La Jicarita News - Community Advocacy for Northern New Mexico

The operative words at the press conference to announce a Clean Water Act lawsuit against Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Department of Energy (DOE) were "moral, and ethical." Members of the coalition filing the lawsuit, Communities for Clean Water (CCW), believe it is time for LANL to not only meet its legal obligations to clean up its toxic discharges into our rivers and streams but to meet its "moral and ethical" obligations to a fundamental and spiritual component of life itself. The members - acequia associations, Native Americans, environmental justice, religious, and anti-nuclear organizations, reflect a broad range of water uses: "ceremonial, spiritual, farming, domestic, artistic, aesthetic, ecological, and recreational purposes."

Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety; Sebia Hawkins, former board member of CCNS; Sarah Laeng-Gilliatt, also former board member of CCNS, celebrate filing of lawsuit

After two years of diligently collecting data on the Lab's toxic discharges and bringing together a coalition of eleven diverse community organizations and individuals, CCW stated that because "regulators have been unable to get LANL to clean up its discharges it is time for citizens to take over that task." The lawsuit, filed on February 7 in U.S. District Court, claims that LANL has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of its storm water National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit at 59 dump sites, where contaminated storm water is allowed to run off into the soils, surface water, and shallow groundwater of LANL's Los Alamos and Pueblo canyon watersheds, eventually traveling down-gradient to the Rio Grande. Such sites are currently regulated under the Clean Water Act and are required to obtain coverage under an industrial storm NPDES permit.

Specifically, the lawsuit claims LANL is violating New Mexico's water quality standards for PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a group of industrial chemicals used in electrical equipment. The manufacture of PCBs was banned in 1977 because they were proven to accumulate in the environment and cause adverse health effects including cancer, thyroid, stomach and liver damage, and impaired reproductive and immune systems. Levels of PCBs have been found at 25,000 times the water quality standard in Los Alamos and Pueblo Canyons. Other violations charged in the lawsuit include LANL's failure to conduct adequate monitoring; to file violation reports; and to maintain pollution treatment and control systems.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a "declarative judgement" that LANL has violated the Clean Water Act; a mandatory injunction for cleanup and monitoring; and assess civil penalties to LANL for violating the terms of the NPDES permit. Joni Arends, director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a CCW member group, stated, " We want specificity of site cleanup at LANL."

PCBs from 59 sites in two canyons represent only a portion of the contamination LANL has produced for over 60 years. The New Mexico Environment Department estimates there are approximately 2,093 dump sites at LANL where toxic chemical and radioactive nuclide waste has been deposited (NMED secretary Ron Curry attended the press conference and stated that he welcomed the lawsuit as another tool to help keep our drinking water safe). Many of these contaminants were dumped directly into the seven canyon watersheds that extend like fingers from the Pajarito Plateau, where the Lab is situated, to the Rio Grande. While these contaminants have long been traveling in storm runoff towards the river, after the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, which caused enormous erosion and soil loss, there has been an accelerated movement of contaminants.

The week before the lawsuit was filed, the Bush administration released its 2009 budget: funding for the design and construction of plutonium pit production facilities at LANL will be increased to nearly $3 billion, while the $164 million budgeted for cleanup falls far short of the $222 million necessary to keep up with cleanup benchmarks of the "Consent Order" LANL signed with NMED. Communities for Clear Water filed suit to not only hold LANL accountable but to emphasize that a change of mission there is imperative.

Editorial: Fifty Years of Mismanagement with no Lessons Learned

By Kay Matthews

The mother of all New Mexico water rights adjudications has yet to begin. Determining water rights in the Middle Rio Grande Basin may well prove to be longer and more contentious than both the Aamodt (over 40 years) and the Abeyta (close to 20). So why hasn't the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) made this adjudication a priority and requested money from the state legislature to fund it? According to Frank Titus, a longtime New Mexico hydrologist who has worked for the USGS, New Mexico Tech, served as an advisor for former State Engineer Tom Turney, and is a charter member of the Water Assembly, "I suggest it's because the concept of adjudicating the Middle Rio Grande ranges from worrisome, to threatening, to terrifying for individuals who understand its potential ramifications. This includes personnel of the OSE and many legislators."

