“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.” – Aldous Huxley

Ever since the Persian Gulf War 15 years ago, countless spokespersons for the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Veterans Affairs have insisted they are intent upon giving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, veterans and war veterans the best medical care available.

Meanwhile, scores of US, United Nations and foreign politicians and military officials have constantly expressed immense concern for potentially millions of innocent civilian victims of the wars in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, relatively little has been done worldwide to track their deaths, console family survivors or obtain health care for the wounded, maimed and sick. The combined ill and the dead from those four wars are estimated in the millions with no exacting figures available. Knowledge about sicknesses caused by the war in Bosnia-Serbia is scarce.

And, what makes US and allied officials far more culpable is this. The environmental hazards foreign civilians and US and allied service members have been exposed to and sickened by are largely generated by US and allied bombings, munitions and even medicines aimed at protecting service members.

They include: radioactive dust from depleted uranium munitions, deadly chemical warfare gases released by US bombings of Iraqi bunkers, oil well fires during the first Gulf War, pollution of European and Middle Eastern foreign air and water supplies from wartime explosions and fires, pesticides, fumes from specialized military vehicle paint, and disease carrying insects.

The Pentagon’s and the British military’s mandatory use of the controversial anthrax vaccine and other experimental drugs, including US use of pyridostigmine bromide pills to protect against gas attacks, on troops have resulted in thousands of adverse reactions, many serious ones, some even listed on drug labels as possible but not provable fatal reactions.

The air and water hazards have had untold deadly impacts on innocent civilians in both Europe and the Middle East for more than the past decade.

Here is but one lone example of the lack of emphasis on care for wounded or sick wartime civilians: “A survey of Medline (a database of medical and health-related research articles) for articles on the Gulf War revealed 368 articles that covered the health-related issues. Only 4 out of these 368 articles were on how the 1991 Gulf War affected the health of Iraqi people.”

Yet, the International Red Cross reported these realities: “[Iraqi] Medical-legal facilities are struggling to cope with the rising influx of bodies, contending with insufficient capacity to store them properly or to systematically gather data on unidentified bodies in order to allow families to be informed of a relative’s death.

In 2006, an estimated 100 civilians were killed every day. Half of them remained unclaimed or unidentified. Thousands of unidentified bodies have thus been buried in designated cemeteries in Iraq. Meanwhile tens of thousands are being held in the custody of the Iraqi authorities and the multinational forces in Iraq. At the same time, tens of thousands of families remain without news of relatives who went missing during past and recent conflicts.”

The US State Department only restarted one highly successful cooperative US-Iraqi medical program, US doctor video conferencing with hospitals Iraq-wide last year, after news stories revealed it had ended.

“It is hard not to conclude that, for all our advocacy on behalf of civilians in need for protection and for all the resources that are devoted to all aspects of protection, [...] we are still failing to make a real and timely difference for the victims on the ground, countless thousands of whom had been killed, injured, ignored or treated as less than human,” said John Holmes, the United Nation’s Emergency Relief Coordinator and under secretary general for humanitarian affairs in June 2007 about the worldwide state of inaction for wartime victims.

Today, after two wars in Iraq, one in Bosnia and another in Afghanistan, involving hundreds of thousands of US troops, neither the Pentagon nor the VA, by their own admissions, are close to giving thousands of soldiers and veterans even adequate health care for potentially deadly illnesses.

Here is one startling affirmation from Kenneth H. Bacon, former assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in October 1997, regarding thousands of service members sick from hazardous exposures during the first Gulf War six years earlier. “No,” he said, “we cannot say that we have yet a clear understanding of what caused what’s called Gulf War Illnesses.

And I might point out that if you’ve read the interim report by the Presidential Advisory Committee, they have not been able to come up with a clear view of that either.

They thought that many of these might be stress related. But they also pointed out that there were a number of other factors ranging from the possibility of low-level chemical exposure to exposure to depleted uranium to exposure to pesticides to oil, fire, smoke, etc. And some of the medicines that soldiers took when they were in the Gulf.”

And almost ten years later, in a June 2007 report to Congress, the US General Accountability Office gave this critical assessment about health care for service members and veterans involved in all of the recent wars.

“Overseas deployments expose service members to a number of potential risks to their health and well-being. However, since the mid-1990s, GAO has highlighted shortcomings with respect to the Department of Defense’s (DOD) ability to assess the medical condition of service members both before and after their deployments…

“GAO is recommending that DOD develop a comprehensive oversight framework with reporting requirements and results-oriented performance measures to improve the implementation of its deployment health quality assurance program. In reviewing a draft of this report, DOD concurred with GAO’s recommendations.”

Scores of department of veteran’s affairs inadequacies in handling health care for war and other veterans can be found on its inspector general’s website. In 2007, “the GAO reported The Iraq War is literally a continuing nightmare for over 9,000 of the Operation Enduring Freedom and OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) veterans at risk for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and their families…”

“A government study published in May 2006 clearly presents the inadequacies of the system in three vital areas: 1) adequately screening OEF/OIF veterans for PTSD, 2) providing effective medical care referrals after screening, and 3) assessing and planning for the increased demands on the VA medical care delivery system for the significant and increasing numbers of veterans who need specialized mental health care for PTSD,”says the GAO.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of veterans and soldiers fester inside and outside of military and VA medical facilities or make due with medical care elsewhere without needed drugs, doctors or rehabilitation. The scandals of after care for sick and wounded service members at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC, unearthed by the Washington Post is but one of many examples.

That story was not as startling as it seemed to some, because at least three newspapers, The Hartford Courant, The Birmingham News and USA Today had been regularly covering the health care crisis in the military for over a decade. Scores of other news outlets had ignored it.

A January 2007 Harvard University Kennedy School of Government study says in part: “the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is already overwhelmed by the volume of returning veterans and the seriousness of their health care needs, and it will not be able to provide a high quality of care in a timely fashion to the large wave of returning war veterans without greater funding and increased capacity in areas such as psychiatric care.” It continues: “the budgetary costs of providing disability compensation benefits and medical care to the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of their lives will be from $350 – $700 Billion.”

