This should be read by everyone who believes that those within the DC-BELTWAY are here to protect and represent you and your families. I can personally tell you how vicious they can be when you are about to expose them. They assassinated my brother, Colonel James e. Sabow, USMC, Jimmy. and they have tried everything on me -short of murder. They have attacked me through the IRS, my professional medical credentials, the narcotics control agency, the Social security Administration, to name a few. My representatives in my state of South Dakota (past and present) won't even talk to me after they realize what has occurred. Senators Daschle, Tim Johnson, Larry Pressler and John Thune have all have all demonstrated their cowardice and their true colors. Each and everyone of them know that Col. Sabow was murdered and most of them suspect or know why. But they all remain silent! What character!
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BETRAYAL is a true story of U.S. Marines who were exposed to carcinogens, injured, and continue for fight for health care and compensation. This nonfiction account was written by two U.S. Marines who were both assigned to the most contaminated site at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, CA. Senior Marine Corps leadership were involved in murder, crime scene cover-up, narcotrafficking (cocaine, the drug of choice), the shredding of records, and the denial of injuries from exposure to deadly contaminants at both El Toro and Camp Lejeune, NC. The connection is not a square peg in a square hole, but its damn close. Thousands of veterans and their families were once stationed at El Toro, the premier Marine Corps jet fighter base closed in July 1999. Legislation to provide health care for Camp Lejeune, an active military installation, was passed in the 112th Congress. However, no veteran compensation was included in the Janey Ensminger Act. None of the veterans that served aboard these two installations were notified of their exposure to deadly contaminants when it was discovered resulting in both bases earning Superfund Cleanup Site status. Many veterans have died without ‘connecting the dots’ between their killing diseases and military service.
BETRAYAL reports on the murder of Marine Colonel James E. Sabow and other Marines whose deaths are tied to the use of El Toro’s assets during the 1980s and 1990s to import South American cocaine into the U.S and to export guns to the Contra Rebel faction of Nicaragua. Demanding a court martial to clear his name of false charges of misuse of government aircraft, which threatened to blow the whistle on the use of El Toro’s assets to support narcotrafficking, Colonel Sabow was found dead on his quarters’ patio by his wife on January 22, 1991. The circumstances surrounding his death and the forensic evidence from the crime scene support murder by a government assassination team, crime scene tampering and government cover-up at the highest levels, including a ‘doctored autopsy photograph’ submitted in a Defense Department report on the death of Colonel Sabow to Congress in 2004. An affidavit in 2010 to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) by an internationally renowned pathologist reported homicide and crime scene tampering. The pathologist orally withdrew the affidavit. The 2010 NCIS cold case investigation dismissed homicide as the manner of death, reaffirmed the false charges of misuse of government aircraft, depression and suicide as the manner of death. Colonel Sabow, decorated Vietnam fighter with 221 combat missions, met his death at the hands of others. The autopsy report by Orange County (no Navy doctors) made no mention of the unexpected violent blow to the right side of the head, which caused unconsciousness. Occipital skull fragments penetrated into the back of his brain. He was near death due to the massive brainstem trauma in which agonal hyperventilation characteristic of this type of injury occurs. Sabow was aspirating blood from a wound in his pharynx that resulted from a basilar skull fracture. In fact, the tracheae, bronchi, bronchioles and alveoli were filled with blood, doubling the weight of the right lung. His shotgun was found under his body. No fingerprints on the shotgun. No suicide note. There was no mention in any government report of the three men who flashed government credentials, forcing Naval Investigative Service (NIS) agents to leave the crime scene. The motive for the murder was to prevent the disclosure of a covert operation to ferry weapons to Central and South America and government sanctioned narcotrafficking on flights into El Toro. Data processing records were purged on the maintenance of unmarked C-130s; a Marine with knowledge to purge the records unexpectedly promoted, transferred and murdered several years later. Other Marines who knew of the illegal drugs would meet violent deaths.
