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|  Terri Taylor is an Emmy award-winning
independent journalist and television producer with numerous on-air credits in
social issues and environmental reporting. She covered Europe and the Middle East for
news organizations including ABC News, United Press International and the Associated
Press, before returning to her hometown of Pittsburgh in 1988 to join the news staff
of KDKA-TV (CBS). In 1991, she reported and produced her first full-length documentary,
"The Gander Crash," which probed the links between terrorism in the Middle East, the
Iran Contra affair and the 1985 crash of a military charter plane in which 248
American soldiers were killed. The Gander Crash aired on A&E's Investigative Reports,
winning top awards at the 1992 New York and Houston Film Festivals. Terri has also
produced and associated-produced documentaries appearing on PBS and The Learning
Channel.
Chip: How did you win the Emmy?
Ms. Taylor: I won the Emmy for a series of pieces about a plane crash in December
1985 involving 248 soldiers coming back from an American peace-keeping mission in the
Sinai Peninsula. It was called the Gander Crash. I was contacted by a mom who had a son in
the 101st Airborne that was lost in the crash. She couldn't get her kid's autopsy
report–which is supposed to be a matter of public record. So I tried to get another
[soldier's] autopsy report, and I couldn't get that one either. So I tried another one
and another one, and I couldn't get any of them. This told me there was something very
amiss with this plane crash, which was ruled "an accident caused by wing icing."
The plane had come over from the Sinai and refueled in Gander, Newfoundland. And it went
down in the deepest, pot-bellied lake in North America, pretty much right after take-off.
The Islamic Jehad had claimed responsibility. There was a lot of stuff going on at the
time–underground talk of terror, there was a top alert at the National Security Agency.
Essentially, the crash was linked to Iran Contra. My reporting was about the crash and
the cover-up surrounding it.
Chip: Was the plane shot down?
Ms. Taylor: There was a bomb planted on the plane. I actually got parts of the plane.
They were headed for a scrap auction in Miami. Somebody called me and said, "You might want
to go down there and buy this stuff." This is incredible when you compare this to Pan Am 103,
where they were searching for years for a microchip. This [Gander Crash] plane was blown
wide open and they pushed most of it into a rock quarry and covered it up. But some pieces
were saved, which we were able to buy. We had it analyzed and actually replicated the
explosion. The bomb was Semtex, plastic explosives. We went to great lengths and worked
with forensic pathologist, Dr. Cyril Wecht [M.D., J.D.]. There was high levels of carbon
monoxide in the soldiers' blood, which indicates something had to have happened before the
plane crashed. There was also a significant amount or enriched uranium.
Chip: How does a local Pittsburgh reporter get into such a global story as the
Gander Crash?
Ms. Taylor: I had been in the Middle East working for ABC News as a radio reporter,
and I spent a couple years in the Persian Gulf area, so I already knew the players. I had
been to Iran when no Americans were permitted there. I learned how to get into places like
that from one of the greatest Afro-American reporters that ever was, William Worthy. When
I got back to the states and was working as an investigative reporter at KDKA
[CBS TV Pittsburgh] and the Gander Crash was dropped in my lap, I knew a lot of what I was
looking at. I had heard plenty about moving weapons around the stockpiles, the nefarious
activities of visiting Iran in a bid to get the hostages out. What we didn't learn until
years later was the Iran-Contra affair. This crash, 248 passengers and crew, rivaled Pan
Am 103 and nobody knew about it–still don't. It was a series of ten pieces [(articles)]
over three years.
Chip: When did you start reporting on environmental issues?
Ms. Taylor: I'd always been interested it, even did several pieces in the Middle
East, like when land mines blew up sections of the oil pipeline and the damage it did to
the environment and local birds. But I guess it really started when I got back to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is the birthplace of American industry–where oil was discovered, where coal was
mined. It was the biggest inland commercial port. It was the third largest corporate
center–Alcoa, Westinghouse. There were a lot of dinosaurs here in terms of a legacy of
environmental disasters–toxic waste dumps, polluted creeks and rivers–so if it didn't come
across my desk, people would come and find me. I did a lot of stories of toxic waste,
coal mining, coal mine drainage, and renewable energy–I did several stories on the wind
farms when they started coming into the state. I got a nickname of "Sewage Sal."
Chip: Sewage Sal?
Ms. Taylor: When I was working on the Gander Crash, it got pretty hot for KDKA. I actually
got pulled off the story. Part of the problem with the Iran-Contra shipments was that
Westinghouse was involved in making the nose cones for Cruise Missiles. Every nose cone had
to be accounted for and they were heading off for Iran. [Westinghouse] had to account for
every one, who they were being made for - and they were going missing. It was a small
thread of the story that I wasn't even interested in. But Westinghouse, at the time,
owned KDKA and was..uh.. not too pleased I was working on the story. I'd get pulled off
the story for a while, get back on it. I got assigned to the septic hauler's strike
every day as a punishment. I really was "Sewage Sal." But I'd do whatever I had to
do that day, then spend the rest of my time working on the Gander Crash.