Recent Veterans for Common Sense fact sheets on returning Afghan and Iraq war veterans’ needs say hundreds of thousands of veterans are still awaiting answers to their claims and the average wait time for answers to veterans claims is six months.

Even this inadequate overall care for US service members, is more than the health care given to Iraqis, Afghans and the innocent victims of the war in Bosnia and Serbia. Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist. His website describes him as a former shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier before he went to college under the GI Bill and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Here is his take on war as quoted in Questionwar.com:

“As wars have developed in the twentieth century, the ratio of civilian deaths to military deaths has changed radically. One hundred years ago 5% of war casualties were civilians. In World War I civilian deaths were about 10%. In World War II, 65%. Tactics of modern wars have shifted casualties to 90% civilians.”

He continues:

“More than half of these civilian casualties are children less than 14 years of age. This is only the direct casualties from bombs, bullets and landmines. Add to this indirect and long-term casualties caused by destroyed infrastructure and a fractured society, resulting in disease, starvation, homelessness, and the numbers become even grimmer. On top of this, add the long-term effects of highly toxic armaments rained down upon the victim country – Agent Orange in Vietnam, Depleted Uranium in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan – and the result is generations of suffering borne by civilians, mostly children.”

Media Coverage

Although US news media regularly reports on the deaths and woundings of US soldiers, it seldom inquires into the long-term illnesses of those wartime veterans or into the deaths, woundings and sicknesses of Iraqi, Afghan and Bosnia-Serbia civilians during wartime.

One estimate sets Iraqi civilian deaths in the 1991 Persian Gulf War at 100,000, while deaths from this current war are said by one source to total between 71,000 and 77,000. That figure is likely much higher.

“Untold hundreds of thousands [of] civilians from both wars [in Iraq] are sick from hazardous exposures. The size of civilian casualties is as yet unclear. The Pentagon has refused to count Iraqi civilian casualties, and organizations trying to assess the number of Iraqi dead have said that the number may be unknowable. The Red Cross has stopped counting the wounded because the casualties were too high. Rep. Chris Shays was the first Congressman to go to Iraq and he had said that humanitarian aid wasn’t reaching Iraqis quickly enough … Before the war, the UN estimated that up to 500,000 Iraqis could suffer serious injuries, and estimated that 10 million Iraqi civilians, including more than 2 million homeless, would be in need of immediate assistance for food and medicine.”

Thomas “Dennie” Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations, for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970’s, he has written extensively about irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court, Probate Court systems for disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct, and failures of the Pentagon and the VA to assist sick veterans returning from war. (He can be reached at denniew@optonline).

In fact, last year, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration temporarily cast aside the latest of several State Department exhortations to begin massive herbal spraying operations on poppy crops producing heroin there.

Colombian aerosol dusting of a mix of Roundup Ultra, Cosmo-Flux and other plant-penetrating agents began seven years ago. (In 2006 alone, the United Nations reported the spraying of approximately 172,025 hectares of coca crops, producing cocaine. That equals a bit over 664 square miles.)

In the meantime, untold thousands of Colombians and Ecuadorians have become sick from the blended chemical spray. Studies have shown the environmental dangers of inhalation and skin and eye saturation of the floating mist. And critically valuable maize, yucca and plantains have been destroyed in large swaths of the fertile country.

For years, DynCorp International of Fort Worth, Texas, has had the lucrative US multimillion-dollar annual contract for Colombian aerial spraying operations.

The company is being sued in Washington, DC, and US District Court by a class of 3,000 Ecuadorians who claim spray blown over the border from Colombia has sickened them.

“Glyphosate is used all over the world without these kinds of claims,” said Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman. “We spray in Colombia, and there Glyphosate is used extensively. But we don’t have any complaints where we spray it and what we do when we spray it. If there are health problems in Ecuador, they are certainly caused by something else.” The spray itself, said Lagana, “is prescribed by the governments of Colombia and the United States. Monsanto makes the spray.”

Monsanto, the herbicide manufacturer, has from time to time been identified by various Internet sites as the supplier of Roundup Ultra to Colombian spraying operations. But, through spokeswoman Tamara J. Craig Schilling, Monsanto refused to say whether the company is or was a supplier for Colombian spraying. Schilling refused to disclose the differences between regular Roundup and Roundup Ultra. The company claims Roundup is not harmful if instructions on the label are followed. Schilling said a Monsanto official in Mexico referred all such inquiries to the State Department. But, Monsanto also lists an office in Colombia inside its website.

Along with Dow Chemical, Monsanto was one of several US Army suppliers of the infamous Agent Orange, the herbicide used to deforest huge areas of jungle during the Vietnam War. The chemicals were alleged by many in multiple lawsuits to have caused birth defects and cancers among a large population of natives as well as US soldiers and their families.

Despite DynCorp spokesman Lagana’s claims that Colombians are not being sickened by the spray, an American Friends service report, as early as 2002, said there were indeed health repercussions in Colombia as well. They cited the Putumayo Health Department report as saying: “Three municipalities targeted by spray campaigns from December 22, 2000, to February 2, 2001, indicated that medical personnel in three local hospitals reported increased visits due to skin problems, gastrointestinal infections, acute respiratory infection, and conjunctivitis following spraying.”

In August 2001, a commission from a European Human Rights Organization found in a visit to the Province of Santanter that: “Contrary to official declarations about the harmlessness of Glyphosate, we were able to verify skin conditions (rashes and itching caused by the skin drying to the point of cracking) in both children and adults who were exposed directly to spraying while they worked their land or played outside their homes.”

In fact, in spite of Lagana’s insistence that Colombians haven’t complained about the spray, a Colombian judge temporarily stopped spraying operations in July 2001 as a result of health complaints from indigenous groups.

Then in January 2002, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations ruled “The UN (Human Rights) Commission should urge the United States and Colombia to discontinue the aerial herbicide application program and seek alternative eradication methods.”

Based on a complaint from Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the council concluded: “The combination of (1) health, food resource, and environmental impacts to Colombians and Ecuadorians, (2) the toxicity of the spray mixture and the failure of the United States and Colombia to instruct sprayers to observe health and environmental safety recommendations, (3) the failure of the United States and Colombia to disclose sufficient information about the mixture and its application, (4) the failure of the United States and Colombia to conduct sufficient health and environmental assessments, and (5) the potential human rights abuses that may result from future health studies, clearly places the United States and Colombia in violation of the rights of Colombians and Ecuadorians to a clean and healthy environment, health, life, sustenance, property, privacy, and access to information.”

