Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA)
makes the case that military activities have had a profound environmental effect on Southern California:
Southern California’s health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity. Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site – and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?
[singlepic=136,320,240,,left] PSR-LA is working to ensure the cleanup of the Rocketdyne Laboratory in the Santa Susana Hills above Chatsworth
Military, intelligence, and to some extent, law-enforcement agencies, not without some reason , are exempt from many regulatory schemes. In the first place – there are often no civilian analogues – making regulations less relevant. Even more powerfully, they’re charged with critical and specialized tasks [singlepic=137,320,240,,right] that might well, in an individual case, or in wartime, outweigh other concerns.
However, as Lord Acton observed, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and the power – especially when masked by official government secrecy – tends to aggregate these decisions.
Fewer than 300 people were killed in the planes on September 11, 2001. The two planes which hit the World Trade Center hit buildings which were owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – a bi-state agency. Because they were government-owned – even though most of the tenants were commercial tenants who might have rented from a regular commercial landlord – all sorts of building and fire codes were waived.