Will DLNR approve Army helicopter training on Mauna Kea?

The staff of the State of Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources is recommending approval of an Army request for a permit to conduct high altitude helicopter training on the sacred mountain Mauna Kea.  The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports:

State Department of Land and Natural Resources staff is recommending approval of a month’s worth of high-altitude helicopter training on the slopes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa for Army pilots and crews deploying to Afghanistan in January.

The Army’s request for a “right-of-way” permit for training in October on state conservation land is scheduled to come before the Board of Land and Natural Resources on Friday.

The 9 a.m. meeting will be held at the Kalanimoku building on Punchbowl Street. Acceptance of an environmental assessment, finding of “no significant impact,” and the permit for the Hawaii Island training are being sought by the Army.

[…]

The permit request is for October training only. Army officials said a decision will have to be made whether to pursue a longer-term permit for high-altitude training on Hawaii Island to include other services, such as the Hawaii National Guard.

The meeting of the DLNR will be Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9am at the Kalanimoku BuildingKAHEA and the Mauna Kea protectors have been mobilizing opposition to this plan.  Testify in opposition to the helicopter training on the sacred temple Mauna Kea.

Army has no plans for live fire in Makua

The new commanding general of the U.S. Army Pacific may be softening his position with regard to live fire training in Makua. The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports:

There may be no Army live-fire training in Makua Valley for years to come, and possibly never again, the new commanding general of the U.S. Army in the Pacific said.

Lt. Gen. Francis J. Wiercinski, who took over the Fort Shafter-based command in March, said he’s focusing on providing replacement live-fire training for Hawaii soldiers through range improvements at Schofield Barracks and at Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii island.

“I firmly believe that if those things stay on track at Schofield and PTA, we will not have to live fire in Makua,” Wiercinski said in a recent interview.

Additionally, Wiercinski is putting on hold his predecessor’s plan to convert Makua into a “world-class” roadside bomb and counterinsurgency training center as the Army continues to deal with litigation that has prevented live fire in the 4,190-acre Waianae Coast valley since 2004.

“I’m not going to move forward with disrupting anything or trying to add another element to this until we get the first steps done,” he said. “I don’t want to complicate what’s already in the court system.”

But Makua is still being held hostage as insurance against delays in the expansion of training areas in Lihu’e (Schofield) and Pohakuloa, which pits communities and islands against one another.  There have been major changes in the army’s command structure that shifted more training and operations to the U.S. Army Pacific:

U.S. Army Pacific oversees issues such as Makua Valley, but also has taken on greater responsibilities across the region.

Troop levels in Alaska and Hawaii have increased as numbers have dropped in South Korea. A series of sub-commands has been added in Hawaii that has bolstered Fort Shafter’s command and control role as an administrative and deployable headquarters.

In years past, U.S. Army Pacific “never really participated in exercises as a headquarters, never participated in operations as a headquarters,” Wiercinski said.

It was always a service component command, meaning it did all of the administrative functions.

“For the first time in the last couple of years, it’s become operationalized,” Wiercinski said. “It gives (U.S. Pacific Command) an extra set of headquarters to be able to do things at a moment’s notice.”

This shift has meant an expansion of Fort Shafter as the Army Pacific headquarters:

In 2001, Fort Shafter had 1,194 soldier “billets,” or positions, and a total population of 4,077, including families and civilian workers, officials said.

That population now stands at 6,306 military members with a total Fort Shafter census of 13,172, according to the command.

While the U.S. tries to reinforce its military presence in east Asia in order to contain China, it is also withdrawing and realigning forces to Guam and Hawai’i in response to protest in Korea, Japan and Okinawa.  The realignment of forces in Korea is having negative repercussions for Hawai’i:

The Eighth Army is becoming a combat unit in a return to its Korean War-era roots.

Fort Shafter will exercise the service component command change with the Eighth Army in August.

For an increase in soldiers in Hawaii, firing ranges have been added at Schofield and a Battle Area Complex for Stryker vehicle training is expected to be completed in late 2012, officials said.