Ecuador has threatened for months to go to The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, to pursue a case against the herbicide spraying by Colombia drifting across their common border. Repeated attempts over several weeks by this writer to contact an Ecuadorian government spokesperson concerning the herbicide spraying controversy failed.

“Colombia is convinced that the herbicide used in aerial spray of coca and poppy crops is harmless for human health and the environment,” said Jurgan Kaiser, a Colombian government spokesman. “A scientific study recently undertaken under the auspices of the Organization of American States (Inter-American Commission against Drug Abuse) confirmed this. For more information about this, check the commission’s web page at www.cicad.oas.org.”

But a search of that site leads to a report on that scientific study that mentions many conflicting conclusions about the environmental impact of the herbicide mix sprayed in Colombia. It intricately discusses the pros and cons of a scientific treatise essentially concluding that the poppy spray is harmless to humans and the environment.

The US State Department believes the spraying of herbicide in Colombia is not harmful to the environment or to humans, said its spokeswoman Susan Pittman.

Contrary to government officials’ and manufacturers’ claims of non-toxicity, at least five inquiries have found that Roundup causes serious human health problems.

Specifically, seven scientific investigators, studying symptoms of Ecuadorians exposed to a mix of Roundup Ultra and other additive chemicals, concluded: “A total of 24 exposed and 21 unexposed control individuals were investigated using the comet assay. The results showed a higher degree of DNA damage in the exposed group compared to the control group. These results suggest that in the formulation used during aerial spraying Glyphosate had a genotoxic effect on the exposed individuals.”

Mitra’s Natural Innovation blog cites four more studies: “A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application.

“An epidemiological study of Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of Glyphosate, as after eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using Glyphosate…. They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of Roundup ‘adjuvants’ or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient, Glyphosate.

“Another study, released in April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger to other life forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on non-target organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly eliminated.

“In 2002, a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of Glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years.”

Notwithstanding the billions of US and Colombian dollars spent on hazardous aerial spraying of crops that some scientific studies insist adversely impact humans, animals and fish, United Nations estimates say Colombian illicit drug production in metric tons has actually doubled in the decade ending in 2006. As well, says the UN, Colombia still remains the world’s biggest coca grower, producing 62 percent of the world’s supply of cocaine.

Sometimes, when Colombia’s illegal drug totals dropped, those in Bolivia and Peru, where aerial spraying is illegal, went up, UN reports say. Even when narcotics-enforcing officials are successful one year, the demand for illicit drugs is so strong in the United States and elsewhere, the poppy crops pop up again and again from year to year.

In the meantime, these annual United Nations inquiries show the Far East, once a booming drug black market for the world, has dramatically cleaned up its act without major environmental harm.

“Thailand has been opium-free for a long time. Vietnam is also opium-free. Laos has cut opium production by 94 percent in less than a decade (down to 1,500 hectares, or about 5.79 square miles). Burma’s share of the world opium market has collapsed from 30 percent in 1998 to under six percent in 2007. A decades-long process of drug control is clearly paying off. Thailand, in particular, stands out as an inspiration to its neighbors and a role model for other countries trying to overcome their drug problems,” says the UN report.

Thailand worked over three decades to eventually replace poppies with other valuable agricultural production, says the UN. The government concentrated on battling the drug trade with a more comprehensive two-pronged approach: a crop replacement program and stronger police control over drug dealing. “In 1969, the Thai efforts were pioneered by King Bhumibol Adulyadej who introduced a crop replacement project after the establishment of his new Phubing Palace in Chiang Mai adjacent to an opium poppy-growing village on the mountain Doi Pui. He promoted a long-term and cooperative approach to opium control that encouraged finding income-generation alternatives rather than law enforcement,” the report says.

Contrasting with Colombia, the US government, which assisted Thailand in its efforts, “removed Thailand from the US list of major drug-producing countries in the late 1990s because of the country’s success in limiting opium cultivation to its current low levels, and from the list of major drug transit countries in 2004 when it was apparent that local trafficking in and through Thailand had no significant impact on the United States. There is, effectively, no cultivation or production of heroin, methamphetamine or other drugs in Thailand today,” said the US State Department’s own report.

Herbicide manufacturers and officials from the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Drug Enforcement Administration, plus Colombian officials, have been claiming for about seven years that the chemical cocktail including Roundup Ultra, in fact sometimes deadly to plants and often fish, is harmless to humans. Safe, they say, provided it is sprayed properly with just the right mixture; assuming humans are not covered with the mist more than several times; and supposing the chemicals don’t repeatedly make their way into drinking water supplies. Apparently, however, there are few, if any, independent overseers to make sure the spray is consistently totally non-toxic or is targeted just to the coca and poppy crops.

Despite the benign chemical claims, Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics & law enforcement affairs, testified in 2002 in the federal court case against DynCorp ongoing today, that there had been no scientific tests of the environmental impacts of the combinations of chemicals used for the extensive Colombian sprayings, then two years old.

Most tellingly, the US State Department has been unable to convince other nations to follow Colombia’s lead. After once again considering the repetitious US proposal to spray the lucrative drug-producing Afghan harvests, President Hamid Karzai’s administration cast aside the offer in October. “We have rejected the spraying of poppy in Afghanistan for good reasons: the effect on the environment, other smaller crops and on human genetics,” the acting minister for counter-narcotics, General Khodaidad, told Britain’s The Guardian.

However, says the article, Karzai promised to continue the difficult manual plant eradication, ongoing with help from US forces for six years, not long after US and Afghan troops began their continuing war with terrorists. Scores of US contract employees, soldiers and Afghan security men have used sticks, tractors and all-terrain vehicles with harrows to destroy poppies. But, this plan proves to be as dangerous as spraying; contractors have been regularly fired upon by terrorists or those allied with farmers, or otherwise blocked in their poppy-bashing efforts by corrupt officials bent on favoring farmers with powerful political connections, a plethora of news reports say.

