Beverly Deepe Keever – ��Ƶ

BRAVO: 60 Years of Suffering, Cover-Ups and Injustice

Beverly Deepe Keever — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:56:34 +0000

Sixty years ago on March 1 in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, the United States detonated the most powerful nuclear weapon in its history.

Codenamed Bravo, the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima nine years earlier. The Bravo blast “represented as revolutionary an advance in explosive power over the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb had over the conventional weapons of World War II,” historian-lawyer Jonathan Weisgall notes.

Also unlike Hiroshima’s A-bomb, Bravo was laced with plutonium, a most toxic element with a radioactive existence of half a million years that may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time.

And, unlike the atomic airburst above Hiroshima, Bravo was a shallow-water ground burst. It vaporized three of the 23 islands of tiny Bikini Atoll, 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii, and created a crater that is visible from space.

A fireball nearly as hot as the center of the sun sucked unto itself water, mud and millions of tons of coral that had been pulverized into ash by the incredible explosion; these clung to tons of radioactive uranium fragments. The fireball swooshed heavenwards, forming a shimmering white mushroom cloud that hovered over the proving grounds of Bikini and Enewetak atolls, whose inhabitants had earlier been evacuated.

Wafting eastward, the cloud powdered 236 islanders on Rongelap and Utrik atolls and 28 U.S. servicemen. The islanders played with, drank and ate the snowflake-like particles for days and began suffering nausea, hair loss, diarrhea and skin lesions when they were finally evacuated to a U.S. military clinic.

These islanders had become a unique medical case. As scientist Neal Hines explains, “Never before in history had an isolated human population been subjected to high but sublethal amounts of radioactivity without the physical and psychological complexities associated with nuclear explosion.”

Bravo bequeathed the world a new word: fallout. Even before Bravo, experts — but not the public — knew that the radioactive dust of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions was invisibly powdering the continental U.S. and touching others worldwide. But Bravo for the first time revealed to the world a new kind of invisible menace, a danger that could not be smelled, seen, felt or tasted.

Bravo exposed radioactive fallout as, what Weisgall calls, “a biological weapon of terror.” It visibly ushered in the globalization of radioactive pollution.

For these islanders, Bravo also ushered in 60 years of sufferings and a chain reaction of U.S. cover-ups and injustices, as detailed below. Over the decades, their pleas for just and adequate compensation and U.S. constitutional rights they had been promised were rejected by the U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, by Congress and by executive-branch administrations headed by presidents of either party.

Snubbed By ‘America’s First Pacific President’

The silence by today’s administration of President Obama is acutely embarrassing, given that shortly after his election he described himself as “America’s first Pacific president,” and promised to “strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”

Since then, Obama has initiated a “pivot” to the Pacific by beefing up and re-positioning U.S. military units in the region. But he failed to acknowledge or recognize that these remote Pacific atolls had served after World War II as proving grounds vital for U.S. superpower status today. They provided sites for nuclear-weapons tests too powerful and unpredictable to be detonated in the 48 contiguous states and for tests enabling the transition in nuclear delivery systems from conventional bombers to intercontinental missiles—Star-War-like tests that still continue.

More recently, also ignoring the moral implications undergirding Marshallese pleas, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called on U.S. military leaders to better instill ethics in their services so as to ensure “moral character and moral courage.”

He issued his instructions for more accountability in the wake of investigations into cheating scandals on proficiency and training tests given to nuclear-related personnel in the Navy and Air Force. The Pentagon is also investigating possible illegal drug violations by 11 Air Force officers, including some responsible for launching America’s deadly nuclear missiles.

UN Criticizes US on Human Rights

If U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific is un-remembered by the American government, it has not been forgotten internationally. While the U.S. regularly castigates the governments of China and Russia for human rights abuses or violations, a special United Nations report urges the U.S. government to remedy and compensate Marshall Islanders for its nuclear weapons testing that has caused “immediate and lasting effects” on their human rights.

“Radiation from the testing resulted in fatalities and in acute and long-term health complications,” according to the report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in September 2012 by Special Rapporteur Calin Georgescu. “The effects of radiation have been exacerbated by near-irreversible environmental contamination, leading to the loss of livelihoods and lands. Moreover, many people continue to experience indefinite displacement.”

The report also urged the U.S. to provide more compensation and to consider issuing a presidential acknowledgment and apology to victims adversely affected by its tests.

The international community and the U.N. “has an ongoing obligation to encourage a final and just resolution for the Marshallese people,” the report reads, because they placed the Marshallese under the U.S.-administered strategic trusteeship for 40-plus years from 1947 until 1990. These international groups might consider a more comprehensive compilation of scientific findings “on this regrettable episode in human history.”

As the sole administrator for the U.N.-sanctioned trust territory, the U.S. government pledged in 1947 “to protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources.” Instead, the U.S. from 1946 to 1958 conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen tests in the Marshall Islands, with a total yield of 108 megatons, which is 98 times greater than the total yield of all the U.S. nuclear tests conducted in Nevada and is equivalent to 7,200 Hiroshima-size bombs. That works out to an average of more than 1.6 Hiroshima-size bombs per day for the 12 years.

In addition, the U.S. as the trust administrator was obliged “to protect the health of the inhabitants.” But the Bravo blast, more than any other single detonation, made visible to the world the adverse health and environmental effects these islanders suffered. Bravo was the first U.S. hydrogen device that could be delivered by airplane and was designed to catch up with the Soviets who had six months earlier exploded their aircraft-deliverable hydrogen bomb.

A Chain Reaction of Cover-up and ‘Ashes of Death’

A U.S. cover-up began just hours after the Bravo weapon was detonated. Hardly a “routine atomic test” as it was officially described, Bravo initially created a radioactive, leaf-shaped plume that turned into a lethal zone covering 7,000 square miles—that is, the distance from Washington to New York. Then, radioactive snow-like particles began descending 100 to 280 miles away over lands, lagoons and inhabitants of Rongelap and Utrik atolls. Within three days, 236 islanders were evacuated to a U.S. Navy clinic.

