absorption by various species of flora.   A reactor of the 100 series is on the horizon behind the sign.   At points downriver, near the southern tip of Hanford, the measurements on different plant species ran consistently in the 0.28 range, equivalent to coastal areas inside the Fukushima exclusion area (9 km from the meltdowns). A ribcage from a faun devoured by coyotes showed remarkably high contamination, suggesting higher levels inside predators.    The high water from the spring snowmelt prevented access to underwater vegetation. The readings along the outer bank of the Columbia, however, indicate levels dangerous to downstream communities and coastal populations in northern Oregon.    Author: Yoichi Shimatsu is a Hong Kong-based science writer and environmental health consultant who provides herbal therapy to Fukushima residents.

When Is It OK To Kill?

Is it okay to kill? I don’t mean a bug in your house, a snake in your garage, or a deer in the woods

Deer tastes good; you may not know if that snake in your garage is poisonous; and bugs are home invaders.
I mean is it okay to kill a man, a human being, a person? Again, I don’t mean someone trying to kill you, rob your business, rape your wife, harm your children, or break into your house. Killing someone might be perfectly justified in those circumstances if it involves defense against aggression.

Specifically, is it okay to kill someone who has not threatened or committed violence or aggression against you, your family, your friends, your neighborhood, anyone you know, or any American you don’t know?
No? Then –

• What if he is not an American?
• What if he lives thousands of miles away from America?
• What if he adheres to a religion that is different from that of most Americans?
• What if he is a darker color than most Americans?
• What if he speaks a language that most Americans don’t understand?
• What if he has habits that seem peculiar to most Americans?
• What if he holds to a political ideology that doesn’t resemble America’s?
• What if he smells different than most Americans?

Does someone having one or more of these characteristics alone mean it is okay to kill him?
Another no? Then –

• What if the U.S. government says he is a terrorist?
• What if the U.S. government says he is an insurgent?
• What if the U.S. government says he is a communist?
• What if the U.S. government says he is an extremist?
• What if the U.S. government says he is a potential threat?
• What if the U.S. government says he hates our freedoms?
• What if the U.S. government says he is the enemy?
• What if the U.S. government says he is a bad guy?

Does the U.S. government merely saying any of these things make it okay to kill him?
No again? Then –

• What if the U.S. government says it is a matter of national security?
• What if the U.S. government says it is in the national interest?
• What if the U.S. government says it is of strategic concern?
• What if the U.S. government says it has secret information that makes it necessary?
• What if the U.S. government says it is part of the president’s grand strategic vision?
• What if the U.S. government says it is essential to maintaining hegemony?
• What if the U.S. government says it is just a part of fighting terrorism?
• What if the U.S. government says it is important to foreign policy objectives?

Does the U.S. government merely saying any of these things make it okay to kill him?
Still no? Then –

• What if the U.S. military gives you a nice uniform?
• What if the U.S. military gives you a gun and ammunition?
• What if the U.S. military pays for your college education?
• What if the U.S. military provides you with free medical and dental care?
• What if the U.S. military offers you citizenship in exchange for service?
• What if the U.S. military gives you an enlistment bonus?
• What if the U.S. military gives you generous combat pay?
• What if the U.S. military assists you with repaying your student loans?
• What if the U.S. military offers you liberal retirement benefits?

Does the U.S. military doing any of these things make it okay to kill him?
Of course not? Then –

• Why are some so quick to make apologies for U.S. military personnel who kill for the state in unjust wars?
• Why are some so quick to excuse U.S. military personnel who kill while not defending the United States?
• Why are some so quick to justify U.S. military personnel who kill people thousands of miles away that are no threat to the United States?
• Why are some so quick to defend U.S. military personnel who kill people that resent and resist being invaded, bombed, occupied, or "liberated"?
• Why are some so quick to blame the government, the politicians, and the defense contractors and exempt the U.S. military personnel who do the actual killing?

For years now I have heard the excuses. But what are these apologists, excusers, justifiers, defenders, and exempters really saying?

• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you can’t find a job.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you can’t make it in college.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are economically disadvantaged.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if your father was in the military.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are patriotic.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are ignorant.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are poor.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are uneducated.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you have no resources available.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you think you are doing the right thing.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you were raised to never question the military.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you were never taught otherwise.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you are just obeying orders.
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you think you are avenging 9/11?
• It is okay to kill for the U.S. government in an unjust war if you think you are defending our freedoms.