Titus, in an Op-Ed series sponsored by the Water Assembly (the non-profit group that is trying to implement the Middle Rio Grande Regional Water Plan), reveals some of the reasons why so many folks are "terrified." Fifty years of indiscriminate pumping of the aquifer to facilitate urban growth and large farm irrigation is now affecting the surface water flows necessary to meet our Rio Grande Compact requirements. According to Titus, "[I]t was easy to delude ourselves with the pretense that impacts on river flows were far off in the future, hence not a worry. While New Mexico was the first state to recognize in its water laws that groundwater and surface water in a large river basin are likely two interconnected parts of the same hydrologic system, we never managed to fit the junior rights the state engineer grants for groundwater use into the older, priority timeframe of surface water rights."

The OSE devised a system called "dedications," whereby it granted groundwater permits on a promise to retire surface water rights when the effects of groundwater development actually reach the river. It isn't clear how many surface water rights in Socorro and Valencia counties, where most of the agricultural is, will have to be retired to satisfy dedications. Additionally, senior, surface water rights in the Middle Rio Grande Basin, from both counties, are being transferred to wells in urban areas for continued development, drying up farmland and creating a water market that will make the adjudication process even more complicated than it already is (see McCarran Amendment, page 8).

At the annual meeting of the New Mexico Water Dialogue in 2007, Peggy Johnson, hydrologist and representative of the Socorro/Sierra Regional Water Plan, had this to say. "There is a very strong water market right now, pulling water north to urban areas upstream, and it is driving the separation of land and water resources . . . . The only way we are going to preserve our agricultural resources-and they're just as important in the big picture as the water resource-we have to be able to preserve our soils and our productive agricultural lands and make those areas continue to produce food, and produce it locally. . . . Our agricultural lands, our soils, our fertile bottomlands are what feed us, and if you take that and abandon it, it is an environmental, it is a hydrologic, it is an economic, it is a social catastrophe."

The rational for all these water transfers from agricultural land is that we have to supply domestic water to urban areas that continue to grow and drive our economy. Another regional water plan representative (Southwest New Mexico), Dutch Salmon (former Interstate Stream Commissioner and current State Game & Fish Commissioner) had this to say about growth at the Water Dialogue meeting: "I think the main problem is that we view growth kind of like the weather-it's something that you can't stop; it's just something you react to when it gets here. And yet there are countries in the world today that do not grow. There are 30 or 40 countries that are or at near zero population growth, and they're not poor countries for the most part, they're among the most well-off countries in the world. We don't need growth for prosperity, and since we don't need growth for prosperity, I'm not sure why we need it. Eventually we're going to have to confront it, or all our conservation practices and all our water development schemes are going to come to naught."

So how are those of us at the grassroots level, who are trying to manage our resources realistically and equitably, ever going to wrest control from the bureaucrats and lawyers who continue down these unsustainable paths? Now that all the regional water plans have been approved (except the Taos plan, whose tortuous path to approval we've been following closely in La Jicarita), are they going to sit on shelves gathering dust while the powers that be continue with their own agendas? In an Op-Ed piece in the Journal North, Frank Splendoria, a representative the Mora-San Miguel-Guadalupe Regional Water Plan, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: "[G]ood thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they are executed." In his editorial Splendoria emphasizes that without Local Implementation Plans the state's current water planning process is doomed to fail. When steering committee members of the Taos Regional Water Plan went before the Interstate Stream Commission to try to gain approval for the plan's Implementation Program to educate the public and review proposed water transfer applications, the response from State Engineer John D'Antonio was, nothing is going to change the way the way OSE handles water transfer applications, so it doesn't ultimately matter if you include any kind of implementation program in your water plan.

Bills have been introduced into the state legislature calling for more money to support regional waterplanning: $345,000 in the House and $1.5 million in the Senate. But unless that money is earmarked for implementation and monitoring, it will no doubt be dollars flushed down the drain, while plans continue to sit on the shelf, gathering dust, and we continue to underwrite development, dry up farmland, and increase the likelihood of defaulting on our compact obligations.