Meanwhile, a new Infantry Platoon Battle Area at PTA that could permanently replace Makua Valley might be ready for use in 2014 or 2015, the Army said.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

 

Pimping Pohakuloa

The Hawaii Tribune Herald reports that Governor Abercrombie, once a black-beret-wearing campus radical, is offering up virgin areas of Hawaiʻi to service the military:

Abercrombie floated the possibility of building public-private housing in West Hawaii for military families who will relocate from Okinawa when the Marine base there moves sometime in the next few years. That base was scheduled to relocate in 2014 but it has been delayed.

Abercrombie said he had similar military housing in his former house district on Oahu, which helped lead to the lowest unemployment rate in the country — he said it was 2 percent at one point.

Another possibility could be off-base housing for troops preparing for deployment at the increasingly strategic Pohakuloa Training Area.

“PTA will be the center for training in the Pacific in the 21st century,” Abercrombie said.

“It’s an interesting concept,” said Lt. Col. Rolland Niles, the Pohakuloa Training Area Garrison Commander. Niles said an off-base area with a military exchange and other amenities would be welcome.

“It could be a tremendous opportunity,” he said.

According to the article “Abercrombie: Pohakuloa vs. Guam” in the Hawaii Business blog, the Governor is talking smack and muscling in on Guam’s action:

The big news – oddly missing from media reports – was Gov. Abercrombie’s pronouncements about current plans (now largely underway) to move tens of thousands of Marines from Okinawa. “The idea was to take the Marines out of Okinawa and move them to Guam,” Abercrombie said. “But there’s no way that’s going to work.”

According to the Governor, Guam’s all wrong. “They don’t have the infrastructure; they don’t have the capacity; they don’t have the space to train; and they don’t have the EIS. It’s not going to work.”

And, of course, he has an alternative in mind: Pohakuloa on the Big Island. After all, he points out, Pohakuloa is already a major training facility; it’s near the Pacific Command and the resources of Pearl Harbor and Schofield Barracks; and, most importantly, it’s in Hawaii. That’s particularly important in today’s all volunteer military, where retention is as important as recruitment. The Governor wryly considered the preferences of young soldiers: “You ask them where they want to end up, on Guam, or on the Kona Coast?”

Of course, Abercrombie’s remarks – especially before this audience – were strategic. First, he pointed out that the current arrangement of U.S. military resources – in a crescent that runs up the West Coast, through Alaska and the Aleutians, and down through Japan and Korea – is an artifact of the Cold War, when our focus was on the Soviet Union. “Today, we need to think of it as bowl,” he said, gesturing with his fingers to indicate an arc running from California, through Hawaii, and reaching all the way to the Indian Ocean. Not coincidentally, that’s pretty much the jurisdiction of the Pacific Command.

It sounds like a turf war between rival pimps.  But the affected people of Hawai’i and Guam whose land, culture and environment will be taken and destroyed are never asked nor listened to when they object.

Under the leadership of William Aila, the Department of Land and Natural Resources is at least following the law by requiring the Army to complete an environmental assessment of proposed helicopter high altitude training in the protected areas of the sacred mountain Mauna Kea.   The Honolulu Star Advertiser headline should have been “State requires Army to conduct environmental review”, but instead it revealed its pro-military bias with the headline “State hobbles Army training”.  The article suggests that Abercrombie may be helping to facilitate the approval of the military training on the mountain.  Native Hawaiians and environmentalists are livid about the prospect of military helicopters using Mauna Kea.  In the past the hot-dogging pilots violated protected areas and landed in the Mauna Kea Ice Age Preserve.

As reported earlier on this site, an investigation of a crash at the Colorado helicopter training site was critical of this type of training:

The article cites an investigation of the crash that says “The investigation was also critical of the training program, designed to prepare Army pilots for Afghanistan… the program “focuses almost exclusively” on landing at high elevations even though helicopters have little need to do that in Afghanistan.”