I have been given every one of these excuses at least ten times. The first part of the excuse is generally omitted, but why should it be? Is not this exactly what people are saying?

None of this means that the despicable creatures in the U.S. government who send American boys to war, and the equally loathsome creatures outside of the U.S. government who cheer them on, are not to be condemned as well. But those aren’t the people that are applauded in airports, called heroes, and thanked for their service.

But why is it that these excuses only seem to be valid for American soldiers? Why is it that soldiers from other countries aren’t lauded as heroes for killing Americans if they offer up one of the excuses that are commonly used to justify killings carried out by American soldiers? 

Some agree with everything I have said thus far, but think that if soldiers are draftees then it changes everything. I know this is the case because they write and tell me. I have written about the culpability of drafted soldiers in my article "Murder Is Still Murder." But again, why is it that it is only drafted American soldiers who can kill with impunity? I don’t think that apologists for draftees realize what they are saying. To excuse the actions of soldiers because they were drafted is to say that the state can somehow sanctify murder. 

Although the U.S. military is looking for a few good men to unjustly kill for the state, it is not okay to kill, even if the military advertises itself as a global force for good.

The Orwellian Paradigm

Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television’s gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell’s 1984.
Contrary to Postman’s critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell’s profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought.

WAR IS PEACE
Formulating the Language of Perpetual War – From AUMF to “Associates of Associates.” 

The semantic deception began shortly after September 11, 2001. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda,” Bush said in his State of the Union address, “but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated (emphasis added).”

The defining feature of this rhetoric is that it declares war on a particular method of violence used by disaffected states or groups. In fact, the phrase “war on terror” functions as what semiotics calls a floating signifier, a term devoid of any real meaning and thus open to any interpretation.

Terrorism has no shape, mass, or boundary; it is an abstraction, a tactic of asymmetrical warfare used to achieve political goals. Imagine if Franklin D. Roosevelt had declared “war on surprise attacks” in the wake Pearl Harbor, or if Lyndon Johnson had vowed to defeat guerilla warfare in Vietnam. This linguistic construct, therefore, ensures an open-ended conflict with no conceivable end.

Unperturbed by this paradox, British Prime Minister Tony Blair dutifully reiterated that, “the fact is we are at war with terrorism.” But the bombing sorties over Afghanistan had barely begun when the label morphed into “The Long War,” and then the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.” And now, the targeted killings program has been “extended to militant groups” with no connection to September 11, 2001 – that is, “associates of associates.” Removing the requirement for any linkage to al-Qaeda gives the government unfettered discretion to assassinate anyone without due process of law.

This phraseology makes it impossible to distinguish the dialectical concepts of war and peace. It makes peace synonymous with a state of warfare. Peace is defined in terms of a generational commitment to war and, in turn, war is framed as a necessity to keep the peace. In other words, War is Peace. 

This is the lexicon of perpetual war, the vocabulary of a conflict that is never meant to end. “You can’t end the war,” as one official admits to the Washington Post, “if you keep adding people to the enemy who are not actually part of the original enemy.”

Aggression is Self-Defense –Waging Full Scale War to Prevent War.
Operation Iraqi Freedom represented phase two in a linguistic framework meant to fuse two diametrically opposite concepts in the public mind: preemption and prevention.
The purpose of preemptive war is to thwart or neutralize an imminent attack – one that is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” – without absorbing the first blow. Conversely, preventive war is pure aggression – it is not tied to any notion of imminence and is primarily directed at securing some strategic advantage. Thus, the dimension of time is the primary difference between the former and the latter.

The Bush Doctrine blurred the lines between preventive and preemptive wars. It represented a seismic shift in national security strategy from one dominated by the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment, to one that now enshrined preventive war as a permanent feature of US policy. During his 2002 commencement speech at West Point, Bush stated:
“If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited too long…Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge…” (emphasis added).”

Furthermore, the 2006 US National Security Strategy Paper states that “If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self-defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack” (emphasis added). In true Newspeak fashion, such a conception of “preemptive action” inverts the traditional model of self-defense under customary international law by rendering imminence completely irrelevant. In doing so, it strips self-defense of any practical meaning.