Update on the Protest of the West Rim Mutual Domestic Water Users Association Water Transfer Application

The West Rim Water Mutual Domestic Water Users Association applied in 2005 to transfer 26 acre feet a year (afy) from the Rio Grande Spring to supply its domestic well, which serves 109 members. The application was protested by the Cerro San Cristobal Ranch and Half Moon Cattle Ranch, and the parties have been in mediation with the Office of the State Engineer (see La Jicarita News, January 08).

The parties drafted a settlement agreement on January 18. The president of the board of the water users association signed the agreement in February, but Dawn Kohorst, association manager, told La Jicarita News that the members aren't happy with it. The terms of the settlement include: all parties will not protest any future water transfer applications; all parties will not make any eminent domain calls on property or water rights; and the ranches will be excluded from the West Rim Water Association's service area (so no taxes could be levied on the ranches if the association ever obtains a water and sanitation district designation). Once the settlement is signed, the protestants will withdraw their protest and the association's application will be remanded back to the Water Rights Division of the OSE for review as an unprotested application. It remains to be seen how many acre feet of water will eventually be allowed in the transfer. In a previous determination the OSE offered 3.81 afy. According to Kohorst, "This entire process has been an ordeal. We just want to get back to improving our well and serving our members."

In the January article we also discussed a 1991 water transfer to the Cerro San Cristobal Ranch of 695.2 afy of groundwater to supplement an existing well with a second well in order to irrigate 316 acres. Those water rights have not been put to beneficial use, and the OSE has given the ranch until 2009 to provide proof that at least 25% of the land is under cultivation. In talking with one of the other ranchers in the vicinity of this transfer, he indicated concern that once the Cerro San Cristobal Ranch begins pumping this large amount of water, other ranch wells in the area could be adversely affected. The neighboring ranches all run cattle and are served by one or two livestock wells, and he believes that irrigation is inappropriate on these dryland ranches. Because the transfer has already been approved by the OSE, if other ranchers are impacted by the Cerro San Cristobal well, their only recourse will be through civil action.

Forest Guardians Takes on a "Bigger, Bolder" Identity

Forest Guardians, the Santa Fe based environmental group rural norteños love to hate, has decided to take on a bigger role than just being the "guardians" of our forests. Now they're prepared to be the guardians of the earth - the WildEarth that is, the earth sin gente. That's the philosophy that underlies their mission: saving nature apart from man, who is the scourge of the planet (see review of Jake Kosek's book, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico, in the December 06 and January 07 issues of La Jicarita).

According to an article by the Associated Press, Forest Guardians has joined forces with the Boulder, Colorado environmental group Sinapu, whose mission is to protect and restore native carnivores in the southern Rockies. John Horning, who was the executive director of Forests Guardians and is now director of WildEarth Guardians, said, "We've created a bigger, bolder, and better organization to achieve our goals to restore wolves across the West, protect iconic Western rivers such as the Rio Grande, and keep wild places like the Sagebrush Sea intact." The combined organization will have 18 staff members, a budget of nearly $1.5 million, and offices in Denver, Boulder, Phoenix, and Santa Fe.

Meanwhile, community forestry groups and grazing associations, who were the victims of Forest Guardians absolutist policy of suing first and not worrying about the social and environmental consequences, have been forced out of business. Will this bigger and badder new organization continue to marginalize rural communities, the "inhabited wildernesses" that are so critical to maintaining acequia-dependent ecosystems, a locally grown natural and organic food supply, and are the last buffer against corporate exploitation of our wildland and water resources?

