The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

“We see this all the time now,” Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as this in all my service,” she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There’s always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word “propaganda” under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby’s head. A doctor beside me speaks of “Tetralogy of Fallot”, a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – “all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body.”

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published.

There is a no-nonsense attitude from the doctors in Fallujah. They know that we know about this tragedy. Indeed, there is nothing undiscovered about the child deformities of Fallujah. Other correspondents – including my colleague Patrick Cockburn – have visited Fallujah to report on them. What is so shameful is that these deformities continue unmonitored. One Fallujah doctor, an obstetrician trained in Britain – she left only five months ago – who has purchased from her own sources for her private clinic a £79,000 scanning machine for prenatal detection of congenital abnormalities, gives me her name and asks why the Ministry of Health in Baghdad will not hold a full official investigation into the deformed babies of Fallujah.

“I have been to see the ministry,” she says. “They said they would have a committee. I went to the committee. And they have done nothing. I just can’t get them to respond.” Then, 24 hours later, the same woman sends a message to a friend of mine, another Iraqi doctor, asking me not to use her name.

If the number of stillborn children of Fallujah is a disgrace, the medical staff at the Fallujah General Hospital prove their honesty by repeatedly warning of the danger of reaching conclusions too soon.

“I delivered that baby,” the obstetrician says as one more picture flashes on the screen. “I don’t think this has anything to do with American weapons. The parents were close relatives. Tribal marriages here involve a lot of families who are close by blood. But you have to remember, too, that if women have stillborn children with abnormalities at home, they will not report this to us, and the baby will be buried without any record reaching us.”

The photographs continue on the screen. January 19, 2010: a baby with tiny limbs, stillborn. A baby born on 30 October, 2010, with a cleft lip and cleft palette, still alive, a hole in the heart, a defect in its face, in need of echocardiography treatment. “A cleft lip and palate are common congenital anomalies,” Dr Samira Allani says quietly. “But it’s the increased frequency that is alarming.” Dr Allani has documented a research paper into “the increased prevalence of birth defects” in Fallujah, a study of four fathers “with two lineages of progeny”. Congenital heart defects, the paper says, reached “unprecedented numbers” in 2010.

The numbers continue to rise. Even while we are speaking, a nurse brings a message to Dr Allani. We go at once to an incubator next to the hospital delivery room. In the incubator is a little baby just 24 days old. Zeid Mohamed is almost too young to smile but he lies sleeping, his mother watching through the glass. She has given her permission for me to see her baby. His father is a security guard, the couple married three years ago. There is no family record of birth defects. But Zeid has only four fingers on each of his little hands.

Dr Allani’s computer files contain a hundred Zeids. She asks another doctor to call some parents. Will they talk to a journalist? “They want to know what happened to their children,” she says. “They deserve an answer.” She is right. But neither the Iraqi authorities, nor the Americans, nor the British – who were peripherally involved in the second battle of Fallujah and lost four men – nor any major NGO, appears willing or able to help.

When doctors can obtain funding for an investigation, they sometimes turn to organisations which clearly have their own political predetermination. Dr Allani’s paper, for example, acknowledges funding from the “Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War” – hardly a group seeking to exonerate the use of US weaponry in Fallujah. This, too, I fear, is part of the tragedy of Fallujah.

The obstetrician who asked to be anonymous talks bleakly of the lack of equipment and training. “Chromosome defects – like Down’s Syndrome – cannot be corrected prenatally. But a foetal infection we can deal with, and we can sort out this problem by drawing a sample of blood from the baby and mother. But no laboratory here has this equipment. One blood transfer is all it needs to prevent such a condition. Of course, it will not answer our questions: why the increased miscarriages here, why the increased stillbirths, why the increased premature births?”

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster who has surveyed almost 5,000 people in Fallujah, agrees it is impossible to be specific about the cause of birth defects as well as cancers. “Some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened,” he wrote two years ago. Dr Busby’s report, compiled with Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, says that infant mortality in Fallujah was found in 80 out of every 1,000 births, compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and only 9.7 in Kuwait.

Another of the Fallujah doctors tells me that the only UK assistance they have received comes from Dr Kypros Nicolaides, the head of Foetal Medicine at King’s College Hospital. He runs a charity, the Foetal Medicine Foundation, which has already trained one doctor from Fallujah. I call him up. He is bursting with anger.

