Confronted with the need to dispose of enormous quantities of war-related trash including batteries, pesticide containers, medical waste and even human body parts, but lacking proper incinerators, private contractors working for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan came up with a simple solution.

They burned the trash in big, open pits.

But now soldiers, contractors and civilians have filed a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies behind the burning, saying the smoke from the pits -- which at times was so heavy it reduced visibility to only a few yards and filled soldiers' living quarters -- contained toxic chemicals that have left them with severe respiratory problems, chronic infections and even cancer.

The suits have been filed in 10 states against Houston-based KBR and former parent company Halliburton by Burke O'Neil, a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Va. Attorney Elizabeth Burke says her firm expects to file suit in 34 states where people are suffering problems they believe are linked to the burning.

Among the claims regarding a burn pit at Iraq's Balad Air Force Base from the suit filed in Maryland:

On at least one occasion, Defendants were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at the open air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents into the fire. The truck caught fire. Defendants' fraudulent actions were thereby discovered by the military.

Defendants burned medical waste that contained human body parts on the open air burn pit. Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains. The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.

One of the suits was recently moved from Texas state court to federal court in San Antonio. It was filed on behalf of six men including David McMenomy of Lampasas, Texas, who had a football-sized tumor removed from his hip that was suspected of being caused by the toxic fumes from a burn pit at Iraq's Camp Al Taji, the San Antonio Express-News reports:

"They took an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars and did shoddy work," Burke said of the contractors. "The work they did harmed the soldiers and hindered the military mission. In some bases with an Air Force presence, planes could not take off and land because of the smoke."

KBR denies any wrongdoing and says it followed U.S. military rules. Halliburton, which also has headquarters in Houston, questioned why it was named in the suits and denied any legal responsibility. The company, which until 2000 was headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, spun off its KBR subsidiary in April 2007.

Last month a group of U.S. lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to review the Defense Department's safety testing of a burn pit at the Balad base, saying the tests may have "significant methodological problems," the Air Force Times reports.

U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), Kerry Baker from Disabled American Veterans, and reporter Kelly Kennedy from Army Times have set up the Burn Pits Action Center website that offers information and personal stories from people affected by the burning.

The lawsuits over the burn pits is the latest controversy for war contractor KBR, which has also been in hot water over the electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers due to faulty wiring, exposing troops to a deadly cancer-causing poison, inflating prices for imported gasoline, poor treatment of migrant workers, rapes of women employees in Iraq, and involvement in human trafficking.

(A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Oh, great, DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Dept -- is convening a meeting to look into geoengineering.

Count me with Ken Caldeira:

That's rather naive, though. If we pursue geoengineering, what are the chances the "military dimensions" won't eventually be involved?

Geoengineering fans constantly tell us that it's "just research." They assure us they still want to avert climate change via social and economic change, and that geoengineering is Plan B, or Plan C, or whatever the metaphor is.

But this has always struck me as a rather bloodless, rationalistic way of looking at it, a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" spin on technology. Easy access to guns affects people's decisionmaking, and the more tangible and within-reach the various dei ex machina of geoengineering seem, the more the political and economic debate will warp around them. Decisions are not made in vacuums.

Do you think China will see our military investigating the purposeful manipulation of climate and conclude that it's "just research"?

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In a big setback for whales and environmentalists, the U.S. Supreme Court has yanked restrictions on sonar use in Navy training exercises near the California coast. The court, which split 5-4, didn't quibble with the Navy's own estimates that sonar can lead to substantial and irreparable harm to whales. However, the majority opinion stated that those concerns are "plainly outweighed by the Navy's need to conduct realistic training exercises."

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Environmental regulators from more than a dozen states have accused the U.S. Department of Defense of retaliating against them for attempting to enforce cleanup of contaminated military-owned sites. "In the worst-case scenarios, the Department of Defense is intimidating a state environmental agency into not pursing enforcement," said Steve Brown of the Environmental Council of States at a congressional hearing on Thursday. The DoD is in charge of dispensing $30 million each year to states to help with the costs of cleaning up contaminated military bases, but in 2006, the DoD allegedly started playing politics with the purse strings, withholding cash from states that pursued enforcement actions and only paying up if they dropped such actions. While a DoD spokesperson denied knowledge of bullying, the alleged misdeeds are in line with other environmental battles the department has fought recently, including refusing to cooperate with the EPA on cleanup of many Superfund sites.

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The U.S. Navy and environmental groups have reached a compromise in a long-running dispute over the Navy's use of low-frequency sonar, which greens say can befuddle whales and sometimes cause them to beach and die. The Navy on Tuesday agreed to restrict use of low-frequency active sonar in areas known to be whale breeding grounds or key habitat. "We don't have to choose between national security and protecting the environment," says Michael Jasny of the Natural Resources Defense Council, saying the agreement "maintains the Navy's ability to test and train, while shielding whales and other vulnerable species from harmful underwater noise." Separate litigation over the Navy's use of mid-frequency sonar is pending at the Supreme Court; greens say mid-frequency sonar is at fault for the Monday stranding and death of a whale on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, but a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesperson objects that it's "premature, speculative and irresponsible to link naval activities to this stranding."