The U.S. had hoped to keep the evacuation secret but a personal letter from Corporal Don Whitaker to his hometown newspaper in Cincinnati shared his observations of the distraught islanders arriving at the clinic.

The U.S. then issued a press release saying the islanders were “reported well.” But gripping photographs taken at the time and later published in the Journal of the American Medical Association documented a 7-year-old girl whose hair had tufted out and a 13-year-old boy with a close-up of the back of the head showing a peeling off of the skin, a loss of hair and a persistent sore on his left ear. Others had lower blood counts that weaken resistance to infections. Decades later, in 1982, a U.S. agency described Bravo as “the worst single incident of fallout exposures in all the U.S. atmospheric testing program.”

Just days after the Cincinnati newspaper expose, another surprise stunned the U.S. government and the world. News accounts reported 23 crew members of a Japanese tuna trawler, the No. 5 Fukuryu Maru (the “Lucky Dragon”) had also been Bravo-dusted with what is known in Japan as shi no hai, or “ashes of death.”

When the trawler reached home port near Tokyo two weeks after the Bravo explosion, the crews’ radiation sickness and the trawler’s radioactive haul of tuna shocked U.S. officials and created panic at fish markets in Japan and the West Coast. The Japanese government and public described the Lucky Dragon uproar as “a second Hiroshima” and it nearly led to severing diplomatic relations.

A U.S. doctor dispatched by the government to Japan predicted the crew would recover within a month. But, six months later, the Lucky Dragon’s 40-year-old radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died. The New York Times described him as “probably the world’s first hydrogen-bomb casualty.”

The U.S. cover stories for Bravo’s disastrous results plus subsequent official cover-ups at the time — and continuing today — were that the might of the Bravo shot was greater than had been expected and that the winds shifted at the last minute unexpectedly to waft radioactivity over inhabited areas. Both cover stories have since been rebutted by revelations in once-secret official documents and by testimonies of two U.S. servicemen who were also Bravo-dusted on Rongerik Atoll.

A String of Unending Injustices

Within days after the Bravo shot, the U.S. cover-up had secretly taken a more menacing turn. In an injustice exposing disregard for human health, the Bravo-exposed islanders were swept into a top-secret project in which they were used as human subjects to research the effects of radioactive fallout.

A week after Bravo, on March 8, at the Navy clinic on Kwajalein, E.P. Cronkite, one of the U.S, medical personnel dispatched there shortly after the islanders’ arrival, was handed a “letter of instruction” establishing “Project 4.1.” It was titled the “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons.”

To avoid negative publicity, the document had been classified as “Secret Restricted Data” until 1994, four years after the end of U.S. responsibilities for its trusteeship at the U.N. and when the Clinton Administration began an open-government initiative.

It would be 40 years before islanders learned the true nature of Project 4.1. Documents declassified since 1994 show that four months before the Bravo shot, on Nov. 10, 1953, U.S. officials had listed Project 4.1 to research the effects of fallout radiation on human beings as among 48 experiments to be conducted during the test, thus seeming to indicate that using islanders as guinea pigs was premeditated. However, an advisory commission appointed by President Clinton in 1994 indicated “there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate intentional human testing on Marshallese.”

For this human-subject research, the islanders had neither been asked nor gave their informed consent—which was established as an essential international standard when the Nuremberg code was written following the war crimes convictions of German medical officers.

Under Project 4.1, the exposed Rongelapese were studied yearly and so were the Utrik Islanders after thyroid nodules began appearing on them in 1963. The islanders began complaining they were being treated like guinea pigs in a laboratory experiment rather than sick humans deserving treatment. A doctor who evaluated them annually came close to agreeing when he wrote 38 years after Bravo, “In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], because it was a research organization, did not include support of basic health care of populations under study.”

During this time, Bravo-dusted islanders developed one of the world’s highest rates of thyroid abnormalities; one third of the Rongelapese developed abnormalities in the thyroid, which controls physical and mental growth, and thus resulted in some cases of mental retardation, lack of vigor and stunted development. Islanders complained of stillborn births, cancers and genetic damage.

Seven weeks after Bravo, on April 21, Cronkite recommended to military officials that exposed Marshallese generally “should be exposed to no further radiation” for at least 12 years and probably for the rest of their natural lives.

Yet, three years later, U.S. officials returned the Rongelapese to their radioactive homeland after they had spent three months at the Kwajalein military facility and at Ejit Island. Besides being Bravo-dusted, their homeland by 1957 had accumulated radioactivity from some of the 34 prior nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands. Utrik Islanders were returned home by the U.S. shortly after their medical stay on Kwajalein.

For 28 years the Rongelapese lived in their radioactive homeland until 1985. Unable to get answers to their questions, they discounted U.S. assurances that their island was safe. Failing to provide the Rongelapese “information on their total radiation condition, information that is available, amounts to a coverup,” according to a memo dated July 22, 1985 written by Tommy McCraw of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Safety.

In mid-1985, when the U.S. refused to move them, 300 Rongelapese persuaded the environmental organization Greenpeace to transport them and 100 tons of their building materials 110 miles away to Majetto Island. Many of them have since stayed there because they fear their homeland is still too radioactive even though the U.S. has funded resettlement facilities.

New Agreements Built on U.S. Secrecy

In 1986, President Reagan signed the Compact of Free Association with related agreements after its ratification by the central government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and the U.S. Congress, thus ending bilaterally America’s trusteeship arrangement, which was continued by the U.N. Security Council until 1990.
The Compact recognizes RMI as a sovereign, self-governing independent nation in terms of internal management and international relations but with significant U.S. economic aid and services and continues to reserve to the U.S. government sole military access to RMI’s 700,000 square miles used still for long-range missile tests.

Yet, during the Compact negotiations, the U.S. government failed to disclose material information about its testing program to the Pacific Islanders. Not until 1994 did the U.S. government respond favorably to RMI’s Freedom of Information Act request for details about the total number of nuclear tests conducted in its territories as well as the kind and yield of each test.

Newly declassified information then also revealed that more islanders were exposed to radiation than previously admitted by the U.S. As late as June 2013 the U.S. gave RMI officials 650-plus pages detailing freshly declassified fallout results of 49 Pacific hydrogen-bomb blasts with an explosive force equal to 3,200 Hiroshima-size bombs conducted in only two years — 1956 and 1958.

