http://thewe.cc/weplanet/news/depleted_uranium_iraq_afghanistan_balkans.html

This can be compared with data from the month of August in 2002 where there were 530 new born babies of whom six were dead within the first seven days and only one birth defect was reported.

Doctors in Fallujah have specifically pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of birth defects but what is more alarming is:   “a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop severe disabilities at a later stage.”

Fatima Ahmed was born in Fallujah with deformities that include two heads

US used white phosphorus chemical and thermobaric fuel-air weapons

War Crimes — Fallujah

As if destroying a country and its culture ain’t bad enough, how about destroying its future, its children?

I want to scream it from the rooftops!

We are complicit in crimes of such enormity that I find it difficult to find the words to describe how I feel about this crime committed in my name!

In the name of the ‘civilized’ world?

Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq.

Thousands of infants are being born with deformities.

Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.” — Jalal Ghazi, for New America Media

The US has refused to fund major research and has been criticised for failing to cooperate with UN attempts to conduct a post conflict assessment in Iraq.

Angus Stickler reports:

Both the US and UK used depleted uranium in Iraq.

The US fired 320 tons in Gulf War I — and possibly as much as 2,000 tonnes in Gulf War II.

But its use is highly controversial — blamed as one of the possible causes of cancer and birth defects.

It’s this that prompted the Untied Nations’ World Health Organisation to conduct a major assessment of the post conflict hazards.   The findings were published in 2001.

Dr Mike Repacholi retired as the Coordinator of the W.H.O. Radiation and Environmental Health Unit in June of this year.   He oversaw the project.

Dr Keith Baverstock — now retired — was a senior radiation advisor with 12 years experience at the W.H.O — part of Dr Repacholi’s editorial team at the time.   He came across research indicating that depleted uranium is a potentially dangerous carcinogen:

“When you breathe in the dust the deeper it goes into the lung the more difficult it is to clear.   The particles that dissolve pose a risk — part radioactive — and part from the chemical toxicity in the lung — and then later as that material diffuses into the rest of the body, and into the blood stream a potential risk at sites like the bone marrow for leukaemia, the lymphatic system and the kidney” according to Dr Baverstock.

As part of the W.H.O. team he submitted these findings — based on peer reviewed research conducted by the United States Department of Defense — for inclusion into the monograph.

It received short shrift.   Dr Repacholi says this was with good reason.

It was the committee’s general conclusion that this data did not substantiate that there was a health effect at this stage.   Was the science that was in that report — which was research that came effectively from the US Department of Defense — was it wrong?

DR REPACHOLI:    We want a comprehensive report — we want to include everything that we can — but we don’t want fairytale stuff — it wasn’t collaborated by other reports — that was felt to the level that science would say this was established.

ANGUS STICKLER:    My understanding is that at the time that there were eight published peer reviewed research studies — attesting to the genotoxic nature of uranium — all of which could have been included in the monograph?

REPACHOLI:    Yep — these — er — papers were speculative at the time and W.H.O. will only publish data that they know is established.

Dr Baverstock disagrees.   He says the W.H.O stance that this is inconclusive science is not safe science.   He attempted to take the issue further.

DR BAVERSTOCK:    When it wasn’t included in the monograph — I with two other colleagues prepared a paper for the open literature and the W.H.O did not permit me to submit that paper for publication.

ANGUS STICKLER:    Why not — what reasons were you given?

BAVERSTOCK:    No I’m not miffed about it at all — we use this kind of laboratory testing in many systems to screen chemicals and to know whether things are going to be dangerous or not.

STICKLER:    Why do you think your study was — as you say — suppressed?

BAVERSTOCK:    It is naive to think that in institutions like the United Nations one is free from political influences — the member states have their own agendas.

STICKLER:    What you seem to be saying there is that the W.H.O. was pressurised by the likes of the United States to come to the right conclusion?

DR REPACHOLI:    The problem that W.H.O had and it went right up to the Director General’s office that it was finally disapproved at that level was that on the basis of the evidence that we have — we can’t conclude that it is harmful — and to have a paper from another W.H.O staff member that says we absolutely think it’s harmful — makes W.H.O look a bit odd.

STICKLER:    With the greatest respect — that’s going to have very little truck with someone who may get seriously ill because of depleted uranium the fact that the W.H.O. may look a bit odd?

The U.S. Government was a marching plague of firepower across Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia is the most bombed area in the world.

And, the vast number of Americans do not have a clue that this horror ever happened.

Geneva convention rules are for fools, who think there is fair play in war.

Now, lets fast forward 30 years, and the same thing is happening in the Middle East.

In a simple statement, George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, is barbaric.

It is a very simple truth.

But, the vast majority of the American people will never hear this truth.

Why?

Because the truth would napalm their soul.

He who does not know history,               is destined to remain a child.

The findings of the US Department of Defense research — are now in the public domain: depleted uranium is genotoxic — it chemically alters DNA and could be a precursor to tumour growth.   Since 2001, there have been numerous studies supporting the findings.

We asked for an interview with the scientist who conducted these studies — Dr Alexandra Miller — the US Department of Defense refused.   The BBC has been told that she applied to the US Army Research Programme to do further work on the effects of depleted uranium in 2004, five and six.   All the applications were turned down.

“I’ve been to several international conferences where I’ve heard Iraqi medical physicians summarise health statistics on the occurrence of birth defects and non Hodgkin’s Lymphomas and the rise in incidents in these kind of effects especially in the area of southern Iraq and the Basra area appears quite alarming on the basis of the figures that I’ve seen — significant data — that would suggest that we should be erring on the side of caution here — and it ought to be investigated” Professor Parrish told us.

Professor Parrish has recently completed another research study — as yet unpublished — but it shows that if inhaled — depleted uranium remains in high concentrations in the body — a potential hazard — for decades.   The priority now, he says, is to ascertain whether it poses a real risk to humans — the people of Iraq.

PROFESSOR PARRISH:    If we want to get to bottom of this issue as to whether populations and people are really suffering — we have to conduct environmental and health assessments — in places where people are exposed and we can I think solve this problem if sufficient resources and the will is there to actually address the problem.

ANGUS STICKLER:    Do you think the will is there on the part of the politicians?

In the meantime the United Nations Environment Programme UNEP has trained a team of Iraqi scientists ready to carry out a detailed assessment.   But despite having political allies in Washington Henrik Slotte chief of the UNEP post conflict branch — says his work can’t progress further without co-operation from the US.

HENRIK SLOTTE:    Without the coordinates and clear information about what was used and when — it is impossible to start working on depleted uranium in the field — it’s like looking for a needle in the haystack.

ANGUS STICKLER:    Are they providing you with all the information you’ve requested?

SLOTTE:    In the case of Iraq we have requested and the reply has been that this is an issue that concerns many parts of that administration and it will take some time for them to come back in writing.

STICKLER:    You do now have a team of Iraqis now ready to go in — wouldn’t it be helpful for them to have this information now?

SLOTTE:    There are no indications.

Depleted Uranium according to a growing body of scientists is carcinogenic — a health hazard not just to Saddam Husain’s republican guard — but Iraqi civilians for generations to come.

It’s been used in other theatres of conflict too — Afghanistan and Lebanon — and calls for action are now gaining ground.

Not just with fervent campaigners — but eminent scientists, academics, and lawyers too — depleted uranium munitions they say should be banned under international law as potential weapons of indiscriminate effect.

You can listen to the report by clicking on the following link      ”LISTEN”

4 million plus people displaced

CAIRO, July 23 (RIA Novosti) — Iraq’s environment minister blamed Monday the use of depleted uranium weapons by U.S. forces during the 2003 Operation Shock and Awe for the current surge in cancer cases across the country.

“Our ministry is fledgling, and we need international support; notably, we need laboratories to better monitor air and water contamination,” she said.

The first major UN research on the consequences of the use of DU on the battlefield was conducted in 2003 in the wake of NATO operations in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Montenegro.

The UN Environment Program (UNEP) said in its report after the research that DU poses little threat if spent munitions are cleared from the ground.

“Health risks primarily depend on the awareness of people coming into contact with DU,” UNEP writes in its 2004 brochure “Depleted Uranium Awareness.”

No major clean-up or public awareness campaigns have been reported in Iraq.

…I suddenly had a flashback.   A dream I had about 6 months prior to the second Gulf War.

I dreamt of a young Iraqi boy, being held by two american GI’s and uplifted to be crucified on a cross.

They nailed him to the cross and walked away.

I woke up choking.   I said to myself, they tortured the children of Iraq now they will crucify them.

The boy is now resurrected and is guiding my pen.

He is asking me to draw him crucified on a old rotting wooden cross.

He tells me that he wants the background to be filled with a half million skeletons of dead babies with Ms.Albright smiling on top of them.

He is asking me to draw newborns with grosteque deformities due to depleted uranium.

He is urging me not to forget the starving looking babies due to malnutrition.

He is making sure I paint the children who have cancer because of american chemical weapons, queuing up in desolate hospitals.

And he has not forgotten the children who survived in tattered clothes with their tattered textbooks walking barefoot to school.

Oh wait, he is also telling me to draw in the corner, a picture of the orphanage bombed during the war of liberation and he is making sure that I show the kids running in the streets desperate with nowhere to go — some kidnapped, some sold whilst others raped.

I asked him if he wanted me to add anything.

He said the picture is almost complete.

“What shall I call it?” I asked.

He replied:

“The World as I see it”.

This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991.

Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure.

Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991.

Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability.

This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.

The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year.

Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.

Depleted uranium, which is used in armour-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells.

The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.

DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power.

It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density – twice that of lead – makes it useful for armour and armour piercing shells.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells.   The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily.

“These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

Once they are lodged in the lung even low levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by.

“The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects.

Weyman was honored for reports he wrote about the use of uranium weapons used by the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan.

These conventional weapons contain uranium, classified as depleted uranium or DU.

Despite the label, these weapons are still radioactive.

Uranium is considered an ideal weapons material due to its density and ability to penetrate its target.

Weyman has conducted health studies in both Iraq, where DU weapons were deployed, and also in Afghanistan, where weapons containing non-depleted uranium were used.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke to Weyman about his research.   Tedd Weyman’s reports have been honored by Project Censored. For more information, call the Research Centre at (416) 465-1341 or visit the group’s website at www.umrc.net

Tedd Weyman    Afghanistan was an extremely traumatic personal experience for me.   I was shaken right to my core because over there the uranium was used in experimental bombs.

That was the days when the name Bunker Buster became well known.

Those cave-penetrating weapons were even called seismic-shock bombs.

So these were very large bombs in the neighborhood of two to five thousand pounds.

I found my first day in Afghanistan a village in which the entire village was no more than a kilometer away from where a bombing sortie had occurred on a quasi-military outpost in the Jalalabad area, which is near the Pakistan border.

All the people in the village were standing watching the bombers fire their bombs.

These bombs came down, very big explosions, deep into the earth, threw a lot of material up into the air as a smoke plume, flashed odd colors, then a smoke plume full of dust, dirt and debris — and of course we found out later was uranium particles — came across their village.

All these people were covered in it, like the dust you could wipe off your skin, off your clothes, off your window ledge because it was such a quantity.

Within a few minutes of exposure people started to feel funny.

US air strike kills 17 Civilians

< The air strike by US forces in eastern Afghanistan last week killed 17 civilians including women and children, a provincial governor has said.

US planes had bombed Chechal village as part of a search for four missing US special forces servicemen.

Assadullah Wafa, governor of Konar province, said the bombing was a “mistake” and called for a US inquiry.

Civilian deaths by US NATO forces are now ongoing

Western Terror States: Canada, US, UK, France, Germany, Italy

Photos of Afghanistan people being killed and injured by NATO

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around the clock educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials on radiation issues.

She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.

She is currently working as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the U.N. subcommission investigating depleted uranium.

According to Wikipedia online encyclopedia, Moret testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Japan in 2003, presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in January 2004.

THE INTERVIEW

ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with reducing depleted uranium exposures on U.S. troops?

I have been following the bill and talking to her.  Yesterday, she testified twice at the United Nations.

I said, “Why don’t we get this bill all over the U.S. in state legislatures because it informs the public and get the local media to cover it.”

The U.S. has blocked any accountability at international and national levels.

There’s a total cover-up just like with Agent Orange, the atomic veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA did.

This is more of the same, but the issue is much, much worse because the genetic future of all those contaminated is effected.

Now vast regions around our world, as well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with the depleted uranium.  They’ve used so much.

I went to Louisiana in April.  I was invited to speak at the University of New Orleans for three days.  One of the veterans asked me to be in their April 19 protest and rally through the City of New Orleans.  He took the Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature, and he got two legislators to sponsor it, and he said, “Just whiteout the name ‘Connecticut’ and write in ‘Louisiana’ on the bill.”