This comes at a time when a new law goes into effect creating a Public Land Development Corporation to promote “public-private investments” to exploit public lands, most of which are the stolen lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom.  The other large portion of the Hawaiian national lands are occupied by the U.S. military (approximately 56% of the military controlled lands in Hawai’i are so-called “ceded lands”).   As Arnie Saiki writes in the Statehood Hawai’i blog:

SB 1555–DLNR’s Public Land Optimization Plan: PLOP, Colonialism 4.0 Sneak-Attack

Next week, on July 1st, 2011, Act 55 goes into effect in Hawaii, an act that gives the State of Hawaii, through the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), a new for-profit entity directed by DLNR, the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT), and the Department of Budget and Finance (DBF), headed by William Aila,  Richard Lim, and Kalbert K. Young, respectively, called the PUBLIC LAND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION to establish a PUBLIC LAND OPTIMIZATION PLAN that will create public-private investment opportunities to develop all public lands currently under the authority of DLNR, which could include the controversial “ceded” lands, the roughly 1.8 million acres of Crown Lands that were  “ceded” to the Territory during the fraudulent transfer to the U.S by the Republic of Hawaii, and transferred to the administration of the State of Hawaii during statehood.

 

Army’s ‘Big Lie’ in Hawai’i

Jim Albertini of Malu ‘Aina released the following message in response to the Army’s announcement that it will renege on a decision to no longer use Makua for live fire training:

The Big Lie!

Lt. General Francis J. Wiercinski, Commanding General U.S. Army Pacific, was quoted in an Associated Press news story on June 19, 2011 as saying: “… I don’t think anybody does it better than us when it comes to protecting the environment and being cognizant and protective of cultural sites.”

Adolf Hitler coined the phrase “The Big Lie” in 1925 for a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”  Sixteen years later, on Jan. 12, 1941 Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,  wrote: “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it … even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

Someone needs to tell General Wiercinski that he looks ridiculous. A few examples:

  1. In Hawaii, the Army secretively tested chemical and biological weapons, including deadly Sarin nerve gas) in Hilo’s watershed, and other sites in Hawaii.  The Army did this on State land in the Waiakea Forest Reserve, with a lease to do “weather” testing.  The Army Lied.
  2. The Army secretly used Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons in Hawaii and contaminated the land with radiation.  For years the Army denied using such weapons in Hawaii.  How much DU was used, and the extent of radiation contamination in Hawaii, is still in question.  The Army has been stonewalling community concerns on DU.
  3. More than 14 million live-rounds are fired annually at the Pohakuloa Training Area  (PTA) according to an Army EIS report of several years ago.  The live rounds include everything from small arms fire, to cannons, fighter jets, bombers, etc. And recent news reports talk of doubling the training at PTA. How many live rounds fired annually are planned for PTA?  Where is the bonding of funds for clean-up when the base is shut down? And General, please explain how bombing the land and waging wars for oil is protecting the environment.

General Wiercinski, if you want to be taken seriously, our organization challenges you to support and fund comprehensive, independent testing and monitoring with citizen oversight lead by Dr. Lorrin Pang, MD (retired Army Medical Corps) to determine the full extent of radiation contamination at PTA, Makua Valley, and Schofield Barracks.

Finally, our organization does not appreciate your attempt to pit one island’s opposition against another.  We are opposed to pushing U.S. desecration and contamination from one site to another in Hawaii or anywhere.  We want an end to U.S. occupation in Hawaii and the restoration of the Hawaii nation.  We want the U.S. to stop bombing Hawaii and clean up its opala.  We want to put an end to U.S. desecration and contamination of all sacred cultural sites.  We do not want the U.S. training anywhere to do to others what the U.S. has already done to Hawaii: overthrow and occupy its government and nation, desecrate its sacred sites, and contaminate its air, land, water, people, plants, and animals with military toxins.

The truth is the U.S. military, (Army included) is the world’s largest polluter and destroyer (not protector) of the environment and culture the world has ever seen.

Jim Albertini

Malu ‘Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action

P.O.Box AB

Kurtistown, Hawai’i 96760

phone: 808-966-7622

email: JA@interpac.net

Visit us on the web at: www.malu-aina.org

Drones arrive in Hawaiʻi – “the future of aviation”?