While the Marshallese were kept in the dark during negotiations about material information, the U.S. crafted Compact agreements that included a provision prohibiting those inhabitants from seeking future legal redress in the U.S. courts and dismissing all current court cases in exchange for a $150 million compensation trust fund to be administered by a Nuclear Claims Tribunal.

However, that trust fund is now depleted. That fund proved inadequate to pay $14 million in monies already awarded for personal health claims and 712 of those granted awards (42 percent) have died without receiving their full payments. The nuclear-weapons tests are presumed by the U.S. to have afflicted many Marshallese with various kinds of cancers and other diseases. A Congressional Research Service Report for Congress in March 2005 indicates that “as many as 4,000 claims may have yet to be filed among persons alive during testing.”

A Marshallese petition sent to the House Speaker and President Bush on Sept. 11, 2000 states that circumstances have changed since the initial agreements and the Marshallese government demands far more in just and adequate compensation for health and property claims. But those demands for justice have thus far gone unanswered.

March 1 will be solemnly remembered in Asia and the Pacific. In the Marshall Islands flags are flown at half-mast during the Nuclear Memorial and Survivors Remembrance Day. Last year on the anniversary of the Bravo shot, Marshallese President Christopher J. Loeak described March 1 as “a day that has and will continue to remain in infamy in the hearts and minds of every Marshallese.” He renewed his call for President Obama and the U.S. government for justice.

This year President Loeak is scheduled in February for a state visit to Japan. He will meet with Emperor Akhito and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and journey to the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial Museum.

With the approaching 60th anniversary of the Bravo blast, Loeak might also visit a pavilion exhibiting the hull of the ill-fated Lucky Dragon fishing trawler and a marker commemorating its 450 tons of radioactive tuna that touched off worldwide alarms.

The Lucky Dragon and Hiroshima beseech “America’s first Pacific president” and the world to reflect on the catastrophic horror of nuclear weapons and to rectify their bitter legacy of lingering injustices.

About the author: Beverly Deepe Keever, Ph.D., is a professor emerita at the University of Hawaii. She covered the Vietnam War for seven years for Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and the London Daily and Sunday Express. Her reporting for the Monitor about the embattled outpost of Khe Sanh was nominated in 1969 for a Pulitzer Prize. She is a co-editor of “U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934-1996” and author of “Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting” and “News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb.”

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Remember Agent Orange: The U.S.’ Own Chemical Weapons History

Beverly Deepe Keever — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 09:51:32 +0000

Poised to decide whether to bombard Syria for its purported unleashing of chemical weapons on its people, U.S. policymakers might well remember America’s own deadly use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Laos half a century ago and the international outrage it produced.

“Remember Agent Orange” is especially relevant for Hawaii. Agent Orange was tested under a U.S. Army contract at the University of Hawaii’s Kauai Agricultural Research Station 45 years ago. Several research workers, regularly drenched with the chemical containing dioxin, a dangerous toxin, died of cancer, according to court documents, and barrels of it were buried on Kauai for decades.

Besides Agent Orange, the U.S. secretly dumped 15 million-plus pounds of chemical weapons in Hawaiian coastal waters during or after World War II but these hazards were hidden from the public for half a century.

Syria is not the first Middle Eastern nation to use chemical weapons and President Obama is not the first commander-in-chief to face such a crisis.

In 1988, responding to the extensive use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, President Reagan, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 26, called for a conference to review the rapid deterioration of respect for international norms against the use of chemical weapons.

Convened by France, 149 states met in Paris, Jan. 7-11, 1989, for a Conference on Chemical Weapons Use. In its final declaration, the states “solemnly affirm their commitments not to use chemical weapons and condemn such use.” They also reaffirmed the prohibitions established in the international agreement called the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Until 1975, the U.S. was the only major government not to ratify the protocol; it then also agreed that the protocol prohibited use of anti-plant chemicals in war.

The U.S. began using Agent Orange in 1965 to defoliate the double- and triple-canopy forests of South Vietnam and Laos just as American combat units were being introduced and continued for six years, despite increasing Soviet propaganda against it and other international condemnation.

On Dec. 6, 1965, two Air Force spray planes flying at treetop levels began defoliating vegetation in Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail there. By the end of the month more than 40 sorties had defoliated almost 24 square miles of trails and roads with 41,000 gallons of herbicide, Paul Frederick Cecil wrote in his “Herbicidal Warfare” book. Other missions continued there for years.

That same month and year, C-123s started spraying in South Vietnam along the roadsides and forests below massive amounts of herbicides, including Agent Orange. By 1971, when the spraying was ended, about five million acres in South Vietnam had been sprayed with herbicides by U.S. fliers, Fred Wilcox wrote in “Waiting for an Army to Die.”

Flying over South Vietnam, I could often see below the dying leaves of jungles or mangrove swamps stretching for miles in the once-lush countryside.

Approval for this defoliation policy was akin to the environmental warfare of destroying the grasslands and buffalo of the Native Americans a century earlier, according to Cecil, a U.S. Air Force veteran of Vietnam’s defoliation operation and historian.

Following the U.S. Civil War, he elaborated: “The Army successfully employed environmental warfare to counter the ‘hit-and-run’ tactics of the plains Indians. Civilian destruction of buffalo herds upon which the tribes were almost totally dependent was applauded by the Army, and aided materially in forcing the tribes onto reservations, where they were more easily controlled.”

One of the more controversial operations in Air Force history, defoliation was criticized so severely at home and abroad as a violation of international agreements, especially the Geneva Protocol of 1925, that the program was cancelled in 1971, Cecil noted. Thus ended, as Cecil explained, a combat organization “created in secrecy and disbanded in controversy,” that was dedicated solely to the purpose of conducting war upon the environment by attacking plants instead of people.

In the final analysis in Vietnam, “The crop destruction program now appears to have been counterproductive and, as predicted by many officials from the beginning, provided the Communist world with a telling argument against the presence of American forces in Vietnam,” Cecil concluded. “Despite some inconvenience to enemy forces, the burden of the program frequently came to bear on civilians, especially women and children and the very young and very old.”