You’re not going to believe it.  It passed 101 to 0 yesterday in the Louisiana House.

I want you to write about it because we want it (the DU testing bill) in Texas.

Nevada is going to introduce it.

Congressman Jim McDermott is going to put it into the Washington legislature.

We want to get the governor of Montana to do it because he’s the first governor to demand his National Guard be returned.

I think half of them are back.  He said, “I need them in the state.”

ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium, being used in weaponry over there, spreading by air over here?

MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it.

It’s completely mixed in one year.

I’m an expert on atmospheric dust.  I’m a geoscientist, a geologist, and that’s what I studied and did my research on.  It’s really a fascinating subject.

We have huge dust storms that are a million square miles and transport millions of tons of dust and sand every year around the world.

The main centers of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which is where the Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that’s all contaminated with radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes straight across the Pacific and dumps all its sand and dust on the U.S., North America.

It’s loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides, chemicals, pollution — everything is in it — fungi, bacteria, viruses.

We did 1,200 nuclear weapons tests there, so all this radiation that is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a global cancer epidemic since 1945.  All of that radiation was the equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki bombs.  We’re talking about 10 times more.

In April of 2003, the World Health Organization said they expect global cancer rates to increase 50 percent by the year 2020.

Infant mortality is going up again all over the world.  This is an indicator of the level of radioactive pollution.

When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban treaty in 1963, the infant mortality rate started dropping again, which is normal.  Now they are going up again.  It’s the global pollution with this radiation.

ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a series of photographs of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq on April 28.

MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm.  They’re posted with photos from Iraqi doctors of the children of people with cancer and leukemia.  So what did you think of that dust storm?

ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.

MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks.

The DU burns at such high temperatures.  It’s a pyroforic metal which means it burns.

The bullets and big caliber shells are actually on fire when they come out of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction in the gun barrel.

Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor.

Radioactive gas weapon

It’s actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant.

I’ll email you the URL of the 1943 memo to General Leslie Grove under the Manhattan Project.  It’s the blueprint for depleted uranium.  They dropped the atomic bombs, but they did not use the DU weapons because they thought they were too horrific.

I’ve toured and gone all over Japan with a pediatrician in Basra and an oncologist, a cancer specialist.  These poor doctors — their whole families are dying of cancer.  He has 10 members of his family with cancer now that he’s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I.  They’ve used much, much, much more in 2003.  All over the whole country.

ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come home?

Some of them have uterine cancer — 18 and 19 and 20 year olds.  The Army will not even diagnose it.  They send them back to the battlefields.  They won’t treat them or diagnose them.  A group of 20 soldiers pushed from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting.  Eight of those 20 soldiers have malignancies.

ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological background when they come home?

It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain.

Four soldiers at Fort Bragg came back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four had murdered their wives.  This is part of the damage to the brain from the radiation and the particles.

The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war.

They came back, and the VA did a study.  Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, their babies born after the war were deemed to have severe birth defects.

They had brains missing, arms and legs missing, organs missing.  They were born without eyes.  They had horrible blood diseases.  It’s horrific.

ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States that are here?  You say that DU is being mixed and spread globally?

MORET: Yes, it’s being mixed globally.  We’re getting secondary smoke.  It’s the secondary smoke effect.  You know the people who inhabit a room with smokers?  They are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.

ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as we speak?

MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the atmosphere all around the globe is increasing.

There are indications that the U.S. will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran.  We’re monitoring the U.S. Army ammunition factories.  They have very large orders for those huge bunker buster bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.

ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?

MORET: It’s going to kill off the world’s population.  It already is, and it doesn’t just effect people.  It effects all living systems.  The plants, the animals, the bacteria.  It effects everything.

ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if they have DU in them, then we’ll just get it in our systems, and so we’re polluting the oceans, so that could effect all marine life?

MORET: Yes, it’s in the air, water, and soil.  The half-life of DU, Uranium 238, is 4.5 billion years the age of the Earth.

A report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2001 said they posed only a small contamination risk.

But a senior UN scientist said research showing how depleted uranium could cause cancer was withheld.

The UK Ministry of Defence said that there was no evidence linking depleted uranium use to ill health.

Depleted uranium is extremely dense and hard, and is used for armour-piercing bullets or shells.

Fears over health implications led to a study by the WHO in 2001.

‘Risk from particles’

But Dr Keith Baverstock, who worked on the project, said research conducted by the US Department of Defense suggested otherwise.

Later, he said, the material enters the body and the blood stream, potentially affecting bone marrow, the lymphatic system and the kidneys.

The research was not included in the WHO report, and Dr Baverstock believes it was blocked.

Mr Repacholi said the findings were not corroborated by other reports and it was not WHO policy to publish “speculative” data. He denied any pressure was brought to bear.

But other senior scientists have pointed to worrying health statistics in Iraq, which show a rise in cancer and birth defects.

Prof Randy Parrish of the Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in the UK said environmental and health assessments were needed in Iraq to establish the facts.

Iraqi scientists trained by the UN are seeking to carry out such an assessment, but Henrik Slotte of the United Nations Environmental Programme said without clear information from the US on what was used and where, it was “like looking for a needle in a haystack”.

He said there was “no indication” this information was forthcoming from the US.

A spokesman for the UK’s Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, told the BBC that there was “no scientific or medical evidence” to link depleted uranium use to sickness in Iraq.

He said the MOD was aware of recent research into the effects of depleted uranium at cellular level, but that it had to be guided by “the professional advice of the Health Protection Agency and the International Commission on Radiological Protection”.

These particles are so tiny that molecules bumping into them keep them lofted in the air, and so the only way for them to get out of the atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution, which will clear them out of the air and deposit them in the environment.

What happens is the surface of these particles gets wetted by the moisture in the air.

They come down and land on stuff and stick to it like a glue.

You can’t ever get the particles off whatever they’re sticking to because have you ever put a drop of water on a microscope slide and then put another one on top of it?   Can you pull those apart?

Once they are removed from the atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they land on.

In a way they are removed from circulation from the atmosphere.

You can’t wash them off.

If it keeps raining or they’re in a creek, you know, if they’re on rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won’t even wash off.

You didn’t know it was this bad, did you?

ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was fairly isolated.

MORET: No.  What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in about four days.  I don’t know if you followed Chernobyl.  That big bubble of radiation went around and around the world, but this is dust.  It becomes a part of atmospheric dust.  Like the dust storm you saw in that photo, it goes everywhere.

ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere or the lower levels?

MORET: It’s in lower orbital space.  They brought the Mir spacecraft back down to Earth when they got done using it, and there was something called a space midge which covered the electronics on the outside of the spacecraft and protected it from radiation that comes from the sun because electronics are real vulnerable to radiation.

They analyzed the surface of that space net and found uranium and uranium decayed products which they said came from atmospheric testing or burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials or nuclear reactors on board.

Uranium can also come from supernovas, but they thought that the most likely sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear materials we put in space.

ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you’re saying that we’re conducting a nuclear war.

MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it.  We’ve built an international movement to stop the use, the manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the deployment of depleted uranium weapons.

ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other countries contained with depleted uranium?

MORET: We have.  In 1968 the first depleted uranium weapons systems that we found a patent for suddenly appeared in the U.S. patent office.

It was for the Navy.

It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system that you mounted on ships.

It rapidly fires like 2,500 bullets a minute.

It’s over 3,000 now.

They’ve improved the design.

Then in 1973, we gave depleted uranium weapons systems to the Israelis and supervised their use.  They used them in the Arab-Israeli war and completely wiped out the Arabs in five days.  Then the show was on the road.  That was the first actual battlefield demonstration of this new weapon system.

Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which is for the Navy.  That’s the Gatling gun system.  They still use it.  That was produced in 1974 and tested.  Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU weapons system to 12 entities which included many branches of the U.S. military and other counties.

We’ve sold DU weapons systems to about — we don’t know exactly for sure — it’s been about 12 or 17 countries.

The good news is that normally such a weapons system that effective would have been sold to 80, 100, or 120 countries by now.

But because of the radiological, biological, and environmental hazard, countries were not only afraid to buy it, the ones who did buy it are afraid to use it.

The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that depleted uranium weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and they are illegal under all international laws and treaties.

In 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution on DU.

What happened is that the NATO forces went into Yugoslavia in 1998 and ’99 and flew 39,000 bombing runs and completely bombed Yugoslavia into radioactive rubble.

Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the destruction of Yugoslavia, and they made sure that countries that didn’t know about the DU, that the peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and Portugal, were sent to the most contaminated regions in Yugoslavia.

Germans and Americans didn’t send their own troops into those areas.  They were in the least contaminated areas.

These poor soldiers from other countries came back and died within weeks or in a couple of days or months.  The parents in Portugal and Italy are furious and went to the Parliament and media, and there was just a huge media storm of articles about DU.

The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.  The cat was out of the bag, but Japanese troops have been sent into Somawa.  They’re self-defense forces.  It was the most contaminated area where the heaviest fighting happened in Iraq.  We can expect those soldiers to be really, really sick.

ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself?  What’s been done thus far?

MORET: It’s uninhabitable.  The whole country.  Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are completely uninhabitable.

Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will rise because of the total contamination levels in all living things will increase because they are breathing that air and drinking water and eating the food from contaminated soils.

It’s just a slow death sentence.  The same with Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective biological weapon.

This is the primary purpose for using it.

Marion Falk (a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab), who is the Manhattan Project scientist I work with, taught me pretty much everything about radiation and particles and DU.

Purpose is the kill, maim and disease the civilian population

He said the purpose of weapons used by the military is not only to injure and kill the enemy soldiers, but the purpose is to kill, maim, and disease the civilian population because it reduces the productivity of a country and pretty soon a lot of their resources are going to be used for taking care of sick people.

They will have fewer and fewer healthy workers.

Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA, that damage is passed on to future generations of that affected person or animal or plant.

DNA does not repair itself.

ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably destructive moreso than constructive.

MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth defects.

ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease because of the radiation, then the generation that would come after me would have the same problem?

MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the cell or functioning of cells, that doesn’t necessarily damage the DNA.

There are two kinds of damage: one damages the cells of the living organism, and that may not be passed on, but if you damage the DNA in the egg or the sperm, that is passed on to all future generations.

ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their sperm is probably going to be —

MORET: Damaged.  Yes.  They also have depleted uranium in their semen.  When they’re intimate with their partners, they internally contaminate them with depleted uranium.

The women become sick themselves.

They have depleted uranium in their bodies, and there is something called burning syndrome.

Just absolutely horrible.

You can read about it in an article by David Rose in the December Vanity Fair.  It’s on the Internet.

A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian Gulf War veteran.

David Rose interviewed her, and she griped about the burning semen.

She said, “I had 20 condoms full of frozen peas in my freezer at all times, and after we were intimate, I would insert one into my vagina, and that is the only way I could bear the pain from the burning semen.”

And it goes through condoms, too.

ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!

MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes when I talk about the burning semen and the internal contamination.

The girls’ mouths go into little round Os, and the boys start panicking because they’re like, “I’ll never get sick!” (laughs)

The name of this article is “Weapons of Self-Destruction.”

The fetus is the most susceptible to radiation damage because all the cells are rapidly dividing, the limbs and the bodies developing, so when you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation, it really damages the natural process of fetal development.

The reason they were able to convince the Senate to sign the partial test ban treaty in 1963 was because of the increase in infant mortality.

It had been dropping and declining two or three percent for quite a long time each year because of better prenatal care and educating mothers.

Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially in the ‘50s when the big bomb testing started.

By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing globally was having a real impact on the unborn.  They signed the partial test ban treaty.

Russia and the U.S. stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality rate started going down right away.

They’re going up again now.

This is global radioactive pollution, and how long it would take to eliminate all life is something nobody knows, but the depleted uranium is a very, very effective biological weapon.

There are two purposes for the military use of weapons.

One is to destroy the enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to destroy the enemy civilian population.

By causing illnesses and disease, long lingering illnesses really impact the productivity and the economy of a country.

I have a World Health Organization world health survey which they published in the Journal of American Medical Association last June.

The impact of atmospheric testing is very, very apparent by the percentage of population in each country they investigated for some form of mental illness.

For instance, Japan is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is very low — 4.7 percent.  They have almost no radiation in Nigeria.

In the Ukraine where they had the Chernobyl accident, it is 20.4 percent.  Spain is at 9.2 percent.  Italy is 8.2 percent.  It’s pretty low because they don’t have nuke plants.

France is 75 percent reliant on nuclear power, so you have mental illness in 18.4 percent of the population.

Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the United States is at 26.3 percent — the highest rate of mental illness in the world.

And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in utero to bomb testing fallout in the United States.

He had a toddler sister who died of leukemia when she was about three.

I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public Health Project. Their website is.

We are all radiation specialists, well-known scientists, and independent scientists.