 It conflates preventive war with preemptive war; it packages aggression as self-defense.
But as Cheney’s one-percent doctrine later revealed, the threat need not even be likely, let alone imminent, for self-defense (read aggression) to apply. According to this logic, even a one percent chance of an event occurring is sufficient to treat it as a certainty. “It’s not about our analysis,” Cheney reportedly said, “…It’s about our response (emphasis added).” Put simply, the likelihood of an event occurring is not a necessary prerequisite to wage war. This embeds the supreme international crime of aggressive war in the fabric of national security policy. Aggression is self-defense, Winston.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
The Obama Administration gave the War on Terror a facelift by rebranding it “Overseas Contingency Operations.” But the sanitizing nomenclature has done little to halt the institutionalization of the apparatus of tyranny– from Kill Lists to Disposition Matrices to Drone Playbooks to indefinite detentions to persecuting whistleblowers to pervasive domestic surveillance. These developments are strikingly at odds with the post-9/11 metanarrative that frames this conflict as a clash between the forces of freedom and despotism. As Bush phrased it:

“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this Chamber, a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

From this point onward, spreading ‘freedom and democracy’ abroad became the rallying point for a nation enraptured by its new messianic role. But it soon became apparent that freedom at home cannot coexist with hyper-militarism abroad.

Accusation Is Guilt – Killing You for Your Own Safety.
What could be more destructive to the cherished freedoms that make America a “shining city on a hill” than giving a “high level official” the power to kill Americans on US soil without any due process, accountability or transparency?

 What could be more Orwellian than asserting such dictatorial authority, which has always been the hallmark of totalitarian states, in the name of protecting the public’s safety? The cost of war is not measured solely in terms of blood and treasure. War also corrodes human morality to a point where even the most inhumane acts become perfectly acceptable. In fact, summary executions without due process and the right to a fair trial served as one of the justifications for removing Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Not only does the recent Department of Justice White Paper resoundingly affirm this power grab, it also destroys the foundation of Anglo-American jurisprudence by nullifying the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ It eviscerates the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits any deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It obliterates the protections afforded by the Sixth Amendment, including the “right to a speedy and public trial,” by asserting that government allegations alone, based on secret evidence, are sufficient to establish guilt.

Accusation is guilt, Winston. As Glenn Greenwald cogently observes:
“But of course, when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when “an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US.

This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that (emphasis in original).”

Rarely do apologists for the normalization of extra-judicial murder realize that this represents a permanent erosion of core liberties, an ever-lasting debasement of the Bill of Rights. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it,” Orwell said. “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” Secret assassinations are here to stay.

The Great Shift Inward — From Enemy Combatants to Homegrown Terrorists.
Under international law, captured enemy soldiers are considered Prisoners of War (POWs), and thus shielded by the Geneva Conventions and the jus cogens prohibition against torture. Furthermore, terrorism was traditionally treated as a federal criminal offense before 9/11. Accordingly, those accused of terrorism could still invoke the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the right to counsel, right to a jury trial, right to confront one’s accusers, right against self-incrimination and conviction based on guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

As the 2002 Padilla Case demonstrated, however, the enemy combatant doctrine creates a category of detainees that are neither POWs nor terrorists. As such, they are beyond the reach of both the Bill of Rights and Geneva Conventions. This undefined label essentially circumvents the safeguards of the legal system and allows the state to treat the accused like a medieval King would a serf. It sets the groundwork for a parallel gulag system in the United States operating on the model of indefinite detention without charge or trial, no access to a lawyer, and confessions obtained through torture.

And then came Attorney General Holder’s recent premonition about a new threat: the “homegrown terrorist.” Speaking to ABC news, Holder’s statement signals a decisive shift in the script governing the ongoing campaign:

“It’s a very serious threat. I think what it says is that the scope, our scope, has to be broadened. We can’t think that it’s just a bunch of people in caves in some part of the world. We have to be concerned about the homeland to the same extent that we are worried about the threat coming from overseas” (emphasis added).

The implications of this statement are staggering, for it turns the United States into the new “battlefield.” Systems of tyranny perfected abroad are always turned inward. It only took a decade for the same tactics of warfare that were previously restricted to foreign countries to now being applied domestically.

Responding to Senator Rand Paul’s question whether the President can authorize drone strikes on US citizens on domestic soil, Holder revealingly states that “It is possible…to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” Even though the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits military involvement in domestic law enforcement, notice how Holder sees no problem with the military, not police, using lethal force against Americans on US soil.

Furthermore, when combined with the DOJ White Paper’s assertion that drone assassinations do “not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future,” it becomes frighteningly clear that an anonymous “high level official” can deploy these “faceless ambassadors of death” to strike you dead anytime, even absent any imminent or likely threat. This gives government the power of God. It repudiates every principle of liberty this constitutional republic was founded upon.