In their new incarnation will they continue to maintain their position that public lands stolen from Indo-Hispano and Native American land grants not be returned to the communities to which they rightfully belong? It's ironic that Forest Guardians has always claimed that it's "too late" to do anything about these injustices, that modern society has "moved on" and the Indo-Hispano and Native American communities need to "move on" as well. Yet their desire to return nature to some prior form of purity presumes that there is a natural condition or wilderness that can be reclaimed apart from man. It is this insidious separation of man from nature that has caused so much harm and has such disturbing parallels to racial purity and cleansing. Will this be WildEarth's agenda as well? Here comes Forest Guardians on steroids.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• The Supplemental Programmatic Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Complex 2030 - otherwise known as "Bombplex 2030" - has been released by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy (the acronym for the document is Complex Transformation SPEIS). This document analyzes the environmental impacts of alternatives for replacing the current nuclear weapons stockpile with "one that is smaller, more efficient, more secure, and better able to respond to changes in national security requirements." The alternatives include: No Action Alternative, which would continue operations to support national security requirements using the existing Complex, which consists of multiples sites located in seven states; Alternative 1, Distributed Centers of Excellence, which would consolidate the major functions required to support the nuclear weapons stockpile at a consolidated plutonium center (CPC) at one of five sites, or an upgrade of existing and planned facilities at LANL or Savannah River Site; Alternative 2, Consolidated Centers of Excellence, which would consolidate the three major "special nuclear materials" functions - plutonium, uranium, and weapon assembly/disassembly) at one or two sites; and Alternative 3, Capability-Based Alternative, which would analyze the potential environmental impacts of operating a Complex of smaller stockpiles than required to meet anticipated future national security needs. For pit [bomb triggers] production, a capability-based alternative would be similar to the pit production capacity being assessed in the current LANL Environmental Impact Statement. Not surprisingly, an alternative "Considered but Eliminated from Detailed Study" was to Pursue Dismantlement and Refrain from Designing and Building New Nuclear Weapons. There is a 90 day comment period and 18 public meetings will be held around the country. The schedule of New Mexico hearings is as follows: Socorro, Macey Center (at New Mexico Tech), 801 Leroy Place, Monday, March 10, 6 pm-10 pm; Albuquerque, Albuquerque Convention Center, 401 2nd Street NW, Tuesday, March 11, 11 am-3 pm and 6 pm-10 pm; Los Alamos, Hilltop House, 400 Trinity Drive, Thursday, March 13, 11 am-3 pm; and Santa Fe, Genoveva Chavez Community Center, 3221 Rodeo Road, Thursday, March 13, 6 pm-10 pm.

CORRECTION

In the January issue of La Jicarita we reported on the protest of the West Rim Mutual Domestic Water Users Association's proposed water transfer. We listed Tony Benson as one of the owners of the Half Moon Cattle Ranch, along with Mike Jones, and a protestant to the proposed transfer. While Tony is a business associate of Jones, he is not a protestant to the water transfer, and we apologize to Tony for the mistake. A settlement is close to being reached between the parties; please see the article on page 6 for details.

Pajarito Plateau Settlers Assert Human Rights Abuses

By Mark Schiller

In the May 2007 La Jicarita News Malcolm Ebright told the story of the unconstitutional dispossession of Hispano farmers and ranchers on the Pajarito Plateau by the federal government's Manhattan Project to make way for what eventually became Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). That article was followed by an August 2007 story in which I detailed the 2004 ten million dollar settlement Congress agreed to pay the heirs of the Pajarito settlers as compensation for that illegal action. In that article I alluded to a lawsuit that was contemplated by the Pajarito Plateau Homesteader's Association regarding human rights abuses associated with the dispossession of the settlers. This article will focus on that lawsuit as well as the government's highly controversial and well documented "Human Plutonium Injection Experiments Program" and "Human Tissue Harvesting Program," which, I believe, lend substantial credibility to the homesteaders' accusations of medical experimentation.

In September of 2001 lawyers representing the Pajarito Plateau Homesteader's Association drafted a lawsuit that outlined a litany of human rights abuses connected with the forceful dispossession of three of the homesteaders. By that time almost all of the original settlers had died and the suit relied on the depositions of two of the last surviving homesteaders and the testimony of the daughter of one of the deceased homesteaders. The two surviving homesteaders were brothers Marcos and José Gomez.

Marcos Gomez testified that his parents, Donaciano and Andrita Gomez, received a patent for 160 acres of land on the Pajarito Plateau in April of 1905. The family lived year-round on the ranch as subsistence farmers who also sold wheat and maintained grazing rights for their livestock on the adjoining Santa Fe National Forest. Marcos married in 1932 and built a house on his parents' property.