We’ve collected 6,000 baby teeth around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them, and one of our members is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of the Bush children, including President Bush himself, because they had severe learning disabilities.

You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released into the atmosphere, and there’s a direct correlation to the decline in SAT scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that was released into the atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them.

These are delayed effects of radiation exposure in utero.

ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but they were still feeling the effects of the radiation in Nevada?

MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that every single person living in the United States between 1957 and 1963 was internally exposed to radiation. So for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus was exposed.

ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we talking about?

MORET: It’s low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy products.

It even killed the baby fish in the Atlantic.

Strontium-90 is a man-made isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.

They measured the levels of strontium-90 in milk in Norway from the 1950s up until the 1970s, and they measured the decline in the fishing catch in that same period, and as the strontium-90 increased in the milk in Norway, fishing catches declined.

By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost every day (they did 250 tests in one year because the treaty was going to be signed), the fishing catch declined by 50 percent.

In the Pacific, it declined 60 percent because there was Russian, Chinese, French, and U.S. testing in the Pacific.

ICONOCLAST: So we’re still eating those contaminated fish today.  Has the genetic code been changed?

MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting rained down, snowed down, or fogged down from the atmosphere.

It’s getting into the oceans.

This big frog die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the radiation in the rainwater.

It’s a global nuclear holocaust.

It effects all living things.

That’s why they call it “omnicide,” which means it kills all living things — the plants, the animals, the bacteria.

Everything.

ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather Channel report on the current sand storm conditions in Iraq so we can prepare four days in advance for the radiation?

One lived 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon.  She went out on her balcony with her geiger counter.  I said, “Get that geiger counter out of your purse.”

We had just done a press conference in San Francisco, and I knew she had it in her purse.

Well, the radiation levels were 8-10 times higher than background.

We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, “Get all those emergency response workers suited up. They need to be protected.”

Two days after 9/11, the EPA radiation expert for that region called back and said, “Yup, the Pentagon crash rubble was radioactive, and we believe it’s depleted uranium, but we’re not worried about that. It’s only harmful if it’s inhaled.”

He said, “We’re worried about the lead solder in the plane.”  Well, you know what’s in Tomahawk missiles?  They have depleted uranium warheads.  The radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU warhead.

ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back to my original question:  Should the Weather Channel report for us on the toxic dust storms in Iraq?

MORET: But how could people get away from them?  These dust storms are a million square miles.  They’re huge, and they come right across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Texas coast line, and right up the East Coast.

There are people who are going to leave the state every time there’s a hurricane.  It’s in the food, drinking water, dairy products, and then the problem with Uranium 238, which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it decays in over 20 steps into other radioactive isotopes.

That’s why I call it the “Trojan Horse.”  It’s the weapon that keeps giving.  It keeps killing.  This is like smoking radioactive crack.

It goes right in your nose.  It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain.  It’s a systemic poison.  It goes everywhere.

These particles that form at very high temperatures — 5,000-10,000 degrees C — are nanoparticles.  They are a 10th of a micron or smaller.  A 10th of a micron is 100 times smaller than a white blood cell.

They get picked up in the lipids and probably the cholesterol and go right through the cell membranes of the cell.  They screw up the cell processes.  They screw up the signaling between the cells because the cells all talk to each other and coordinate what they’re doing.  It messes up brain function.

They had scrupulous databases of the health problems and disease rates, which is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the Ministry of Health.

We destroyed all those records so that a pre-Gulf War health base could not be established to show how much these diseases have increased.

This would concern the U.S. in terms of compensation for war crimes.

In these horrible U.N. sanctions, they (the Iraqis) could never get all of the protocol medicine for the treatment of leukemia.

They (the U.N.) would say, “These steps of the leukemia treatment were components in weapons, so you can’t have that.”

They never gave the people the full proper protocols in the areas of treatment they needed to get rid of the leukemia.

It hid the effects of the depleted uranium because the children were starving.

They had malnutrition.  They had the healthiest population in the Middle East (prior to Gulf War I).

ICONOCLAST: Let’s talk about the children of Iraq.

MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a week born with birth defects in the hospitals in Basra.

Now they are having 10-12 a day.

The levels of uranium are increasing in the population every year.  Every day, people are eating and drinking while the whole environment is contaminated.  Just what you’d expect.

There are more babies born with birth defects, and the birth defects are getting more and more severe.  An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are being born now that are lumps of flesh.  She said that they don’t have heads or legs or arms.  It’s just a lump of flesh.

This also happened to populations that were not removed from islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred.  Basically, governments were using them as guinea pigs.

ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped with nuclear weapons are guilty of those atrocities.

MORET: They were all doing it.  France, Russia.  China, and the U.S.  And I’m not sure if Britain did bomb testing.  They were real low key about it.

ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the United States?

MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100 miles of nuclear power plants.  We have 110 nuclear power plants in the U.S.  We have the most of any country in the world, but only a 103 are operating. Almost all of the entire East Coast.

What we did was we took government data from the Centers of Disease Control on breast cancer deaths between 1985 and 1989.

It’s also around the nuclear weapons laboratories.

That would be Los Alamos in New Mexico, the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Lab in Idaho, and Hanford in Washington State, which is where they got the plutonium for all the bombs.

They contaminated the entire Columbia River watershed and almost the whole state of Washington.

It gets into the water and into the plants and into the vegetation.

If you eat clams or mussels or crabs or things like that, even certain kinds of fish that eat off of the mud at the bottom of the river, you have much higher levels of radiation in your tissues.

It depends on each person and on how healthy they are, but this man from Washington State died suddenly.

He was in his late 40s.

They did an autopsy, and he was full of radioactive zinc.

They went, “Where in the world did he get this?   It only comes from nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.”

They studied his diet and discovered he loved to eat oysters.

They found out where he bought his oysters and found the oyster beds.

They were 200 miles off shore, from Washington State.

The radiation was being carried off out to sea from the coastline.

It was passing over this oyster bed.

The oysters were just gobbling them up.

That’s the actual taste of the uranium metal.

Then within 24-48 hours, soldiers on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick.

They start getting muscle aches, and they lose energy.

Some of them came back incontinent.

In other words, in adult diapers.

One woman reported that the first night home, she wanted to be intimate with her husband, but she had absolutely no feeling.

She couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.

This particulate matter damages the neuromuscular system, the nerves; it just goes everywhere.

And there’s no treatment for it.

These particles are very, very insoluble, so they can’t even dissolve in body fluids, so they can be excreted from the body.

Then they keep releasing.

Even when uranium decays, it turns into another radioactive isotope.

Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth.

Teeth just start falling apart.

The uranium replaces calcium in the calcium-phosphate structure of the teeth.

Some have complained about grand mal seizures, cerebral palsy.

Some diseases reported at very high rates in Air Force and Army soldiers are Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Hodgkin’s disease.

This is damage to the mitochondria in the cells and the nerves.

The mitochondria make all the energy for the body, so when you damage mitochondria, another symptom is chronic fatigue syndrome.

There’s just not enough energy produced by the body to function normally.

I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory employee newsletter in September 2003.

They are doing major studies in mitochondrial disfunction related to Lou Gehrig’s, Hodgkin’s, and Parkinson’s diseases for veterans.

Since it’s at a nuclear weapon’s lab, they are fully aware of the health damage.

It’s $5,000.

The urine test is a $1,000.

If you test positive with the urine test, you know you’re contaminated.

If you test negative, it does not mean that you’re not contaminated.

It just means that you may or may not be contaminated but enough hasn’t dissolved in your blood stream to go through your kidneys to be excreted in your urine.

Anyone who goes now cannot avoid being contaminated.

Anyone!   Anyone!   Anyone!

Everyone who goes to the Middle East and Afghanistan will be contaminated.  The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet.  What else has that impact?

They have altered the genome for the entire planet forever with this DU.  The Pentagon people say, “You’re exaggerating or you use the uranium word to scare people.”

I don’t care if people believe me or not.

All I can say is that over time what I am saying will actually be an underestimation of the long term effects.

A Military Perspective Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project

http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news04.htm

A Survivor’s Perpsective

http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news05.htm

http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news03.htm

Note: all have been removed due to your Corporate Conglomerate

You own the country you live in.

You own the laws.

You can do something about this.

Get rid of all politicians, in the US Democrat and Republican, outside the US, all your own politicians in the pocket of multi-national corporate conglomerates.

Stop them taking away your access to knowledge.

Stop them taking away your freedoms.

It’s up to you if you wish the elite of the world to rule you.

And your children’s world.

Health officials and scientists said this could be due to radiation passed through mothers following years of conflict in the country.

The most affected regions are in the south of the country, particularly Basra and Najaf, according to experts.

Weaponry used during the Gulf war in 1991 contained depleted uranium, which could be a primary source for the increase, scientists in Baghdad said.

“In my experiments we have found some cases where the mother or father were suffering from pollution from weapons used in the south and we believe that it is affecting newborn babies in the country,” Dr Ibraheem al-Jabouri, a scientist at Baghdad University, told IRIN.

According to Dr Nawar Ali, at the University of Baghdad, who works in the newborn babies research department, a significant number of cases of deformed babies had been reported since 2003.

“There have been 650 cases in total since August 2003 reported in government hospitals — that is a 20 percent increase from the previous regime.   Private hospitals were not included in the study, so the number could be higher,” Ali warned.

The health expert said polluted water, which could contain radiation from weapons used in previous conflicts, was the main factor behind the increase.

The type of deformities found in newborn babies are characterised by multiple fingers, unusually large heads, unilateral lips or no arms or legs.

In addition, Dr Lamia’a Amran, a pediatrician at the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) hospital in the capital, told IRIN that inter-marriages were also to blame and that most of cases of deformed babies were from poor families in the southern region.

“Most of the women who have deformed babies in our hospital are married to relatives and have no idea that a common blood factor can also cause such problems,” Amran added.

The IRCS hospital registers at least four cases of deformities every week.

During April this year, 15 cases were reported, according to the hospital spokesman, a number considered high for a short period of time.

However, Amran added that 60 percent of the cases were not related to blood factors, but due to other causes.

She explained that after studying family history of couples with deformed babies, they concluded that radiation and pollution were the main causes of the deformity.

But most of the cases reported don’t survive for more than a week, doctors said.

Nearly 90 percent of such cases at the Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics in Baghdad do not survive, according to Wathiq Ibrahim, director of the hospital.

“We have asked for help from the government to make a more profound study on such cases as it is affecting thousands of families,” he told IRIN.

“My two children were born with deformities and today I had my third one with the same problem.   The doctors say pollution is the cause and now my husband wants to divorce me claiming that I am not capable of bringing healthy children into the world,” Fatima Hussein, a 34-year-old patient at the hospital, told IRIN.

The Ministry of Health (MoH) is working on developing a programme to alert mothers to the problem.   A MoH senior official told IRIN that studies had been undertaken to discover reasons for deformities occurring and to find solutions fast.

Officials at the World Heath Organization (WHO) have not yet developed any kind of research on the subject, but said they would assist the MoH if requested.

“The Iraqi government should take a lead on this issue and if we are asked to assist we will do it,” Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the WHO in Cairo, told IRIN.

“It is a very delicate problem, I have heard about cancer caused by pollution, but deformities in newborn babies is something new and as a result of security issues in the country our staff are outside Iraq, which makes surveying more complicated,” she added.

“Our children have started to suffer the effect of years of war and disasters inside Iraq.   The wars happened but no one cared about the result it was going to have and today innocent lives are being lost due to pollution and poor information,” Firdous al-Abadi, a spokeswomen for the IRCS, told IRIN.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/bad5cdd6e59942ed1a0bb28fa28163fa.htm

Tuesday 1st March 2005 Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed for Sec of Veterans Affairs departure

Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated:

“The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence,”

“Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as ‘spectacular … and a matter of concern!’”

References 1.  Depleted uranium: “Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad” by Leuren Moret, http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml.

2.  Veterans for Constitutional Law, 112 Jefferson Ave., Port Jefferson NY 11777, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director.

3.  Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.  Email Gary Kohls, gkohls [ at ] cpinternet.com, with “Subscribe” in the subject line.

http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml

by : Bob Nichols Tuesday 1st March 2005

Email Bob Nichols at bobnichols [ at ] cox.net.

They had throat and nasal problems.

Bleeding within the nose.

Within twenty-four hours almost everybody who had been exposed was having a kind of bad runny noses.

They woke up in the morning with blood in their throat and in their noses.

Over several weeks they developed a variety of flu-like cold-like symptoms.

Also a stomach-flu type symptom, which then progressed onto a whole series of very classic symptoms that we call the ‘Symptoms of Uranium Internal Contamination:’

Lower backaches, which reflect the kidney damage.

Cervical column or neck pains.

Progressive, repeating gastro-intestinal problems.

Intermittent fevers and neurological problems in which they started to loose their memory and so on.