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that the Hawaiʻi Army National Guard recently got four Shadow 200 RQ-7B unmanned aerial vehicles.    While these UAVs are unarmed, the military is looking for ways to weaponize them.

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Source: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20110525_hawaii_guard_gets_flock_of_shadow_UAVs.html#

Hawaii Guard gets flock of Shadow UAVs

Isle soldiers will be ready to use the unmanned aircraft should they deploy to Afghanistan as expected in 2013

By William Cole

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, May 25, 2011

A 24-year-old private first class piloted a new $300,000 Hawaii Army National Guard aircraft over Wheeler Army Airfield Tuesday — from inside a Humvee parked on the tarmac.

The Shadow 200 RQ-7B unmanned aerial vehicle, its 38-horsepower engine revved up like a leaf blower on steroids, leapt off its pneumatic catapult and soared over Wheeler and the Waianae Range as its swiveling camera tracked cars driving on the military base.

An unveiling ceremony was held Tuesday for the National Guard’s four new Shadows, a UAV that has had widespread success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The Shadow represents the future of aviation,” Lt. Col. Neal Mitsuyoshi, commander of the 29th Brigade Special Troops Battalion, said at the ceremony.

Officials said National Guard brigades in 11 states are receiving Shadows this year, bringing the total to Guard units in 30 states.

The Army previously said it had fielded 98 Shadows and the Marines had 11, with the “workhorse” UAV exceeding 600,000 combat hours in Iraq and Afghanistan since it was first introduced into the Army.

The Marine Corps said it has no UAVs in Hawaii, while the active-duty 25th Infantry Division has Shadow UAVs in Iraq, officials said.

The vehicle’s arrival to the National Guard follows an announcement in April that more than 2,000 Hawaii soldiers with the 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, along with 1,600 others from Guam and Arizona, could deploy to Afghanistan in 2013.

It would be the third brigade-level deployment for the Hawaii National Guard to a combat zone since 2004.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man – Who pays?

Today’s Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that a planned Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment center has been delayed due to difficulty in the consultation process regarding the preservation of historic properties:

The reason for the long delay lies with the VA’s difficulty in navigating the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and Section 106 of that act, which requires federal agencies to take into account effects on historic properties, and consult with state and other preservation agencies over their proposed actions.

[…]

Pua Aiu, administrator for the State Historic Preservation Division, said it’s taken a long time to gain consensus on the project because it’s going in on the “relatively pristine” Tripler grounds, an area that’s eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

“And when that happens, (consultation) normally takes a long time,” Aiu said.

Aiu said it’s not unusual for an agency to come in and “they believe their project is really good, and we believe their project is really good, but they have to accommodate the historic preservation rules. It’s a federal law.”

The VA came in initially with a project “that was simply unacceptable to be put on a property that’s eligible for the (National Register),” she said.

Veterans’ advocates say that the facility is desperately needed and criticize the “bureaucratic impasse” that has delayed the project.

There is no doubt that the epidemic of PTSD America’s wars have unleashed on our communities desperately needs attention. But as the New York Times article “A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man” makes painfully clear, PTSD is merely a symptom of the profound moral, spiritual and social “disease” of war and militarism.  Treating symptoms will not cure the disease.

And why should Hawai’i’s cultural resources, environment and communities have to pay the terrible costs of war, whether they are in Makiki, Moanalua, Lihu’e (Schofield), Makua, or Pohakuloa?

Here is a sample of an excellent article in the New York Times about the Stryker Brigade murders of civilians in Afghanistan:

April 27, 2011

A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man

By LUKE MOGELSON

Last May, in the small village of Qualaday in western Kandahar Province, a young Army lieutenant and his sergeants met with several elders to discuss the recent killing of a local mullah. The desert heat was fierce, and the elders led the soldiers across their village to sit under the shade of nearby trees. Three days had passed since they were last there; during that interval the place appeared to have been abandoned. When they sat down, some of the soldiers removed their helmets, and a few elders their sandals and turbans. A freelance photographer was permitted to make an audio recording of the discussion. The lieutenant wanted to know where everyone had gone. One elder explained: People left because they were afraid.

