Navy Changes Story but Still Denies Responsibility
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2004; Page A03
The Navy has acknowledged that vessels on maneuver off Hawaii last month used their sonar periodically in the 20 hours before a large pod of melon-headed whales unexpectedly came to shore in the area. The acknowledgment added to an already contentious debate over whether the sound from sonar has been causing marine mammals to strand.
Some marine mammals come to shore naturally, because they are following a sick lead animal or trying to avoid predators and such natural occurrences as potentially harmful red tides. Melon-headed whales are relatively small and highly social animals that normally live in deep waters, at least 15 miles from shore. Wildlife officials said it is highly unusual for such a large number of them to come to shore as they did on July 3, although there is one report of a similar mass movement in the 1850s.
A navy spokesperson pointed to the 1850s events as proof that not all whale beachings are sonar-related. “Sonar was of course invented in the first half of the Twentieth Century, so there’s simply no way that the 1850s event was caused by the U.S. navy. Unless of course, you believe the navy has a time machine. Which it doesn’t. Now now. I mean, it never did.”
Some analysts, however, note that the navy has repeatedly asserted that sonar cannot “inadvertently” cause changes in whale behavior, and note that leaves open the possibility that the whales are being deliberately targeted. They note that several of the vessels involved in last month’s incident came back to port with small whale silhouettes with Xs painted through them were painted on their hulls.
“Why would the Navy go out and beat up on whales?” asked Tethys Sargasso of the Honolulu Maritime Institute and Tiki Bar. “I don’t know, but I suspect it has something to do with the Pentagon’s torture memos.”
Indeed, at least one copy of the infamous memo authorizing torture is believed to have arrived at CINCPAC HQ, and it is speculated that the sailors, for lack of Arabs to practice on, have been honing their interrogation skills on whales. “It’s not easy,” lamented one cigarette-smoking, finger pointing enlisted man. “We tried embarrassing them by taking pictures of them naked, but them whales is some kind of perverts who don’t mind being naked—they just flapped their fins at us. Then we tried to scare them with dogs, but the dogs don’t swim so good, and the whales outweigh them by a couple of tons, so they weren’t scared. So we switched to the sonar. That’ll teach those sumbitches!”
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has denied he ever authorized whale torture, saying “they’re more useful to use for target practice.”
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