Eric Bonds (2015) - Legitimating the environmental injustices of war ~ toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan Environmental Politics DOI

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Environmental Politics

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Legitimating the environmental injustices of war:toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq andAfghanistan

Eric Bonds

To cite this article: Eric Bonds (2015): Legitimating the environmental injustices of war:toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Environmental Politics, DOI:10.1080/09644016.2015.1090369

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2015.1090369

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Legitimating the environmental injustices of war:toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq andAfghanistanEric Bonds

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mary Washington,Fredericksburg, USA

ABSTRACTDuring the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense burnedthe majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches, producing largeamounts of potentially hazardous emissions. While journalists have coveredstories of US service members who link their illnesses to these fumes, theyhave almost entirely ignored potential civilian impacts. However, satelliteimages demonstrate that pollution from open-air trash burning on US basescould not have impacted US personnel without also harming Iraqi and Afghancivilians living near bases, indicating that burn-pit pollution is an important, ifunacknowledged, environmental justice issue. Content analysis of news articlesshows the extent to which civilian impacts have been left out of mainstream USmedia reporting on burn-pit pollution. This selective attention is symptomatic ofthe way military violence is legitimated, which involves a complicit news mediathat typically overlooks the humanitarian impacts of war.

KEYWORDS Environmental justice; Iraq War; Afghanistan War; treadmill of destruction; legitimation;war reporting

Introduction

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense(DoD) burned the majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches.For many years, in fact, this was the only form of waste disposal at mostbases (GAO 2010, IoM 2011). It is well known that the uncontrolledburning of plastics, Styrofoam, electronics, unexploded weapons, andother manufactured and highly processed materials releases harmful toxinsand particulate matter into the air. US journalists have paid increasingamounts of attention to the suspected impacts of this pollution. Theirattention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the potential harmto US soldiers and veterans, while it ignores potential civilian impacts. For

CONTACT Eric Bonds [email protected]

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2015.1090369

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instance, news stories such as the following frequently give accounts ofveterans who link their sicknesses to pollution from the burning refuse.

When Wendy McBreairty got back from Iraq in 2004, she desperately tried tounderstand what was causing her medical symptoms, including shortness ofbreath, muscle fatigue, muscle spasms, fatigue and dry eyes. The 32-year-oldAir National Guard staff sergeant found that others had similar, often equallypuzzling, problems. Among the 40 people in her shop alone, five haveneurological or respiratory issues. One thing they had in common was thatthey all lived. . . a mile southeast of an open-air burn pit at Joint Base Balad,Iraq. (Kennedy 2010)

Within a few months of arriving at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, in April2010, [Capt. Rebecca] Selby, an Air Force logistician, could no longer explainaway a growing list of ailments, including digestive problems, rashes and painthroughout her body that made it hard to walk. The only culprit she or herdoctors could suggest was the acrid smoke that filled her lungs most days asshe drove past Bagram’s burn pit, where tons of trash was burned daily,releasing a toxic bouquet of chemicals. (Carrol 2013)

While US journalists covering the burn-pit controversy tell such stories, it isnever mentioned that if military base pollution made soldiers sick, it must havemade civilians living nearby sick as well. And when journalists describe thepollution itself, how it billowed over military bases and covered living quarterswith ash and soot, such accounts never mention that this pollution would nothave stopped at the cement barricades and concertina wire at base boundaries,but must have also settled over civilians’ homes and the surrounding landscapes.

In what follows, I make a contribution to our collective understanding ofenvironmental inequality by providing descriptions of satellite imagery toshow that US bases (including those that burned waste in the open air foryears) were not located in the uninhabited deserts or wastelands that manyAmericans might imagine Iraq and Afghanistan to be. On the contrary, Ishow that many bases were located next to farmsteads, townships, cities,cropland, orchards, and rivers. By so doing, I establish that US burn pits arean important, albeit neglected, environmental justice issue. I also provide acontent analysis of major US newspaper coverage of the burn-pit contro-versy to show how it has almost entirely ignored potential civilian impacts.These findings raise a vital question: why is it that US news accounts attendto the potential toxic effects caused by military pollution on US servicemembers, while completely ignoring the fact that civilians living next tobases would be impacted too? I argue that this has much to do with thelegitimation of military violence in America, which involves both USgovernmental attempts to shape media coverage of war, along with acomplicit news media, that together produce a style of reporting thatsociologist Altheide and Grimes (2005) has called ‘war programming.’ Byraising and answering this question, I make contributions to both studies

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on the environmental impacts of militarism, or the ‘treadmill of destruc-tion,’ and studies on the legitimation of war by showing how the US newsmedia, through its silence and selective attention, helps to hide environ-mental injustices created by the US military.

