The Freedom We Have Spread.... the horrors we have hidden...

[HysteryDiagnosis]

the people and their land we have DESTROYED.... the tragedies we have spawned.... the ongoing nightmares others endure while an American corporation goes unscathed... yet again. Wanna know a secret?? They hate us for our freedom.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040524/hertsgaard

>>The exact death toll will never be known--many corpses were disposed of in emergency mass burials or cremations without adequate documentation--but the Indian government now puts the total at more than 22,000 and climbing.<<


One a Muslim and the other a Hindu, Bee and Shukla are leading the fight to hold Union Carbide and its new owner, Dow Chemical, accountable for the Bhopal disaster, which the two women assert is still killing and injuring thousands of people a year through poisoned groundwater. "The gas disaster was sudden, one night, but the last twenty years have also been miserable," Shukla said in an interview. "People still have pain and breathlessness, and now we are seeing cancers, too. There is mental and physical retardation among children. Many women are sterile or never begin menstruating, so men don't want to marry them." A 1999 study commissioned by Greenpeace International but conducted by independent scientists concluded that Bhopal's groundwater contains heavy metals, volatile chemicals and levels of mercury millions of times higher than is considered safe.


http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030109/world.htm#1

The poisonous waste returned is only a fraction of hundreds of tonnes that have been strewn around the pesticide plant in Bhopal since 1984 when Union Carbide, which is now owned by Dow, fled the city after a gas leak at the plant killed 8,000 persons and injured half a million. No one has accepted responsibility for the waste and the chemical company still refuses to clean up the site.

For 18 years chemicals have leaked into the ground water in and around the factory site and have been poisoning people who survived the gas leak. Today, the death toll stands at 20,000 and is rising every day. Children born to survivors are suffering health problems and 150,000 persons are in urgent need of medical attention.


http://www.bhopal.net/oldsite/poisonpapers.html
Second deadly secret slides out of Carbide’s ‘poison papers’



• Union Carbide has known for longer than a decade that its derelict factory was poisoning ground water and posed a threat to drinking wells of local communities
• Company issued no warnings, took minimal action to prevent further contamination
• Secret Carbide documents show company tried to hide danger, claimed water was safe
• 2002 Study finds lead, mercury and organochlorines in breast-milk of local women
• Poisons damaging the same communities decimated by the 1984 gas massacre
• Survivors' organisations: "Eighteen years later that terrible factory is still killing us"


http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna04182005.html
On December 3rd 1984, just after midnight, 40 tons of poisonous substances leaked from Union Carbide's (now Dow's) pesticide plant in Bhopal, central India. A huge yellow cloud exposed a half million people to the gases, which hung over the city for hours. It remains the worst industrial accident of all time, with an estimated 7,000 deaths and 190,000 injuries the first few days and over 15,000 claims of deaths to date.


Guns and Guards

Dow has not learned its lesson. It is successfully fighting U.S. Homeland Security initiatives that would require them to use safer chemicals and processes where available, to better protect the 8 million residents surrounding their plants across the country. But they are reluctant to consider risk reduction alternatives beyond guns and guards. And guns and guards are having a field day.

[hiley]

1. You are so right

they are having a field day.
Dow is upon the law apparently much like bush for now.
This does not mean I am giving up, though.
edit to say thank you for posting this.

[oblivious]

2. Understatement: "the Bhopal disaster is worse than the Sept 11 tragedy"

15,000 deaths, 190,000 injuries.....

The definition of terrorism.

What a sorry excuse of a company.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

4. Because such companies exist, on foreign soil, where they may

do the unthinkable and get away with it, American shareholders can mature into retirement secure in the idea that they will be well taken care of..... just like the ones in the nursing home in Bernard Parrish, just like the ones who are cutting their medications in half in Ohio and elsewhere, just like the retired veterans who cannot get the care they were promised, just like the millions of Americans many children who do not have proper healthcare.... just like all the fogotten third world Americans in NO... just like most of the rest of us...

[La Coliniere]

3. Thanks for posting this.

It just goes on and on. Sickening.
Your screen name is one of my favorites, btw.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Well, really it's 8.... but it's four more of the same so to speak. :)