These were the classic symptoms.

Melinda Tuhus    So these were very serious short and medium term effects. What about the long-term impact of uranium exposure?

Tedd Weyman    I think you could there are three categories or classes of effects in uranium internal contamination from these weapons.

One is the overall systemic breakdown leading to immune system failure and people leading a life similar to those who might have AIDS in which you don’t have the system strength to be able to handle viruses and bacteria.

Then, what they call the mutagenic effects.

This can happen to several organs in the body.

The third area is the congenital effects, which is…their seems to be some preponderance of problems in the offspring of veterans, and Iraqi civilians and Afghan civilians in which several birth defects seem to be consistent in certain populations that have been exposed to uranium weapons.

The first two areas, the immune system breakdown, and the potentially cancerous effects in those exposed directly are known to be scientifically and medically factual.

The birth defects has not been through enough study to determine if that is in fact the case, although having seen those photographs, I’ve interviewed those doctors in Basra who can show that the timing of the onset of both cancer on children and adults, as well as the timing of the onset of birth defects and the mothers from whom those children with birth defects come from, they are very confident that it corresponds to exposure to uranium.

It is the burst of radioactivity from the explosion, called neutron radiation or gamma radiation that causes the damage, but these conventional weapons we are not talking about a few tens to a few hundreds of pounds of material.

We are talking about tons and tons of it.

So in fact if you add it all up it is much greater than a single or even a group of nuclear explosions.

Because it is there continuously, and it releasing continuously and the quantities are much higher.

Melinda Tuhus    That was Ted Weyman

Depleted uranium shells used by British forces in southern Iraqi battlefields are putting civilians at risk from ‘alarmingly high’ levels of radioactivity.

Experts are calling for the water and milk being used by locals in Basra to be monitored after analysis of biological and soil samples from battle zones found ‘the highest number, highest levels and highest concentrations of radioactive source points’ in the Basra suburb of Abu Khasib — the centre of the fiercest battles between UK forces and Saddam loyalists.

Critics of these controversial munitions — used to penetrate tank armour — believe inhaling the radioactive dust left by the highly combustible weapon causes cancer and birth defects.

It has long been alleged that depleted uranium (DU) used in the first Gulf conflict was responsible for abnormally high levels of childhood leukaemia and birth defects in Iraq.

Depleted uranium is also believed by some to be a contributing factor in Gulf War syndrome.

The disclosure comes days after the charity Human Rights Watch claimed hundreds of ‘preventable’ deaths of civilians have been caused by the use of cluster bombs by US and UK forces during the conflict.

The latest research, based on a two-week field trip by scientists, was carried out by the Canadian-based Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) led by a former US military doctor Asaf Durakovic.

Tedd Weymann, deputy director of UMRC, said: ‘At one point the readings were so high that an alarm on one of my instruments went off telling me to get back. Yet despite these alarmingly high levels of radiation children play on the tanks or close by.’

The amount of DU used during the Iraq war has not been revealed, although some estimate it was more than a thousand tons.

Last week, Labour MP Llew Smith obtained from the Ministry of Defence a list of 51 map co-ordinates in Iraq where sites were struck by DU weapons.

France, Spain and Italy claim soldiers who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, where DU shells were used by Nato, have contracted cancers.

Dr Chris Busby, who is a member of a government committee examining radia tion risks, expressed concern.

‘There is no question that inhaling this radioactive dust can increase the risk of lymphomas,’ he said.

Professor Brian Spratt, who chaired a Royal Society working group on the hazards of DU, said: ‘British and US forces need to acknowledge that DU is a potential hazard and make inroads into tackling it by being open about where and how much has been deployed.

Fragments of DU penetrators are potentially hazardous, and should be removed, and areas of contamination around impact sites identified.

Impact sites in residential areas should be a particular priority.

Long-term monitoring of water and milk to detect any increase in uranium levels should also be introduced in Iraq.’

Iraqi children continue to find them every day.

They have ruined the lives of just under 300,000 people during the last decade — and numbers will increase.

The reason is simple.  Two hundred tonnes of radioactive material were fired by invading US forces into buildings, homes, streets and gardens all over Baghdad.

The material in question is depleted uranium (DU).  Left over after natural uranium has been enriched, DU is 1.7 times denser than lead — effective in penetrating armoured objects such as tanks.

After a DU-coated shell strikes, it goes straight through before exploding into a burning vapour which turns to dust.

“Depleted uranium has a half life of 4.7 billion years that means thousands upon thousands of Iraqi children will suffer for tens of thousands of years to come.  This is what I call terrorism,” says Dr Ahmad Hardan.

As a special scientific adviser to the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, Dr Hardan is the man who documented the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq between 1991 and 2002.

But this year’s invasion and occupation has doubled his workload.

Terrible history repeated

“American forces admit to using over 300 tonnes of depleted uranium weapons in 1991.  The actual figure is closer to 800.

“This has caused a health crisis that has affected almost a third of a million people.  As if that was not enough, America went on and used 200 tonnes more in Baghdad alone this April.  I don’t know about other parts of Iraq, it will take me years to document that.”

Hardan is particularly angry because he says there is no need for this type of weapon US conventional weapons are quite capable of destroying tanks and buildings.

“In Basra, it took us two years to obtain conclusive proof of what DU does, but we now know what to look for and the results are terrifying.”

Leukaemia has already become the most common type of cancer in Iraq among all age groups, but is most prevalent in the under-15 category.  It has increased way above the percentage of population growth in every single province of Iraq without exception.

Women as young as 35 are developing breast cancer.

Sterility among men has increased tenfold.

Barely human

But by far the most devastating effect is on unborn children.  Nothing can prepare anyone for the sight of hundreds of preserved foetuses barely human in appearance.

There is no doubt that DU is to blame.

“All children with congenital anomalies are subjected to karyotyping and chromosomal studies with complete genetic back-grounding and clinical assessment.  Family and obstetrical histories are taken too.  These international studies have produced ample evidence to show that DU has disastrous consequences.”

Not only are there 200 tonnes of uranium lying around in Baghdad, the containers which carried the ammunition were discarded.  For months afterwards, many used them to carry water others used them to sell milk publicly.

It is already too late to reverse the effects.

After his experience in Basra, Hardan says that within the next two years he expects to see significant rises in congenital cataracts, anopthalmia, microphthalmia, corneal opacities and coloboma of the iris and that is just in people’s eyes.

Add to this foetal deformities, sterility in both sexes, an increase in miscarriages and premature births, congenital malformations, additional abnormal organs, hydrocephaly, anencephaly and delayed growth.

Soaring cancer rates

“I had hoped the lessons of using DU would have been learnt especially as it is affecting American and British troops stationed in Iraq as we speak, they are not immune to its effects either.”

If the experience of Basra is played out in the rest of the country, Iraq is looking at an increase of more than 300% in all types of cancer over the next decade.

The signs are already here in Baghdad the effects are starting to be seen.

Every form of cancer has jumped up at least 10% with the exception of bone tumours and skin cancer, which have only risen 2.6% and 9.3% respectively.

Another tragic outcome is the delayed growth of children.

Skeletal age comparisons between boys from southern Iraq and boys from Michigan show Iraqi males are 26 months behind in their development by the time they are 12-years-old and girls are almost half a year behind.

“The effects of ionising radiation on growth and development are especially significant in the prenatal child”, adds Dr Hardan.  “Embryonic development is especially affected.”

Action needed

Those who have seen the effects of DU hope the US and its allies will never use these weapons again but it seems no such decision is likely in the foreseeable future.

“I arranged for a delegation from Japan’s Hiroshima hospital to come and share their expertise in the radiological related diseases we are likely to face over time,” says Hardan.  “The delegation told me the Americans had objected and they had decided not to come.”

“Similarly, a world famous German cancer specialist agreed to come, only to be told later that he would not be given permission to enter Iraq.”

Moreover, Hardan believes the authorities need to produce precise information about what was used and where, and there needs to be a clean-up operation and centres for specialist cancer treatment and radiation-related illnesses.

Iraq only has two hospitals that specialise in DU-related illnesses, one in Basra and one in Mawsil this needs to change and soon.

The crime has been committed and documented but we must act now to save our children’s future.”

Thursday 25th November 2004

Is Gulf War syndrome — possibly caused by Pentagon ammunition — taking its toll on G.I.’s in Iraq?

by David Rose

When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos’s first instinct was to fight.

“I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to exercise it out,” he says.

“I was going for runs, working out.  But I never got any better.  The headaches were getting more frequent and sometimes lasted all day.  I was losing a lot of weight.  My overall physical demeanor was bad.”

Rapidly down hill

A 20-year veteran of the New York National Guard, Ramos had been mobilized for active duty in Iraq in the spring of 2003.

His unit, the 442nd Military Police company, arrived there on Easter, 10 days before President Bush’s mission accomplished appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

A tall, soft-spoken 40-year-old with four children, the youngest still an infant, Ramos was proud of his physique.

In civilian life, he was a New York City cop.

“I worked on a street narcotics team.  It was very busy, with lots of overtime — very demanding.”

Now, rising unsteadily from his armchair in his thickly carpeted living room in Queens, New York, Ramos grimaces.

“The shape I came back in, I cannot perform at that level.  I’ve lost 40 pounds.  I’m frail.”

At first, as his unit patrolled the cities of Najaf and al-Diwaniyya, Ramos stayed healthy.

But in June 2003, as temperatures climbed above 110 degrees, his unit was moved to a makeshift base in an abandoned railroad depot in Samawah, where some fierce tank battles had taken place.

“When we first got there, I was a heat casualty, feeling very weak,” Ramos says.  He expected to recover quickly.  Instead, he went rapidly downhill.

Right side of face numb

By the middle of August, when the 442nd was transferred to Babylon, Ramos says, the right side of his face and both of his hands were numb, and he had lost most of the strength in his grip.

His fatigue was worse and his headaches had become migraines, frequently so severe “that I just couldn’t function.”

His urine often contained blood, and even when it didn’t he would feel a painful burning sensation, which “wouldn’t subside when I finished.”

His upper body was covered by a rash that would open and weep when he scratched it.

As he tells me this, he lifts his shirt to reveal a mass of pale, circular scars.

He was also having respiratory difficulties.

Later, he would develop sleep apnea, a dangerous condition in which he would stop breathing during sleep.

Eventually, Ramos was medevaced to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

They thought I was faking it

Doctors there were baffled and sent him on to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

There, Ramos says, one neurologist suggested that his condition could have been caused by some long-forgotten head injury or might just be “signs of aging.”

At the end of September 2003, the staff at Walter Reed ordered him to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where, he says, a captain went through his record and told him, “I was clear to go back to Iraq.  I got the impression they thought I was faking it.”

He was ordered to participate in a long-distance run.

Halfway through, he collapsed.

Finally, on July 31, 2004, after months of further examinations, Ramos was discharged with a medical disability and sent home.

Symptoms such as Ramos’s had been seen before.

In veterans of Operation Desert Storm, they came to be called Gulf War syndrome; among those posted to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Balkans syndrome.

He was not the only member of the 442nd to suffer them.

Others had similar urinary problems, joint pains, fatigue, headaches, rashes, and sleep apnea.

Today, some scientists believe that all these problems, together with others found in war-zone civilians, can be traced to the widespread use of a uniquely deadly form of ammunition.

Tens of thousands of shells and cannon rounds

In the ongoing Iraq conflict, just as in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the Balkans, American and British forces have fired tens of thousands of shells and cannon rounds made of a toxic and radioactive material called depleted uranium, or D.U.

Because D.U. is dense — approximately 1.7 times as dense as lead — and ignites upon impact, at a temperature of about 5,400 degrees, it can penetrate armor more effectively than any other material.

It’s also remarkably cheap.

The arms industry gets its D.U. for free from nuclear-fuel processors, which generate large quantities of it as a by-product of enriching uranium for reactor fuel.

Such processors would otherwise have to dispose of it in protected, regulated sites.

D.U. is “depleted” only in the sense that most of its fissile U-235 isotope has been removed.

What’s left — mainly U-238 — is still radioactive.

Three of the main weapons systems still being used in Iraq — the M-1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the A-10 Warthog attack jet-use D.U. ammunition.

A 120-mm. tank round contains about nine pounds of solid D.U.

When a D.U. “penetrator” strikes its target, up to 70 percent of the shell’s mass is flung into the air in a shower of uranium-oxide fragments and dust, some in the form of aerosolized particles less than a millionth of a meter in diameter.

When inhaled, such particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the surrounding tissue with alpha radiation, known to be highly dangerous internally, and smaller amounts of beta and gamma radiation.

Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that D.U. was potentially hazardous.

Before last year’s Iraq invasion, it issued strict regulations designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment after the use of D.U.

‘Undiagnosed illnesses.’