“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his legs and badly disfigured his face. The soldiers claimed that Allah Dad was trying to throw a grenade at them. Two days after the killing, however, a company commander attended a council during which the district leader announced that people believed the incident had been staged and that the Americans had planted the grenade in order to justify a murder.

“Tell them it’s important that not only the people in this village know, but the people in surrounding villages know, that this guy was shot because he took an aggressive action against coalition forces,” the lieutenant told his interpreter. “We didn’t just [expletive] come over and just shoot him randomly. We don’t do that.”

Last month, in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.

The story that has been told so far — by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan — is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders — parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem.

On the day of Jeremy Morlock’s confession, I watched as several of his friends and relatives took the stand to vouch movingly for his character and struggle to fathom how the young man they knew could have committed the crimes to which he confessed. I watched, too, as Morlock himself recounted his failed ambition to follow in the footsteps of his father, a former master sergeant who died in a boating accident not long before Morlock deployed. “If he had been alive when I went to Afghanistan,” Morlock told the judge, “I know that would have made a difference. . . . I realize now that I wasn’t fully prepared for the reality of war as it was being fought in Afghanistan.”

Among the witnesses who testified that day was Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes. Mestrovic was allowed to study an internal 500-page inquiry into the Fifth Stryker Brigade’s “command climate,” the purpose of which was to assess whether shortcomings in leadership might be partly to blame for the murders, and to identify any officers who should be held to account. In court, Mestrovic said he was shocked by how dysfunctional the brigade appeared to have been, and he added, “In a dysfunctional unit, we cannot predict who will be the deviant — but we can predict deviance.”

I met with Mestrovic later that evening and asked him to elaborate. Before becoming involved in Morlock’s case, he served as an expert witness at trials related to Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad canal killings and Operation Iron Triangle, a case with some similarities to this one, in which American soldiers in Iraq murdered three unarmed noncombatants. He excoriated the tendency of the Army — and the news media — to blame such crimes on “a few bad apples” or a “rogue platoon.” Close examination of these events, Mestrovic argued, invariably reveals that the simplistic bad-actor explanation “doesn’t fit the picture.”

Of course, while the murders in southern Afghanistan reflect most glaringly upon the men who committed them, the need to revisit these crimes goes beyond questions of culpability and motive in one platoon. As with Abu Ghraib and Haditha and My Lai, it’s hard not to consider how such acts also open a window onto the corroding conflicts themselves. This isn’t to suggest that military personnel are behaving similarly throughout Afghanistan as a result of the conditions there; it is only to say that 10 years into an unconventional war whose end does not appear imminent, the murder of civilians by troops that are supposed to be defending them might reveal more than the deviance of a few young soldiers in a combat zone.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Oahu residents can expect more helicopter noise

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that O’ahu residents should expect more helicopter noise:

Some additional helicopter noise is coming the way of residents in the vicinity of H-1 and Moanalua freeways.

The Army said it will conduct a new round of training missions Friday through May 24 to the Big Island in preparation for a January deployment to Afghanistan.

The training will result in an increase in air traffic as helicopters depart Wheeler Army Airfield, and fly east along the H-1 corridor, a route mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, officials said.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Army violated Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations regarding Depleted Uranium

The Army appears to have violated Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations by conducting activities to remove and disturb depleted uranium contamination in the Schofield Range on O’ahu.  A letter from the NRC to Lieutenant General Rick Lynch, dated 4/5/11 “APPARENT VIOLATION OF U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION REGULATIONS AND REQUEST FOR PREDECISIONAL ENFORCEMENT CONFERENCE” states:

On March 4, 2010, a resident of Hawaii filed a request with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to take enforcement action against the Army if the NRC found that the Army had possessed or released depleted uranium (DU) to the environment without a license. The NRC reviewed this request pursuant to 10 CFR § 2.206, the process by which an individual may petition the NRC to take an enforcement action.

Based on the NRC’s review of the information in its possession, it appears that the Army is in violation of 10 CFR § 40.3, “License Requirements,” in that it appears that the Army is in possession of DU at multiple installations without proper NRC authorization in the form of a specific or general license issued by the NRC. It also appears that the Army performed decommissioning activities at the Schofield Barracks installation without NRC authorization.

