US Navy gets ok to torture whales again.

[JohnyCanuck]

FU Shamu, and the wave you rode in on
by Ed Naha | Sep 18 2007 - 9:54am |

Just how deep does Bush's "I is Sparticus" attitude run in this government? Apparently, it even thrives down in Davy Jones' Locker.

This month, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco gave the Navy the thumb's up to turn whales' innards into tapioca via sonar blasts off the California Coast by stating: "The safety of the whales must be weighed, and so must the safety of our warriors. And our country."

Uh, our warriors? Are we talking Aquaman and a super-buffed The Little Mermaid, here?

The underwater sonar tests are part of the Navy's anti-submarine drills and they screw up sea life Big Time. In August, a federal judge in Los Angeles suspended the experiments. They're planned to go on through 2009. The judge, Florence-Marie Cooper, said that the sonar blasts could harm nearly 30 species of marine mammals, including five species of endangered whales. She said that the Navy's protective measures were "woefully inadequate."

Oh, yeah, the Navy estimated that 466 permanent injuries to whales would occur.

Now, I'm not someone who chains myself to trees or takes a rubber dingy out to stop submarines, but this whole "we're patriots, we're at war, suck it up" stuff has gone beyond lunacy and is hovering somewhere between obscene arrogance and orthodox dipshitism.

SNIP

It's not like the Navy doesn't know that they're destroying nature. Back in 2002, the Navy admitted that its sonar caused the beaching of 16 whales in the Bahamas in 2000. A report signed by Navy Secretary Gordon England said that the autopsied animals "had experienced some sort of trauma likely to be associated with pressure, an intense acoustic event, or an impulse, that led to their stranding and subsequent deaths."

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9992

[Mojorabbit]

1. I think this upsets

me more than anything I have read lately. I love these magnificant creatures and they have no way to protect themselves. In a hundred years nobody will care about this war nor this technology. It isn't worth it.