Legitimating the environmental injustices of war

Preparing for and fighting wars is inherently damaging to the environment.Making weapons is highly resource intensive (NRC 2008). Training for warsproduces a great deal of pollution, and can severely damage whole landscapes(Seager 2003, Schmidt 2004), while deploying troops overseas and maintainingnavies across the world’s oceans requires a tremendous amount of energy(Yergin 1991). War itself often means the intentional destruction of environ-ments, and unexploded ordinance (bombs, landmines, and cluster munitions)can continue to kill long after wars are officially declared over. Because the USgovernment maintains the world’s largest military, with bases and a navy fleetdeployed across the globe, and because it has regularly fought wars since WorldWar II, it has an especially large environmental footprint (Gould 2007, Clark andJorgenson 2012).

The treadmill of destruction model calls attention to the increasingly severeenvironmental impacts of war and militarism (Hooks and Smith 2004, Clarkand Jorgenson 2012). According to this model, governments are continuouslybuilding up their capacities for violence as they vie with one another forterritory and power. As they do so, they develop and utilize increasinglycomplex technologies that produce greater environmental footprints. Studieson the treadmill of destruction model also stress that the environmentalimpacts of militarism are not borne equally. On the contrary, militarism isan important domestic cause of environmental injustice, as the DoD places adisproportionate toxic burden on poor communities and communities of colorfor weapons development and testing in the United States (Hooks and Smith2004, Sbicca 2012). The US government also creates global environmentalinequalities as a result of the wars it fights, both through the pollution it createsas part of its daily operations and through its embrace of high-tech weaponsthat can cause long-lasting and widespread environmental impacts, such as theuse of Agent Orange in the VietnamWar (Frey 2013), other herbicides used todestroy drug crops in Colombia (Smith et al. 2014), the use of cluster muni-tions in Laos, and the use of depleted uranium in Iraq (Nixon 2013).

The treadmill of destruction model calls attention to the relationshipbetween militarism and environmental degradation, while also pointing tothe US military as an important global driver of environmental injustice. Themodel, however, has not yet been extended to explain how these outcomes arelegitimated. This is an issue of major concern because the often-devastatingenvironmental impacts of militarism are at odds with widely upheld human

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rights norms and ideals of the ‘just war,’ which requires that militaries restrainthemselves to prevent unnecessary widespread or severe civilian harm.Without legitimation work to reconcile these impacts with widely sharednorms, then the US government might see reduced domestic support for itswar-fighting, and may have to deal with increased antiwar sentiment (Bonds2013).

The environmental injustices of war are legitimated in several ways, buttwo key methods have to do with the denial of environmental risks and,perhaps more importantly, the ability to limit public awareness of thecivilian impacts cause by conflict. First, when the US government is accusedof exposing soldiers and civilians to toxins, its response – like the responseof most actors vested in the use of potentially harmful chemicals – is denial.According to Nancy Langston (2010, p. viii) ‘since World War II, syntheticchemicals in plastics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides have permeatedbodies and ecosystems throughout the United States, often with profoundhealth and ecological effects.’ This regulatory failure is often due to inade-quate scientific models that cannot initially track the ways that exposures toeven small amounts of some chemicals can produce negative healthimpacts, or the ways that potential toxins can interact with one anotherand the surrounding environment to produce unanticipated illnesses (Nash2006, Langston 2010). And toxins may escape initial regulatory controlbecause their effects are slow to develop and may not be known for years,which is especially the case for chemicals that impact fetal development andtherefore cause health impacts across generations (Langston 2010). Butcompanies and government agencies that have vested interests in the useof potential toxins also play a role here, first by insisting that the absence ofscientific proof linking chemicals to ill-health effects means that they aresafe, and then by working to raise doubts about the scientific evidence thatdoes emerge (Nash 2006, Langston 2010). The US DoD, which has a longhistory of producing toxic contaminants both internationally and withinthe nation’s border, has regularly used such tactics in an effort to avoidliability and cleanup expenses (Bonds 2011).

