http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Stop-Narconon/Documents/Miceli/
"the Human Subject Review Committee at Wayne State University refused
to allow the study to proceed because it was deemed unfit for human
experimentation"

Lake Michigan in Illinois at that time was found to have large amounts
of PCB's polluting the water, due to the chemical releases from
factories on the lake.

fwiw, Utah now has a PCB warning:

http://www.heraldextra.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

 No source pinpointed for Utah Lake PCBs
Mike Stark - The Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY -- Manmade chemical compounds known as PCBs are showing
up in fish at Utah Lake, but it's still unclear where they're coming
from.
The Utah Division of Water Quality had hoped to have some answers this
fall from a study of the lake's bottom sediments. But the results
released Tuesday didn't pinpoint one source.

State officials say levels of PCBs were relatively low in the
sediments, meaning they likely aren't a key source for PCBs showing up
in fish at the lake.

They say it's possible the PCBs aren't coming from a new source, but
are simply being passed from one animal to another in the lake's food
chain.

Meanwhile, a fish consumption advisory for catfish and carp caught at
Utah Lake remains in effect.

http://www.heraldextra.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

-----

And $cientology discharges bilge from the Freewinds.

What a way that would be - to sell the detox, knowing full well they
were polluting somewhere. Would that be jumping to a paranoid
conclusion?

Here is the story of one Scientolgist Robert Friedland - friend of
Reed Slatkin (ponzi schemer) and Michael Baybak (time mag 1991)
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.scientology/browse_thread...

http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/11/mm1194_08.html

Environment
The Ugly Canadian
Robert Friedland and the Poisoning of the Americas
by Roger Moody

The Vancouver Stock Exchange (VSE) has long enjoyed a reputation as
the "Wild West" of mining funds. Despite attempts to refurbish its
tarnished image, a January 1994 report by James Matkin of the
Vancouver Stock Exchange & Securities Regulation Commission found the
VSE a hotbed of "shams, swindles and market manipulations." Scores of
junior companies and entrepreneurs regarded as too high-risk, or
flatly unacceptable in New York and London have flocked to the VSE. Of
these, none has been more welcomed in the Canadian markets than gold
mine financier Robert M. Friedland, a Canadian whose Venezuelan
Goldfields (Vengold) in 1993 made the biggest float in VSE history -
$31 million.

 However, no one's track record casts more doubt on the integrity of
Canadian money markets than that of Friedland, a man who admits he was
attracted to the VSE because "it is one of the freest and most
underregulated venture capital markets in the world."

Friedland's grounded rocket

 A 43-year-old Chicago native (he became a Canadian citizen in the
late 1980s), Friedland first emerged from relative obscurity in 1985,
with a VSE shell company called Galactic Resources. Notwithstanding
the hubristic title, for a while the sky indeed seemed the limit:
"Galactic's stock performed like a rocket," comments John Wood, editor
of the Vancouver-based financial news service, Stockwatch. Friedland
had soon formed joint ventures with the world's biggest mining
corporation, RTZ, at Ridgeway, South Carolina, and opened up the
Ivanhoe gold joint venture on Nevada's Carlin Belt.

 Along the way, he sold off Galactic's 30 percent share in the
Philippine Far South East Gold project to CRA (RTZ's Australian
associate), having persuaded the World Bank's International Finance
Corporation (IFC) to package the deal. And though in 1987 he failed -
along with T. Boone Pickens, the notorious Texas corporate raider - to
gain control of Newmont Mining, a year later he conviced Homestake
Mining (second only to Newmont in the U.S. gold stakes) to buy shares
in Galactic.

 Friedland's golden apple was undoubtedly the Summitville mine in
Colorado. Its $222 million costs were bankrolled mainly by European
(especially Swiss and British) investors, although the Bank of America
also came through with $30 million, after the world's biggest civil
engineering company, Bechtel, agreed to take on design and engineering
of the mine. By the decade's end, Friedland had become a darling among
North America's smart-monied sets. Rick Young and Dan Noyes of the New
York Times observed, "Industry executives filled conference rooms to
hear him speak on innovative ways to finance mining operations."

