Navy cleared to kill whales again

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to let the Navy kill whales again:

"We are currently engaged in war, in two countries," said [Judge Andrew] Kleinfeld, joined by Judge Consuelo Callahan. "There are no guarantees extending from 2007 to 2009 or at any other time against other countries deciding to engage us, or our determining that it is necessary to engage other countries.

"The safety of the whales must be weighed, and so must the safety of our warriors. And of our country."

I'm writing about this because I nearly passed a stone when I hit that bit about "the safety of our warriors."  Our warriors?  Is this what passes for objective judicial language from these bozos?

You can read the full decision here (pdf).  If you do you'll see that they cite the critical use of this technology: "The Navy uses something called medium frequency active sonar, which basically bounces a loud noise off the hulls of extremely quiet submarines to detect their presence."  Given that they state that "we are currently engaged in war, in two countries" as justification for the decision, are they seriously mooting the possibility that Iraqi insurgents or Taliban fighters might try attacking in their "extremely quiet submarines"?  News flash, Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges: I think I can state with confidence that these groups have extremely limited naval capabilities.

(Yeah, I see the bit about "other countries deciding to engage us," but unless they're talking about Israel I don't think the threat of underwater attack looms particularly large.)

So what's the environmental cost of having the Navy train to protect us from this potential onslaught of super-stealthy Islamic submersibles?

The Navy’s Environmental Assessment (“EA”) reports that the planned SOCAL exercises may result in approximately 170,000 “takes” of marine mammals and, according to the district court’s order, may include “approximately 8,000 exposures powerful enough to cause a temporary threshold shift in the affected mammals’ sense of hearing and an additional 466 instances of permanent injury to beaked and ziphiid whales.”

And the Navy bastards don't even plan to have a few sailors scan the horizon for whales, as they were required to do in the past by a court settlement.

I took a look at the background of the three judges (whale-haters Kleinfeld and Callahan and the lone voice of reason, Smith), since I was curious to see if there might be any correspondence between their nomination pedigrees and their decisions in this case.  But as it turns out they're all Republican appointees--and Smith was appointed by none other than George W. Bush.  So the sliver of light here is that just as in the Dover "intelligent design" case, we see that ostensibly conservative judges can (and at least occasionally do) put principles before ideology.

UPDATE: The Chronicle made extensive updates to the article I cited after I posted this, which is not uncommon for them.  The article now contains an unsourced claim that the Navy does plan to post lookouts--in contradiction to what the court decision states ("the Navy proposed to use medium frequency active sonar in training exercises off the coast of Southern California without mitigation measures").  Also, a Navy spin doctor who is now quoted at length in the article says that the Navy "employs extensive mitigation measures, approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to minimize the risk to marine life whenever active sonar is used," contradicting both the court decision and the Navy's own Environmental Assessment for this exercise (as I cited).

You can decide how you feel these contradictions can best be reconciled, but my own feeling is that instead of "Navy bastards" I should have written "lying Navy bastards."

Comments

[StO]

"The safety... of our country." Forget the law, you know right there that this phrase contains the crux of his "reasoning." I know very little of Iranian submarines, which are probably the ones they are worried about. A cursory Google search indicates that as of 2006 there were a few Iranian submarines, probably based on old Korean models. The expected people view them as a great threat.

Really, as the US's environmental record shows, there's no reason to expect our national psychopathy should stop at the bounds of humanity. I've heard "save-the-whales" used as an epithet by a conservative relative. The sonar concerns just go to show.

Norway and Japan are not big whale-lovers either, if I recall.
"This is our psychopathy. There are many like it, but this one is ours."