The incredible difficulties with manual eradication apparently left Karzai with some doubts, so he has not yet completely eliminated the possibility of reconsidering a US-sponsored effort to spray the poppy crops from the air with weed and plant killer Roundup and the typical additives accompanying it.

In February 2006, William B. Wood moved from his post as US ambassador to Colombia to become the ambassador to Afghanistan. At that point in time, Sam Logan of ISN Security Watch editorialized: “it is worrying that (Wood) might promote the same failed drug policies used in Colombia…. Fumigation alone – the leading method for reducing the supply of coca plants – has eradicated other, legitimate crops and caused international disputes between Colombia and Ecuador. Environmental concerns linked to the use of herbicide to kill coca bushes inside Colombia’s national parks underline the lengths the US government will go to target small, clandestine coca plantations in Colombia. Aircraft spraying chemicals in Colombia must fly at high altitudes to avoid damage due to small arms fire from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).”

It appears, however, that back-to-back wars in Afghanistan have created intense public animosity to airborne chemicals. Many Afghans are fed up with the decades of hazardous pollutants welling up from US aerial bombardments and bunker-busters, home-made terrorist bombs, radioactive depleted uranium dust from fired US munitions, smoke from oil and other chemical fires and a host of other sorts of dangerous chemical contaminations.

“The US government was pushing for this to happen,” said Said Mohammed Azam, a former Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics official. “But the Brits were reluctant, particularly when it (developed) that the spray (could) have happened in Helmand province. Nearly half of the opium that was produced last year came from Helmand alone … most (Afghan officials) were afraid of nodding yes to (the spray) because they were not very much aware of the (contents)…. This concern among Afghan officials underpinned when the two sectarian ministries, public health and agriculture opposed the idea because they reasoned the chemicals could harm the environment in areas where the spray took place. I heard the eradication of poppy started (in early 2008) in Helmand province and the Interior Ministry has deployed 500 extra troops from center for this purpose. Apparently the eradication will happen through traditional means: hand, tractor or using oxen or other animals.”

Thomas “Dennie” Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations, for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970′s, he has written extensively about irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court, Probate Court systems for disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct, and failures of the Pentagon and the VA to assist sick veterans returning from war. (He can be reached at denniew@optonline).

“October (2006) was a pretty depressing month for national newspapers. While circulations slide, the industry news has been dominated by job cuts and staff unrest, particularly among journalists,” England’s Guardian Unlimited reported a month later. A month earlier, Der Spiegel, the intellectual German news magazine, disclosed that more and more, German journalists are leaving the print media to get safer and more lucrative jobs with corporate public relations agencies.

More recently in March of this year, Newspaper Association of America Chairwoman Susan Clark-Johnson summed up the current economic climate in the NNA Internet site by declaring, “It’s a hellish time for the business of newspapering.” And, Techcrunch reported: Figures released by the NNA show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006, the biggest drop in revenue since 1950, the year they started tracking annual revenue.”

But some concerned and dedicated journalistic observers both inside and outside the US news business believe the demise or baggage-seat status of newspapers is a farfetched theory. It is promoted, say news insiders, by corporate executives operating large newspaper chains. They are engrossed in making news collection as cheap as possible, while forcing a larger advertising layout in newspapers at the expense of the formerly generous pages of a variety of local, national and international news. And as they do, publishers and editors claim to be inventing a new, easy-to-read, streamlined form of tabloid attractive to all ages, particularly the younger set.

Threat of Extinction

Published explanations of fiscal threats to newspapers from so-called industry communications experts and corporate news executives sound so logical. Their mantra is: the news business is under constant threat of extinction from fierce Internet advertising competition, extraordinary increases in newsprint costs and declining newspaper profit margins.

It is hard to question news executives’ assertions that the Internet is a modern information superhighway, easier to access, keenly popular with a younger generation of site-Googling activists. As a result, experts say, newspapers are losing much of their classified and display advertising to a host of flashy, photogenic and even audio-video-oriented Internet sites. Only older adults, used to washing ink off their hands, would read a newspaper, those same experts say. Newspapers have fought back, creating their own Internet sites with free news and paid advertising.

In spite of the Internet’s allure, and a variety of news sites like Salon and Slate, many competing newspapers are still making 20 percent profits. That is five percent more than used to be acceptable in the decades when publishers understood the costly but essential responsibility of being part of the Fourth Estate, while scrutinizing and reporting on government and corporate corruption.

Profitable and Resilient

In its 2005 state of the news media, Rick Edmunds of the Poynter Institute says, “As businesses, newspapers are strong, highly profitable and resilient. In good times and mediocre, the industry now boasts operating margins in the low to middle 20-percent range, a bit less than Microsoft and Dell, but higher even than pharmaceuticals.” Those profits may have dropped in the next three years, but some believe that is largely due to what was reported earlier in the annual 2004 report’s conclusion from Journalism.org:

“… the long-term profitability of newspapers, and the clear advantages in content that print offers over some other media, can also be a crutch. Newspaper publishers can justify not investing more in new product, in new content, in diversifying their target audiences, because they can argue that they are already the strongest newsgathering operation in their community. More quality, they may think, will not pay for itself. And the financial markets have come to expect, with a few exceptions like The New York Times, a mature industry that must justify itself to investors by producing high profits, not by investing them back into the product for a potentially risky return.”

Hosts of editors, reporters and readers are angry just listening to and repeatedly reading what they consider “excuses” to increase profits while eroding probing enterprise journalism. Those committed to public service news and investigative reporting believe grave industry profits to be manipulative, shallow or misleading. In fact, the very rationale for saving newspapers – cost cutting, layoffs and buyouts – is thought to have created circulation and profit drop-offs, and to foster the very predictions of a dark, deadly fiscal whirlpool. The bigger the staff and cost cuts, the more advertisers and readers are scared away, indeed creating loss of disgusted readers and lesser profits.

As newspaper size shrinks, experienced reporters and editors are replaced by relative greenhorns. Then, the comparative evidence in daily published reporting shows a wide variety of in-depth stories and features morphing into larger sensational headlines, bigger photos, news graphics and repetitious bad news dominated by politics, crime and war. Traditional, expensive and time consuming investigative stories are becoming scarcer nationwide.

