If it hadn't been written on page eight of the "demining" plan of the Delta peninsula, one might have thought of a joke. Instead, it's all true. Written and signed by the Ministry of Defence, Sardinia Army Military Command. The heart of the affront is circumscribed in paragraph three, with a more than eloquent title: «Purpose of the Intervention». Pronouncing the fateful phrase "Environmental Reclamation" for the leaders of the Defense is like asking them to gargle with muriatic acid. The title of the document filed with the Regional Department of the Environment, in the midst of a criminal proceeding for an environmental disaster, is encrypted: "Compendium for the removal of exercise residues from the "Delta" Peninsula of Capo Teulada".

Unexploded and forgotten

In other words, translated from the "militarese", it means: theoretical reclamation plan for the "forgotten" "unexploded bombs" in the extreme tip of Sardinia, the most devastated by war games. The premise of the plan is always the same: «the polygon represents an important resource also for the local economy». It is a pity that for the last exercise, the Ministry of Defence, in Sardinia and in Teulada, did not even buy drinking water, which arrived directly from Naples for the occasion. Not to mention the million-dollar jobs entrusted to direct negotiation to two companies arriving directly from Calabria, or the purchase of croissants and bacon in Bologna.

The sewage economy

In Sardinia there is only the disposal of sewage waste, that accumulated by the chemical toilets arrived for the occasion directly from NATO. The reclamation plan, preceded by an imaginative land response, which we mentioned in the previous episode, can be summarized in four lines, those on page eight: «the purpose of the removal of exercise residues is to restore the conditions of the "Delta" firing range to allow normal transit in safety and future use of the same as a target area for shots arriving".

Clean up to pollute

There is no precedent of this kind, not even looking for it with the lantern: in practice the objective of reclamation is to resume polluting and destroying. A sort of perennial license to destroy habitats and landscapes, trampling criminal investigations and community directives, ignoring the decrees that established maximum environmental protection in those same areas. It is not clear who the military authorities want to encircle with surreal environmental salaams, certainly the continuation of the "prince" paragraph of the phantom reclamation is enriched with a further "gem" when they state that "the target area for the arrival of shots will be delimited with material eco friendly".

Bombs and parks

In short, as if to say that the missiles or bombs carrying a thousand pounds (454 kg.) of explosives will have a small garden of phosphorescent roses and flowers as a demarcation. The plan prepared by the Ministry of Defense is entirely hypothetical when even newbies know that an environmental impact assessment cannot be based on mere hypotheses. On the contrary, a systematic contradiction emerges from the comparative examination of the documents which does not bode well. It all starts from the Pasubio operation, the one put in place on the orders of the Public Prosecutor's Office, with the aim of verifying the conditions of pollution and degradation of the Delta Peninsula, better known as "interdicted" precisely because of the devastation to which that strip was subjected of Sardinia. On that occasion, to allow a minimum access to the area, the military wrote, it was necessary to suspend training activities.

Shoot against the coast

A "suffering" not only for the warmongers on duty, but also for the war industries which have seen a slowdown in earnings linked to the systematic consumption of bombs and missiles. The defense leaders do not hide the "sacrifice": we had to suspend "the shooting against the coast of the Navy, the releases of real and inert ammunition of the Air Force and remodulate the fire activities of the Armed Forces". It is the following sequence that stands out for its ambiguity, disavowing itself several times. The military write: "At the moment, the analytical results have excluded the chemical / radiological contamination of the soil".

Foxtrot & Golf prohibited

Immediately afterwards, however, they state that the "Foxtrot" and "Golf" areas are "areas characterized by steep slopes that do not allow the transit of vehicles and personnel in safe conditions". On the one hand, therefore, they affirm that the analytical results have excluded contamination, then, a few passages later, they nonchalantly affirm that in those areas where the bombings have taken place the most, it is impossible to carry out checks. The lack of contamination declared in the request for Environmental Impact Assessment of the Ministry of Defense are denied not only by the report of the Prosecutor of the Republic of Cagliari, but by the same report of the Task Force of the seventh Defense regiment, chemical and radiological bacteriological nucleus, which, in As part of the operation Pasubio, precisely in those areas, found radioactive "emission sources", linked to the engines of two Milan missiles that exploded against the Delta Peninsula.

Radiation gone

A figure that suggests the seriousness of the situation: missiles of that type, according to the Cagliari prosecutor's office, 11,785 were exploded on that front. Therefore, a good 11,873 of radioactive waste would be missing, given that they have found, or wanted to find, only two. Not a detail, but the heart of the crime. On the one hand, the technicians of the Public Prosecutor's Office have identified the presence of radioactive substances in various areas of the shooting range, on the other, in the military's "reclamation" proposal, through the assessment of the environmental impact, all these contaminations have in fact disappeared. The excessively strong wind, explicitly adopted by the Defense to declare pollution measuring instruments unusable, appears to be a very little credible justification to be accepted, both on an administrative level, especially on a criminal level.

Omissions and shadows

It is this blatant attempt to hide the real pollution that risks blowing up, figuratively, the defense plan. It is all too evident, in fact, that the technical and administrative prerequisite for an environmental impact assessment is precisely that of identifying the level of pollution in every detail, without leaving gray areas on which, with the excuse once of the wind and another of inaccessibility, an attempt is made to bring down a blanket of silence and silence. On the other hand, the military leaders, those who according to the judges must answer for environmental disaster for the still prosecutable facts, could not in any way present a "complete" and not an "omission" remediation plan. It would have meant fully endorsing the conclusions of the prosecutor's consultants appointed by the Public Prosecutor Emanuele Secci and the decisions of the Judge for Preliminary Investigations Alessandra Tedde who indicated the names and surnames of those who authorized that environmental destruction.

Impunity

The basic theme, however, after the presentation of this pseudo clean-up plan by the Defense, is that of the environmental impunity of the Defense top management. The request for an environmental impact assessment also contains constraints and prohibitions for the protection of that «Site of Community Importance». For mere mortals, citizens and tourists, it is forbidden even to walk on that naturalistic compendium called "Isola Rossa and Capo Teulada". In the management plan of the area it is written that the military activities are permanently devastating the natural habitat. The Ministry of Defence, on the other hand, also on the basis of the plan presented to the Region, believes that the laws of the State do not exist for them. The license is to always bomb, even protected environmental and naturalistic sites. In the land of Sardinia, after all, everything is allowed, until proven otherwise.

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