But the Pentagon insists that there is little chance that these veterans’ illnesses are caused by D.U.

The U.S. suffered only 167 fatal combat casualties in the first Gulf War.

Since then, veterans have claimed pensions and health-care benefits at a record rate.

The Veterans Administration reported this year that it was paying service-related disability pensions to 181,996 Gulf War veterans — almost a third of the total still living.

Of these, 3,248 were being compensated for “undiagnosed illnesses.”

The Pentagon’s spokesman, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of its Deployment Health section, says that Gulf War veterans are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere.

V.A: “Typical of young, active, healthcare-seeking populations”

Those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom are also beginning to report illnesses in significant numbers.

In July 2004, the V.A. disclosed that 27,571 of them — 16.4 percent of the total — had sought health care.

Of that group, 8,134 suffered muscular and skeletal ailments; 3,505 had respiratory problems; and 5,674 had “symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions.”

An additional 153 had developed cancers.

The V.A. claims that such figures are “typical of young, active, healthcare-seeking populations,” but does not offer figures for comparison.

First Gulf War

There is also evidence of a large rise in birth defects and unprecedented cancer rates among civilians following the first Gulf War in the Basra region of southern Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place.

Dr. Kilpatrick says, “I think it’s very important to try to understand what are the causes of that high rate of cancer and birth defects.

There has to be a good look at that, but if you go to the M. D. Anderson hospital, in Houston, Texas, you’re going to find a very high rate of cancer.

That’s because people from all over the country with cancer go there, because it’s one of the premier care centers.  Basra was the only major hospital in southern Iraq.

Are the people there with these different problems people who lived their entire lives in Basra, or are they people who’ve come to Basra for care?”

It is possible, he says, that some other environmental factor is responsible for the illnesses, such as Saddam’s chemical weapons or poor nutrition.

“I don’t think anything should be taken off the table.”

No mention of DU

In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, a scientific panel run by the V.A., was leaked to The New York Times.

According to the Times, the panel had concluded that there was a “probable link” between veterans’ illnesses and exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to protect them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself, which was released when U.S.-led forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot.

Asked why there was no mention of D.U. in the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the panel’s scientific director, says that her group plans to address it in a later report:

“We’ve only just begun work on this topic.  We are certainly not ruling it out.”

D.U.’s critics, meanwhile, say it’s entirely possible that both neurotoxins and D.U. are responsible for the widespread sickness among veterans.

Members of the 442nd have vivid memories of being exposed to D.U. Sergeant Hector Vega, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who in civilian life works in a building opposite Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, says he now struggles with chest pains, heart palpitations, headaches, urinary problems, body tremors, and breathlessness — none of which he’d ever experienced before going to Iraq.

He recalls the unit’s base there:

It was open to the elements, and dust was coming in all the time.

When the wind blew, we were eating it, breathing it.

It was everywhere.”

(The Department of Defense, or D.O.D., says that a team of specialists is conducting an occupational and environmental health survey in the area.)

When began to voice fears first warned, then fired

He says that when he began to voice these fears inside the military he was first warned, then fired: he now operates from Toronto, Canada, at the independent Uranium Medical Research Centre.

In December 2003, Dr. Durakovic analyzed the urine of nine members of the 442nd.

With funds supplied by the New York Daily News, which first published the results, Durakovic sent the samples to a laboratory in Germany that has some of the world’s most advanced mass-spectrometry equipment.

He concluded that Ramos, Vega, Sergeant Agustin Matos, and Corporal Anthony Yonnone were “internally contaminated by depleted uranium (D.U.) as a result of exposure through [the] respiratory pathway.”

The Pentagon contests these findings.

Dr. Kilpatrick says that, when the D.O.D. conducted its own tests, “our results [did] not mirror the results of Dr. Durakovic.”

The Pentagon says it has tested about 1,000 vets from the current conflict and found D.U. contamination in only five.  Its critics insist this is because its equipment is too insensitive and its testing methods are hopelessly flawed.

It appears Kilpatrick misspoke

At a briefing before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick tried to reassure reporters about D.U. by citing the cases of about 20 Desert Storm vets who had D.U. shrapnel in their bodies.

“We have not seen any untoward medical consequences in these individuals,” he said.

“There has been no cancer of bone or lungs, where you would expect them.”

It appears that he misspoke on that occasion: one of these veterans had already had an arm amputated for an osteosarcoma, or bone tumor, at the site where the shrapnel entered.

Dr. Kilpatrick confirms that the veteran was treated by the V.A. in Baltimore, but says his condition may not have been linked with the shrapnel: “Osteosarcomas are fairly common.”

Studies have shown that D.U. can begin to move through the body and concentrate in the lymph nodes, and another of the vets with shrapnel has a form of lymphatic cancer.

But this, Dr. Kilpatrick says, has “no known cause.”

He concedes that research has not proved the negative, that D.U. doesn’t cause cancer.

But, he says, “science doesn’t in 2004 show that D.U. causes any cancer.”

It does, however, show that it may.

Pentagon-sponsored studies at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that, when D.U. was embedded in animals, several genes associated with human tumors underwent “aberrant activation,” and oncoproteins of the type found in cancer patients turned up in their blood.

The animals’ urine was “mutagenic,” meaning that it could cause cells to mutate.

Another institute project found that D.U. could damage the immune system by hastening the death of white blood cells and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.

In June 2004 the U.S. General Accounting Office (G.A.O.) issued a report to Congress that was highly critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome and veterans’ cancer rates.

The report said that the studies on which federal agencies were basing their claim that Gulf War veterans were no sicker than the veterans of other wars “may not be reliable” and had “inherent limitations,” with big data gaps and methodological flaws.

Because cancers can take years to develop, the G.A.O. stated, “it may be too early” to draw any conclusions.

Dr. Kilpatrick dismisses this report, saying it was “just the opinion of a group of individuals.”

Unborn children

In September 2004, the New York Daily News reported that Gerard Darren Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the 719th Transportation Company, which is based in Harlem, had tested positive for D.U. after suffering migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating.

Following his return, his wife became pregnant, and their daughter, Victoria Claudette, was born missing three fingers.

Ultimately, critics say, the Pentagon underestimates the dangers of D.U. because it measures them in the wrong way: by calculating the average amount of D.U. radiation produced throughout the body.

When we meet, Dr. Kilpatrick gives me a report the Department of Defense issued in 2000.

It concludes that even vets with the highest exposures from embedded shrapnel could expect over 50 years to receive a dose of just five rem, “which is the annual limit for [nuclear industry] workers.”

The dose for those who inhaled dust from burned-out tanks would be “far below the annual guideline (0.1 rem) for members of the public.”

But to measure the effect of D.U. as a whole-body radiation dose is meaningless, Asaf Durakovic says, because the dose from D.U. is intensely concentrated in the cells around a mote of dust.

The alpha particles D.U. emits — high-energy clumps of protons and neutrons — are harmless outside the body, because they cannot pass through skin.

Inside tissue, however, they wreak a havoc analogous to that of a penetrating shell against an enemy tank, bombarding cell nuclei, breaking chains of DNA, damaging fragile genes.

Marcelo Valdes, a physicist and computer scientist who is president of Dr. Durakovic’s research institute, says the cells around a D.U. particle 2.5 microns in diameter will receive a maximum annual radiation dose of 16 rads.

If every pocket of tissue in the body were to absorb that amount of radiation, the total level would reach seven trillion rads — millions of times the lethal dosage.

Within three years, two were dead

In the potentially thousands of hot spots inside the lungs of a person exposed to D.U. dust, the same cells will be irradiated again and again, until their ability to repair themselves is lost.

In 1991, Durakovic found D.U. in the urine of 14 veterans who had returned from the Gulf with headaches, muscle and skeletal pain, fatigue, trembling, and kidney problems.

“Immediately I understood from their symptoms and their histories that they could have been exposed to radiation,” he says.

Within three years, two were dead from lung cancer: “One was 33, the other 42.  Both were nonsmokers, in previously excellent health.”

D.U., he says, steadily migrates to the bones.

There it irradiates the marrow, where stem cells, the progenitors of all the other cells the body manufactures in order to renew itself, are produced.

“Stem cells are very vulnerable,” Durakovic says.

If stem cells are damaged, they may form defective tissue.”

If D.U. is as dangerous as its critics allege, it can kill even without causing cancer.

At her home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Susan Riordon recalls the return of her husband, Terry, from the Gulf in 1991.

Terry, a security captain, served in intelligence during the war: his service record refers to his setting up a “safe haven” in the Iraqi “theatre.”

Possibly, Susan speculates, this led him behind enemy lines and exposed him to D.U. during the long aerial bombing campaign that preceded the 1991 invasion.

In any event, “when he came home, he didn’t really come home,” she says.

Semen into a caustic alkali

At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, oozing rash, and other symptoms.

But later he began to suffer from another symptom which afflicts some of those exposed to D.U.: burning semen.

Terry’s medical records support her description.

In England, Malcolm Hooper, professor emeritus of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such cases.

He hypothesizes that the presence of D.U. may be associated with the transformation of semen into a caustic alkali.

“It hurt [Terry] too.  He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire,” Riordon says.

“It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell.”

In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, “I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant.”

That, she says, made her pain just about bearable.

Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent.  “And that was like our last little intimacy gone.”

The Twilight Zone

By late 1995, Terry was seriously deteriorating.

Susan shows me her journal — she titled it “The Twilight Zone” — and his medical record.

It makes harrowing reading.

He lost his fine motor control to the point where he could not button his shirt or zip his fly.

While walking, he would fall without warning.

At night, he shook so violently that the bed would move across the floor.

He became unpredictably violent: one terrible day in 1997 he attacked their 16-year-old son and started choking him.

By the time armed police arrived to pull him off, the boy’s bottom lip had turned blue.

After such rages, he would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no memory of what had happened.

That year, Terry and Susan stopped sleeping in the same bedroom.

Then “he began to barricade himself in his room for days, surviving on granola bars and cartons of juice.”

Become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome

As he went downhill, Terry was assessed as completely disabled, but there was no diagnosis as to why.

His records contain references to “somatization disorder,” post-traumatic stress, and depression.

In 1995 the army doctors even suggested that he had become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome.

Through 1998 and 1999, he began to lose all cognitive functions and was sometimes lucid for just a few hours each week.

Even after he died, on April 29, 1999, Terry’s Canadian doctors remained unable to explain his illness.

“This patient has a history [of] ’Gulf War Syndrome’ with multiple motor, sensory and emotional problems,” the autopsy report by pathologist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins.

Not long before Terry’s death, Susan Riordon had learned of Asaf Durakovic, and of the possibility that her husband absorbed D.U.

His urine-test results — showing a high D.U. concentration eight years after he was presumably exposed — came through on Monday, April 26:

On the Wednesday, I completed the purchase of this house.

On Thursday, he was dead.

Diwaiya, Iraq

Knowing he was D.U.-positive meant he wasn’t crazy anymore

I’ve always felt that Asaf allowed Terry to go: knowing he was D.U.-positive meant he wasn’t crazy anymore.

Those last days he was calm.

He wasn’t putting the phone in the microwave; he had no more mood swings.”

To this might be added a third:

In 1991, the U.S. used D.U. weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and armored vehicles on the “highway of death” from Kuwait to Basra.

The one-sided victory ushered in a new era of “lethality overmatch” — the ability to strike an enemy with virtual impunity.

A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a central objective of the American military is to “generate dominant lethality overmatch across the full spectrum of operations,” and no weapon is better suited to achieving that goal than D.U.

The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army’s Materiel Command in March 2003, just before the Iraq invasion:

We want to be ahead, and D.U. gives us that advantage.”

If the Pentagon is right about the risks of D.U., such statements should not be controversial.

If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi — Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the position is less clear-cut.

One desert morning in the early spring of 1991, while sitting in his office at the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Lieutenant Doug Rokke was shown a memorandum.

Rokke, a health physicist and training specialist, was a reservist and had recently been ordered to join the Third U.S. Army’s depleted-uranium-assessment team, assigned to clean up and move American vehicles hit by friendly fire during Operation Desert Storm.

The memo, dated March 1, came from a senior military officer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.

During the Gulf War, it said, “D.U. penetrators were very effective against Iraqi armor.”

However:

We want this stuff — don’t write anything difficult

Rokke says: “I interpreted the memo to mean: we want this stuff — don’t write anything that might make it difficult for us to use it again.”

Rokke’s assignment was dangerous and unpleasant.

The vehicles were coated with uranium-oxide soot, and dust lay in the sand outside.

He wore a mask, but it didn’t help.

“We could taste it and smell it,” he says of the D.U.

“It tasted very strong — and unmistakable.”

Years later, he says, he was found to be excreting uranium at 5,000 times the normal level.