BETRAYAL reports the denial of responsibility and the cover-up to hide the truth of environmental contamination from veterans, their dependents, and the public at El Toro, once the premier Marine Corps jet fighter base. These include no usage records on TCE and other organic solvents used on the base for decades; Marine Corps’ denial of ownership of the TCE plume spreading or miles into Orange County until a lawsuit forced the government to accept responsibility; loss of the official government contract procurement file for the municipal water purchase with the Irvine Ranch Water District; loss of all of the original well construction drawings; over 40 years of water distribution engineering drawings missing; no records on the dates the base wells were abandoned but several engineering drawings showing the base wells part of the water distribution system after the early purchase of a small quantity of softened municipal water; unexplained cut-off of pumping records when the base wells were clearly shown as not abandoned on engineering drawings and the purchase of softened municipal water from The Metropolitan District was not enough to allow El Toro to abandon its base wells; and a radiation contaminated hangar shuddered and sealed in 2012, ten years after the Navy reported the hangar free of radiation. At El Toro, fifty-five gallon drums of trichloroethylene (TCE) waste were buried on the base for years to hid them from the Marine Corps Inspector General; the official position is that TCE was not used after 1975 in direct conflict from eye witness testimony from Marines who reported the toxic chemical was used into the 1990s; all the original well construction drawing are missing; over 40 years of water distribution engineering drawings are missing; the entire set of water distribution drawings redrawn in 1986, the year after TCE was found in agricultural wells downgradient and during the period when Camp Lejeune’s wells were found contaminated with TCE; an El Toro Marine dead from Agent Orange exposure who never served in Vietnam—the dead Marine transported empty 55 gallon drums to the base’s landfills; other Marines reported use of Agent Orange to spray the fence line to kill vegetation growth; a 200,000 square foot hangar, the former site of a Radium 226 paint room, shuttered and sealed in 2012 while the State of California requires the Navy to redo a radiation survey; the waste water pipes under the former Ra 226 paint room were cut and the sewer lines may be contaminated with radiation, forcing the Navy to dig up the lines and disposed of them at a hazardous waste site off-base at a cost that could easily amount to several hundred million dollars.
BETRAYAL provides the legal argument for presumptive disability compensation for Lejeune Marines who currently have access to the VA for 15 medical conditions associated with organic solvent and benzene exposure to contaminated well water on the base over a 30 year period (1953-1987), and presents the argument for a Science Advisory Board (SAB) with backgrounds in environmental exposure, environmental assessment, heath monitoring, and other relevant fields to objectively evaluate the risk of toxic exposure of the 130 military installations on the EPA Superfund list. Taking care of veterans should be one of this country’s highest priorities. There’s a critical need for medical monitoring of veterans exposed to toxic chemicals and the evaluation of disability claims from Superfund sites by scientists with environmental exposure backgrounds. The VA’s current system provides no routine medical care monitoring for those at risk for toxic exposures while veterans are left to their own resources and skills to file disability claims frequently denied by administrative staff without input from scientists with backgrounds in environmental exposures. The disability compensation claim denial rate for Camp Lejeune veterans is about 84%.
BETRAYAL supports the facts that Marine veterans, dependents, and civilian workers were exposed to toxic chemicals at both El Toro and Camp Lejeune. The routes of exposure through ingestion from the water wells are clearly documented at Camp Lejeune and hidden in a fog of missing documentation at El Toro, but nevertheless present. Marines at both bases worked with TCE and other toxic chemicals without protective clothing and face masks. Many have died without ‘connecting the dots’ to military service. Semper Fidelis, the Marine Corps’ motto, was seriously tarnished by the Corps’ refusal to support Marine veterans and their dependents exposed to toxic chemicals; many of them sick with deadly cancers, including over 80 Lejeune male Marines with male breast cancer.
BETRAYAL was written by two former El Toro Marines: Robert O’Dowd, investigative reporter and columnist, and Tim King, photo/journalist, war correspondent, and Executive News Editor of Salem-News.com. O’Dowd, a retired Defense Department manager, honed his investigative skills as an auditor for EPA Inspector General; King, a Los Angeles native, spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, while he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. King holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991). King has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.
Phi Beta Iota: James Sabow is the brother of Col James Sabow, USMC, who was evidently murdered by several US Marines acting on the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, because he was going to expose Marine Corps collaboration with CIA drug running (feeding the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles). Integrity? Lost in the 1980's.