Lock on Talent

Paul Marks, 55, spent 30 years of his life as a reporter in more than one newspaper before he became discouraged by the lock on his development and talent, and left the ever-declining staff of the Hartford Courant in 2006. He said he once again feels professionally energetic and less creatively constrained as an aerospace and speechwriter for the president of Pratt & Whitney, a manufacturer of aircraft engines, gas turbines and space propulsion systems.

As an eventual result of declining staff, Marks said, Courant editors cut back on reporter training, workshops, fellowships and conferences. Reporters were sometimes trapped collecting and writing a workaday 10-inch story instead of attending a rare all-day, local seminar on an assigned specialty – in his case the energy industry.

When he and other reporters wanted to be reassigned to expand their careers, Marks said, they frequently were blocked because cutbacks made it difficult for editors to transfer them to better assignments with so few replacements. And, as time and cuts wore on, said Marks, reporters had difficulty suggesting time-consuming, in-depth stories because they were needed instead for day-to-day routine coverage. “The people who had good local or deep sources and thorough understanding of the political landscape the Courant lost to attrition,” said Marks. “As a result, the Hartford Courant just became another parachute in news organization, like TV stations or the Associated Press.”

“Every time a newspaper loses staff, it forces those remaining to take on more duties in the effort to continue the paper’s core mission … to create a strong local report,” Les Gura, metro editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, told the Poynter Online journalism site. “The problem?” he asked. “If you reduce staff, you are going to have to either cut local coverage, or add duties to those remaining to maintain local coverage.”

Readers Rebelled

As reporters were being pulled out of some towns that supplied prime circulation, said Marks, local readers were pelting the paper with e-mails, phone calls and letters complaining about the loss of published news in their towns. Still other readers are being fed a steady diet of news features, initiated from such superficial inspirations as eunuchs collecting taxes in India. Such oddities can be easily collected by a reporter from the Internet and rewritten, a task that saves the reporter the time it takes to explore on the street for a more fascinating, readable local feature, said Marks.

However, the Courant’s newly appointed top editor, Cliff Teusch, has said the cuts are merely a challenge for editors and reporters to reinvent ways to cover news for a “thriving” newspaper. “We all know very well the grander reinvention agenda that faces us today,” Teutsch told the staff two years ago. “We need to make the smartest, boldest moves we can as we confront challenges in circulation and advertising and changes in how people get their news and information. As a staff, you have shown great enthusiasm for this in the numerous innovative ideas you have submitted in recent days.” Since then The Courant’s staff has declined even further with more layoffs and buyouts of some of its most experienced editors and reporters.

Bob Greene, who died recently, was a longtime investigative reporter and editor for Newsday and the founder of the journalism program at Hofstra University. He was perhaps one of the foremost experts in the country on investigative journalism. Greene suggested the innovation Teutsch mentioned has disappeared. “Reduced news staffs lead to gradual abdication of responsibility for comprehensive and insightful news coverage,” he said.

“The quarterly report drives public corporations, including those holding and publishing newspapers,” said Greene. “When many of our great newspapers were owned by individual persons or families, they were willing to reduce their profit margins in any given quarter or year if it came to maintaining reporting staff or devoting much time and money to investigative and other forms of public service reporting. This was in tacit acknowledgment that their businesses also had a unique Constitutional responsibility to fully inform.

Profits Are the Goal

“In this respect, I can think of publishers like the Taylor family and the Boston Globe, Alicia Patterson and Newsday, the Bingham family with the Louisville Courier Journal, the Chandler family and the Los Angeles Times, the Pulliam family in both Indianapolis and Phoenix and many others, big and small. These newspapers and others of their kin are now owned by public corporations, where constantly increasing profits are the paramount goal,” said Greene.

Pat Feeley, a former Connecticut resident now living in Colorado, is a veteran newspaper reader who buys hard copies of the Coloradoan, and regularly reads the New York Times online, as well as sometimes the online Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, “and even the [Hartford] Courant.” She thinks news executives, editors, reporters and readers, too, have allowed their public service values and native intelligence to erode. Instead, she says, they have become mesmerized by starlit gossip and scandals, money-making, power politics, Internet blogs, television and conformity.

“Newspapers and journalists themselves are slipping,” says Feeley, “and most have adapted ineptly to the succession of electronic media. The public companies have become hysterically responsive to the ‘expectations’ of Wall Street…. [News] is a mature industry, and a profitable one, and it isn’t going to have growth like Microsoft or Crocs or Google before the bubble burst. I think it is managing for the short term, not the longer one.

“Don’t discount the decline of American education,” she says, “and the rise of the consumerist imperatives as sources of trouble in the newspaper trade. We now think we should be entertained from infancy to senility, and aren’t willing to work to understand difficult concepts, other cultures, other points of view, nor do many citizens have the skills to do any of that. This goes for journalists as well as readers,” she explains. “We keep seeing what we want to see; we keep following the herd, as in the hero worship that kept Bush in office with scare tactics. [Some] journalists and publishers knew better, but were afraid to say anything for fear of being tabbed as ‘disloyal’ or ‘un-American.’”

Simplistic Thinking

“This is the kind of simplistic thinking that says, ‘You’re for us or against us’ was contagious,” says Feeley. “Fear and greed too are powerful motivators. I think the scariest thing is how many people listen to and read only [information] that agrees with their point of view; the proliferation of purported news outlets permits one to do that. If you are narrow, you only get narrower that way, and the country gets more polarized.”

Although newspaper executives like Dennis FitzSimons, chairman, president and CEO of Tribune Company in Chicago, say the declining revenues of newspapers require responsible officials like himself to repeatedly cut expenses and reduce staffing, those closer to the printing presses believe these reductions are themselves the cause of lost revenues and quality newspapers.

