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Wikileaks: They’re not just for revealing how Norm Coleman stores unprotected, unencrypted donor data anymore.
We mentioned yesterday the varied mix of leaked documents that the Wikileaks.org Web site posts, including a U.S. Army memo on soldiers’ exposure to toxins. Today that Army memo and the Wikileaks site share center stage in a Duluth News Tribune story (via), along with a member of the 148th Air National Guard in Duluth who was one of thousands exposed to a toxic heap of burning trash in Iraq.
Here’s an excerpt:
Retired Chief Master Sgt. Ken McDonald of the 148th Air National Guard in Duluth said there was no way to avoid exposure to the massive open-air burn pit at the Balad air base in Iraq.
“We drove by it every day,” he said. “It was pretty nasty.”
McDonald, along with thousands of other troops who have served at Balad, may have been exposed to toxic waste from the pit, according to an Air Force memo that was leaked Tuesday on Wikileaks, a Web site that receives documents from anonymous sources to help expose government misdeeds.
“In my professional opinion, the known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and chronic health hazard to our troops and local population,” Lt. Col. James R. Elliott, the chief of aeromedical services, wrote in the memo.
The memo, written in December 2006, said the pit had been identified as a health concern for several years, with one assessor calling it “the worst environmental site I have personally visited” in 10 years.
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Comment posted March 12, 2009 @ 11:49 am
And the fires keep on burning:
I’m looking at my screen saver here. It’s a picture of a girl about eight; maybe nine. She has long black braids and carrying a pink rucksack, school bag on her shoulders…white letters on her navy jacket spell out her school emblem in white embroidery; in letters I cannot recognize. The bell-bottom denims flap around her ankles and I can make out Snoopy graffics on her socks.
She walks head down, past two burned out cars smouldering and what looks like a plastic shopping cart… their smoke her companion on her journey down a main street in Baghdad. She has an old-beyond-her-years, determined look on her face. She was obviously on her way to school one day, maybe a couple years ago when I first spotted her AP image. Made her my screen saver to remind me…
More than smoke gets in your eyes after burning and bombings done by our military for anyone in the region.Toxic indeed for all those living or occupying, near the burnings and rubble of Iraq. And now back again too, in Afghanistan?
Is she still alive? I’ll never know.
Soldiers families worry. Oberstar is worried too and enters into the storyline.
I call the girl in the picture Nada. It’s a girl’s name. It also means No in other languages…so it goes.
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