But these methods are necessary only when toxic contamination is broughtto light and contested. Another important way that the environmental impactsof war are legitimated in America is that they are so difficult for Americans tosee. This is bound up with the more general legitimation of militarism andconflict through a complicit news media, something David Altheide andJennifer Grimes (2005, p. 618) call ‘war programming’ to refer to ‘the organi-zation and structure of the discourse of recent reportage about wars, and notmere content. It encompasses content as well as thematic emphases anddominant frames.’ War programming is part of the ongoing legitimation ofAmerica’s regular war-fighting. It begins with the demonization of leaders incertain foreign countries that have been targeted for military action, along with

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coverage of military experts anticipating and planning for an impending war(see also Solomon 2005). War programming continues with coverage of thewar itself, largely from a US perspective and reliant upon US governmentsources. After the war, and a period of reflection, academics and journalistsmay engage in some criticism that the war’s coverage was too deferential to theUS government, and that it did not adequately report on the true costs of theconflict or potential alternatives to war. Unfortunately, according to Altheideand Grimes (2005), these criticisms will make only a superficial impact in thecoverage of the next war as the process repeats itself.

A fundamental aspect of war programming is that the humanitariancosts of war are largely hidden from view. Numerous analyses haveshown that the US news media regularly fails to report on the civilianimpacts of US wars (Herman and Chomsky 1988, Tumber and Palmer2004, Ravi 2005, Lindner 2009). This outcome is not, of course, the result ofdirect censorship, but is due to a more subtle coincidence of interestsbetween large news media companies and the US government that pro-duces a similar effect (Herman and Chomsky 1988). For one, these mediacompanies need to keep reporting costs down and are wary about the risksof sending reporters out into war zones, so they become highly reliant onofficial sources of information. The US government, however, focusesattention away from the death and suffering experienced by civilians inits wars – General Tommy Franks famously summed up this position in theIraq War by stating, ‘We don’t do body counts’ (quoted in Tumber andPalmer 2004).

While the US government withholds some kinds of uncomfortable ortroublesome information, it also actively works to encourage reporters tocover wars from a military perspective. It provides opportunities for jour-nalists to ‘embed’ with US military forces. This might be attractive toreporters, as it is much safer than going into a war zone without theprotection of US troops, but it also means that they will be more likely totake the perspective of soldiers, and not that of civilians, when covering thewar (Lindner 2009). The US government also provides video footage,satellite imagery, and high-tech graphics of weapons to news organizations,which gives them ample opportunity to devote extensive coverage to thetechnical marvels of the US military, but again does not present much of anopportunity to consider civilian impacts (Thussu 2004). Finally, newscompanies, at least at the start of US wars, may avoid reporting on civiliandeaths and suffering due to fear of criticism for not being patriotic orsupportive of US troops and the war effort (Herman and Chomsky 1988,Hallin 2013), though Altheide and Grimes (2005) note that this dynamicmight change when wars drag on and become increasingly unpopular.Taken together, these factors help produce a kind of war reporting in theUS news that largely ignores civilian death and suffering. As war

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programming, it is a kind of framework for perception and discourse that istaken for granted and a matter of convention. The following case study onthe news coverage of US military burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan willshow that, like the impacts of war more generally, the environmentalconsequences of conflict are legitimated when they are left out of newsreports, and so become impossible for Americans to see.

The wastes of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

While the DoD used open-pit burning as its primary means of wastedisposal in Iraq and Afghanistan, it did not keep records of how muchwaste it burned. It has, however, estimated that every US service member ineach theater produced on average 8–10 pounds of waste per day (IoM2011). This means that, at the peak of the two wars’ respective ‘surges,’roughly 900,000 pounds of waste was produced a day by the US military inAfghanistan in 2011 and approximately 1,700,000 pounds of waste wasproduced per day in Iraq in 2008, the majority of which was burnedwithout any pollution controls.1 To grasp how much waste was put intoburn pits, it is helpful to know that an estimated 90,000 empty plastic waterbottles were burned each day at the Balad air base in Iraq alone (Kennedy2008a). Overall, the waste burned at US bases in Iraq and Afghanistanincluded paper, plastic, Styrofoam, rubber, petroleum products such as oiland lubricants, chemicals such as solvents and paint, metals, unexplodedweapons, electronics, batteries, and medical waste (Senate Hearing 2009,GAO 2010, IoM 2011).

Burning refuse without pollution controls is associated with numerousnegative health impacts. According to the US Environmental ProtectionAgency (2014), burning waste in one’s backyard is widely prohibited in theUnited States, and “is far more harmful to our health than previouslythought. It can increase the risk of heart disease, aggravate respiratoryailments such as asthma and emphysema, and cause rashes, nausea, orheadaches. Backyard burning also produces harmful quantities of dioxins,a group of highly toxic chemicals that settle on crops and in our waterwayswhere they eventually wind up in our food and affect our health.”

