Locke, DOE and Allies Violate Patriot Act and Move Dirty Bombs through Washington

Recent actions by branches of the Federal, and State Government put the lie to any claim that the snowballing erosion of our civil liberties is based on a concern of terrorist threat.

In the midst of our government granting federal powers to underpaid workers at airports and imprisoning anyone who even looks like they come from the Middle East, our government is steamrolling happily ahead with a badly planned, poorly supervised project, that could turn the Northwest into a nuclear wasteland.

Some years before September 11, 2001, a great master plan was hatched to turn Hanford Nuclear Reservation, already one of the most toxic places on the planet, site of more than 60 leaking containers of nuclear waste the size of the Olympia Capital Dome, into the nation's premiere storage site for nuclear waste. To accomplish this, 70,000 unidentified trucks will travel across the nation and converge on I-5, I-84, I-90 and others, to bring their waste to Hanford. Anyone who's driven these roads, especially when it's wet, especially in the winter, knows that portions of these roads are some of the most dangerous and accident prone anywhere. And anyone who's driven these roads knows, the conditions can get awful and undriveable with incredible suddenness. Governor Locke stated on the January 6th "Ask the Governor" show on KCTS: "We have a lot of unsafe stretches of road across our state."

Worse, the contents of these containers are much more lethal than we're being told. A member of a Hanford watchdog group who looked at the government records, compared them to the contents of the dreaded dirty bombs we keep getting warned about. Of course we're hearing about scores of enemies who are waiting, willing and able to seize such material at a moment's notice if we don't bomb them into oblivion unilateral and immediately.

Forgetting the impossibility of protecting these 70,000 trucks during their transport, shouldn't we be guarding against weather and bad road conditions when the result of a failure to do so could be as catastrophic or worse then anything our unelected Presidential administration is warning that asymmetrical enemies could accomplish if we fail to follow Bush and Company blindly?

Washington as a state should be especially aware of the possibility of Nuclear attack. The 2001 Hart Rudman Report is a federally sponsored study on the danger of terrorism, completed prior to the events of September 11.

In assessing the danger of Nuclear attack by terrorists, this report names the Seattle area, home of military bases, Boeing and Microsoft, as one of the more likely targets for a nuclear attack from terrorists, higher than New York or Los Angeles. Perhaps this is why Washington's Governor and Attorney General initially opposed the federal government's plan to transport this waste to the setting of Ernest Callenbach's novel Ecotopia.

In a letter to Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Energy dated October 29, 2002 the Offices of the Washington State Governor and Attorney General, question the wisdom of shipping this waste in this climate of our government going to extraordinary lengths to nominally protect us in a "war on terrorism."

Prior to being leaned on by the federal-government/oil monopoly/war machine they wrote:

"As you know, the FBI has just issued an alert regarding the targeting of nuclear waste shipments and the U.S. Railway sector.... Given the FBI threat communication, we question the wisdom of unnecessary shipments of dangerous materials coming across the country until we have assurances that the risks associated with these shipments have been adequately addressed."

Citizens groups began to line up behind the office of our esteemed Attorney General, and spouse of the owner of used car dealer Dwayne Lane, Christine Gregoire. Unfortunately Gregoire's office, who collapsed its claims against a tobacco industry that kills as many people every four days as all those who died September 11 at the World Trade Center, once again yielded in it's duty to defend the people of Washington, and collapsed this action as well in mid December.

The front page of the Tuesday, December 17, 2002 Seattle Post Intelligencer, features a telling juxtaposition. On the top is an article announcing that:

"The federal government will for the first time ship highly radioactive waste from California along Interstate 5 to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation."

Directly below this is an article that reads:

"More than 20 vehicles were involved in at least nine accidents in the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 through Federal Way yesterday."

Not only is this the most glaring hypocrisy, it is a violation of the very laws that the "War on Terrorism" is nominally supposed to protect us from. I'm talking about the PATRIOT ACT itself.

Section 801 of the PATRIOT Act includes the following language:

`Whoever willfully-- "places or causes to be placed any destructive substance, or destructive device in, upon, or near a mass transportation vehicle or ferry, ... with a reckless disregard for the safety of human life;...shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, if such act is committed, or in the case of a threat or conspiracy such act would be committed, on, against, or affecting a mass transportation provider engaged in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, or if in the course of committing such act, that person travels or communicates across a State line in order to commit such act, or transports materials across a State line in aid of the commission of such act.

I cannot conceive of a more blatant violation of the language of this act. It threatens our most basic transportation system. It threatens literally millions of residents. It involves interstate commerce. It is reckless beyond imaging.

If the federal government insists on moving forward with this criminally reckless activity, it will be the clearest indicator possible that they do not take this "War on Terrorism" seriously, for they will be placing more U.S. citizens in even greater mortal danger than our worst enemies could have conceived of.

Paul Richmond is an attorney in Seattle, a producer and consultant of the movie Urban Warrior, and author of Waging War on Dissent.