MILITARY CONTAMINATION AT OVERSEAS BASES

[Polly Parks <pparks@igc.org>]

This article is posted with permission of Inside Washington Publications
copyright 1998.

Defense Environmental Alert, Vol. 6, No. 3 -- February 10, 1998

International Environment

ORGANIZATION CALLS FOR ACTION ON ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS AT OVERSEAS BASES

An international environmental organization is calling on the Defense and
State departments to implement procedures for determining the environmental
effects of military-related actions abroad. The group, Friends of the
Earth, is asking the departments to implement a 20-year-old executive order
as the management tool for setting up the procedures. Otherwise, DoD and
the State Department face a "congressional hammering" if they fail to act,
Friends of the Earth President Brent Blackwelder said in an interview.

Partly because the executive order has not been implemented, "the Department
of Defense is abrogating its leadership responsibilities in managing the
environmental effects of its mission outside our nation's borders," charges
a Jan. 22 letter from Blackwelder to Defense Secretary William Cohen.
Friends of the Earth sent a similar letter to Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright. Further, sources argue that there could be diplomatic,
commercial, and national security consequences unless the U.S. government
changes its approach to overseas cleanups.

U.S. and foreign environmentalists have previously criticized DoD's overseas
cleanup efforts, especially the military's failure to provide information or
conduct cleanup at former bases in Panama and the Philippines. And a
DOD-brokered deal with Canada to compensate the country for U.S. military
contamination through arms credits was highly controversial. and rejected
last year by Congress for failing to coincide with any U.S. legal
obligations. DOD in its fiscal year 1999 budget request is again asking for
Congress to approve the Canadian deal, which would funnel $100 million over
10 years in arms credits as compensation.

"Tensions with former and active host nations have reached the point that
they are bypassing the Department of State and Department of Defense and
going directly to Congress -- even on as basic an issue as information
release," says the letter to the State Department. The military has been
reluctant and unwilling to release information on contamination at overseas
installations, which they know exist, argues a military environmental
consultant familiar with overseas cleanup issues. Several host nations are
continuing to actively follow the issue, this source says. DoD is now
"confronting serious military-related environmental problems with Bermuda,
Canada, Okinawa, Panama, the Philippines and India," the letter to DoD says.
A comprehensive and senior-level policy is needed, the consultant says. At
stake are diplomatic, commercial, and national security repercussions, argue
sources, with one source saying that it should not be looked at "strictly
from the stand point that the environment is a moral issue." For example,
the U.S. government's failure to address environmental contamination issues
at bases in the Philippines could have repercussions as the two governments
are negotiating a status of forces agreement that must be ratified by the
Philippine legislature, this source says. In another case, a drug
trafficking interdiction center that the United State is supporting must go
through a referendum in Panama, the environmental consultant source says.
The commercial factors at stake are the environmental assessment and cleanup
markets that a U.S. policy favoring such actions would create, according to
the source.

Friends of the Earth is advocating the use of former President Jimmy
Carter's Executive Order 12114 as a mechanism for triggering the flow of
information on environment issues that will be needed to make decisions
regarding overseas bases. However, the group does not claim the executive
order is a panacea to the environmental problems confronting DoD. The
letter to DoD describes E.O. 12114 as "a critical and elemental tool to
afford decision makers, including yourself [Cohen] and the Joints Chief of
Staff, the information they need to reflect and make prescient diplomatic,
national security, and international commercial and export promotion
decisions." The executive order orders a structure for State Department-led
exchanges of information between federal agencies and other countries, and
requires federal agencies that are taking significant federal actions abroad
to provide environmental impact statements and other similar documents.

A spokesperson with the State Department would not comment on the letter. A
DoD spokesman was not familiar with the issue.

Polly Parks