While the US government has known for several decades that uncon-trolled burning of waste produces negative health impacts, this has been thetypical method of waste disposal by the US DoD during times of war (IoM2011). While it has always posed risks, a panel from the US NationalAcademy Institute of Medicine (2011, p. 3) warns that, ‘technologicadvances in recent military conflicts mean that new items are being burned– plastic bottles and electronics, for example – and the burning of suchitems presents new health risks.’ Many large US bases in Iraq andAfghanistan were not, after all, rugged and sparsely furnished outposts,

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but highly developed areas with movie theatres, fast-food restaurants,swimming pools, and ‘big box’-like PX retail stores (Senate Hearing2009). They had, in other words, many of the furnishings of contemporaryAmerican life without contemporary forms of waste disposal. This devel-opment is consistent with the treadmill of destruction model, which antici-pates that militaries will have increasingly large environmental footprintsboth as more resources are put into militarism and as militaries becomemore high tech (Hooks and Smith 2004).

Thousands of US soldiers and other coalition troops were exposed toburn-pit emissions, which have been linked with toxins known to causenegative health outcomes. These chemicals include dioxins, ‘acetaldehyde,acrolein, arsenic, benzene . . . ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, hydrogen cya-nide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, various metals, nitrogen diox-ide, phosgene, sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, toluene, trichloroethane,trichloropropane, and xylene’ (Curtis 2006). And just as important as theactual chemical constituents, burning trash at US bases without controlsproduced pollution in the form of very small particulate matter, which canget lodged in human lungs and is associated with a number of chronicillnesses (IoM 2011).

The acrid smell of burn-pit emissions, sometimes billowing plumesreaching upwards high into the air or hanging as a low haze, was a muchremarked upon part of daily life at some bases. Much less discussed,however, is the fact that civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were exposedto this pollution too, making burn pits an under-recognized environmentaljustice issue. Because Americans oftentimes imagine war zones as unin-habited wildernesses or as unpopulated ‘sacrifice zones’ (Seager 1993,Kuletz 1998), it is important to take a closer look.

While the US relied on open-air burning for the majority of its solid-waste disposal, the DoD began introducing waste incinerators into Iraq andAfghanistan in 2005 (GAO 2010). Regrettably, the DoD has not releasedinformation to the public about the exact locations where open-pit burningwas continued after this time and where it was phased out (GAO 2010, IoM2011). The DoD has, however, released rough estimates of the numbers ofburn pits it kept in operation. In 2009, for instance, burn pits were beingoperated in 30 out of 45 medium-sized bases and in 19 out of 45 large basesin Iraq (GAO 2010). While this information helps give a sense of howextensively the DoD relied upon open-air burning as a method of wastedisposal, it does not help to establish exact areas where civilians wereexposed to toxic emissions.

Fortunately, there have been some government investigations of themilitary’s burning of waste that document specific locations of burn pitsover particular time periods. Google satellite imagery gives a sense of theextent of civilian habitation around the bases and shows other important

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features, such as the presence of farmland and rivers.2 A discussion of thesespecific examples underscores the more general point that bases were oftenlocated next to farmland, agricultural communities, rivers, and urbanneighborhoods. As such, civilians were widely exposed to burn-pit pollu-tion from US military bases during the Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan(2001–present) wars.

Balad air base, Iraq

The burn-pit operation at Balad air base was the largest in Iraq andAfghanistan, operating from 2003 to late 2009. At its peak, it burned upto 200 tons of waste per day (GAO 2010, IoM 2011). The continuouslyburning pit produced a column of smoke that was ‘such an invariable partof the horizon that software engineers writing a program to help fighterpilots navigate their way onto the base made it a central part of the digitallysimulated skyline’ (LaPlante 2008a). The former US base is surrounded onall sides by cropland. Numerous farmsteads are within one mile of the base,and at least six small communities lie within two miles. The Tigris River, animportant source of drinking and irrigation water in Iraq, runs parallel tothe base within a distance of one mile.

Forward operating base Marez, Iraq

This former US base complex at Mosul Airport sits adjacent to cropland onits east side. The Tigris River runs parallel to the base, within two miles ofits boundary. The city of Mosul, with a population of more than onemillion, begins on the immediate north side of the former base. The basewas established in 2004 and continued to use open-pit burning as late as2009 as its main form of solid-waste disposal, though it also had an unlinedlandfill (GAO 2010). US government inspectors found that the base was notin compliance with DoD directives on waste disposal, and continued toburn plastics, batteries, aerosol cans, and electronics (GAO 2010).