In May of 1943, armed members of the United States Army Corps of Engineers forcibly evicted the entire Gomez family from their homestead. Marcos testified that the soldiers "ordered the family to watch" as they demolished their cabins and outbuildings and gathered their livestock in corrals and shot them. He was then taken by bus to a military barracks where he was forced to live "along with many other homesteaders" for the next two years. During these two years he and other Pajarito homesteaders were forced into involuntary servitude, digging ditches for the foundations of LANL buildings at a rate of one dollar per day. But even these meager earnings, Gomez claimed, were essentially stolen from the dispossessed homesteaders as they were not allowed to leave the facility and were forced to purchase food and other supplies at what he termed a "company store."

Gomez also testified that the homesteaders were under constant "armed surveillance," even when they sent to the bathroom. At the end of two years Gomez said the military guards told the homesteaders "their family lands would be returned to them when the government no longer needed them," and were finally allowed to leave.

Marcos' brother José's story is even more disturbing. After the dispossession, José moved with his parents to El Rancho. According to his testimony, however, he was forced to take a bus every day to Los Alamos where he was "subjected to involuntary servitude" and medical experimentation. The lawsuit states: "José was compelled to wear a light body suit for protection with a mask and given a black box to carry. He would then be driven in a jeep, accompanied by two armed guards, to a cave in Los Alamos Canyon. Inside the cave, there were cubicles and a guard would accompany José into the cave while he placed the black box inside a cubicle. He was told that if he dropped the box he would be blown-up. He was also told he could not talk to anyone about his work on this 'top secret' project. He was then forcibly subjected to physical examinations by doctors and other Lab personnel every eight days. Approximately every fifteen days he was compelled to allow Lab personnel to take a blood sample. Every evening, before going home, he was given an unidentified liquid to drink by employees of the Lab. When he asked what it was, he was told that it was medicine and that he was sick."

The black boxes José transported, according to testimony from other sources, contained plutonium pits, and José was being monitored to see exactly what the effects of the radiation that was broadcast by the pits were on the human body. The daughter of Samuel Valencia, who stated that her father told her he was subjected to the same treatment, corroborated his testimony.

José also stated that his mother went into a severe depression as a result of the dispossession and died within three months. His father lived three more years, but remained completely destitute. The lawsuit further alleges that the settlers were "specifically targeted because of their racial and/or ethnic background as Hispanic Americans."

Although these allegations may sound extreme, the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for developing the nuclear weapons program, and LANL, which was the brain trust for that project, were both associated with well-documented programs that affected thousands of unwitting victims. These experiments clearly crossed the line into human rights violations, drawing comparisons with human medical experimentation conducted by Nazi Germany during World War II. Bear in mind that in the 1940s when the Manhattan Project was initiated scientists knew that exposure to plutonium posed serious health hazards, but did not know specifically how it was retained and distributed throughout the human body and what its effects were. In order to acquire this information the government initiated a series of experiments on human victims, none of whom gave their consent or were even aware they were part of these studies. This program was masterminded at LANL by three of the pioneers of the nuclear weapons program, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Stafford Warren, and Louis Hepplemann

According to Eileen Welsome, a former Albuquerque Tribune reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for her investigative articles that brought these experiments to light, "the victims were the most vulnerable people in our society: the young, the disenfranchised, the poor, people of color, people who did not know enough to ask questions." The most notorious of these experiments involved eighteen people who were injected with doses of plutonium, varying from five to ninety-five micrograms, at hospitals in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Chicago, San Francisco, and Rochester. The case of Elmer Allen is exemplary.

Allen was an African-American railroad porter who had fallen from a train and hurt his leg. The leg did not heal properly and as a result Allen went to the University of California at San Francisco Hospital where, unbeknownst to him, he was selected by doctors for radiation experimentation. Three days before doctors at the hospital amputated his leg, he was intramuscularly injected with plutonium. Doctors then took urine, feces, and tissue samples to monitor the effects of the plutonium. While Allen was never informed about these experiments, he had his suspicions and later told a friend, "They guinea-pigged me." When he went to his family doctor and told him, "I've been injected with something," the doctor diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Elmer Allen and his wife

While ten of the eighteen experimental subjects died within ten years of the injections, four, including Allen, survived more than twenty years and were reexamined in 1973, but still not informed they were part of this program. Instead, Allen was told that doctors knew he had a very serious cancer and wanted to know why he had lived so long. In addition, the remains of several of the experimental subjects who had already died were exhumed and tissue and bone samples were harvested for examination without the informed consent of their families. After Welsome's articles finally brought the truth of these experiments to light, Allen's family changed his tombstone to read, "ONE OF AMERICA'S HUMAN NUCLEAR GUINEA PIGS."

