USFK Agrees to Clean Up Environmental Damage

USFK has come up with a plan to clean up the alleged environmental damage on US camps vacated and to be handed over to the Korean authorities. From the Stars and Stripes:

U.S. Forces Korea has presented an environmental cleanup plan to South Korea that the Americans say goes ?above and beyond? previous agreements about the almost 60 bases going from U.S. to South Korean control, a USFK spokesman said.

South Korean officials still must accept the plan, USFK spokesman David Oten said Friday. USFK declined to release any estimate of the cost, which the United States will pay, before a joint U.S.-South Korean public statement was prepared.

The government has been authorized to spend what is needed to follow the U.S.-written plan, Oten said.

USFK should clean up environmental damage, but the claims by the activist groups should be put into context with the surrounding communities. Take a look at the land surroundings these vacated camps, it is not exactly the Garden of Eden up in 2ID where these camps are located. Much of the land surrounding these camps is polluted even worse by the locals than the alleged polluting by USFK. The military will clean these lands to be absorbed by the surrounding communities who I am willing to be will just pollute them again.

If USFK thinks this will stop the activists claims they will find that they are mistaken. They will just keep finding things to bring up because none of this is about the environment. It is about making USFK look like the big bad bogey man. These people could care less about the environment, it is just a convenient topic that has gained traction in South Korean society to hammer USFK with.

Anyone remember the Great 2000 Water Dumping Scandal? USFK was accused of polluting the Han River when a civilian base worker drained some chemicals down a sink in Yongsan. The activists jumped all over USFK for the actions of the civilian worker while they could care less about the massive amounts of dumping going on in plain sight by Korean nationals. I have literally seen a Korean tanker truck dump raw sewage into a stream that runs into the Han River before. Take a Han River cruise to see the garbage floating in the river yourself. This “scandal” was exploited not for environmental reasons, but to slime USFK. If these people really cared about cleaning the Han River they would be out campaigning to stop all polluting of the river, not just USFK.

It will be the same thing with the alleged polluting of the vacated camps. They got to spread their anti-USFK message and will move on to the next topic they can smear the US military with.

Click here for more additional information about the anti-US hate groups’ manipulation of environmental issues in Korea.