Forward operating base warhorse, Iraq

Like Marez, this US military base was without a controlled incinerator,and continued to burn plastics and other potentially toxic materials inthe open air well into 2009 (GAO 2010). The base was located roughlythree miles from the city of Baqubah, and was immediately surroundedby farmland. Two small townships and fruit orchards are located withina mile of the former facility. The Diyala River runs about a mile from thebase.

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Shindad air base, Afghanistan

This base, which was first established in 2004, housed an estimated 4000 USservice members and Afghan troops in 2013. It continued to burn its solidwaste – including plastics and batteries – as late as 2013, according to USgovernment inspectors (SIGAR 2014). Agricultural fields and small town-ships are located directly south of the Shindad base.

Forward operating base Salerno, Afghanistan

This base was first developed in 2002 and continued to burn its waste in theopen air until at least 2013 (SIGAR 2013a). While the DoD paid to have twotrash incinerators built at this base in 2010, US government inspectorsfound that they had not been used. Instead, the base was burning 14 tonsof trash per day in the open air (SIGAR 2013b). The Salerno base is locatedwithin a mile of the town of Khost and is surrounded by agricultural landsand small townships on all sides.

These specific examples show that US open-pit burning created toxic airpollution that did not stay on US bases, but also spread into Iraqi andAfghan homes, cropland, and waterways. The examples also indicate thatcivilian exposures to this pollution from US bases across Afghanistan andIraq – as a whole – were widespread, even if we do not know the specificyears and the specific locations where this pollution occurred. The DoD,after all, reported that in 2010 it was operating 184 burn pits in Afghanistanand 52 burn pits in Iraq (GAO 2010). This initial analysis demonstrates thatopen-pit burning is an important, even if unrecognized environmentaljustice issue. The next section considers how this inequality has beenlegitimated in the US news media.

Denial and disappearing civilians from view

Up until 2008, there was little public regard for the DoD’s preferred methodof waste disposal in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the issue had been givenpractically no major press coverage. This changed in 2008 when a reporterfrom the Army Times named Kelly Kennedy ran the first of several storieson the issue that year. Her first article was based on a newly uncoveredmemo from Air Force Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis (2006) – a PhD in environ-mental engineering – who wrote to his supervisors stating that, ‘in myprofessional opinion, there is an acute health hazard for individuals. Thereis also the possibility for chronic health hazards associated with the smoke.’

The 2008 articles by Kennedy galvanized US veteran activism. Sickveterans who were largely unable to explain their illnesses recognized thatexposure to burn-pit emissions was a possible cause of their suffering, and

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the Disabled Veterans of America began raising awareness about thepotential health problems that toxic emissions from burn pits could cause(Kennedy 2008b, 2008c). Members of Congress soon began raising inqui-ries into the DoD’s waste-disposal policies in Iraq and Afghanistan(Kennedy 2008d, Senate Hearing 2009), and it became the subject ofmedia attention, to which the DoD had to respond.

At first, the DoD steadfastly denied that the emissions from its open-pitburn sites could have made soldiers and veterans sick. Military officials toldreporters, for instance, that there are ‘no short- or long-term health risks,and no elevated cancer risks are likely among personnel deployed to Balad[air base]’ (quoted in LaPlante 2008a). Officials also stated that, despitesome initial monitoring, ‘we have not identified anything, where there aretroops, where it would have been hazardous to their health’ (quoted inLaPlante 2008b). The DoD, of course, had a vested interest in making suchclaims in order to avoid healthcare expenses and compensation paymentsto sick veterans that could easily cost billions of dollars. The DoD also hadan interest in denying these risks in order to protect its own legitimacy,which would be put at risk if it appeared as though it had unnecessarilydamaged its soldiers’ health.