This is no exaggeration, as Holder’s follow-up response to Senator Paul clarifies: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer to that question is no (emphasis added).” As any lawyer can attest, Holder’s heavily qualified statement creates more ambiguity.

Note the following points: (1) Holder is not saying that the President cannot kill an American on US soil. The phrasing of his question is much narrower, which can arguably be interpreted as allowing the President to kill without using “weaponized drones;” (2) most important of all, his statement implies that the President does have the authority to kill Americans “engaged in combat.”

Hence, the issue of how “combat” is defined carries great importance. In this regard, William Grigg brilliantly points out that al-Awlaki’s assassination sets a precedent that stretches the interpretation of “combat” to a point where there are few, if any, restraints on the Presidents power to kill:

“Combat” can consist of expressing support for Muslims mounting armed resistance against U.S. military aggression, which was the supposed crime committed by Anwar al-Awlaki, or sharing the surname and DNA of a known enemy of the state, which was the offense committed by Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdel. Under the rules of engagement used by the Obama Regime in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, any “military-age” male found within a targeted “kill zone” is likewise designated a “combatant,” albeit usually after the fact.”

More than half a century ago Orwell had warned us that the scourge of war eventually turns inward. “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war”, therefore, has become misleading” (emphasis added). Stated differently, war becomes a buzzword for concealing a rather insidious internal dynamic, one that treats those who oppose the status quo – the intrepid whistleblower, the outspoken journalist, the vocal activist – as a legitimate target for persecution.

Dissent Is Treason.
It is precisely the ability to express unpopular opinions and the autonomy to diverge from convention without fear of persecution that makes any society free. As Edward R. Murrow reminded us during the McCarthy era, dissent should never be confused with disloyalty because “we are not descended from fearful men […] who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.” That same principle holds true today, regardless of the nature of the claimed emergency.

Bradley Manning was caged like an animal under insanity inducing conditions for more than two and a half yearswithout trial. Manning’s treatment is an epiphenomenon of the current administration’s unprecedented war against whistleblowers, which makes an example of any lowly prole who dare expose corruption at the highest levels of the Inner Party. John Kiriakou rots in prison for the “crime” of informing the people about the CIA’s illegal waterboarding, whereas John Brennan ascends to the heights of power for endorsing torture and assassinations.

The operative effect of such incidents is to create a culture of intimidation and silence by making it a “thoughtcrime” to deviate from the official version of events.
Investigative journalist Chris Hedges points out that the NDAA (the Homeland Battlefield Bill) “permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who ‘substantially support’—an undefined legal term—al-Qaida, the Taliban or ‘associated forces,’ again a term that is legally undefined.”

This represents a clear step toward the criminalization of activities that were formerly protected under the First Amendment. It equates any meaningful dissent with treason.
As if this weren’t bad enough, some government employees are told to view “protests” as a form of “low-level terrorism,” and consider “Fury at the West for reasons ranging from personal problems to global policies of the U.S.” as a potential indicator of terrorist activity.

Recall that the PATRIOT Act was also billed a necessary counterterrorism tool. Even though it vastly expanded the state’s investigative power without any attendant checks and balances, Congress was given no time to read it due to the claimed exigency of the circumstances. Almost a decade later, however, its application has been expanded to ordinary, non-terrorism cases like drug dealing and child pornography.

Understanding how this process works is vital, for tyranny always treads a familiar path: first it clamors for unfettered authority to resolve some overriding problem; then it consolidates that power; next it gradually expands its vocabulary and application; finally, it turns around and uses that power to persecute everyone. Indeed, those who wield unrestrained power will inevitably abuse it.

Big Brother Is Watching You – Argus, TrapWire, Stingray, EARS and Total Information Awareness. 

Reporting on DARPA’s most recent project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text (EARS), Wired magazine reports that “Darpa wants to make systems so accurate, you’ll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the conversations you ever have.” It’s a “little freaky,” the author admits, since it gives those who wield this technology total omniscience – the power to know everything about everyone at any time.

The parallels to 1984 are obvious: “Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull(emphasis added).” The only vestige of privacy is in one’s own mind – for now at least.