Even after the war had ended, however, the use of Agent Orange and other defoliants in Vietnam drew even more controversy in the 1970s when Vietnam veterans increasingly claimed serious health and genetic damage, when inconclusive medical studies were made and when numerous lawsuits were brought against the government (these were dismissed on procedural grounds) and then against the product manufacturers, who agreed in an out-of-court settlement to establish a $180 million indemnification fund, without any admission of liability.

Results of Agent Orange’s defoliation in South Vietnam appear long lasting in contrast to the sarin chemical the U.S. claims Syria has used; sarin dissipates in the air within six days.

Forests were destroyed and dioxin persists at levels exceeding standards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As The New York Times reported in 2007, the dioxin there has left traces in soil, animals, blood and breast milk and increased the risks of cancer and other diseases to the impoverished mountain peoples.

About the author: Professor Emerita Beverly Deepe Keever is the author of the recently released “Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting.”

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UH Set to Sign New Contract for Fought-Over, Mostly-Secret Military Lab

Beverly Deepe Keever — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:02:17 +0000

Not since the Vietnam War and other protests of 40 years ago had the Manoa campus seen anything like the furor that erupted in opposition to establishing a military research laboratory at the University of Hawaii.

Students and faculty sounded off with blowhorns at assemblies, hung banners from rooftops, held nighttime vigils at the UH President’s mansion and petitioned the Board of Regents at a marathon, six-hour hearing. With backpacks and sleeping rolls, they swooped up the stairs of Bachman Hall, invaded the president’s office, and settled in for a six-day sit-in and sleep-in that garnered negative headlines around the globe and lured the nation’s leading academic newspaper to send its own staff reporter to the scene.

“The last time the U.S. Navy built a laboratory on a university campus, Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and the United States was a war with Axis powers,” Kelly Field reported to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Sixty years later, as the nation battles terrorism and an insurgency in Iraq, the Navy is encountering fierce resistance at home over its plans to develop a laboratory here at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.”

The plans began in 2003 when the Navy agreed to fund a proposal made by UH administrators and then-Senator Daniel Inouye. The reporter quoted a Navy official saying, “Inouye did very good job pointing out to the Navy that Hawaii is a very strategic university.”

So, in mid-2008, UH signed a five-year contract to embed in campus facilities the Navy’s first Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) in 58 years. By its signing, UH ignored the “fierce resistance” voiced by the Kuali’i Council representing Hawaiians and Hawaiian-serving programs, arguing an ARC would destroy the flagship Manoa campus—which is sitting on ceded lands gained when U.S. military overthrew their Queen Liliuokalani—as a “Hawaiian place of learning” that is promised in its strategic plan.

UH also ignored the opposition of the Manoa Chancellor, the Manoa Faculty Senate, Manoa’s undergraduate student association and hundreds of citizens in the community, who argued the ARL’s censorship of and property rights to all UH research would hijack the university’s core value essential for the free flow of ideas and innovation needed for creating knowledge and disseminating it to students, other scholars and the public, including commercial enterprises.

Now, fast-forwarding to five years later, Senator Inouye has passed on and on July 14, the UH’s contract expires with the U.S. Navy’s Sea Systems Command, its war-fighting, weapons-development arm.

Without discussion by or disclosure to the public, UH is set to sign a new contract with the Navy. “Because there are no planned changes to the contract other than the timeframe, this modification would be signed by the Vice President for Research with the approval of the President,” according to the response to my e-mail made by a representative of Lynne T. Waters, UH’s associate vice president for external affairs and university relations. UH is now selecting replacements for both the Vice President for Research and for the President.

Before UH administrators sign the new contract, however, the Board of Regents has been urged to have a designated UH administrator explain fully the amount, scope, costs, revenues, locations, outcomes of UH’s ARL-conducted research and the kinds of censorship placed on dissemination of all research results. The Board is scheduled to meet on July 18 at the UH Cancer Center in Kaka`ako.

“Plans for the next steps have been under discussion with the Navy,” UH’s response added. The Navy would also have to sign the contract at a time when U.S. military funding is being slashed in many areas.

UH’s response also stated that no classified military research was conducted under this five-year ARL contract.

However, just what was conducted under the ARL contract is still largely shrouded in secrecy. When the contract was first finalized in July 2008, UH announced three defense-related contracts–totaling less than $2 million. But since then neither UH nor the Navy has produced requested documents that could inform the public about the amount, nature, scope, location of or funding figures for ARL-generated research. Those three announced contracts were for:

$5,000 for updating for ARL UH’s plan for converting into a lockdown facility the Manoa Innovation Center situated near Noelani School for securing classified information by installing sensors, surveillance cameras, safes and designing badges for directors and even janitors who must hold special clearances,
$850,000, for which UH received $43,548 in fixed fees, to investigate effects on health and the environment of 15 million-plus pounds of chemical weapons secretly dumped in Hawaiian coastal waters off the Waianae Ordnance Reef during or after World War II,
$980,334, for which UH received $50,226 in fixed fees, to develop technologies for detecting improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which wounded many U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

UH responded to my request for copies of its ARL contracts or “task orders” (Navy language for assignments) by telling me to contact a Navy representative in Washington, D. C. There, my Freedom of Information Act request to the Navy, dated Feb. 19, 2013, received a response three weeks later.

That response cited “unusual circumstances” in going beyond the 20-day legal requirement for releasing a requested U.S. government record. It stated that under President Executive Order 12600 the Navy gives notice to contractors, asking them “to review contractual information and to identify portions considered to be propriety.” The response added that a decision about releasing my requested records will be made “in the most prompt manner possible.” None has been received.

Even without these requested records, however, UH seems to have failed to garner the $50 million over the five years of the contract that its administrators had touted as a reason for establishing the ARL in the first place. Summaries of departmental and unit research listed in annual reports for this period shows that the ARL pulled in only $6.75 million. And UH gained only a fraction of that amount in fixed fees to cover such costs as providing electricity and office space.

These summaries also listed only eight researchers as being awarded ARL’s “task orders.” This number is significantly fewer than the 250 possible awardees touted to the Manoa Faculty Senate in September 2004 by Gary Ostrander, then UH’s most visible advocate when he was Manoa’s vice chancellor of research and graduate education.