Faced with the continued advocacy of veterans groups and ongoing presscoverage of sick soldiers, the DoD soon undertook a more nuancedapproach to denial. The same officials that earlier denied potential healthimpacts told the press, ‘we feel at this point in time that it’s quite plausible –in fact likely – that there are a small number of people that have beenaffected with longer-term health problems’ (quoted in LaPlante 2009).While the official DoD position now acknowledges that exposure to burnpits could combine with other risk factors to make some troops sick (Levine2009), it also maintains that there is insufficient evidence to prove that anysingle illness was caused by burn-pit emissions exposure, rather than havingother genetic, individual behavioral, or other environmental causes(USAPHC 2014). Like other controversies regarding potential or actualtoxins, the DoD is denying responsibility for illnesses in the absence ofmedical certainty, which often takes years to produce due to limitations inscientific understanding, because contaminants can create different kinds ofhealth impacts in different environmental conditions, and because theseimpacts themselves are not always immediate but can take years – or even ageneration – to develop fully (Nash 2006, Langston 2010). But due to publicand Congressional pressure, the DoD and the Department of Veterans’Affairs is continuing to study this issue. Congress, in fact, mandated that itdo so in a 2013 law that establishes a ‘burn-pit registry’ in order to track thehealth outcomes of service members who believe they were exposed toburn-pit emissions (Kennedy 2014). There has been no attempt from theUS government, however, to understand how the health of Iraqi and

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Afghan civilians has been impacted by the military’s open-air waste incin-eration, though they certainly were subjected to the same pollution andwere just as vulnerable, if not more so. Civilians, in fact, have been almostentirely excluded from the news discourse regarding the burn-pitcontroversy.

In order to understand how civilian impacts of burn pits were – or werenot – discussed in the US news media, I conducted a survey of majordomestic newspapers from 2007 through 2014.3 Newspaper stories continueto be an important way that Americans learn about the world each day, andwhile their importance may be waning compared with TV news and otheronline news formats, newspaper articles are easily searchable and aretypically representative of other forms of mainstream news. The searchproduced 49 distinct stories. While five of these stories made passingreference to civilian impacts, and one story mentioned potential impactsto civilians on par with impacts to soldiers, the vast majority of news storiesmade no mention that Iraqi and Afghan civilians might also have beenharmed by the US military’s burning of waste (see Figure 1).

The omission of Iraqi and Afghan civilians from the burn-pit contro-versy in the US news creates quite a puzzle. After all, they would have beenjust as much impacted by exposure to toxins in burn-pit emissions as theUS soldiers who were featured in news accounts. Toxic pollution, after all,does not harm all people equally (Langston 2010). While babies and youngchildren, pregnant women, and sick individuals are the most vulnerable totoxins, healthy adult men are – as a whole – the least susceptible. And, ofcourse, US soldiers are disproportionately men who are screened beforedeployment to ensure that they are physically fit, whereas the Iraqi andAfghan communities living near bases included a multitude of more vul-nerable persons. Additionally, while deployments for US soldiers could beas long as 15 months, and some soldiers were deployed multiple times,

Figure 1. Stories mentioning potential civilian impacts.

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there was no reprieve for Iraqis and Afghans living near the bases, who alsowere potentially further exposed to toxins from burn-pit pollution throughcontaminated water used both for drinking and for irrigating food crops.To sum things up, if US soldiers were endangered by open-pit burning atUS bases, then so too were Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Any mention of thesepotential impacts, however, is almost entirely absent from mainstream USpress coverage. These findings beg the question, why?

The answer likely has two parts. First, in this era of limited funding forinvestigative work, reporters are often relegated to covering the ‘actions’ ofimportant players relevant to topics thought to be of interest to readers andmedia audiences (McChesney 2003). Consequently, the ‘facts’ regarding anissue tend to be of secondary importance compared with what importantplayers – which may be politicians, government agencies, celebrities, oradvocacy groups – think, say, or do (McChesney 2003). This means thatsuch actors have tremendous leverage – whether they intend it or not – toframe how issues are perceived (Best 2013). In this particular case, thosewho were framing the issue of burn-pit pollution were not doing so in away that included civilians. This is borne out in my content analysis ofnewspaper coverage regarding the controversy, in which I assessed andcategorized the ‘action’ or story that each article covered.4 These findingsare represented in Table 1.

Taken as a whole, veterans’ actions were the most common stories toldin newspaper accounts of burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. News storiesran about individuals or groups of veterans demanding adequate healthcareand compensation for sicknesses they linked with burn-pit exposure. Anumber of stories were written to update readers about developmentsregarding a class-action lawsuit filed by veterans seeking compensationfrom KBR, a private contractor that operated many burn pits on behalf ofthe US military at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Understandably, veteranssuffering from negative health impacts they believe were caused by USmilitary pollution are not in a position to advocate for others given theirown pressing needs, but the result is that US reporters covered their plightwithout ever mentioning that civilians might be suffering similar effects.