Now 55, he pants during ordinary conversation and says he still gets a rash like the one Raymond Ramos of the 442nd suffers from.

In addition, Rokke has joint pains, muscle aches, and cataracts.

In 1994, Rokke became director of a Pentagon project designed to learn more about D.U. contamination and to develop training that would minimize its risks.

“I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke says.

And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed.

You can’t do this safely in combat conditions.

You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”

Rokke and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nevada nuclear-test site.

They set fire to a Bradley loaded with D.U. rounds and fired D.U. shells at old Soviet tanks.

At his remote, ramshackle farmhouse amid the rural flatlands of central Illinois, Rokke shows me videos of his tests.

Most spectacular are those shot at night, which depict the fiery streak of the D.U. round, already burning before impact, followed by the red cascade of the debris cloud.

“Everything we hit we destroyed,” he says.

“I tell you, these things are just … fantastic.”

Iraq government of US forced to call truce

Everything we hit we destroyed — these things are just … fantastic

The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to “mask” the intense radiation around holes left by D.U. projectiles by sealing them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard.

(Such work, Rokke wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full radiological-protection suits and respirators.)

When it came to clothes, however, D.U. particles “became imbedded in the clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods.”

Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were still registering between two and three times the limit.

“This may pose a significant logistics impact,” Rokke wrote, with some understatement.

The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile, would be almost impossible to implement in combat.

“On a real battlefield, it’s not like there’s any control,” Rokke says.

Who’s going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks?

You’ve got a pile of rubble and mess and you’re still coming under fire.

The idea that you’re going to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up a building or a smashed T-72 [tank] — it’s ridiculous.”

Re-suspended

Large amounts of black D.U.-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the D.U.-packed Bradley that was set on fire.

But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much greater distances.

Worse, such dust could be “re-suspended” in the atmosphere “upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement.”

For American troops, that meant that “respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of recovery.”

For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they might be exposed to windblown D.U. far into the future.

Conclusions about future viability of D.U. weapons — he was fired

After Rokke completed the project, he was appointed head of the lab at Fort McClellan where it had been based.

He resigned the staff physicist post he’d held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved south with his family.

Early in 1996, after he began to voice the conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of D.U. weapons, he was fired.

“Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo,” he says.

“They’d wanted ’proponency’ for D.U. weapons, and I was giving them the opposite.”

I ask Dr. Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on D.U., about Rokke’s test firings.

His reply:

He was not part of that program at all.

At that time he was working in education at an army school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops.”

Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but did not organize them.

Kilpatrick — He was not part of that program at all

Documents from Rokke’s service record tell a different story.

His appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr. Ed Battle, then chief of the radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke’s mission as follows: to “plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the U.S. Army … depleted uranium training development project.”

He continued: “Captain Rokke has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as effective as any I have known.”

He had directly participated in “extremely crucial tests at the Nevada Atomic Test Site,” and his achievements had been “absolutely phenomenal.”

Rokke was awarded two medals for his work.

The citation for one commended him for “meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project leader.

Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all soldiers.”

Rokke’s work in Nevada helped persuade the military that D.U. weapons had to be dealt with carefully.

On September 16, 2002, General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that have been hit and contaminated by D.U.

“During peacetime or as soon as operational risk permits,” it states, local commanders must “identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated equipment].

Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible.”

Under pre-existing regulations, damaged vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and “covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of contaminants,” with loose items placed in double plastic bags.

Soldiers who carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.

The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd’s barracks in Samawah may not have been the only D.U.-contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay.

In the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic’s, spent 16 days in Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General Shinseki’s directive.

“When tanks shot up by D.U. munitions were removed, I saw no precautions being taken at all,” he says.

Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination — so high that on his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium in his own urine.

This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.

A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30, 2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel “who were in, on, or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by D.U. rounds,” or who entered such vehicles or fought fires involving D.U. munitions, should be assessed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care.

This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.

Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small.

“There isn’t any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium,” Dr. Kilpatrick says.

He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in Iraq, disposing of any D.U. fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation is impossible.

“We really can’t begin any environmental assessment or cleanup while there’s ongoing combat.”

Nevertheless, he says, there’s no cause for concern.

“I think we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it.”

What is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it.

As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows D.U. to be a “lethal but safe weapons system.”

In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick said that even if D.U. weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread.

“It falls to the ground very quickly — usually within about a 50 — meter range,” he said.

“It’s heavy.  It’s 1.7 times as heavy as lead.  So even if it’s a small dust particle … it stays on the ground.”

Evidence that this is not the case comes from somewhere much closer than Iraq — an abandoned D.U. — weapons factory in Colonie, New York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.

In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted-uranium products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line.

In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of D.U. ammunition to meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistle-blower from inside the plant told the county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of D.U. oxide into the environment.

Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the New York State Assembly and a local residents’ campaign group.

They painted a picture of reckless neglect.

D.U. chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys.

“I used to do a lot of burning,” William Luther told the governor’s task force in 1982.

“They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn’t be seen.”

Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.

August 2006

They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn’t be seen

In January alone, the D.U.-chip burner had released 2,000 microcuries.

An official environmental survey produced horrifying results.

Soil in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300 times the normal background level for upstate New York.

Inside the 11-acre factory site, readings were up to five times higher.

A few deep pits

The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called fusrap — the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

Today, all that is left of the Colonie plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits.

In its autumn 2004 bulletin to residents, the fusrap team disclosed that it had so far removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho.

In some places, the excavations are more than 10 feet deep.

Fusrap had also discovered contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play, and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of contaminated water.

The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the earliest forecast for the work’s completion is 2008.

Contaminated excavations more than 10 feet deep

Years before fusrap began to dig, there were data to suggest that D.U. particles — and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those produced by weapons — can travel much farther than 50 meters.

In 1979, nuclear physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie.

“We had air filters all around our perimeter fence,” he recalls.

There could only be one source: the N.L. plant.”

Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E. sites.

The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles northwest, and upwind, of Colonie.

All the filters contained pure Colonie D.U.

“Effectively,” says Dietz, “the particles’ range is unlimited.”

Particles’ range unlimited

In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a short report on Colonie.

On the one hand, it declared that the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer.

Because the source of the danger had shut down, however, there was now “no apparent public health hazard.”

Thus there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had lived near and worked at the factory — the one way to produce hard scientific data on what the health consequences of measurable D.U. contamination actually are.

The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their own.

Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years.

She used to work 60 hours a week at two jobs — as a clerk in the state government and as a real-estate agent.

Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a textbook case of Gulf War syndrome:

I can’t go upstairs without getting out of breath.

I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can’t do much.

And I fall down — I’ll be out walking and suddenly I fall.”

Together with her friend Anne Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the plant as possible.

So far, they have almost 400 replies.

Among those who responded were people with rare cancers or cancers that appeared at an unusually young age, and families whose children had birth defects.

There were 17 cases of kidney problems, 15 of lung cancer, and 11 of leukemia.

There were also five thyroid cancers and 16 examples of other thyroid problems — all conditions associated with radiation.

Other people described symptoms similar to Herr’s.

Altogether, 174 of those in the sample had been diagnosed with one kind of cancer or another.

American women have about a 33 percent chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes, mostly after the age of 60.

(For men, it’s nearly 50 percent.)

Some of the Colonie cancer victims are two decades younger.

“We have what look like possible suspicious clusters,” says Rabe.

“A health study here is a perfect opportunity to see how harmful this stuff really is.”

How harmful this stuff really is?

On June 14, 2004, the army’s Physical Evaluation Board, the body that decides whether a soldier should get sickness pay, convened to evaluate the case of Raymond Ramos of the 442nd Military Police company.

It followed the Pentagon’s approach, not Dr. Durakovic’s.

The board examined his Walter Reed medical-file summary, which describes his symptoms in detail, suggests that they may have been caused by serving in Iraq, and accepts that “achieving a cure is not a realistic treatment objective.”

But the summary mentions no physical reason for them at all, let alone depleted uranium.

Like many veterans of the first Gulf War, Ramos was told by the board that his disability had been caused primarily by post-traumatic stress.

It did not derive “from injury or disease received in the line of duty as a direct result of armed conflict.”

Instead, his record says, he got “scared in the midst of a riot” and was “emotionally upset by reports of battle casualties.”

Although he was too sick to go back to work as a narcotics cop, he would get a disability benefit fixed at $1,197 a month, just 30 percent of his basic military pay.

On the day we meet, in September 2004, his symptoms are hardly alleviated.

My wife tells me things and I just forget.

It’s not fair to my family.”

For the time being, the case against D.U. appears to remain unproved.

But if Asaf Durakovic, Doug Rokke, and their many allies around the world are right, and the Pentagon wrong, the costs — human, legal, and financial — will be incalculable.

They may also be widespread.

In October, the regional health authority of Sardinia, Italy, began hearings to investigate illnesses suffered by people who live near a U.S. firing range there that tests D.U. weapons.

United Nations — its use is a breach of international law

In 2002 the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that depleted uranium was a weapon of mass destruction, and its use a breach of international law.

But the difference between D.U. and the W.M.D. that formed the rationale for the Iraqi invasion is that depleted uranium may have a boomerang effect, afflicting the soldiers of the army that fires it as well as the enemy victims of “lethality overmatch.”

The four members of the 442nd who tested positive all say they have met soldiers from other units during their medical treatment who complain of similar ailments, and fear that they too may have been exposed.

Raymond Ramos:

That’s not right.”

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.  His book Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights is an in-depth investigation of the atrocities taking place at the Cuban prison.

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/041115roco04?print=true

by : David Rose Thursday 25th November 2004

The US is the largest single user of depleted uranium (DU) in weaponry.

It is also the largest seller and exporter of depleted uranium weapon technology.

DU is used in smart bombs, bunker busters, anti-tank weapons, and the tow missiles.

All very highly effective.

As we saw in Gulf War I, the US bunker buster bombs tipped with DU were penetrating concrete shielding up to 10 feet thick

The bunker buster”s effectiveness is that it can penetrate and then explode — raising the destructiveness and a higher body count than convention bombs.

Cruise missiles can penetrate deeper before the explosion happens.

As an anti-tank weapon, rounds tipped with DU can penetrate the tank”s hull and then do its dirty deed.

Deplete Uranium is actually a misnomer.

It is uranium, incredibly hard and a very dense metal, yes.

But it is still very much radioactive.

The US is quick to defend the use of DUs and scorns all scientific finds that indicate there might be serious lingering problems.

Weapons using DU can be rightfully called a “dirty bomb”.

The US classifies a “dirty bomb” as an explosive device that permeates the surrounding area with radioactive/biological/chemical material.

Such is the fears of the US homeland Security.

The bomb itself is not the object of fear; it is the spread of the radioactive/biological/chemical material that encases the bomb that brings Homeland Security the night sweats.

Now we have radioactive material spreading over a large area.

The US has moved away from the term DU, and has come up with a more polite term of “dense metal” — but it is still DU and still a dirty bomb.

On March 14, 2003, Colonel Jim Naughton from Army Materiel Command, took the podium and tried to justify the use of DU weapons.

He stated: “During the Gulf War, we fired ammunition weighing approximately 320 tons” and while he down played the amount of DU unleashed, he took note that if taken together, the amount of DU would be a cube about eight feet on the side.

A radioactive bric5k the size of 512 cubic feet — no smaller matter.

A United Nations study found DU contaminating air and water seven years after it was used.

A study that the US denies and marks as hysterical.

Ray Bristow of the Canadian military said: “I remained in Saudi Arabia throughout the war.

I never once went into Iraq or Kuwait, where these munitions were used.

But the tests showed, in layman’s terms, that I have been exposed to over 100 times an individual’s safe annual exposure to depleted uranium.”

Natural occurring uranium does not give off the amounts of radiation that would cause this type of exposure.

The question is how Mr. Bristow was exposed.

One educated guess would be airborne radiation from the usage of DU.

This site also provides a better description than I can of the mechanisms of using DUs in a battlefield setting.

I quote: “DUP’s are effective antitank weapons, but when DU bullets strike, they ignite, forming fine particles of toxic and radioactive dust which can be inhaled or swallowed.

DU can cause lung and other cancers, damage to the kidneys and liver and congenital malformations and genetic damage”.

August — we had three babies born with no head.

Dr. Zenad Mohammed, of Basra, has been documenting suspect birth defects and parts of her journal read: “August — we had three babies born with no head.

Four had abnormally large heads.

In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads and two with short limbs or other types of deformities.”

When did all this start?

Just after the US used DUs in Iraq.

Dr. Ashahine, a senior gynecologist in southern Iraq, has noted: “If it is not a child without a brain, then maybe it’s one with a giant head, stumpy arms like those of a thalidomide victim, two fingers instead of five, a heart with missing valves, missing ears.

The deformities have one thing in common: they are congenital”.