There were many other experiments associated with this program that were also conducted on human victims, including one at a Massachusetts school for disabled children. During that experiment seventy-three disabled children were fed oatmeal that had radioactive isotopes in it. This went on daily over the course of several years while scientists took blood, urine, and feces samples to evaluate the effects on the children.

Another experiment involved 829 pregnant women who participated in a study right after World War II at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The women were told they were being given vitamins that would help their babies when, in fact, they were being given radioactive iron to study how quickly it passed into the placenta. According to Welsome, the women developed "all kinds of ailments [including] skin diseases, cancer and blood disorders." Many of the children also developed cancer and died in childhood.

Subsequent experiments included purposely exposing thousands of soldiers to radiation from above ground nuclear weapons explosions in Nevada and at test sites in the Pacific in order to study the effects, and irradiating the testicles of prisoners in Oregon jails to determine the potential effects of space radiation on astronauts.

LANL also conducted studies using tissue samples from cadavers that were taken without prior authorization from the deceased or the posthumous consent of family members. In 2001 the University of California, which ran the Lab at the time, and the Department of Energy agreed to pay the more than 400 families involved in these experiments $9.5 million in compensation. Many people have subsequently theorized that the Lab, in an effort to acquire animal tissue for radiation experiments, is responsible for the rash of cow and wildlife mutilations that have taken place in northern New Mexico.

Once again, I emphasize that this is not speculation or science fiction, but well documented fact. I encourage you to read Welsome's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Plutonium Files, and/or the October 3, 1995 "Presidential Advisory Committee's Report on Human Radiation Experiments" and see for yourselves the inhumanity that was (and possibly still is) perpetrated in the name of science. The government has paid untold million of dollars in compensation as a result of lawsuits brought by the victims of these experiments and their families.

Which brings me back to the original subject of this article, the human rights abuses perpetrated against the dispossessed Pajarito Plateau settlers. Within the context of Welsome's revelations about the nuclear experimentation programs, these allegations don't sound the least bit far fetched and, in fact, the victims clearly fit Welsome's profile of disenfranchised people of color who were singled out because of their vulnerability. While no amount of money will ever compensate the victims' families for the atrocities committed against their ancestors, a thorough investigation of these allegations must be undertaken and compensatory and punitive damages awarded.

Get a PhD in Homeland Security!

One of our loyal La Jicarita News subscribers, Tamara Teale, recently sent us the news that her alma mater, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, plans to offer a doctorate in Homeland Security. Apparently CU Colorado Springs, CU Denver, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, have teamed up to offer the program, which will be funded by $1.9 million in federal defense money. Classes could start as early as this fall, although officials haven't decided which campus will host the classes. According to a article in the Colorado Springs Gazette, there are 50 applicants for the program, which is targeted at three kinds of employees: instructors who will be qualified to teach masters programs in Homeland Security; researchers who can help influence policies and work through the theoretical and political challenges associated with the field; and workers in the field, from high-level emergency directors to military brass.

In her letter to La Jicarita, Teale pointed out a statement by instructor Dr. Dale Jones in the syllabus of his course at UCCS called "Introduction to Homeland Defense": "Like you, I am committed to making contributions to assist our nation in winning the war on terrorism and defending the American homeland and our way of life." Teale questions just who the so-called enemy is this time and whose "way of life" we're defending. Maybe it won't be just Arab or Muslim peoples but Native American and Hispanos. Or is it just a way of "creating jobs for saber-rattling men with nothing better to do." As Teale points out, UCCS has always accepted large amounts of money from the Department of Defense and defense contractors.

Teale suggests that the Native American and acequia communities get together to discuss "homeland insecurity" that is being perpetrated by these warmongers of the military industrial complex.