#fosses_de_brulage

“They really don’t want this out”: The biggest Iraq War scandal that nobody’s talking about - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2016/02/16/burn_pits

Thousands of soldiers have suffered similar fates since serving in the vicinity of the more than 250 military burn pits that operated at bases throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Many who haven’t succumbed to their illnesses yet have passed along the legacy of their poisoning to their children. “The rate of having a child with birth defects is three times higher for service members who served in those countries,” according to the book.

The impact on local civilian populations is even more widespread. Although collecting data in these war-ravaged areas is extremely difficult, the studies that have been conducted reveal sharp increases in cancer and leukemia rates and skyrocketing numbers of birth defects. The toxic legacies of these burn pits will likely continue to devastate these regions for decades.

So what are the “burn pits”? When the U.S. military set up a base in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of building incinerators to dispose of the thousands of pounds of waste produced each day, they burned the garbage in big holes in the ground. The garbage they constantly burned included “every type of waste imaginable” including “tires, lithium batteries, asbestos insulation, pesticide containers, Styrofoam, metals, paints, plastic, medical waste and even human corpses.”

Here’s where the story gets even more infuriating. As a result of the privatization of many aspects of military operations, the burn pits were operated by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of #Halliburton, the company where Dick #Cheney was CEO before ascending to the White House. During the Bush administration, Halliburton made nearly $40 billion from lucrative government contracts (despite many corruption scandals), Dick Cheney and his corporate allies got incredibly rich, and the soldiers whose lives have likely been destroyed by this reckless operation… are pretty much screwed.

#fosses_de_brulage #crimes #états-unis #Irak

Media : Is the US ignoring military burn pits’ harm to Middle East civilians ?
▻http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2015/oct/media-is-the-us-ignoring-military-burn-pits2019-harm-to-mid

« The US » : comprendre les politiques ET les médias ET les scientifiques,

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/images/2015/ehn-and-tdc/oct/TOP%20burn%20pits.jpg

The U.S. media has failed to expose the civilian toll of recent wars by largely ignoring burn pits’ toxic effects on local people, a U.S. researcher argues in a new report, suggesting the burn pits are this generation’s Agent Orange.

The coverage gap helps legitimize war and overlooks the undeniable humanitarian impacts, said Eric Bonds, an assistant professor of sociology and researcher at the University of Mary Washington.

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, things such as plastics, Styrofoam, electronics and unexploded weapons were burned in large pits, sending toxics into the air and people’s lungs. Bonds surveyed major U.S. newspapers from 2007 to 2014, and found that of 49 stories that mentioned wartime burn pits, only one mentioned civilian impacts on par with that of soldiers.

This “silence and selective attention” of the U.S. media extends to the U.S. government and researchers who are well aware of what toxics in the air might do to local citizens, said Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an independent environmental toxicologist who studies the environmental toll of recent Middle East conflicts.

“This makes me, as a public health researcher, feel extremely uneasy,” said Savabieasfahani, who won the 2015 Rachel Carson prize for her research in the Middle East.

In comparing the open pit burning to Agent Orange used during Vietnam, Bonds points out the U.S. government has performed some small scale cleanup of Agent Orange-contaminated areas, but has never made amends with the Vietnamese who were most affected and said the burn pits are on the same track.

“Even as the U.S. government establishes a ‘burn pit registry’ to study the impacts of toxic pollution on soldiers, it is on course to leave Iraqi and Afghan victims exposed to burning-trash fumes unacknowledged and uncompensated,” Bonds wrote in his study published this month in the journal Environmental Politics.

#criminels #Etats-Unis #fosses_de_brulage #santé #civils #victimes_civiles #moyen-orient #impunité #leadership