As a result of the pressures from stockholders and boards of directors, the Tribune is actively trying to extract itself from the fiscal-vs.-journalistic- value controversy. Its officials are proposing to sell out as a corporate whole or by auctioning off its newspapers and television stations to individual buyers. The latter prospect has encouraged some dedicated journalists to hope that selected parts of the news business will flash back decades. That’s when some newspapers were owned by rich individuals who allowed professional editors and reporters to pursue in-depth news. But a few of the potential buyers swooping in over the Tribune, it is believed, are thought to have ambitions to influence news content for more selfish schemes.
The Tribune was purchased in December 2007 by Sam Zell, a billionaire real estate entrepreneur. Although Zell initially claimed chain papers around the country would have control over good journalistic enterprise, his reign and accumulated debt has lead to dire fiscal predictions for The Tribune and further rounds of layoffs and buyouts of still more reporters and editors. As it turns out, it seems Zell was most attracted to the real estate The Tribune owned.

As newsroom cuts continue to threaten the product, the corporate goal of attracting new buyers willing to pay the highest of prime sales prices seems to become less realistic to some inside the news profession. And, even if that goal is reached, it is clear to many editors and reporters that new owners will have to improve staffing levels and encourage a wide variety of in-depth story collection.

Tradition Destroyed

“Reporters and editors once had a vocation and worked in a place that generated hope and the possibility of justice,” says Andy Thibault, a former reporter and editor who now operates, investigates, reports and edits from his own Connecticut news blog. “The so-called news executives have sold out and destroyed a grand tradition.”

In her last column before she took a buyout in December 2005 as part of staff reductions at the Hartford Courant, 27-year news veteran Michele Jacklin was clearly fed up with constant erosion at the nation’s oldest continuously published broadsheet.

“In the 1980s, the Courant staffed its Capitol bureau [covering the state legislature] with five reporters. [Still] other reporters were assigned to cover the full panoply of state agencies, from the Department of Transportation to the Properties Review Board. Today, there are fewer reporters in the Capitol bureau and many of the state and regional beats have been dismantled,” wrote Jacklin in “This Columnist’s Last Stand.”

“Not long ago, a spokesman for a major agency confided that employees once lived in fear of opening the newspaper and reading about some bureaucratic misstep that was sure to land them in hot water. That anxiety has gradually dissipated,” Jacklin wrote.

Heft of Cotton Candy

She continued: “Nowadays, the spokesman said, agency officials don’t worry about embarrassing revelations. The news media don’t dig as deeply as they once did, don’t attend hearings as often as they used to, don’t go to as many press conferences as in the days of old. Sad to say, Connecticut’s Fourth Estate no longer believes that informing and educating voters about their political leaders and government is its chief responsibility. As a substitute for hard news and insightful analysis, readers are served up a steady diet of splashy graphics, celebrity gossip and stories with the heft of cotton candy.”

The Associated Press’s 2006 headlines tell it all for then and now:

Tribune Said to Be Mulling Sale of Company in Pieces
Google Targets Newspaper Advertising
LA Daily News Publisher Out, 21 Jobs Cut
Akron, Ohio, Newspaper Cuts Top Newsroom Job
San Diego Newspaper Offers Buyouts

Surprisingly, despite today’s predictions of the demise of newspapers as a result of declining advertising and readership in the Internet age’s takeover of communications, part of this dragged-out story is decades old.

The movie “Network,” about the perils of network television news aiming daily sensationalistic programming at viewers and advertisers to make millions of dollars for corporations, was produced 30 years ago.

“Deadline USA,” another and even older 1950s film, starring the legendary Humphrey Bogart as the feisty city managing editor battling to save his newspaper as it’s about to be sold off for profit-taking, has, as well, a familiar story line in this 21st century.

On one hot polar extremity is Bogart’s character, editor Ed Hutchenson – and in “Network,” actor Peter Finch’s character, wild and crazy news anchor Howard Beale – while on the other frigid extremity are multiple imaginary, money-hungry corporate executives.

The two courageous characters, editor Hutchenson and news anchor Beale, look to many harried modern-day newsmen like rare dinosaurs, but are they?

“Not Going to Take This”

As his world as a newsman morphs more into entertainment and his very professional existence is threatened, Beale screams at his TV viewers: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” And editor Hutchenson is outraged and unrelenting – fighting on all fronts for his news colleagues and for the perpetuation of his sacred journalism, says a New York Times movie review.

Where are Beale and Hutchenson today?

They are still around, but seldom seen in the columns of their own newspapers. One of them lost his battle with corporate executives recently.

Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet was ousted November 7, 2006, for taking the “mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” attitude toward staff cuts at the paper. Eventually, after he continually refused to go along with the latest in a series of staff cuts ordered by Tribune Company executives controlling the Times, Baquet, to the dismay of reporters and editors, was forced out. He became one of several Times’ editors to be forced out because they wouldn’t go along with The Tribune’s continuing and drastic staff cuts.

“Sometimes when I sit down with editors and managing editors, I find them all too willing to buy the argument for cuts,” Baquet was quoted as saying. “We need to be a feistier bunch. It is the job of the editor of the paper to put up a little more of a fight than we’ve been willing to put up in the past, because a public service is at stake. We understand the business model is changing and we have to do some cutting,” he said, “but don’t understand it too much.”

But, of course, Baquet, instead of covering city hall as a newsman, was fighting it as the editor closest to corporate executives’ reach. And, now he’s gone from the Times after 19 years as a journalist there and elsewhere. Eight years earlier, as an investigative reporter for the same Tribune that pressured him out as editor, he won a Pulitzer Prize for leading a team of three in documenting corruption in the Chicago City Council.

Some wonder if Pulitzer Prizes, like reporters and editors, will become far scarcer at Tribune newspapers.

Thomas “Dennie” Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations, for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970s, he has written extensively about irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court and Probate Court systems for disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct. His stories about the corrupt activities inside the Hartford Probate Court helped encourage a federal grand jury probe leading to the conviction of the court’s investigator for corrupt activities, the first attempted impeachment of a judge or any official in the state’s history, and a legislative probe that resulted in major changes of the court’s disciplinary system for state lawyers. Another of his investigative inquiries in the 1980s led to the forced resignation of a Superior Court judge who was hiring and appointing friends and relatives for lucrative court duties. His most recent freelance stories exposed failings of the Connecticut Judicial Review Council, investigating misconduct by Superior Court judges and the regular one-and-a-half-year delays in deciding State Appellate Court cases. He has received numerous awards for his investigative and in-depth reporting.