As a result:

The described apparent violation is being considered for escalated enforcement action in accordance with the NRC Enforcement Policy.

A “Predecisional Enforcement Conference” will be held on May 10th, which the public may observe by toll free number and online:

The NRC will be holding a Predecisional Enforcement Conference with the US Army Installation Management Command on Tuesday May 10, 2011 at 2:00 pm CST in the NRC’s Regional office in Arlington, Texas. The purpose of the Predecisional Enforcement Conference is to discuss apparent violations of NRC requirements involving possession of source material (depleted uranium from Davy Crockett spotting rounds) without a license.

The public is invited to observe this meeting and will have one or more opportunities to communicate with the NRC after the business portion, but before the meeting is adjourned.

Interested members of the public can participate in this meeting via a toll-free teleconference and view presentations via a website. For details, please contact the individuals listed in the attached Meeting Notice.  The Meeting Notice is also available at the NRC’s website at: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/index.cfm

Below are a series of email correspondence between Cory Harden and the NRC.

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From: prvs=092cb6278=Dominick.Orlando@nrc.gov [mailto:prvs=092cb6278=Dominick.Orlando@nrc.gov] On Behalf Of Orlando, Dominick
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11:45 PM
To: Cory (Martha) Harden
Cc: Michalak, Paul
Subject: RE: Predecisional Enforcement Conference with US Army IMCOM

Ms. Hardin

Attached is the letter to the Army regarding the apparent violation.  I think this would be the most useful for your review as it will be the basis for the discussion during the Predecisional Enforcement Conference.

Dominick Orlando

From: Cory (Martha) Harden [mailto:mh@interpac.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 4:42 AM
To: Orlando, Dominick
Subject: RE: Predecisional Enforcement Conference with US Army IMCOM

Hello Dominick Orlando,

Thank you for the notice. Can you recommend any documents on ADAMS that would be good to read beforehand? Amy ML numbers you have would be helpful.

Thank you,

Cory Harden
PO Box 10265
Hilo, Occupied Hawai’i 96721
808-968-8965
mh@interpac.net

From: prvs=0909e5355=Dominick.Orlando@nrc.gov [mailto:prvs=0909e5355=Dominick.Orlando@nrc.gov] On Behalf Of Orlando, Dominick
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 7:46 AM
To: mh@interpac.net; panghi@hawaii.rr.com; Geomike5@att.net; imua-hawaii@hawaii.rr.com; ja@interpac.net; lanny.sinkin@gmail.com; Honerlah, Hans B NAB02; russell.takata@doh.hawaii.gov
Cc: Michalak, Paul; Burgess, Michele; McConnell, Keith; Summers, Robert; McIntyre, David; Klukan, Brett; Sexton, Kimberly; Joustra, Judith; Roberts, Mark; Lipa, Christine; LaFranzo, Michael; Rodriguez, Lionel; Spitzberg, Blair; Evans, Robert; Schlapper, Gerald; robert.cherry@us.army.mil
Subject: Predecisional Enforcement Conference with US Army IMCOM

Good Morning

The NRC will be holding a Predecisional Enforcement Conference with the US Army Installation Management Command on Tuesday May 10, 2011 at 2:00 pm CST in the NRC’s Regional office in Arlington, Texas. The purpose of the Predecisional Enforcement Conference is to discuss apparent violations of NRC requirements involving possession of source material (depleted uranium from Davy Crockett spotting rounds) without a license.

The public is invited to observe this meeting and will have one or more opportunities to communicate with the NRC after the business portion, but before the meeting is adjourned.

Interested members of the public can participate in this meeting via a toll-free teleconference and view presentations via a website. For details, please contact the individuals listed in the attached Meeting Notice.  The Meeting Notice is also available at the NRC’s website at: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/index.cfm

Thank you

Dominick Orlando, Senior Project Manager
Special Projects Branch
Decommissioning and Uranium Recovery Licensing Directorate
Division of Waste Management and Environmental Protection
__._,_.___

Attachment(s) from Cory (Martha) Harden
1 of 1 File(s)
ARMYPEC.pdf

The Army’s persistent Depleted Uranium problem in Hawai’i

Joan Conrow has written an excellent synopsis of the military’s depleted uranium (DU) contamination issue in Hawai’i on the Civil Beat website.   Here’s an excerpt of her article:

The Army prohibited all training with DU in 1996; however, munitions containing DU remain in wide use.