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Environmental groups are up in arms about training exercises conducted by the U.S. Navy -- not sonar this time, but underwater explosives. The Wild Fish Conservancy and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility have filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy, saying its practice of training divers to explode dummy mines in Washington State's Puget Sound poses an unacceptable hazard to salmon, orcas, sea lions, birds, and other wildlife. The National Marine Fisheries Service conducted an environmental review of the practice, and the Navy has made some alterations to lessen its impact, but the groups say more could be done. Pointing to one training exercise that blew up at least 5,000 fish, the groups suggest that the training be conducted in the open ocean instead of shallow harbors and canals. "We are not trying to block Navy demolition exercises," says PEER's Adam Draper. "We are simply trying to induce the Navy to train without creating needless carnage."

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Defying environmental law, the U.S. Defense Department has resisted repeated orders lately from the U.S. EPA to clean up some of the nation's most contaminated places. The DoD/EPA standoff has turned into a bureaucratic pissing match wherein the EPA has asserted its authority to order and oversee cleanup of ultra-polluted Superfund sites the DoD owns, but where DoD, in its characteristic style, doesn't want to acknowledge EPA's power and maintains that it's cleaning up many of the contaminated sites itself voluntarily -- albeit extremely slowly. The fate of contaminated aquifers, polluted soil, and public health at three military bases hang in the balance; timely cleanup of some 12 other Superfund sites are also at stake. Complicating matters, different departments in the executive branch are discouraged from suing each other, so the EPA's legal recourses are limited. Meanwhile, the DoD is appealing to the Justice Department and the White House to intervene on its behalf.

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Waterways made navigable by melting Arctic ice pose a security threat to the northern U.S. border, says the Pentagon. The shrinking ice cap has led to increased interest in tourism and energy development in the Arctic, and the extra traffic makes the Pentagon wary. "The Arctic is a new area that is important to us because of the changes in ice flows," says Air Force General Gene Renuart. The Defense Department intends to beef up both its maritime and aerial surveillance of the northern border.

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Navy training exercises could expose 94,370 marine mammals to behavior-altering sonar frequencies each year, potentially injuring or killing as many as 30, according to an environmental impact statement released Friday by the Navy. But in its 1,796-page report, the Navy sticks with current safeguards for protecting marine animals, not adopting stricter standards imposed by a federal judge earlier this year. Green groups are likely to challenge the EIS in court, continuing a seemingly neverending cycle of litigation and appeals.

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As a legal battle rages on over the U.S. Navy's use of whale-addling sonar, the military maritimers have resumed sonar training off the California coast.

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Update on the seemingly endless saga of whether the U.S. Navy should restrict underwater sonar use in the interest of whale health: A federal appeals court has ruled that while the Navy may continue its current training exercises in southern California as is, exercises that begin in January must operate under better safeguards for marine mammals. The plan will have to be approved and clarified by the federal court that ordered a sonar ban this summer, so stay tuned for back-and-forthing still to come.

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Some 1 million Marines stationed at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune between 1958 and 1987 drank, cooked with, and showered in toxic water; under a defense reauthorization bill amendment recently approved by the Senate, the U.S. Navy would be required to, um, let them know. The federal government closed the base's wells in the mid-'80s after confirming they were contaminated with engine-degreasing and dry-cleaning solvents, and the feds are studying the link between the carcinogen-tainted water and the many reported instances of birth defects in children born to women who were exposed. No doubt the news needs to be spread, although apparently many people are already aware that they were sickened, as hundreds of lawsuits have already been filed against the military.

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It's the controversy that keeps on controversing: The U.S. Navy wants to test underwater mid-frequency sonar. Marine advocates say such testing effs up whales and other marine mammals. Repeat. (Grist has been writing about this issue since 1999, and we have never reused a headline. Thank you.) Anyhoodle, here we go again: last month, a federal judge ordered the Navy to stop using mid-frequency sonar off the California coast through 2009; on Friday, a federal appeals court put the kibosh on that decision. "The public does indeed have a very considerable interest in preserving our natural environment and especially relatively scarce whales," wrote Judge Andrew Kleinfeld. "But it also has an interest in national defense. We are currently engaged in war, in two countries." And we can't be too careful -- what if the whales are working for the terrorists?

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Federal judge halts Navy sonar exercises off California coast

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Navy to stop using mid-frequency active sonar in exercises off the Southern California coast through 2009. Noting that the Navy's own evaluation says the sonar exercises could disrupt marine mammal behavior in as many as 170,000 instances, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper found in favor of the Natural Resources Defense Council and four other groups. Cooper, who ruled against the Navy in a similar case last year on exercises off Hawaii, is not a hit with the boys (and girls) in blue, who will appeal. "This court decision prevents us from using active sonar," said Vice Admiral Samuel Locklear. "It potentially puts American lives and our national security at risk." But NRDC attorney Joel Reynolds says that line of defense is doltish: "Just as the Army has a responsibility not to train soldiers to shoot in the middle of a crowded city street, the Navy has a duty, when it's learning how to hunt with sonar, not to choose a practice range next to a marine sanctuary."

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