In fact, a couple of months ago, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration temporarily cast aside the latest of several State Department exhortations to begin massive herbal spraying operations on poppy crops producing heroin there.

Colombian aerosol dusting of a mix of Roundup Ultra, Cosmo-Flux and other plant-penetrating agents began seven years ago. (In 2006 alone, the United Nations reported the spraying of approximately 172,025 hectares of coca crops, producing cocaine. That equals a bit over 664 square miles.)

In the meantime, untold thousands of Colombians and Ecuadorians have become sick from the blended chemical spray. Studies have shown the environmental dangers of inhalation and skin and eye saturation of the floating mist. And critically valuable maize, yucca and plantains have been destroyed in large swaths of the fertile country.

For years, DynCorp International of Fort Worth, Texas, has had the lucrative US multimillion-dollar annual contract for Colombian aerial spraying operations.

The company is being sued in Washington, DC, and US District Court by a class of 3,000 Ecuadorians who claim spray blown over the border from Colombia has sickened them.

“Glyphosate is used all over the world without these kinds of claims,” said Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman. “We spray in Colombia, and there Glyphosate is used extensively. But we don’t have any complaints where we spray it and what we do when we spray it. If there are health problems in Ecuador, they are certainly caused by something else.” The spray itself, said Lagana, “is prescribed by the governments of Colombia and the United States. Monsanto makes the spray.”

Monsanto, the herbicide manufacturer, has from time to time been identified by various Internet sites as the supplier of Roundup Ultra to Colombian spraying operations. But, through spokeswoman Tamara J. Craig Schilling, Monsanto refused to say whether the company is or was a supplier for Colombian spraying. Schilling refused to disclose the differences between regular Roundup and Roundup Ultra. The company claims Roundup is not harmful if instructions on the label are followed. Schilling said a Monsanto official in Mexico referred all such inquiries to the State Department. But, Monsanto also lists an office in Colombia inside its website.

Along with Dow Chemical, Monsanto was one of several US Army suppliers of the infamous Agent Orange, the herbicide used to deforest huge areas of jungle during the Vietnam War. The chemicals were alleged by many in multiple lawsuits to have caused birth defects and cancers among a large population of natives as well as US soldiers and their families.

Despite DynCorp spokesman Lagana’s claims that Colombians are not being sickened by the spray, an American Friends service report, as early as 2002, said there were indeed health repercussions in Colombia as well. They cited the Putumayo Health Department report as saying: “Three municipalities targeted by spray campaigns from December 22, 2000, to February 2, 2001, indicated that medical personnel in three local hospitals reported increased visits due to skin problems, gastrointestinal infections, acute respiratory infection, and conjunctivitis following spraying.”

In August 2001, a commission from a European Human Rights Organization found in a visit to the Province of Santanter that: “Contrary to official declarations about the harmlessness of Glyphosate, we were able to verify skin conditions (rashes and itching caused by the skin drying to the point of cracking) in both children and adults who were exposed directly to spraying while they worked their land or played outside their homes.”

In fact, in spite of Lagana’s insistence that Colombians haven’t complained about the spray, a Colombian judge temporarily stopped spraying operations in July 2001 as a result of health complaints from indigenous groups.

Then in January 2002, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations ruled “The UN (Human Rights) Commission should urge the United States and Colombia to discontinue the aerial herbicide application program and seek alternative eradication methods.”

Based on a complaint from Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the council concluded: “The combination of (1) health, food resource, and environmental impacts to Colombians and Ecuadorians, (2) the toxicity of the spray mixture and the failure of the United States and Colombia to instruct sprayers to observe health and environmental safety recommendations, (3) the failure of the United States and Colombia to disclose sufficient information about the mixture and its application, (4) the failure of the United States and Colombia to conduct sufficient health and environmental assessments, and (5) the potential human rights abuses that may result from future health studies, clearly places the United States and Colombia in violation of the rights of Colombians and Ecuadorians to a clean and healthy environment, health, life, sustenance, property, privacy, and access to information.”

Ecuador has threatened for months to go to The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, to pursue a case against the herbicide spraying by Colombia drifting across their common border. Repeated attempts over several weeks by this writer to contact an Ecuadorian government spokesperson concerning the herbicide spraying controversy failed.

“Colombia is convinced that the herbicide used in aerial spray of coca and poppy crops is harmless for human health and the environment,” said Jurgan Kaiser, a Colombian government spokesman. “A scientific study recently undertaken under the auspices of the Organization of American States (Inter-American Commission against Drug Abuse) confirmed this. For more information about this, check the commission’s web page at www.cicad.oas.org.”

But a search of that site leads to a report on that scientific study that mentions many conflicting conclusions about the environmental impact of the herbicide mix sprayed in Colombia. It intricately discusses the pros and cons of a scientific treatise essentially concluding that the poppy spray is harmless to humans and the environment.

The US State Department believes the spraying of herbicide in Colombia is not harmful to the environment or to humans, said its spokeswoman Susan Pittman.

Contrary to government officials’ and manufacturers’ claims of non-toxicity, at least five inquiries have found that Roundup causes serious human health problems.

Specifically, seven scientific investigators, studying symptoms of Ecuadorians exposed to a mix of Roundup Ultra and other additive chemicals, concluded: “A total of 24 exposed and 21 unexposed control individuals were investigated using the comet assay. The results showed a higher degree of DNA damage in the exposed group compared to the control group. These results suggest that in the formulation used during aerial spraying Glyphosate had a genotoxic effect on the exposed individuals.”

Mitra’s Natural Innovation blog cites four more studies: “A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application.

“An epidemiological study of Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of Glyphosate, as after eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using Glyphosate…. They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of Roundup ‘adjuvants’ or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient, Glyphosate.

“Another study, released in April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger to other life forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on non-target organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly eliminated.

“In 2002, a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of Glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years.”

Notwithstanding the billions of US and Colombian dollars spent on hazardous aerial spraying of crops that some scientific studies insist adversely impact humans, animals and fish, United Nations estimates say Colombian illicit drug production in metric tons has actually doubled in the decade ending in 2006. As well, says the UN, Colombia still remains the world’s biggest coca grower, producing 62 percent of the world’s supply of cocaine.