Although the Army for years denied that it had ever used DU munitions in Hawaii, contractors found 15 tail assemblies from the M101 spotting rounds while clearing a firing range at Schofield Barracks in 2005. Even then the Army did not publicly disclose the presence of DU in Hawaii. The issue came to light inadvertently in 2006, when Earthjustice discovered communication about DU in Army e-mails subpoenaed as part of the ongoing litigation over the use of Makua as a live fire training facility.

The Army subsequently acknowledged that it trained soldiers on the Davy Crockett weapon in Hawaii and at least seven other states during the 1960s.

As a result, some residents have developed a deep distrust of the Army’s statements regarding DU, even though the Army maintains it is committed to transparency on the issue.

Impacts

It’s unclear how much DU is located in the Islands, or exactly where. Some 29,318 M101 spotting rounds containing 12,232 pounds of DU remain unaccounted for on American installations, according to the Army’s permit application. In Hawaii, the Army’s initial surveys were conducted at just three installations — Schofield, PTA and Makua — and the effort was severely limited by dense vegetation, rugged terrain and what the military characterized as “safety considerations” due to unexploded ordnance.

It’s also unclear just how DU may be affecting human health and the environment in Hawaii, as well as other parts of the world where it was used in combat. Its potentially severe and long-lasting impacts are the core of a growing controversy over its use on the battlefield and its presence in the Islands.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Here’s a related article from August 2010 on the Army’s application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an after-the-fact license to “possess” DU at ranges in Hawai’i.

Hawai’i Island Appeal for Solidarity

Activists from Hawai’i island issued an appeal for solidarity in the face of a massive military expansion planned for Pohakuloa.   Please send solidarity statements to ja@interpac.net. Mahalo!

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For Public Release concerning U.S. military training at Pohakuloa
See list of individual signers below

Further contact: Jim Albertini 966-7622
Contact: Malu `Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box AB Kurtistown, Hawai`i 96760.
Phone (808) 966-7622.  Email ja@interpac.net http://www.malu-aina.org

Appeal for Solidarity!

We (the undersigned) appeal to all Hawaii peace, justice, environment, and independence activists, to the general public, and to local and state government officials.  We ask that you stand in solidarity with us on Moku O Keawe in resistance to major U.S. military expansion at the 133,000-acre Pohakuloa Training Area, and now even helicopter assault training for Afghanistan on our sacred mountains –Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.

We congratulate the Malama Makua community organization for its victory in stopping all military live fire in Makua Valley on Oahu.  But Makua is still held hostage by the military and used to train for ongoing U.S. wars of aggression.

We are opposed to pushing U.S. desecration and contamination from one site to another.  We want an end to U.S. occupation in Hawaii and the restoration of the Hawaii nation.  We want the U.S. to stop bombing Hawaii and clean up its opala.  We want to put an end to U.S. desecration and contamination of all sacred cultural sites.  We do not want the U.S. training anywhere to do to others what the U.S. has already done to Hawaii: overthrow and occupy its government and nation, desecrate its sacred sites, and contaminate its air, land, water, people, plants, and animals with military toxins.

Restore the Hawaii Nation!

End U.S. Terrorism!
Military Clean-Up NOT Build Up!
Stop all the Wars!  End all Occupations!

Signers
Isaac Harp, Kelii “Skippy” Ioane, Hanalei Fergerstrom,
Kihei Soli Niheu, Ali`i Sir Kaliko Kanaele, Calvin Kaleiwahea,
Lloyd Buell, Danny Li, Stephen Paulmier, Ronald Fujiyoshi,
Moanikeala Akaka, Tomas Belsky,
Samuel Kaleleiki, Jim Albertini