When did all this start?

Just after the US used DUs in Iraq.

1 million rounds of ammunition coated in DU fired

February 1991, coalition planes fired at least 1 million rounds of ammunition coated in a radioactive material known as depleted uranium, or DU.

The Guardian, independent foreign newspaper, said, and I quote” Using simple radiation Geiger counters, we measured high levels of radiation in the destroyed tanks and in the desert that surrounded them.

The source of the radiation was a substance that had never been used in the battlefield before the Gulf War.

Iraq became the laboratory for an untested and unknown material — DU.”

Arjun Makihani, the president of the US Institute for Energy and Environmental Research says of DU:

(From research carried at Oak Ridge National Laboratories which controversially used uranium to trace the passage of calcium from the placenta to the fetus.)

According to the US Department of Defense, at least 40 tons of DU were left on the battlefields of southern Iraq.”

“Battlefields littered with the residue of spent DU bullets remain radioactive almost indefinitely.”

Christian Science Monitor, 4/30/99.

A single charred DU bullet found by US forces was emitting 260-270 millirads per hour.

The current limit of exposure for nonradiation workers is 100 millirads per year.

1991 U.S. Army Safety Memo (DU Case Narrative 9/98 , p.183, available — Military Toxics Project)

In 1991, DU penetrators were first used in the Gulf War.

No information about protection was given to our soldiers.

The DUs were used with no regard for the lives of the civilian population.

In 1995, DU weapons were used in Bosnia.

In Dec. 1995 and Jan. 1996 the US Marine Corps fired 1,520 DU rounds near Okinawa, Japan.

In Feb., 1999, the US Navy dropped 267 rounds of DU on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.

In April of 1999, DU weapons were used in Kosovo.

In September of 1999, it was reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Co.

TV that over the years from 1991 until about 1998, the Canadian navy fired six tons of depleted uranium shells, mostly into a fishing area off Halifax harbor.

Lt.-Cmdr. Bill McKillip “said there are no plans to either clean up the slugs or test to see if radioactive material has entered the food chain.”

Enraged, the United States voted against the resolution — the only dissenting vote.

On one hand, the US strenuously counters all scientific works that point out the clear and present dangers of DU, while on the other hand talks about the dangers.

What is the reader supposed to understand from such an obvious contradiction?

“If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.

The risks associated with DU in the body are both chemical and radiological.”

“Personnel inside or near vehicles struck by DU penetrators could receive significant internal exposures.”

From the Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI), Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the U.S. Army, June 1995

“Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer.”

The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, has tripled in the last five years.

But it’s not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer.

As of January 23, eight Italian soldiers who served in the region have died of leukemia.”

“Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever.”

The late Terry Riordon, a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, serving in the Gulf War, rotated back after displaying the symptoms of loss of motor control, chronic fatigue, respiratory difficulties, chest pain, difficulty breathing, sleep problems, short-term memory loss, testicle pain, body pains, aching bones, diarrhea, and depression.

During his autopsy, Depleted Uranium (DU) contamination was discovered in his lungs and bones.

Mr. Riordon is not the only one either.

Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, in his analysis the urine samples of 24 men sent to him observed: Serious health imbalances were found involving immune system, respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, and severe kidney problems.

Doctors without Borders have pulled out of Afghanistan and we cannot continue to study the after effects of DU there.

However, it is reasonable to rightfully conclude that there are parts of Afghanistan, and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that a nuclear hot zones that will continue to spread their lethal atoms of death for thousands of years.

In a feature article in the Daily News, “Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops.”

“Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone — are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict”.

Father tested positive for radiation exposure

Darrell Clark, a gulf war veteran, returned to the states in hopes of settling down and getting on with his life.

He and his wife became the parents of a baby girl who was born without a thyroid.

She also has hemangiomas, benign tumors made of tangled blood vessels.

Born with only hands, no arms, and stumps for legs.

Darrell, tested positive for radiation exposure.

Reed was exposed to radioactive depleted uranium while serving a few months with the 442nd Military Police out of New York.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed.   There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool.   Bright light hurts his eyes.   A tumor has been removed from his thyroid.   Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin.   Migraines cleave his skull.   His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is.   He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers.   An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist.   He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life.   He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno.   As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults.   It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants.   It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium.   The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country.   Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq.   He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine.   Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit.   And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

“We all had migraines.   We all felt sick,” Reed says.   “The doctors said, ‘It’s all in your head.’ “

That made eight sick soldiers

Then the medic from their unit showed up.   He too, was suffering.   That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.

But the medic knew something the others didn’t.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings.   They’d brought radiation-detection devices.   The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey’s Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA.   Those results were negative, Reed said.   “Their test just isn’t as sophisticated,” he said.   “And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn’t one.   They’ve lied to us all along.”

The VA’s testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says.   More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive.   Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival.   Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care.   “Then you have far-left groups that … declare it a crime against humanity.”

Britain used it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.   An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs.   As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous — not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.

A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.

“I’ve been working on this since ’93 and I’ve just given up hope,” he said.   “I’ve spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials … who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes.”

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide.   Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.

“The bottom line is it’s more hazardous than the Pentagon admits,” Fahey said, “but it’s not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is.   And there’s a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans.”

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans.   Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes.   Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities “found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities,” the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq.   Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said.   Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32.   Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.

The study group’s size is controversial — far too small, say experts including Fahey — and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.

It has found “no clinically significant” health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.

Critics say the VA has downplayed participants’ health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.

So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government’s spending of at least $300 million.

30 percent of 700,000 men and women

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed’s unit.

Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they’d been exposed?   Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell.   And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war.   After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.

It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.

In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.

It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses — comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates.   It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard:   Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

“Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal,” stated its December 2005 report.   “Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective.”

And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.

Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall.   He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier.   Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.

His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased.   But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined.   It is a limp — more like a hitch in his get-along.

It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.

Even sleep offers no release.   He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help.   No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.

At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker’s Island prison.

He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.

He should have been trained about its dangers

According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed.   He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity.   He says he didn’t get anything of the kind.   Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans’ groups.

Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians’ offices.   It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Some days he feels fine.   “Some days I can’t get out of bed,” he said from his home in Colorado.

Growths removed from brain

Now 29, he’s had growths removed from his brain.   He has suffered a small stroke — one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face.   In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

“Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it,” he said.   “Except I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of “non-related conditions.”   He knows he was exposed to DU.

“A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium.   My guys were rooting around in it.   I was trying to get them out of the vehicles.”

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said.   His knowledge, like Reed’s, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it.   He doesn’t feel up to the fight.   There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.

He’d really just like to feel normal again.   And he knows of others who feel the same.

“I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape.   Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they’re in as good as shape as a professional athlete.

“Then we come back and we’re all sick.”

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.

Stumps for legs

Paul Hanson, returned home from the gulf war and he and his wife wanted a child.

Their son, was also born with no arms, just hands, and stumps for legs.

What do the two children have in common?

Fathers who served in the Gulf region and had exposure to the aftermath of DU.

Neither couple is getting any assistance from a “grateful nation”.

Nor are the returning troops who have been exposed to a nuclear nightmare caused by their own government.

The US is engaging in a nuclear war minus the mushroom cloud.

And maybe we have found the true cause of “Gulf War Syndrome” and we will refuse to recognize it.

While doing discovery for this article, I can across another article that indicated the use of the Atomic bomb is considered as a viable means of subduing Iraq if things get too out of hand.

In June 2005, the Selective Service is scheduled to resume full operation.

With declining enlistments and soldiers mustering out, plus the number of soldiers who are being evacuated for non-combat related health issues have all taken their toll to the troop strength of the US.

The Individual Ready Reserve has already been exploited to its fullest.

The only way to offset this reduction is through forced military service, a.k.a. “The draft”.

As with the draft of Viet Nam era, the only complete exemptions will be the family and friends of the President, the Vice President, the white house cabinet, and family and friends of the members of congress.

The age groups that will be considered eligible are people 18 – 34.

Women will be included in this new draft.

Conscientious objectors will be drafted into internal service in one of the national defense industries located in any part of the country — provided they meet the qualifications outlined for conscientious objector status.

Because of the racial inequality in the last draft, there will be no deferments awarded.

Being a full time student will not be of any benefit in avoiding being drafted.

One of the new changes is that because of the number people who fled to Canada in the last draft, the US and Canadian governments have signed off on an agreement — if you are of draft age, crossing the Canadian border will result in arrest, and extradition to the United States for immediate induction into the armed forces or imprisonment.

As with the last draft, a two year obligation to the active service is required, but it is reasonable to assume that once a person’s two year obligation is up, one will be required by law to report to the active reserve components.

Of course, reserve units will be subject to activation and rotation into regular service and overseas deployments.

With the talk now turning towards military intervention in Iran and the Sudan, a larger sustainable military force will be required.

A larger force is also necessary to offset the number of countries that are withdrawing from the Middle East conflict, the president of the US has committed the US to “going it alone” in the conquest of the Middle East and surrounding countries.

There are no indications that the GI Bill will be afforded to those inducted.

This country can ill afford the additional strain on an already back breaking deficit.

The downsized, and under funded, VA hospitals will probably be able to administer only to those whose battle injuries and disease are going to result in death.

There also exists the very real possibility that US troops will be introduced into the conflict in Israel.

The US might act as the buffer zone between Israel and Syria, the west bank and possible the Gaza strip.

A seriously large military force would probably be stationed at the Mountain of Megiddo.

The US will probably become embroiled in Chechnya, fighting what Bush and the US Government has deemed human rights violations.

Despite what the US public has been told, the Russian military is still very strong and Russia is still very capable of stopping US global military presence.

Russia also has something the US wants — oil.

Oil in quantities that far exceed that of the Middle East oil producing countries.

It is also estimated that there is more gold underneath the Russian soil and for a cash strapped US, the temptations might prove to be too much.

The potential for the US disassembling Russia is not unlikely.

There are elements within the US who are convinced that the US flag should fly over the Kremlin.

Russia has also adopted the use of DU as a weapon.

However, if attacked, we cannot rule out the possibility that Russian tactical nuclear weapons will be used.

With indicators are pointing to an aggressive American stance, the role of securing the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan become paramount.

Using Pakistan and Afghanistan as launching points, the US would have a straight shot at the Russian under belly.

The US would need to secure the border between Russia and China should China elected to intervene.

The US would also need to secure the border between Tajikistan and China.

Increased US troop strength will be needed to both fight in Sudan, and to hold Chad, Libya, and Egypt in check.

These countries will not sit idly by with US military involvement so close to their sovereignty.

The US will have to have absolute control over the Suez Canal and a heavy military force will be needed on both sides of the canal along with heavy US navel warships patrolling the entrances.

The US will not be able to count on Nato for assistance as the number of US supporter is dwindling quickly.

Nato might find itself now on the defensive.

The massive manpower of the US and the seizure of all Hispanics crossing the Mexican/US border to be immediately handed over the US military will be able to supply enough manpower for at least a two generation war.

Mexican’s impressed into service for the US might be offered a green card in exchange for their service.

Bush has outlined a very aggressive US global presence and there are far right religious organizations that are pushing Bush to initiate such actions to hasten the war of Armageddon.

Bush also shares in the religious beliefs of the extreme right wing and he, in all reality, probably sees bringing Armageddon to fruition as his holy mission.

The UN has already resigned itself to the fact the US cannot be controlled any longer, and the US fits squarely into the category of a “rouge” nation.

The survival of the US depends on an unlimited amount of free oil, and staggering amounts of gold to balance the budget, pay off the cost of war, and to refill the empty coffers of the depleted social security.

There are some who believe it is imperative that the US gains total control of the world to continue our way of life.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  Gerard, can you tell me a little bit — tell us, the listeners and viewers, a little bit about your experiences.   When did you get to Iraq, what did do you when you were there, and how did your illnesses develop?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  Well, I was deployed January 15 of 2003, and I moved out, shipped out, from Fort Dix, April 10, arrived in country April 11.

Stayed over there, came home on emergency leave in August, and that’s when I started receiving the problems.

Initially, I was getting swelling and burning sensation, but I thought it was attributed to the heat, being in a high heat environment.

As time went on, going back, I started getting worse.

I started getting swelling in my face, blurred vision, because I’m a truck driver, and I felt like I saw my face two — two different faces.

If you put a cross section down the middle of my face it’s like I’m seeing a right-side facial droop coupled with blurred vision.

It was very traumatic because I’ve never had any problems before.

I’m a very healthy person.

I’m a runner, and to take this and now have a child with a problem, and getting a result, it’s really traumatic.

That could be attributed to what I have.

Plus, I believe it could be from things that happened from the prior war that’s been hidden, or mistargeted shrapnel that we inhaled.