Table 1. Burn-pit news stories.Article story type Number of stories

US government agency action (i.e., investigation report, policy change, etc.) 12Veteran organizing 7Veteran lawsuit 6Congressional action 8Health study/research controversy 8Sick soldiers (‘human interest’ stories) 6Leaked memo on burn-pit pollution 2Total 49

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One exception is a New York Times story about a protest held by theorganization Right to Heal, which is comprised of both US veterans andIraqi civilians. Members of this group advocated that ‘Washington must dosomething for the thousands of people suffering from what the group calledthe “environmental poisoning” of Iraq’ (Smith 2014).

Another common story type focused on US government agency actionsin relation to burn pits, for instance an agency’s decision to fund a newstudy, the unveiling of new waste-disposal policies, or internal governmentinvestigations, namely those undertaken by the Government AccountabilityOffice (GAO) or the Special Inspector General for AfghanistanReconstruction (SIGAR). The US government agencies, however, werelargely responding to political pressure regarding harmful impacts onsoldiers, and would likely have no desire to increase the political falloutby extending the scope of the problem to civilians. And of course the USgovernment, as a whole, has a strategic imperative to gloss over or ignorethe civilian impacts of war more generally (Shaw 2005).

Other kinds of stories largely failed to mention, in even a brief sentence,that Iraqis and Afghans must have been impacted by this pollution too.News reports on health studies and on the scientific controversy over theextent of harm caused by burn pits also failed to register that civilians inthese wars might have been exposed too. Finally, when veterans’ advocatesin the US Congress took up the issue, they predictably did so in a way thatexcluded Iraqi and Afghan civilians. For instance, the Senate DemocraticPolicy Committee was the first group to hold a hearing on the issue in 2009,entitling it ‘Are Burn Pits in Iraq and Afghanistan Making our VeteransSick?’ (Senate Hearing 2009). Framing the event this way precluded anacknowledgment that these are countries populated by civilians who wouldbe similarly endangered. Senators and members of the House ofRepresentatives of course have good reason to frame the impacts of pollu-tion this way; in US politics, there are gains to be made by expressingconcern for veterans and for advocating on their behalf, but there are alsopotential political costs to pay by criticizing the military too extensively intimes of war.

Taken together, the results of my content analysis show that each of themost common story types cover the ‘actions’ of players who are very likelyto frame burn-pit pollution in terms of impacts on US soldiers and toexclude impacts on Iraqi and Afghan civilians. While this goes some way inhelping to explain why potential civilian impacts were mostly excluded andhidden from view in US news stories, it does not provide a completeaccount. After all, even in an era of media cutbacks and declines ininvestigative reporting, there is nothing stopping reporters from at leastmentioning that if soldiers are being made sick from pollution at US bases,then civilians would likely be impacted too. For this reason, part of the

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answer must also be that reporters were simply following a more generalconvention in US news coverage of the nation’s wars, which typically failsto consider civilian impacts across the board.

Instead, mainstream news media sources mostly give a US-focusedaccount of fighting (Altheide and Grimes 2005, Solomon 2005), and whilethis style of coverage sometimes draws attention to the costs of war, thedeaths and injuries of soldiers are given far more weight than civiliansuffering and casualties (Solomon 2005). Needless to say, such coveragehas a legitimating effect in that it prevents many Americans from develop-ing a full appreciation of the destruction and anguish caused by war. Theanalysis at hand indicates that the environmental injustices caused byconflict and overseas militarism are similarly legitimated in the US throughthe coincidence of interests between the US military and major newscompanies that together produce war programming.

Conclusion: A new generation’s Agent Orange?

Politicians and news reporters have called open-pit burning ‘this generation’sAgent Orange.’5 Both the use of Agent Orange in the VietnamWar and open-air trash incineration in Iraq and Afghanistan produced large amounts ofpollution. US soldiers coming home from both of these conflicts linked theirotherwise unexplained illnesses with wartime toxic exposures. In the cases ofboth Agent Orange and open-pit burning, the US government at first deniedthat toxic exposures caused sicknesses, and refused to compensate soldiers fortheir losses. Eventually, the US government changed course for VietnamVeterans, even if only after a long political fight that left many sick veteranswithout compensation or adequate healthcare (Wilcox 2011a). Sick veteransand their advocates hope that the US government, after creating a congres-sionally mandated burn-pit registry, will similarly make the decision tocompensate US veterans who have fallen ill from exposure to emissionsfrom open-air waste incineration. But it is important to keep in mind thatmost of the people harmed by Agent Orange were not US soldiers – they wereVietnamese civilians who were exposed to defoliants but were never recom-pensed for the loss of their livelihoods or health (Wilcox 2011b, Frey 2013).