Unlike the four sprawling research centers that the Navy established during the World War II era and maintained and staffed for decades, Manoa’s unique, guinea-pig ARL calls for it to be embedded into and utilize, if not usurp, UH’s campus research infrastructure of buildings and personnel that Hawaii’s taxpayers have funded for years.

The current contract also calls for hiring a number of Navy-mandated and -approved officials to manage this secret bureaucracy embedded in UH’s existing ivory-tower bureaucracy.

About the author: Professor Emerita Beverly Deepe Keever is the author of the recently released “Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting.”

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Post-Election Lesson: Stifling Transparency Hurts

Beverly Deepe Keever — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 03:14:34 +0000

Stifling transparency and spin-doctoring the public doesn’t pay.

That may be a bitter lesson from Tuesday’s mayoralty election with its contentious focus on Honolulu’s multi-billion-dollar fixed-rail project and the string of lawsuits it has ignited.

Just how open future government meetings and records will be at all levels in Hawaii is scheduled for public discussion at a hearing Thursday, Nov. 15, 10 a.m. at the State Capitol Auditorium.

Virtually every Hawaii taxpayer and resident has a direct interest in the outcome of these rules, given the short-circuiting of public input and participation witnessed in the wasted resources and intellectual focus expended in the Superferry debacle and the continuing furor over the recently rammed-through Public Land Development Corporation.

The draft rules for public comment are proposed by the state’s Office of Information Practices (OIP). That office is responsible for administering and enforcing the state policy designed to ensure open government records and meetings at the state and city/county level so as to protect the public interest and promote accountability.

Hawaii residents and organizations interested in how open and accountable Hawaii’s governments will be in the future are encouraged to attend, bring copies of their written comments and urge amendment to OIP’s draft administrative rules that will have the force of law once a final version is approved by the attorney general and governor.

No E-Testimony

To speak up, persons must access the draft rules and accompanying impact statement by opening OIP’s web site at and clicking on “What’s New.”

Surprisingly, OIP has not arranged for members of the public to submit testimony electronically like the Legislature does to facilitate sharing of all testifiers’ perspectives among themselves and the citizenry at large, although OIP has changed its web site for its own bureaucratic convenience and for creating form-generators for agencies.

OIP’s draft rules detail the intricate, step-by-step bureaucratic procedures to be used for processing:

Hawaii resident’s complaints about denial of records access or a violation of the open-meetings law (Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapters 92F and 92 respectively),
disclosure of certain written opinions of the Department of Taxation.

These draft rules also seem to grant the OIP director overly broad, unlimited authority to overturn OIP’s earlier formal opinions that provided uniformity for government agencies and boards and more transparency under previous governors.

Procedures Urging More Transparency Faster

Open-government advocates may testify for more transparency — and getting it faster — by urging OIP to amend its administrative rules in the following four ways.

First, new rules should make OIP responsible for handling complaints and appeals when government agencies fail to respond at all to requests for public records that should be disclosable within set timetables set forth either in the statutes or under earlier administrative rules in Chapter 2-71-13. Currently, some agencies are slow to respond at all.

Second, the new rules should call for public disclosure of all of OIP and agency actions regarding a denial of access of records or violation of the open-meetings law. OIP’s proposed rules are silent on granting more transparency, a surprising omission given that OIP was established to provide a place where Hawaii residents could turn for an expeditious, informal, no-cost process to assist them to get access to government operations needed to hold agencies and boards accountable.

Third, time limits on OIP for its own decision-making should be included in every procedure in the appeal process detailed in the proposed rules. Currently, OIP is slow in processing citizen complaints and appeals.

Fourth, the new rules should state explicitly that OIP’s procedures shall specify that the agency whose actions are being appealed has the burden of proof to show that its action is justified by an exception to the general rule of openness under the Hawaii’s open-meeting or open-records law, and thus must provide a substantive justification of its position to prevail in the appeal. Therefore, it should also make clear that the person making the complaint or appeal is not required to assume any responsibilities primarily because it is the policy of the state to conduct government business as openly as possible and provide a means to hold government entities accountable. This language needs to be included in the administrative rules to better inform the public about the issue at hand, to provide clearer guidance to the agencies as to their responsibilities, to delimit OIP’s prerogatives and to acquire the force of law.

New Draft Needed for Public E-Input

These and other changes to the draft rules calling for more transparency and faster access to it are regarded as being significant enough that OIP should be urged:

to submit a revised draft incorporating some, if not all, comments from the public,
or else to justify its refusal to include them,
to post the revised draft on its web site and
to enable posting of all public comments on this new revision (much like the Legislature accepts and posts all public testimony).

Rules for New Bureaucracy

These draft rules are precipitated in the aftermath of open-government advocates’ sustained but unsuccessful struggle during the last Legislature to block a bill that for the first time permitted a government agency to turn to Circuit Court to contest disclosing its record to the public that had been mandated under a ruling made by the OIP under Hawaii’s Freedom of Information Law (Chapter 92F, Part II).

Sponsored by Governor Abercrombie and OIP, that bill passed and became law. So, in case OIP is taken to court and must justify its position mandating disclosure of a government record, these rules create a new bureaucracy documenting its track record. But under the rules OIP is proposing, this new bureaucracy shuts out the very public that it was established to assist in protecting the public interest and insuring official accountability.

About the author: Beverly Deepe Keever is professor emerita of the University of Hawai’i’s School of Communications. Keever is the author of “News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb.”

Community Voices aims to encourage broad discussion on many topics of community interest. It’s kind of a cross between Letters to the Editor and op-eds. We do not solicit particular items and we rarely turn down submissions. This is your space to talk about important issues or interesting people who are making a difference in our world. Columns generally run about 800 words (yes, they can be shorter or longer) and we need a photo of the author and a bio. We welcome video commentary and other multimedia formats. Send to news@civilbeat.com.