Sometimes, when Colombia’s illegal drug totals dropped, those in Bolivia and Peru, where aerial spraying is illegal, went up, UN reports say. Even when narcotics-enforcing officials are successful one year, the demand for illicit drugs is so strong in the United States and elsewhere, the poppy crops pop up again and again from year to year.

In the meantime, these annual United Nations inquiries show the Far East, once a booming drug black market for the world, has dramatically cleaned up its act without major environmental harm.

“Thailand has been opium-free for a long time. Vietnam is also opium-free. Laos has cut opium production by 94 percent in less than a decade (down to 1,500 hectares, or about 5.79 square miles). Burma’s share of the world opium market has collapsed from 30 percent in 1998 to under six percent in 2007. A decades-long process of drug control is clearly paying off. Thailand, in particular, stands out as an inspiration to its neighbors and a role model for other countries trying to overcome their drug problems,” says the UN report.

Thailand worked over three decades to eventually replace poppies with other valuable agricultural production, says the UN. The government concentrated on battling the drug trade with a more comprehensive two-pronged approach: a crop replacement program and stronger police control over drug dealing. “In 1969, the Thai efforts were pioneered by King Bhumibol Adulyadej who introduced a crop replacement project after the establishment of his new Phubing Palace in Chiang Mai adjacent to an opium poppy-growing village on the mountain Doi Pui. He promoted a long-term and cooperative approach to opium control that encouraged finding income-generation alternatives rather than law enforcement,” the report says.

Contrasting with Colombia, the US government, which assisted Thailand in its efforts, “removed Thailand from the US list of major drug-producing countries in the late 1990s because of the country’s success in limiting opium cultivation to its current low levels, and from the list of major drug transit countries in 2004 when it was apparent that local trafficking in and through Thailand had no significant impact on the United States. There is, effectively, no cultivation or production of heroin, methamphetamine or other drugs in Thailand today,” said the US State Department’s own report.

Herbicide manufacturers and officials from the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Drug Enforcement Administration, plus Colombian officials, have been claiming for about seven years that the chemical cocktail including Roundup Ultra, in fact sometimes deadly to plants and often fish, is harmless to humans. Safe, they say, provided it is sprayed properly with just the right mixture; assuming humans are not covered with the mist more than several times; and supposing the chemicals don’t repeatedly make their way into drinking water supplies. Apparently, however, there are few, if any, independent overseers to make sure the spray is consistently totally non-toxic or is targeted just to the coca and poppy crops.

Despite the benign chemical claims, Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics & law enforcement affairs, testified in 2002 in the federal court case against DynCorp ongoing today, that there had been no scientific tests of the environmental impacts of the combinations of chemicals used for the extensive Colombian sprayings, then two years old.

Most tellingly, the US State Department has been unable to convince other nations to follow Colombia’s lead. After once again considering the repetitious US proposal to spray the lucrative drug-producing Afghan harvests, President Hamid Karzai’s administration cast aside the offer in October. “We have rejected the spraying of poppy in Afghanistan for good reasons: the effect on the environment, other smaller crops and on human genetics,” the acting minister for counter-narcotics, General Khodaidad, told Britain’s The Guardian.

However, says the article, Karzai promised to continue the difficult manual plant eradication, ongoing with help from US forces for six years, not long after US and Afghan troops began their continuing war with terrorists. Scores of US contract employees, soldiers and Afghan security men have used sticks, tractors and all-terrain vehicles with harrows to destroy poppies. But, this plan proves to be as dangerous as spraying; contractors have been regularly fired upon by terrorists or those allied with farmers, or otherwise blocked in their poppy-bashing efforts by corrupt officials bent on favoring farmers with powerful political connections, a plethora of news reports say.

The incredible difficulties with manual eradication apparently left Karzai with some doubts, so he has not yet completely eliminated the possibility of reconsidering a US-sponsored effort to spray the poppy crops from the air with weed and plant killer Roundup and the typical additives accompanying it.

In February 2006, William B. Wood moved from his post as US ambassador to Colombia to become the ambassador to Afghanistan. At that point in time, Sam Logan of ISN Security Watch editorialized: “it is worrying that (Wood) might promote the same failed drug policies used in Colombia…. Fumigation alone – the leading method for reducing the supply of coca plants – has eradicated other, legitimate crops and caused international disputes between Colombia and Ecuador. Environmental concerns linked to the use of herbicide to kill coca bushes inside Colombia’s national parks underline the lengths the US government will go to target small, clandestine coca plantations in Colombia. Aircraft spraying chemicals in Colombia must fly at high altitudes to avoid damage due to small arms fire from the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).”

It appears, however, that back-to-back wars in Afghanistan have created intense public animosity to airborne chemicals. Many Afghans are fed up with the decades of hazardous pollutants welling up from US aerial bombardments and bunker-busters, home-made terrorist bombs, radioactive depleted uranium dust from fired US munitions, smoke from oil and other chemical fires and a host of other sorts of dangerous chemical contaminations.

“The US government was pushing for this to happen,” said Said Mohammed Azam, a former Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics official. “But the Brits were reluctant, particularly when it (developed) that the spray (could) have happened in Helmand province. Nearly half of the opium that was produced last year came from Helmand alone … most (Afghan officials) were afraid of nodding yes to (the spray) because they were not very much aware of the (contents)…. This concern among Afghan officials underpinned when the two sectarian ministries, public health and agriculture opposed the idea because they reasoned the chemicals could harm the environment in areas where the spray took place. I heard the eradication of poppy started yesterday (January 30) in Helmand province and the Interior Ministry has deployed 500 extra troops from center for this purpose. Apparently the eradication will happen through traditional means: hand, tractor or using oxen or other animals.”

Thomas “Dennie” Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations, for the Hartford Courant. Since the 1970′s, he has written extensively about irregularities in the Connecticut Superior Court, Probate Court systems for disciplining both judges and lawyers for misconduct, and failures of the Pentagon and the VA to assist sick veterans returning from war. (He can be reached at denniew@optonline).