I mean I really and truly — I’m still trying to — I’m mind-boggled by the whole thing.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  The military gave you in May a 40% disability pension.   What did they diagnose as what your problems were?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  They gave me 30% for the migraines.

They call it a — and they gave me 10% for angioedema, which is the swelling on my face, which occurs off and on, and for the last — since I’ve gotten this, I think — I don’t know if it’s just my mind playing games, but it seems like every day under my eye it’s swollen for some odd reason.

He found the anomaly and he told me about it, and they gave me options of having an abortion.

And I figure with the child now being five months, it’s like killing someone.

I been over there in Iraq, I didn’t kill anybody, and now I’m going to try to do something to my own daughter.

Eventually, she conceived the baby, and it’s healthy, except for the hand.

We don’t know if there’s going to be any cognitive issues in the long run, but I mean, you could — you should see the hand.

It’s just — it’s unbelievable.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  We’re also joined by Staff Sergeant Ray Ramos, who was part of the group of soldiers that we tested in the Daily News actually earlier this year.

Out of nine soldiers who had returned sick from Iraq, and was stationed at Fort Dix and the army couldn’t tell him what was wrong with him.

Ray was one them actually who was at Walter Reed medical center.   Welcome to Democracy Now!.

RAY RAMOS:  Thank you, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  You’ve just recently have gotten out of the army, finally, I think in July.

RAY RAMOS:  Yes, July 31.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  What did they finally figure out was wrong with you?

RAY RAMOS:  They gave me a 30% disability, temporary disability, for my migraine headaches, and they linked it together with post traumatic stress disorder.

The other illnesses they ruled out.

They said they were medically acceptable, including the depleted uranium exposure.

RAY RAMOS:  Yes, they told me my levels were low.   They were too low to even test, pick up the uranium.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  Now, let me ask you this:  What was the reaction when you were still in the army at Walter Reed when they found out you had gone out for independent testing?

Can you talk a little bit about that?

RAY RAMOS:  Yes.   I was actually grilled for about a couple of hours.

I was asked by Colonel Hack, Lieutenant Colonel Mercer.   I was questioned as to why I felt that I was exposed to depleted uranium.

I was asked if I was in any burning vehicles or I was around any vehicles that had been struck by uranium rounds.

My response to them was that I was not aware of any exploded ordinance around me, although we had patrols that had gone out and had expressed that, you know, they would see things.

It wasn’t too receptive when they first started questioning me about it.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  And when they found out you’d gone to the Daily News?

And my answer to them was, when I asked to — about the depleted uranium in Fort Dix, I was told that I didn’t have anything to worry about, and that there was no known testing for depleted uranium.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  I’d like to ask Gerard also.   You went to the army in April, and you did submit a urine sample and asked for it to be tested for D.U.

What happened to the army’s test?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  It’s so-called unfounded.

They don’t know where the specimen is, and I’ve been contacted since the article by Walter Reed and they’re wanting to have me redo the test.

They’ll send the bottles at home and for me to send it to West Point, but in lieu of the articles that what has stirred the pot a little bit.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  In other words, they lost your sample, or they claim that they don’t have a record that you ever gave it back in April?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  Yes, Mr. Gonzalez.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  And now that the article came out, now they’re calling you and saying they want to test you now.

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  Yeah, and I think it’s kind of late.

If one thing is already stating that I have it, what is the use of another test?

It’s still going to state that I have it.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  One of the interesting things obviously is that there has been a lot of, in New York, quite a few of the political leaders, Congressman Eliot Engel, Senator Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer have gotten involved and actually Senator Clinton got a new bill passed just this summer requesting systematic testing of all soldiers when they return from Iraq as well as when they leave.

Yet we have a situation with you where the army has lost a test that you gave them, a sample that you gave them five months ago.

Senator Clinton issued a statement yesterday saying that she’s still troubled by the failure of the army to be able to adequately screen troops when they leave, and when they return from Iraq.

So, we’ll be continuing to cover this issue of depleted uranium.

The military continues to insist that no soldiers that they have tested who have returned from Iraq have tested positive.

And yet in the Daily News now, we have out of 10 soldiers that we’ve tested — and I should add in your test, we actually sent three different samples to a lab in Germany, two of reporters and one of Gerard’s and we didn’t identify any of the three.

The two reporters came back completely negative, only Gerard’s came back positive.

At the request of the news, nine soldiers from the New York Army National Guard serving in Iraq tested for radiation from depleted uranium shells.

Four of the ailing G.I.s tested positive.

The day after your story appeared, army officials rushed to test all returning members of the company, the 442nd Military Police based in Rockland County.

By week’s end, the scandal had reverberated all the way to Albany as Governor Pataki joined the list of politicians calling for the Pentagon to do a better job of testing and treating sick soldiers returning from the war.

Your exposé sparked a huge demand for testing.

By mid-April, 800 G.I.’s had given the army the urine samples and hundreds more were waiting for appointments.

Two weeks later, the Pentagon claimed that none of soldiers from the 442nd had tested positive for depleted uranium; but the news experts found significant problems with the testing methods.

Finally, I wanted to just ask, Gerard Darren Matthew, what are you demanding now for your daughter?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  Just take care of her.

AMY GOODMAN:  Just to take care of her; and what has the army said about that?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  The army is now willing to give her a test and my wife a test, all of a sudden, and my Tricare insurance runs out November 2nd, but they’re willing to do whatever it takes in order to help…all of a sudden.

AMY GOODMAN:  Juan Gonzalez is in New York as we talk about his most recent expose: depleted uranium exposure of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Juan, this is such an important report.

Our guest, Gerard Darren Matthews, who returned from Iraq.   His wife got pregnant and born was Victoria Claudette, June 28.

The baby is missing three fingers, most of her right hand.

Ray Ramos, Juan was asking you this question before the break, but can you describe the scene when after the expose came out in the New York Daily News, you were brought into this room with — at Walter Reed where they grilled you.

I mean, how many doctors, military people, were in the room, and were they accusing you of going outside the military to do these tests?

RAY RAMOS:  Well, I was in a room with about three military personnel and a civilian.

Basically, the questioning was to the effect of why I felt I was exposed.

I didn’t have anything to worry about unless I was in a burning vehicle that had just been hit with a uranium round.

Who was I, who did I get the testing from, and how much did it cost me to get the testing done?   Things to that effect.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  As I recall, there was one doctor in the room, one officer, who you had asked months before for testing and had turned you down, and you reminded them of that, that several months back, that was the very doctor that you had said,  “Listen, I’d like to be tested,”  right?

RAY RAMOS:  Yes.   At that time I got the same answer, that I didn’t have anything to worry about, that unless I was, again, in direct contact with the uranium round, that I wouldn’t be exposed.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  See, and I think this is important to understand, because the army in the spin that it is giving this story, Amy, continues to say,  “Well, these soldiers were not in direct contact.

They were national guardsmen who were doing basically support work for the combat troops.”

But it’s precisely the fact that they were not in combat and yet many of them are turning up positive that would suggest that there’s a much more widespread problem, especially among the combat troops who were directly involved.

Many of these men were sleeping in their — next to burned-out tanks or, in Darren’s case, were transporting these burned-out tanks to bases in Kuwait.

What about those soldiers who were even more closely involved in combat?

The army’s testing, the problem with the testing, according to the experts that I’ve consulted in nuclear medicine and in radiation, is that the army is continually referring when they do testing of soldiers to the total uranium content that they find in urine, of natural uranium.

If that’s not a high level, from their perspective, they don’t even bother to look for depleted uranium.

It can stay in your lungs for years and emit alpha particles, intense radiation, to a very, very localized spot within the lung.

That can lead to problems, as well as the toxic effects.

Because depleted uranium has not only radiological effects, it also has toxic effects as a heavy metal to the kidney and other organs.

So that the military is using the testing procedure just for natural uranium and is not even using the most sensitive equipment that could detect smaller parts of depleted uranium that might be a reflection of — that the uranium has settled somewhere else in the body, especially the lungs.

AMY GOODMAN:  Darren, have other people in your unit been tested?   Has everyone so far been tested?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  I know of only one soldier who has been tested, and to believe me, he was the one that turned in his urine sample just before mine.

That’s why.  And they have the results of him, but they don’t have the results of me, which I find very intriguing.

JUAN GONZALEZ:  And your company was the 719th Transport Company?

GERARD DARREN MATTHEW:  Yes, 719 Transport out of Harlem, New York.

AMY GOODMAN:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you again very much for being with us.

Gerard Darren Matthews, guardsman returned, his daughter born without most of her right hand.

Ray Ramos, back from Iraq from the 442nd Military Police.

And Juan, thanks for doing the report.

Note: all have been removed due to your Corporate Conglomerate

You own the country you live in.

You own the laws.

You can do something about this.

Get rid of all politicians, in the US Democrat and Republican, outside the US, all your own politicians in the pocket of multi-national corporate conglomerates.

Stop them taking away your access to knowledge.

Stop them taking away your freedoms.

It’s up to you if you wish the elite of the world to rule you.

And your children’s world.

Why, I don’t believe any of it — not the bloody body, not the bloody mind, not even the bloody Universe, or is it bloody multiverse.

“It’s all illusion,” I say.   “Don’t you know, my lad, my lassie.   The game!   The game, me girl, me boy!   Takes on interest, don’t you know.   T’is me sport, till doest find a better!”

Pssssst — but all this stuff is happening down here

Let’s change it!

4 billion US dollars per year

There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.   This is absolute nonsense.

In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been:  it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

The greatest threat to Israel’s right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.

For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology….

In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel ‘as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.’

Palestinian students peer into the doorway as they look at a large pool of blood on the floor

The school has been fired on many times, placing the 1,300 students and their teachers in constant danger

Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying

— Lest we forget

Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures

What CNN never shows you

The typhoid poisoning of Palestinian wells and water supplies in 1948

The conversion of F-16s into nerve gas ‘crop dusters’ in 1998 Close cooperation between IIBR and the British-American biological warfare programme

Israel, chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs

New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces

Undetectable poison-needle gun for ‘clean’ assassinations

Winner of the Walkley Award   Australian filmmaker   Carmela Baranowska.

What I find is that the US Marines act with impunity.  They are conducting cordon and search operations designed to humiliate and terrorise the local community into compliance.

This is a rare and damning insight into what US forces are doing in that other “war on terror.”

Away from the eyes of the media, humiliation and brutalisation tactics similar to those used at Abu Ghraib are practiced here with impunity.

This documentary is a unique and unprecedented look at the sharp edge of the war on terror in one of the most remote and inaccessible places on earth.

100 hundred percent of the time was accurate, which is just 30 watts of power beaming straight into solid rock.

HAARP uses a billion watts beamed straight into the ionosphere for experiments.

Picture these strings on the piano as layers of the Earth, each one has its own frequency.

What we used to do is beam radio waves into the ground and it would vibrate any ‘strings’ that were present in the ground.

We might get a sound back like ___ and we would say, that’s natural gas.

We might get a sound back like ____ and we’d say that’s crude oil.

We were able to identify each frequency.

We accomplished this with just 30 watts of radio power.

If you do this with a billion watts the vibrations are so violent that the entire piano would shake.

In fact the whole house would shake.

In fact the vibrations could be so severe under ground they could even cause an earthquake.

Angels Dont Play This HAARP weather manipulation 1 hour 36 minutes video — click here

(poor quality to watch but well worth listening)

Article on Chemtrails — unusual cloud formations in the US.

Norman Finkelstein, Professor Marc Saperstein and Middle East Journal

U.S. Bombing of Fallujah — the Third World War continued: Chechnya, North Ossetia, Ingushetia

Is the secret of the Tomb

If they knew what you and I know

They would know it is just men

Who rob them, cheat them, kill them

Then start it all again

The Negative Return Economy — a discourse on America’s black budget

Fascinating and lucrative

Black Budget?   What Black Budget?

More atrocities — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying

al-Sadr City

Iraq’s real WMD crime — the effects of depleted uranium

World War Two soldiers did not kill      Kill ratio Korea, Vietnam.      Iraq.

Afghanistan — Terror?

Photos over past three months.

The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images

The House of Saud and Bush

All with U.S. Money:

US and Israel War Crimes

Darfur pictures and arial views of destruction

Atrocities files — graphic images

‘Suicide bombings,’ the angel said, ‘and beheadings.’

‘And the others that have all the power — they fly missiles in the sky.

They don’t even look at the people they kill.’

The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa

Follow the torture trail…

Photos August 2004

Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying

When you talk with God

were you also spending your time, money and energy, killing people?

Are they now alive or dead?

American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture — London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures

Photos April 2004

The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza, and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months

Photos March 2004

The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images

Photos February 2004

US missiles — US money — and Palestine

Photos January 2004

Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert

Photos December 2003

Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003

Photos November 2003

Atrocities — graphic images…

Photos October 2003

Aljazeerah.info

Photos September 2003

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