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Marshallese Nuclear Experiments Inspire Halloween Haunted House

Beverly Deepe Keever — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:05:20 +0000

The top-secret Project 4.1 that Marshallese allege used them as human guinea pigs to study for decades the effects of radiation from U.S. nuclear-weapons experiments has inspired a zombie-studded Halloween attraction in the Washington, D. C. area.

Leaders from the Republic of the Marshall Islands have condemned the highly publicized entertainment, the Marshall Islands Journal reports with a headline “Project 4.1 morphs into haunted house.”

The attraction is a “sad example of gross insensitivity,” according to government official Tony deBrum in the newspaper account. He condemned the attraction in mid-October in the Nitijela (parliament), adding that the U.S. government “claims Project 4.1 didn’t happen.”

Meanwhile, in Honolulu, the Project 4.1 saga is being presented tomorrow (Oct. 18) at the Hawaii International Film Festival in an award-winning documentary titled “Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1.” To be shown at 9:15 p.m. in Dole Cannery C Theater, it is billed as revealing “how U.S. scientists turned a Pacific paradise into a radioactive hell, using Marshall Islanders as guinea pigs for three decades to study the effects of nuclear fallout on human beings.”

Bug-eyed zombies with blistered and blood-splattered faces glamorize on web sites and Facebook the spookiness of the attraction that runs for 23 days until Nov. 3 in an abandoned warehouse in the upscale Baltimore-Washington suburban city of Rockville, Maryland. Tickets are $30.

Zombies stagger through a college food court, parade around a college campus and scare teenage girls in YouTube videos.

The attraction is “going to be more terrifying than any other haunt you’ve ever been to,” key organizer Justin Watson told George Mason University’s student newspaper. “We aim to scare grown men.” Watson graduated from that university in 2010 with a degree in government and international politics but then turned to this entrepreneurial venture.

The Republic of Marshall Islands embassy in Washington, D.C. has posted a description of Project 4.1 and a chronology of the 67 U.S.-detonated nuclear-weapons tests conducted from 1946 to 1958 at .

Using the Marshallese atolls and waters of Bikini and Enewetak as its main experimental staging areas, the U.S. from 1946 to 1962, detonated 86 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the Pacific waters and at Johnston Islands—only 800 miles south of Hawaii. Over 16 years, these 86 bombs yielded the explosive force equal to 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs—or l.4 weapons a day.

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U.S. Should Remedy Violations of Islanders’ Human Rights

Beverly Deepe Keever — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:06:20 +0000

The U.S. government, now flexing its military muscle to pivot to the Asia Pacific region, should remedy and compensate Marshall Islanders for its nuclear weapons testing that has caused “immediate and lasting effects” on their human rights, a special United Nations report concludes.

The U.S. government should also open up still-secret information and records regarding the environmental and human health effects of past and current U.S. military use of the islands, grant Marshallese full access to their medical and other records, and consider issuing a presidential acknowledgment and apology to victims adversely affected by the 67 weapons tests it conducted from 1946 to 1958 when it administered the Marshall Islands as a U.N. strategic trust territory, according to the report presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in mid-September in Geneva, Switzerland by Special Rapporteur Calin Georgescu.

The report noted the frequent concerns expressed by Marshallese about then-secret Project 4.1. In it Marshallese allege that in 1954 they were deliberately used “to assess the effects of nuclear weapons on humans” when they were powdered by radioactive fallout from the explosion of a hydrogen bomb codenamed Bravo.

The largest nuclear bomb in U.S. history, it was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that had devastated Hiroshima nine years earlier. It was laced with plutonium, one of the planet’s most deadly substances with a radioactive existence of half a million years that may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time.

Marshallese voices are to be poignantly presented Thursday (Oct. 18) at the Hawaii International Film Festival in a gripping documentary titled “Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1.”

The award-winning feature length documentary by Adam Jonas Horowitz is billed as revealing “how U.S. scientists turned a Pacific paradise into a radioactive hell, using Marshall Islanders as guinea pigs for three decades to study the effects of nuclear fallout on human beings.” The film includes devastating interviews with survivors, some of whom have since died.

It is scheduled to be shown Thursday (Oct. 18) at 9:15 p.m. in Dole Cannery C Theater. Sponsored by Pacific Islanders in Communications, the 87-minute film is presented in English and Marshallese with English subtitles.

The U.N. report noted the conclusion that “there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate intentional human testing on the Marshallese.” That conclusion was made by President Clinton’s Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments. It was appointed in 1994 to investigate unethical human experiments made by U.S. personnel.

These experiments included bombarding the testicles of prisoners in Washington and Oregon state prisons with radiation dangerous enough to cause harm, feeding Quaker Oats laced with radioactive tracers to 100 supposedly mentally retarded teenage boys in a Massachusetts state institution in the 1940s and 1950s and providing drinks containing radioactive iron to 820 pregnant women by Vanderbilt University in the late 1940s.

These experiments were hidden for decades until exposed in 1999 by investigative reporter and author Eileen Welsome in her award-winning “The Plutonium Files.”

Survivors told the U.N. official that they were subjected to nuclear testing on humans without their prior and informed consent and that the treatment they received from U.S. personnel had been “degrading and culturally insensitive.”

Voluntary consent of human subjects has been established as an “absolutely essential” international standard when the Nuremberg Code was written following the war crimes convictions of German medical officers for their horrific experiments with concentration camp inmates during World War II.

The U.N. report cited Clinton’s Advisory Committee’s finding that “one of the greatest harm from past experiments and intentional releases may be the legacy of distrust they created.”

The report added that the U.S. government’s denial of “access by Marshallese patients to medical files, and denial of access of Marshallese authorities to previously classified, then declassified, but unreadable scientific documentation, were cited as major concerns and a hindrance to open dialogue” between the two governments.

These international groups might consider a more comprehensive compilation of scientific findings “on this regrettable episode in human history.”

Over the decades, the U.S. courts, Congress and executive agencies have rejected Marshallese pleas for adequate, just and fair compensation for human, property and environmental damages and remediation.

Ten months after A-bombing ended World War II, the U.S. began conducting nuclear-weapons experiments in the Pacific. From 1946 to 1962, the U.S. detonated 86 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the Pacific waters and at Johnston Islands—only 800 miles south of Hawaii. Over 16 years, these 86 bombs yielded the explosive force equal to 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs—or l.4 weapons a day.
The U.N. report applauds the U.S. government for the funding and programs it has undertaken, but these are inadequate and it needs to do more.