“To me, the criminal aspect of all this – during the war – was that the British and the American governments could not go to Woolworths and buy some computers to even document the deaths in Iraq. So we have a Lancet publication that estimates 600,000 deaths in the war. Yet the occupying power did not have the decency to have a computer worth only £500 that would enable them to say “this body was brought in today and this was its name”.

Now you have an Arab country which has a higher number of deformities or cancers than Europe and you need a proper epidemiological study. I’m sure the Americans used weapons that caused these deformities. But now you have a goodness-knows-what government in Iraq and no study. It’s very easy to avoid to doing anything – except for some sympathetic crazy professor like me in London to try and achieve something.”

In al-Hadidi’s office, there are now photographs which defy words. How can you even begin to describe a dead baby with just one leg and a head four times the size of its body?

Source

Also see:

The Children of Fallujah – Sayef’s story

The Children of Fallujah – families fight back

“[Depleted uranium tipped missiles] fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way… I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.” Marion Falk, chemical physicist (retd), Lawrence Livermore Lab, California, USA

In the first 24 hours of the Libyan attack, US B-2s dropped forty-five 2,000-pound bombs. These massive bombs, along with the Cruise missiles launched from British and French planes and ships, all contained depleted uranium (DU) warheads.

DU is the waste product from the process of enriching uranium ore. It is used in nuclear weapons and reactors. Because it is a very heavy substance, 1.7 times denser than lead, it is highly valued by the military for its ability to punch through armored vehicles and buildings. When a weapon made with a DU tip strikes a solid object like the side of a tank, it goes straight through it, then erupts in a burning cloud of vapor. The vapor settles as dust, which is not only poisonous, but also radioactive.

An impacting DU missile burns at 10,000 degrees C. When it strikes a target, 30% fragments into shrapnel. The remaining 70% vaporises into three highly-toxic oxides, including uranium oxide. This black dust remains suspended in the air and, according to wind and weather, can travel over great distances. If you think Iraq and Libya are far away, remember that radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales.

Particles less than 5 microns in diameter are easily inhaled and may remain in the lungs or other organs for years. Internalized DU can cause kidney damage, cancers of the lung and bone, skin disorders, neurocognitive disorders, chromosome damage, immune deficiency syndromes and rare kidney and bowel diseases. Pregnant women exposed to DU may give birth to infants with genetic defects. Once the dust has vaporised, don’t expect the problem to go away soon. As an alpha particle emitter, DU has a half life of 4.5 billion years.

In the ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq, more than 1,500 bombs and missiles were dropped on Baghdad alone. Seymour Hersh has claimed that the US Third Marine Aircraft Wing alone dropped more than “five hundred thousand tons of ordnance”. All of it DU-tipped.

Al Jazeera reported that invading US forces fired two hundred tons of radioactive material into buildings, homes, streets and gardens of Baghdad. A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor took a Geiger counter to parts of the city that had been subjected to heavy shelling by US troops. He found radiation levels 1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal in residential areas. With its population of 26 million, the US dropped a one-ton bomb for every 52 Iraqi citizens or 40 pounds of explosives per person.

William Hague has said that we are in Libya ” to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas”.You don’t have to look far for who and what are being ‘protected’.

In that first 24 hours the ‘Allies’ ‘expended’ £100 million on DU-tipped ordnance. The European Union’s arms control report said member states issued licences in 2009 for the sale of £293.2 million worth of weapons and weapons systems to Libya. Britain issued arms firms licences for the sale of £21.7 million worth of weaponry to Libya and were also paid by Colonel Gadaffi to send the SAS to train his 32nd Brigade.

For the next 4.5 billion years, I’ll bet that William Hague will not be holidaying in North Africa.