Journalists’ and politicians’ comparisons between Agent Orange contam-ination and burn-pit emissions is very telling. For one, it bolsters Altheideand Grime’s (2005) model on war programming as an ongoing legitimatingprocess for US militarism and conflict. In the model, the mainstream newsmedia largely paves the way for new wars by demonizing foreign leaders,portraying looming wars as inevitable, and failing to fully consider thepossible costs of – or alternatives to – conflict. In the early days of war,the press mostly reports on the war uncritically and from a US militaryperspective, largely ignoring civilian impacts. At the war’s conclusion, or

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after it has dragged on and become increasingly unpopular, members of themedia may engage in some reflection and limited self-criticism, which willbe superficially incorporated into the next round of war coverage.

These dynamics are illustrated in the analogies journalists make betweenburn pits and Agent Orange, as they self-consciously state that they hope thatthe US government and public will not ignore sick Iraq and Afghanistan Warveterans, as happened after the Vietnam War. With this cautionary lesson inmind, and a desire to avoid the journalistic failings of the past, they are willingto tell the tragic stories of sick soldiers who believe their illnesses were causedby exposure to burn-pit emissions. At the same time, as Altheide and Grimes(2005) anticipate, even as war programming was altered in response to thiscritique of Vietnam-era reporting, it also remained largely the same in crucialways. Most importantly here, media accounts continued to ignore or excludecivilians from coverage, creating the impression that only US soldiers wereimpacted by toxins from the US military. Taken together, these reports seemto portray a war zone in which civilians do not exist.

But of course they do exist, and they were also exposed to such toxins. Thisstudy, I hope, adds to the literature on the treadmill of destruction by furtherdocumenting how US militarism causes global environmental injustice. I hopeto have further contributed to the theory by discussing how such inequalities arelegitimated in the United States, both through the denial of environmental risksand through the discursive disappearance of civilian impacts by a largelycomplicit mainstream news media. As in the case of Agent Orange, the DoDat first denied that soldiers could become sick due to chemical exposure bytaking refuge in the difficulty of pinning down effects of toxins given thecomplex ways they interact with the human body and the environment, andgiven the length of time some impacts take to develop (see Nash 2006, Langston2010). Unlike in the case of Agent Orange, the DoD has deployed a moresophisticated strategy of denial in the case of burn-pit exposure, in which itacknowledges that toxins from burning trash could potentially make soldiers ill,while it also asserts that it is impossible to know if any one illness was caused byburn-pit fumes given themany other potential environmental and genetic causesfor sickness.

But when toxic effects are real, this strategy of denial only works for solong. In the case of Agent Orange, evidence eventually accumulated toprove beyond doubt that the herbicide contained chemicals that werevirulently toxic. Nonetheless, the US government has never acted to com-pensate the people of Vietnam for the toxins it sprayed across their country.Likewise, evidence presented here shows that even as the US governmentestablishes a ‘burn pit registry’ to study the impacts of toxic pollution onsoldiers, it is on course to leave Iraqi and Afghan victims exposed toburning-trash fumes unacknowledged and uncompensated. As in the case

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of Vietnam, this has much to do with war programming and a complicitnews media that hides the civilian victims of war from view.

Notes

1. These estimates were made using the lower eight pounds of waste per dayaverage.

2. This analysis relies upon my observation of Google satellite images of currentand former US bases, the locations of which were confirmed by at least twoother sources. Such an analysis can only provide rough estimates of theproximity of homes and important landscape features near bases. Whilemore exact mapping and measurements should be done in future research,my observational analysis is adequate for the argument at hand, which issimply making the point that US bases weren’t located in desert no-man’s-lands, but in populated areas and near environmental features upon whichpeople depended.

3. This search was conducted in LexisNexis Academic, using such search termsas: ‘Burn pit and (Iraq or Afghanistan)’ and ‘waste and burn and (Iraq orAfghanistan).’

4. I used an iterative process for my content analysis, in which I first anticipated– given my initial familiarity with the topic – the categories I thought wouldbest fit the stories being depicted in these news reports (Altheide 1987). As Iread through the articles, I recorded which story matched each category, but Ialso ran across new articles that required the creation of new categories, orthat challenged my categorization scheme. I therefore made additions andadjustments as necessary, and then went back to reassess previously codedarticles.

5. For examples, see Amin and MacVicar (2014), LaPlante (2010), SenateHearing (2009), and Simonich (2011).

Acknowledgments

I thank Nabil Al-Tikriti, Leslie Martin, and the anonymous reviewers atEnvironmental Politics for their helpful comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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