“Radiation from the testing resulted in fatalities and in acute and long-term health complications,” the report reads. “The effects of radiation have been exacerbated by near-irreversible environmental contamination, leading to the loss of livelihoods and lands. Moreover, many people continue to experience indefinite displacement.”

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Post-Wonderblunder: Investigate UH’s Military Research Center

Beverly Deepe Keever — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:21:40 +0000

Wonderblunder is just a warm-up. The Senate Accountability Committee should leap into the big-leagues and expand its investigation into UH’s lack of accountability and transparency on a more critical issue: signing a contract with the U.S. Navy’s war-fighting arm to establish system-wide a military research center, originally called a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) and now called an ARL (Applied Research Laboratory).

On July 15, 2008 the ARL’s final contract was executed despite years of widespread student and faculty protest at Manoa and other campuses, a six-day sit-in at President David McClain’s Bachman Hall office that drew negative news stories nationally and locally, rejection by the Manoa Faculty Senate, chancellor, Native Hawaiian groups and a withering article in a national academic newspaper, as shown in the documents that follow.

Since letting the contract, UH announced in 2008 three defense-related contracts, totaling around $2 million—but then has invoked silence about the touted $50 million.

This special Senate committee is urged to investigate the lack of accountability and transparency of the UH system and provide full disclosure to the public on these and perhaps other questions:

Instead of Wonderblunder’s vanished $200,000, where is the phantom $50 million UH suckered students and taxpayers into fantasizing UARC might bring into UH, according to a statement by President David McClain and other officials?

Instead of mismanagement of athletics on one campus, investigate the military research center contract that hijacked UH’s academic integrity and credibility systemwide by limiting the institution’s core value to be an arena for the free flow of ideas essential for creating knowledge and disseminating it to students, other scholars and the public. Unclassified research results must be sent to Navy censors who determine whether it is “sensitive and appropriate for disclosure regardless of medium,” according to the UH-Navy contract.

For the first three years of the five-year contract, no classified military research was to be conducted at UH, McClain stated. After three years UH was to evaluate continuing UARC–but what did UH’s evaluation conclude? Was any classified military research conducted at UH during those three years? What about after those three years? Were any limits placed on the disclosure of research information and, if so, in what way and on whom?

Lastly, will the five-year contract be renewed in 2013 and, if so, why, and, if not, why not? Will the public be allowed to comment?

A special Senate investigation into these questions far more critical to UH’s reputation, credibility and integrity than Wonderblunder is urgently needed.

About the author: Dr. Beverly Deepe Keever taught journalism and communications at UH-Manoa for 29 years, and is now a professor emerita.

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From World War II Dossiers To Today’s e-Dragnet

Beverly Deepe Keever — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:09:50 +0000

Hawaii is the only state with a haunting history that struck me this summer as I stood at the counter to renew my state driver’s license.

That history reminded me of the dossiers of newspaper clippings, photographs and documents compiled on residents of Japanese ancestry by American authorities before World War II.

Within hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor 71 years ago, these dossiers enabled the individualized nabbing of hundreds of such targeted leaders of the Japanese communities as a newspaper editor and a priest.

Rounded up without probable cause of committing crimes but feared because of presumed loyalties to then-enemy Japan, these leaders were interrogated and shipped to oft-described concentration camps, in contrast months later to the mass uprooting from the West Coast and incarceration of about 120,000—from toddlers to grandpas, aliens and U.S. citizens alike. Decades later the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and President Reagan acknowledged the nation’s injustice and gave an apology and redress.

This history of Hawaii’s singular claim to shame hit me as the cherub-faced matron at the counter instructed me to peer into the camera at her fingertips. I had already passed the vision test and had handed her my valid U.S. passport that verified my place and date of birth plus my about-to-expire driver’s license listing my sex, current address, height, weight, driver’s license number, color of eyes and notation that I wore glasses. She hardly inspected my personal information as she scanned the documents into a small machine near her elbow that had not been used four years earlier when I renewed my license.

Expecting my photo would be laminated onto my new driver’s license, I grinned happily. No, she explained, another photo for the license would be taken later; the photo she snapped was required under the new federal law that Hawaii began implementing on March 5, 2012.

Then she spotted a hitch. My social security card. It carried my maiden name, not my husband’s surname that I had assumed decades earlier, that was listed on the other documents she had scanned and that had carried me through 29 years of employment at the University of Hawaii. Not good enough, she told me. I had to prove my name change.

Off I went to retrieve my marriage certificate; the next day I visited another clerk. She digitalized the marriage certificate and handwrote detailed notes about its issuing authority. Then, I received the paperwork necessary to be photographed for my license.

A New Age of Covert Surveillance

Suddenly, I realized, the paper dossiers compiled more than 70 years ago to pinpoint and snare individual “enemy aliens” had morphed into an unseen and un-told digital network supplying elements of an e-dragnet on anyone. We had entered a new age of silent, invisible government surveillance.

This e-dragnet has come into play. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, U.S. authorities employed elements of this e-dragnet to detain, sometimes indefinitely, and interrogate — without recourse to counsel — 5,000-plus non-citizens, mostly men of Arab, Middle Eastern or South Asian origin.

As Law Professor Natsu Taylor Saito concludes, “Striking similarities exist between measures now taken in the name of fighting terrorism, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the U.S. government’s long history of incarcerating people on charges of sedition or ‘disloyalty.’”

Those not wanting or needing a driver’s license repeat a similar process to obtain a state-issued I.D. card. Those without a Social Security card are directed to contact the Social Security Administration and request it to verify that they are ineligible for a social security number. Personal information and digital photographs also register men between the ages of 18 and 26 with the Selective Service System for possible military duty.

After finishing my second photo, I received only a temporary card before the laminated license card arrived weeks later. That delay gave officials time to verify personal information with interlocking nodes on their digital network.