But even though the average citizen’s privacy has been eviscerated, the government continues to operate at unprecedented levels of secrecy. As the Associated Press reports:
…the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office.The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

In that context, privacy is not dead per se; it is flourishing insofar as the government’s inner workings are concerned.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality…and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything…”

Like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the opinion molders – the handful of corporations that control the flow of information – sanitize reality to cover for even the worst cases of executive wrongdoing. Their paternalism regards people as mere casual observers to be controlled, not stakeholders to be informed about the democratic process. Their function is to control the narrative of events, for “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Oceania Has Always Never Been At War With East Asia.
Orwell explained doublethink as “holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed…”

A recently declassified memorandum written by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, almost a year and a half before Operation Iraqi Freedom, adds to the plethora of evidence that Rumsfeld, along with the rest of the neoconservative war hawks, concocted false pretexts to market the invasion of Iraq. The same Donald Rumsfeld, who invoked Saddam Hussein’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) as a casus belli to invade Iraq in 2003, previously armed the same Iraqi dictator with chemical and biological weapons as Ronald Reagans Middle East envoy during the 1980s. Oceania was never at war with East Asia.

But this was an inconvenient fact in the prelude to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and therefore had to be forgotten. It never happened. “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
Conclusion – The Grand Contradiction. 

In a historical irony, Orwell’s proposed preface to Animal Farm about censorship in the English press was suppressed and remained undiscovered for years after his death. In it, Orwell mounts a principled defense of intellectual freedom during a time when the western press brooked no criticism of Joseph Stalin or his murderous regime.

 “These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you,” Orwell warned. “Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists.” Make a habit of endorsing drone strikes in far off lands, and perhaps the next drone will show up in your neighborhood.

In conclusion, the grand contradiction lurking behind all the rhetorical smoke screens is simply this: in trying to rid the world of evil using the tactics of evil, we unleash even greater horrors; we become what we seek to destroy.

Faisal Moghul is an attorney. He can be reached at fez.moghul1@gmail.com

Sequester Cuts From Poor Gives To War Efforts

Chemtrails Frightening Lesser Known Facts

Earth-Heal
By David Richards

“In the last ten years, respiratory disease in the US has moved from 8th to 3rd highest cause of death. Asthma rates have more than doubled in the western world and Alzheimer’s’ disease, a condition that is caused by aluminum poisoning, has also skyrocketed. ”

If we don’t organize to stop this scourge, we deserve what we get.
There has been an increasing awareness of chemtrails in recent years. Protests have been organized, movies have been released and whistle blowers have come forward. Most significantly, former Los Angeles FBI chief Ted Gunderson made a video denouncing chemtrails shortly before his death in 2011.

The heavy spraying began in NATO countries in the late 90s, but today chemtrails are being recorded pretty much everywhere, from Russia to Brazil, South Korea to Cuba. This is a program of extraordinary scope and importance. However, while we know a chemtrail program exists, there is very little hard information on how it functions and what its goals are.
I have been researching chemtrails and, while I don’t yet have the full picture, I present this information will plug a few holes.

• Most politicians are as oblivious as we are. AC Griffin, a former CIA and NSA operative, says: ‘The monies that go into CIA projects don’t necessarily come from congressional appropriations. The congress as a whole is completely oblivious to the aerosol program. They are afraid to ask.’

People on the inside who oppose the program are punished. ‘One of the key people who designed the aerosol is now sitting in federal penitentiary. They still go to him to ask him questions.’




Griffin also revealed that former Clinton era Navy Chief of Naval Operations, Jeremy Boorda, left, was murdered because he opposed the program. Boorda was found dead in 1996 with three shotgun wounds in his chest. The authorities were quick to claim he committed suicide, and the autopsy results were never released to the public.

• Commercial airliners are involved in spraying. In the very beginning, the aerosols were sprayed solely by military planes, but now the program has been expanded and commercial airliners have been outfitted with aerosol units controlled by computers and satellites. Photos provide evidence of this, like this Lufthansa jet flying over the US (below,left).

In the airline industry, the operation is known as Project Cloverfield. In 2000, a high level executive at an American airline revealed his office was visited by two men from an unnamed government agency:



‘They told us that the government was going to pay our airline, along with others, to release special chemicals from commercial aircraft. When asked what the chemicals were and why we were going to spray them, they told us that information was given on a need-to-know basis and we weren’t cleared for it…We were made to sign non-disclosure forms that basically stated that we would go to prison if we told anyone what we knew.’