 But the bitter reality was that Friedland had savagely cut corners,
as well as costs, to bring Summitville on-stream in almost record
time. "People were willing to go along with his assumptions," declares
John Dobra, a Washington Gold Institute consultant. "The problem was,
his assumptions were usually wrong."

 Friedland's major, catastrophically false assumption was that the
recently developed heap-leach system (virtually the cheapest and
fastest way to extract gold from ore) would work on a vast scale
(spread over 50 acres) and halfway up an icebound mountain. In heap-
leach mining, ore is crushed and stacked on huge liners. Cyanide is
then dumped on the heap and the liners are supposed to collect the
cyanide, gold and other metals which leach out. Within days of
Summitville's opening in 1986, the cyanide solution used to dissolve
gold from the 127-foot high ore heap began leaking through its
stretched and rupturing liner.

 Kenneth Gooding, mining editor of the London Financial Times,
describes what happened over the next three years: "More water flowed
into the heap than flowed out or evaporated. ... Acid water began to
flow from the waste pile." Cyanide started to leak into a nearby
creek, and from there into the ground water. When the company tried to
pump the leaking water back into the heap, this simply "raised the
[water] level at an alarming rate." Soon there were spills of water
"laced with cyanide and heavy metals," says Gooding, while
contaminants, crammed into a mere five-acre disposal site, overflowed
into other nearby streams, feeding the rivers below.

 The Colorado state authorities turned an unseeing eye on the disaster
for many months, "worried about the loss of jobs and taxes," according
to Gooding. Eventually, they moved to close down the site, but it was
far too late. "Contaminated water was not only flowing from the land
disposal operations but also from nine other unauthorized discharges."
Colorado Department of Health Inspector Jim Horn commented,
"Literally, there was 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of heavy metals [daily]
leaving the site in dissolved form. It was like adding half a Buick a
day to the Whiteman Fork that flows into the Alamosa. There was no
life in the river for 17 miles."

 Summitville suspended operations in 1991. It had become "the Exxon
Valdez of the American mining industry," declares Thomas Hilliard,
formerly of the Washington, D.C.-based Mineral Policy Center.
"Overambitious management, botched construction, reckless mining and
weak state government regulation combined to create one of the biggest
scandals in recent mining history," concludes Gooding. In early 1994,
Summitville cost the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) roughly
$50,000 a day, just to contain cyanide, sulfuric acid and heavy metals
threatening nearby waterways. It is estimated that a reclamation plan
will cost at least another $60 million.

 The EPA first became involved in September 1990, when an anonymous
telephone caller sent agency officials rushing to the scene. Within
two months, EPA and Galactic drew up a containment plan which would
have cost around $20 million to implement. By then, however, the
company was virtually broke. On December 15, 1992, Galactic filed for
bankruptcy.

 Conveniently, just six weeks earlier, Friedland had freed himself
from any liability for the disaster, by suddenly resigning all his
positions at the company. He was, as U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbitt later put it, "stealing away in the middle of the night."
Stockwatch Editor John Wood says, "Friedland is able to say with a
perfectly straight face, with those mesmerizing eyes, that
[Summitville] wasn't his problem; he relied on other people. ... He
doesn't say [that he resigned] the very day the EPA came knocking on
the door."

Friedland reborn

 Once he washed his hands of Summitville and Galactic, Friedland began
regenerating his main investment front, VSE-registered Ivanhoe Capital
Corp. Together with brother Eric, Friedland predicted a gilded future
well away from the shores of North America, specifically in the huge
South American Guiana Shield, which covers Guyana, Venezuela, French
Guiana, Suriname and part of Brazil. "What Chile is to copper, the
Guiana shield will be to gold," Friedland said. Using Ivanhoe's
investments in South American Goldfields Inc., Friedland bought his
way into a struggling Canadian junior mining company called Golden
Star Resources, in which he became the largest single shareholder. As
well as digging its way into French Guiana and Suriname, the company
now operates Guyana's Omal mine, the first corporate gold mine in the
heart of the Guyanese rainforest and one of the biggest mines in South
America. According to Friedland, Star was "a bird with a broken wing,
and I helped it mend."