An Alphabet of Network and Nodes

What I had sensed but could not see was illuminated in Hawaii’s statutes and administrative rules: the Digital Image Access and Exchange Program (DIAEP). That Program permits Hawaii’s license examiners to obtain from and provide to another state my personal information and digital photograph so as to verify visually my identity; facial recognition technology may be used.

Enter SSOLV, a network node that permits examiners to query the Social Security Administration’s Online Verification system. EVVER encompasses the Electronic Verification of Vital Events Records to permit checking birth certificate information, as does NAPHSIS, the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems.

The HAVV node contains centralized, computerized voter databases that states and cities are required to develop for verification purposes under the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Enter SAVE and ICE. Non-citizens are required to supply authentic papers proving their legal presence before their license can be issued for the duration of their legal stay. Their digitalized documents can be transmitted to Department of Homeland Security nodes called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) or to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which handles deportations. Employers may access non-citizens’ data to verify workers’ eligibility.

This invisible, yet all-seeing government surveillance is sensed and unsettling to some, as evidenced in unpublished readers’ comments appended to a news report of l.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone subscribers’ text messages and caller locations.

Daniel in San Diego wondered “if in the dark days of the Soviet Union the government spied on its own people to the extent that our government does today.”

Within hours on July 8 Sergio countered. “To be fair, the Soviet Union did spy on its own citizens even more than the current US government does.”

But, he added, “Today, the US government spies on its own citizens more than Russia does.”

About the author: A co-editor of “U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities,” Beverly Deepe Keever is the author of “News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb” and a professor emerita of journalism and communications from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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Freedom Of Information At Stake In Legislature

Beverly Deepe Keever — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:05:56 +0000

More than a dozen community, media and open-government organizations are waging a desperate fight today to save Hawaii’s Freedom of Information Law from its most serious erosion in its 24-year history.

Acting urgently before the Thursday afternoon deadline at the Legislature, the groups are petitioning House and Senate members sitting on a key committee to develop and agree to a new compromise Conference Draft on . Gov. Abercrombie’s administration originated this bill.

The broad-based organizations ask that a new compromise draft delete portions of the bill that would permit a government agency to go to court to contest an official agency’s decision compelling disclosure to the public of a record to which the law entitles it. The 17 organizations petitioning the legislators as of late yesterday range from Common Cause Hawaii, the Sierra Club, AARP and the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists; the full list is included below.

By making this deletion in today’s overly broad bill, legislators would preserve the provision expressed in the legislative history of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that “the legislative intent for expediency and uniformity in providing access to government records would be frustrated by agencies suing each other.”

This key language is overturned in the current draft by calling for a complex, cumbersome process allowing a government agency to appeal to already overburdened courts an official decision mandating disclosure of a record to which the public is entitled.

Retaining FOIA in the existing bill would unnecessarily weaken OIP’s powers, waste limited resources of OIP and other agencies, and make it even more difficult for citizens to obtain government records in a timely manner.

Some groups also fear that including FOIA in the draft being circulated could facilitate the governor’s current campaign to curtail public participation in Hawaii’s environmental review processes.

Earlier versions of SB 2858 and the proposed Conference Draft 1 distributed on Tuesday would set up a judicial appeal process for allowing agencies to challenge decisions made by the state’s Office of Information Practices on the Sunshine Law (“open meetings,” Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapter 92) as well as Hawaii’s Freedom of Information Act, also known as the Uniform Information Practices Act (“open records,” Chapter 92F).

Rather than relying on a informal dispute resolution process, the legislation advocated by the governor would permit—perhaps even invite—litigation that entangles competing taxpayer-funded government attorneys in court actions.

The Office of Information Practices (OIP) was established as part of FOIA 24 years ago and was “intended to provide a place where the public can get assistance on records questions at no cost and within a reasonable amount of time.”

OIP has also advised numerous state and city/county agencies as they sought to sort out increasingly complex privacy and public-disclosure issues when the computer was beginning to impact government operations and citizen use. In 1998 the Legislature gave OIP the additional responsibility to administer the Sunshine Law.

The citizen groups are appealing today to the legislators to restrict the appeals process outlined in SB2858 ONLY to the Sunshine Law, and not the FOIA. A decision by Hawaii’s Intermediate Court of Appeals in 2009 held that under the Sunshine Law, OIP could be sued and that OIP had erred in directing the Kauai County Council to make public a requested record.

However, that Court decision left untouched the FOIA language that bars a taxpayer-funded government agency attorney from suing another taxpayer-funded government attorney.

In extensive testimony before three committees and conspicuous lobbying of legislators, OIP Director Cheryl Park has argued that because of the court decision the sweeping legislation is needed to create “a uniform procedure” applicable not only to the Sunshine Law but also to FOIA. She provided no specific reasons for the need for uniform procedures to cover FOIA, which was unaddressed in the court decision.

The current bill being considered today copies virtually word for word the original proposed by the Abercrombie administration. As the bill moved through three legislative committees, it drew strong oppositional comments from city/county officials as well as numerous citizen groups and individuals.

Three members of the Maui County Council, including the chair and the vice chair, and Kauai’s county attorney testified against the bill as did Honolulu’s Managing Director Douglas Chin.

In written testimony, Chin complained, “OIP does not have any rules or procedures for agencies to submit evidence, facts, or arguments in support of their positions.”

Brief statements of support for the bill came from a dozen other state agencies, including the Office of the Governor. However, no state agency official offered any instance or evidence that his or her government body had been adversely impacted by an OIP decision during the 24 years since Hawaii’s FOIA was enacted.

Organizations appealing to legislators meeting today on SB 2858 include:

Media Council Hawaii
The Hawaii Independent
Common Cause Hawaii
Earthjustice
Society of Professional Journalists, Hawaii Chapter
Disappeared News
Sierra Club
American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
Community Alliance on Prisons
Citizen Voice
Kapiolani Park Preservation Society
Life of the Land
Hawaii’s Thousand Friends
Americans for Democratic Action/Hawaii
Right to Know Committee
Hawaii Coalition for Health
Non-Partisan Hawai’i Ohana

About the author: Professor emerita from the University of Hawaii’s School of Communications, Beverly Deepe Keever is the author of “News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb.” Her memoirs of Vietnam War reporting are forthcoming.

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