The US Navy has proposed high frequency underwater sound testing in Hawaii, California and Atlantic coasts, and the Gulf of Mexico starting 2014. According to the Navy's own estimates this testing will deafen 15,900 whales and dolphins and kill 1,800 more over the next five years. Strandings and deaths of cetaceans have already been attributed to the US Navy's use of high frequency sonar. These are feeling, sentient, highly intelligent mammals who feel love, pain, fear and suffering just as we do. They are truly gentle beings with a capacity for compassion, generosity and love at least equal to ours.
The Navy also wants to practice shooting high powered explosives that fatally injure the lungs and other organs of marine mammals. This is horrifying and insane. The use of spent munitions and depleted uranium in our oceans and elsewhere is an environmental holocaust, one that international judiciary bodies have already warned against due to cancer clusters in soldiers, animals and civilians in countries where we have used these munitions.
This bears repeating, folks: the United States Navy plans to detonate in a testing exercise more than 50,000 explosives underwater up and down the US coastline, as well as more than 10,000 hours of high intensity sonar that is so forceful it can explode the internal organs of whales and other sea creatures. Dolphins, whales and other innocent sea creatures will die for this, or be made deaf, their lives disrupted and destroyed. For nothing. No threat, no war, nothing. Just a sick, perverse, irretrievably stupid military force completely out of control and insane with arrogance, hostility and blood lust. Do you believe your Navy and Secretary of Defense protect you? From this senseless plan, it's clear they themselves are the threat, as cruel, out of control, toxic and dangerous as any in history. This does nothing for national security; in fact it weakens it. Clearly, our government is run by hostile, sick, out of control psychopaths and we need to wake up to this fact, now. Now, if you have children or you're a teacher will have the courage to tell them the truth? This is what your government and military does: this exercise in cruel, senseless atrocity. This is what it is: sick, pointless, out of control, destructive moral cowards who eviscerate precious innocent marine mammals for nothing. I have a friend who told me a story about someone he knew in the military. He and his buddies were sitting around bored one day, took some sheep they had at the base, and put them in an old abandoned tank. They shot the tank with a depleted uranium weapon, just to see what would happen. The sheep did not suffer the way these poor dolphins and whales will; they were killed instantly, liquified. This, however, is the same mentality driving the Navy's proposal. Men with these kinds of toys eventually want to shoot them off. It's natural and predictable. In the absence of any real threat, our Navy just wants to shoot its weapons off. What a truly atrocious, tragic, cowardly thing for them to do in our oceans, with those beautiful, innocent creatures, along with an entire marine ecosystem the victims. We have so much painful destruction of innocents and of the Earth already; that our officials could approve something like this, and that the Navy would even propose it, is proof that our own government and military is an out of control psychopath. No "Global force for good" would do anything like this, folks. No government that served its people or its nation would allow it. These policies are as uncivilized and as anti-human as anyone can imagine, as much as the Third Reich, as much as any horrifyingly toxic regime in history, and the only response is outrage and immediate call to action for each and all of us to stop these toxic sociopaths.
When you prepare for war all day and see the world in terms of conflict, eventually you want to practice shooting your weapons off. The Navy's position is a sad and predictable symptom of this illness. In truth, this kind of abuse makes us less safe. What are we safe from, if we kill our own precious cetaceans in our own oceans in a testing exercise? If that is the kind of nation we're going to be, we won't be worth saving or protecting anyway.
I am no pacifist. I believe that of the warrior is a legitimate avocation, an honorable one even, but this proposal, and this kind of atrocity, is one of the pitiful coward. There is no honor in this whatsoever, nor the US Navy, nor its commander or Commander In Chief Barack Obama if this pointless, horrific slaughter of innocents and destruction of our fragile ocean mammals goes through.
We do nothing to protect anyone's freedom with this unfeeling brutality; we show the world that we are sick, addicted, out of control and deviant. This does not have to go forward, and we have every ability, right and responsibility to stop it.
The US Navy's slogan is "A global force for good." This will be a sad, ugly comedy if they commit this atrocity against these innocent, feeling mammals. A great warrior would not do this; it is the proposition and the behavior of a brutal coward. I don't have a problem with war, when it's appropriate. A true warrior would protect the innocent and vulnerable, not attack them. In a proposal like this one, the United States has become the bully, become the coward, become the out of control aggressor.
Nearly 500,000 Americans have already signed a petition to prevent this horror. You have the power to speak up and stop this, and I urge you to take action. This link will give you the name and email of your legislators in the US. I have written to and called my Senators and congressman on many issues, and find they encourage and make this process easy. Please call or write. I welcome and invite you to copy in my text above; you are also perfectly free to alter it or write your own. Thank you. Tristan Luke Sullivan Please sign
further reading: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/zsmith/this_week_in_whales_join_the_h.html http://www.orcanetwork.org/news/shoup.html http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2012/06/take-actionthe-navys-testing-far-reaching-sonar-explosives-threaten-whales-dophins-oth
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