Jon Stewart, the comedian who shot to fame as the era-defining host of the Daily Show in the 2000s and 2010s, is throwing his fame around on behalf of injured veterans.
Stewart, who has increasingly dabbled in serious political commentary and activism since departing the Daily Show in the mid 2010s, is bringing pressure to bear against the Biden administration in the hopes that they will repair an oversight in a veteran’s aid bill, which fails to make provisions for American soldiers who were deployed to Uzbekistan in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Around three weeks after the attacks, members of American special forces units—the soldiers in question—were sent to a base known as “K2” or Karshi-Khanabad.
K2 was once a Soviet air base. U.S. forces were granted permission to use to launch sorties into Afghanistan and strike targets controlled by the Taliban in the very early phases of what would become a twenty year-long war and occupation, which ended in ignominy in 2021.
During the Soviet period, the base had been used to process chemical weapons and was left in ruins. Troops stationed there were exposed to waste and litter of all sorts, including radioactive uranium powder (a report confirmed through AP-obtained documents). Nobody seems to know why the ground was littered with uranium powder, nor how it happened, but those who were stationed at the base have been worried ever since. Many of those who served at K2 have developed complexes of medical symptoms which point to conditions known to be caused by radiation poisoning.
In an interview with the Associated Press where he made a case on behalf of the veterans, Stewart compared the “toxic soup” that the soldiers were living in to being stationed inside a methamphetamine laboratory from the hit television show “Breaking Bad.”
Stewart is hoping that his activism will inspire congress to amend the PACT act so that the soldiers’ radiation poisoning will be covered.