 Since then, the hawk has truly taken flight. This year - much to the
alarm of Amerindian communities in western Guyana - Golden Star is
doing airborne surveys of more than a million hectares in the Upper
Mazaruni rainforest, after concluding a very favorable deal with the
avowedly leftist Jagan government for the choicest deposits it finds.
While the region has been plagued by privately-owned "missile
dredges," - huge, remote-controlled vacuum cleaners which pump water
into alluvial deposits and suck them up to process out the minerals,
ripping out the river banks and choking marine sytems - the area has
so far been spared any large corporate mines. Friedland's prospecting
may soon change that.

 Using Ivanhoe Capital as his main financing vehicle, Friedland
controls several other outfits, of which Vengold is the most
important. This company owns the potentially lucrative Oro Uno
concession in Venezuela's Bolivar state, along with several other
"properties."

 Friedland has also sealed joint venture deals with Carson Gold,
Queenstake Resources and Philip Resources in the same area, and has
acquired a minority stake in Bolivar Goldfields. In cahoots with a
shady Venezuelan national, Charles Brewer Carlas, he has been fishing
for gold along the Orinoco river. In Namibia, Ivanhoe controls the
deep-sea miner, Diamond Field Resources, while in the Papua New Guinea
highlands, it has negotiated a share of the Mt. Kare prospect,
ironically surrendered by CRA after landowners threatened an armed
attack in 1993.

 But once again, everything is not going according to Friedland's
plan. Venezuelan environmental groups and politicians have publicly
condemned his operations in Bolivar, while 5,000 indigenous people
recently mobilized to protest invasions of their land by Friedland and
other Canadian corporations. "The genocide of our peoples
continues ... the land is sold off without taking into account our
concerns," protested indigenous leader Jose Luis Gonsalez. The chief
Venezuelan agency for such misappropriation has been the CVG, a state
corporation which supposedly regulates the transfer of mining rights
from private landowners to foreigners and also maintains its own
mining operations. Friedland's skill at taking over disputed claims
hints at an inside track to the CVG. In any case, Venezuela's
"structural adjustment" program will likely put CVG's mining
operations on the private market - and Friedland has expressed
interest in buying.

 Surprisingly few people in Venezuelan government seem aware of
Friedland. Last year, when asked by the Financial Times for his
opinion of the man, Oswaldo del Castillo, Venezuela's mining expert on
the National Council for Investment Promotion, commented, "It's a
relief to us that Mr. Friedland is not involved in mining in
Venezuela." Yet by then, the Canadian entrepreneur was the second
biggest owner of mining claims in Bolivar.

 In late 1994, Ivanhoe began major base metals prospecting in Burma,
despite longstanding calls from the Burmese democratic movement for a
ban on all foreign investment until democracy is reestablished in the
country.

 Today, the Big Guns of the mining industry desperately need to
convince a growing body of skeptics that its practices are safe and
ecologically sound. Michael Brown, vice president of the Gold
Institute, has damned Robert Friedland as the "mining industry's
Charles Keating" - a reference to the former savings and loan
executive who came to symbolize the deregulated excesses of that
industry in the 1980s.

One might conclude that no respectable miner would now touch the wily
Canadian with a dragline. But over the past 18 months, as the full
extent of the Summitville Horror has registered and Friedland has
plundered ever southwards, one company has cordially negotiated with
the pariah. Britain's RTZ, corporate mining's leading power and self-
appointed advocate, will team up with Vengold to hold 40 percent of
Papua New Guinea's massive Lihir project - the biggest untapped gold
deposit outside of South Africa.

----

Maureen