Delivery by commercial aircraft raises the possibility that many countries have not given consent to being sprayed, and may be unaware it’s even happening
.
• Weather manipulation is a daily occurrence – Chemtrails are used in conjunction with HAARP for geo-engineering (the technical term for weather control). Much is written about the ability to create disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis against an enemy, but we don’t realize that weather patterns are manipulated all the time. Scott Stevens was a TV weatherman in the US but quit his job upon realizing that this was happening on a nigh daily basis.

GAMBLING ON FOOD: ‘WEATHER DERIVATIVES”

Global warming is the cover story for the increasingly severe and bizarre weather worldwide.
• Geo-engineering is used to force GMO crops on the world. Manufactured floods and droughts damage harvests and put farmers out of business.

Monsanto has the patent for GMO seeds that are drought and flood resistant, as well as resistant to the poisonous effects of aluminum, one of the key metals in chemtrails. Any farmer who refuses to grow GMO crops will not be able to guarantee a good harvest and will go out of business. Even worse, Monsanto’s end game is to force what are termed ‘Terminator’ seeds on farmers worldwide. These crops don’t produce seeds, meaning the farmer has to buy new seeds from Monsanto every planting season!

• Weather Derivatives are chemtrail insurance. – You may wonder how the big players protect their interests from weather warfare. Say, how does George Soros, who owns thousands of acres of farmland in America, protect his profits from engineered drought?



Companies use financial instruments to hedge against risk of adverse weather conditions. They first appeared in the late-nineties, the same time the heavy spraying started! Michael Agne, a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, explains how they work:

‘You’re betting there’s going to be a weather disaster within a particular time-frame, at a particular location, and when it does happen there’s going to be a big pay-off.’ Obviously, insiders can make big bucks making bets based on the geo-engineering timetable.

CREATING A SICKLY DEPENDENT POPULATION

• Chemtrails are a ‘soft kill’ operation – Soft kill attacks primarily aim to disable and weaken the enemy, not kill him. As Dr. Len Horowitz has explained, wars are an inefficient way to lower population numbers because they destroy infrastructure. The preferable scenario is to create a sick population dependent on the military-medical-industrial complex for their health. In this way, you have population control, make vast fortunes doing it and keep the infrastructure intact.

Chemtrails are a multi-pronged attack.

Firstly, the metallic salts used in the aerosols are highly toxic and require our bodies to waste tremendous amounts of energy removing them. Millions of people cannot do it. In the last ten years, respiratory disease in the US has moved from 8th to 3rd highest cause of death. Asthma rates have more than doubled in the western world and Alzheimer’s’ disease, a condition that is caused by aluminum poisoning, has also skyrocketed.

The second thing is the release of diseases. A high placed military insider claims that bacteria and viruses are freeze-dried and placed on fine filaments for release. The metals released along with the diseases heat up from the sun, creating a perfect environment for the bacteria and viruses to thrive in the air supply.

Third, chemtrails contain nano technological weapons. Surprisingly, this fact has remained so low-key in the alternative media. It is well proven by researchers like Dr. Hildegarde Staninger and former government scientist Clifford Carnicom.

The nanotech consists of genetically modified organisms that are basically bio-robots. When we inhale them, they take up residence in our bodies and live as parasites. When the infestation becomes advanced, the individual develops what is termed Morgellons disease. He is so weak that he can barely do anything and suffers an array of bizarre and ghastly symptoms: scabs that don’t heal, hair that falls out and is replaced by pseudo hair and unceasing crawling sensations beneath the skin.
MORE HERE>>

Effects of Digital Milennium Copyright Act on Blogs

 Greetings

The following "take down" notice and action was taken on an article that I republished in its entirety, but someone claimed that I had plagiarized the article.  The article that I posted, with videos, related to Dr Chris Busy and his positions on Radiation and claims that the Military Industrial Complex personnel were libeling him and sites posting information related to that were being given DMCA notices in an effort to silence him.

Definitions have not changed, plagiarism,  would be the case IF I had claimed the published work as my own......which I did not.

The notice below from GOOGLE is standard format and should be chilling.

Truth matters not, the content of the article does.......the watchers are everywhere if they are able to fund staff that searches out names, words or topics that could be offensive to the Dominant Society. 

Imagine, this tiny, unimportant Blog earning a DMCA take down......crazy world....and just who's money is that doing this funding, hmmmmm?

I just checked out Chilling Effects website, quite an interesting world happening out there.

Thanks

Toni

take down notice below
______________


Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.

A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_counternotice&product=blogger.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.

If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

Affected URLs:

http://natural-health-home-remedies.blogspot.com/2013/02/christopher-busby-libeled-by-military.html