Chip: But now you are working full time on environmental issues?
Ms. Taylor: When I left KDKA, I went freelance. I did my first documentary for A&E.
I did several pieces for WQED [PBS-TV Pittsburgh]. I'm looking a whole rack of tapes here:
Shade Trees; Wind Farms; Farmer's in Shifts–that was about PASA; Deer Creek–the Mall and
development; Acid Rain; a series of pieces for a program called Health News; Breast Cancer;
and so on. Probably the biggest one, the one I'm working on now, is on longwell coal mining.
The whole issue of coal is one of the most tremendous environmental disasters.
Chip: Are you talking about the pollution it causes from burning it?
Ms. Taylor: The entire coal cycle from cradle to grave. "Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
When you extract it, when you clean it, when you transport it, when you burn it, the
ramifications are huge for human health, the environment, the planet, in terms of global
warming, I could go on a long time about that. I did a documentary on longwell coal
mining and now I'm doing another one that's supposed to be done the first of May:
"Subsided Ground–Fallen Futures: The Legacy of Longwell Mining."
Chip: What is longwell mining?
Ms. Taylor: Longwell mining is mountain top removal, only 600 feet underground.
Imagine this for a second. The shearing machines, as they are called, are the biggest extraction
machines you have ever seen. They are 1500 to 2000 feet across. Picture a Norelco shaver
or salami slicer with big pins on it the size of your arm. It moves through the coal seam
cutting out 6 feet high taking out everything leaving an unsupported roof - the earth below
us - wherever it goes. They take out panels that can be a mile long. And when they finish
the seam, they take out the machine, move it over and keep going. The Pittsburgh seam runs
from New York though here, where it gets the thickest, then down into Kentucky. It's the
purest coal seam in the world. There's not a lot of refuse when they pull the coal out. What
happens is that all the land above a longwell mine sinks three to six feet.
In Europe, there's a lot of refuse and they backfilled the gaps so the earth didn't
collapse. Longwell mining is outlawed in most of Europe now because it is too damaging.
So they took these machines made in Germany, and they brought them over here to
Southwestern Pennsylvania. We've lost hundreds of square miles of watershed. [Rainfall
flows into the mines instead of river systems. – Chip] It's not going into the Mississippi
River, people can't drink it or water their livestock. It's causing tremendous damage as
water fills the mines picking up heavy metals and becoming highly acidic. This is seeping
into our water table and already there has been a lot of pollution, but sooner or later there will
be a major blow to our underground water supply.
Nothing on the surface is untouched. You have to see this to believe it. Just a few miles
from where I've been working–you don't see houses falling down, but houses are abandoned
and boarded up. The real telltale signs are water buffalo - water cisterns that dot the
landscape. [Water has to be trucked in for human consumption and is stored in these
cisterns. – Chip] If you see those, you know that the shearing machines have been through.
They can't just go around your house.
People see the damage caused by mountain top removal, but the longwell damage doesn't make
good pictures. It appears in lowered water quality. I've watched streams and
ponds that were on the earliest hand-drawn maps disappear in an afternoon, and never come
back.
It's only recently that mining became mechanized, and there's only a few people down there
with Gameboys [to control the shearing machines –Chip]. It's not pick and shovel. There
are not a lot of coal jobs, but there are a lot of auxiliary jobs, and people are torn.
There's a company store kind of feeling down there: you work for them, but you don't want
to run the machine under your mom's house. There's a lot of social stress in the area.
Chip: I hear you are going to Croatia this week.
Ms. Taylor: I am. I'm going to Zagreb and meeting with two leading scientific researchers
of zeolite, Kreššimir Pavelic, and Vesna Colic-Cvrlje.
Chip: The two who are studying zeolite with respect to epithelial cancer.
[Pavelic & Colic, "Natural zeolite clinoptilolite: new adjuvant in anticancer therapy."]
Ms. Taylor: Yes. Actually, zeolites are a class of mineral compounds that are found
in volcanic ash. One of these, clinoptilolite, is the one we are interested in.
Chip: What is significant about theses zeolites?
Ms. Taylor: If I had to put it in a nutshell, zeolites are negatively charged
mineral compounds that attract to them and trap positively charged minerals and compounds.
What is great about this is that these positively charged compounds [heavy metals and toxins]
are what get in the way of healthy functioning in our body systems--endocrine, metabolic,
you name it. Why I'm interested in it is that we have had few and not terribly effective
ways of ridding the human body of toxins. And we are all loaded with toxins.
We can safely and effectively clean ourselves instead of spending so much money on medicines
to suppress the symptoms of these toxins. And everyone is toxic. To find clean water, we
have to go to before the turn of the century in core ice. I'm talking about heavy metals,
dioxins, pharmaceuticals, plastics, dyes, preservatives, nitro-cyanines, viral components--a
whole range of things can respond to clinoptilolite.
© 2007 Chip Engelmann
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