A note on sources

The military and the politicians are very shy about the uses of depleted uranium, but we know that DU is or has been used in the following ordnance. The list is not exhaustive:

• M919 25mm ammunition used in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle141
• PGU-14 30mm ammunition used by the A-10 Thunderbolt II
• M900 105mm tank round used by the US Army and Marine Corps
• M829A1 / M829A2 120mm ammunition used by the M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank
• Tomahawk cruise missiles
• GBU-28 ‘Bunker Buster’
• CHARM 3 APFSDS L27 ammunition in use with the British Army
• The 5000 lb BLU-122/B A/B penetrator
• The 4700 lb BLU-113 A/B penetrator

Source…

The only evidence of a move away from DU usage is the MK149 20mm ammunition, previously used by the US Navy’s Phalanx Anti-Ship Missile Defense System, which has been replaced by a non-DU version with a Tungsten penetrator.

The UK Ministry of Defence and US Dept of Defence are careful how they refer to DU and prefer not to answer questions about its use. But in those ‘official’ documents we have been able to view it is clear that DU is commended for its excellent penetrating qualities and we must assume that what is considered of military value is going to be used especially when the political spokespeople for the military are keen to deny that DU has any harmful affects on human beings.

If it is harmless and effective why not use it? Thus the UK Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, in correspondence with Bill Wilson (no relation), a member of the Scottish Parliament in February 2011 said:

“The UK does not support resolutions that presuppose DU is harmful… The Government’s policy remains that DU can be used within weapons; it is not prohibited under current or likely future international agreements. UK armed forces use DU munitions in accordance with international humanitarian law. It would be quite wrong to deny our serving personnel a legitimate capability.”

Liam Fox is repeating the views of earlier UK Defence Secretaries. This is an excerpt from then Defence Secretary, Des Brown’s letter to Tony Benn, dated 21 April 2008

“In conclusion, our view remains that DU can be legitimately used within weapons and that it would be quite wrong for the UK Government to deny our troops a legitimate capability that provides the best possible protection for them during armed conflicts.”

My view is that we have to assume that DU remains in use in the ordnance listed above and that the list is likely to be incomplete. Since we are being told, when we’re told anything, that DU is not dangerous and is an effective tool for warfare why would they not continue its use?. So long as that is the official opinion from the military and the politicians we must take it at face value and force them to confirm with evidence that we are wrong and DU is no longer used.

I would love to be proved wrong as would, even more so, the people who are under bombardment. The military and politicians give us every reason to suppose the worst.

Note:

When you check through official documents on weaponry in both the US and UK you will find few references to DU usage, they prefer to talk about ‘enhancements’ and ‘design modifications’ to ‘improve penetrations’ as here:

“The Air Force is improving capability to attack hardened and/or deeply buried targets during adverse environmental conditions. The performance of the current 4,700-lb BLU-113, used on the GBU-28 GPS/laser-guided bomb, is being greatly enhanced through the design modification of the BLU-122 warhead, improving its penetration, lethality, and survivability. This modification will increase the number of deeply buried targets held at risk. In addition, some existing targets held at risk will require fewer weapons, therefore reducing the number of missions necessary to defeat a target.”

However, the Washington-based think-tank Global Security provides a rare history of military uses of depleted uranium

Source

A high level of children in Fallujah, Iraq, are born with birth defects, according to doctors and parents.

They blame the increase in deformities among children on weapons used by the U.S. during fierce battles in the city in 2004.

One hospital doctor told the BBC they now see two or three cases of birth defects every day.

The rise in abnormalities, which include babies being born with two heads, multiple tumours and nervous system problems, has been noticed by specialists working in Fallujah’s over-stretched health system.

The U.S. military strongly refutes the claim, saying it always takes public health concerns ‘very seriously’.

‘No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,’ U.S. military health system communications director Michael Kilpatrick told the BBC.

‘Unexploded ordinance, including improvised explosive devises, are a recognised hazard,’ he added.

Iraqi doctors are reticent to talk about the problem, fearing they will create trouble for the U.S. military.

The official line is that Falluja, which lies 40 miles west of Baghdad, has only two or three cases of birth defects a year more than normal, according to the BBC.

But local people believe toxic materials left over from the 2004 fighting entered the water supply in Fallujah after rubble from damaged buildings was bulldozed into the river.

Controversial weaponry was used during the bombing, including white phosphorus.

Last year a group of Iraqi and British officials called on the UN to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over after decades of war.

‘We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies,’ Falluja general hospital’s director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais told the Guardian.

‘Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically.’

‘Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs,’ he said.

‘There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1255312/Birth-defects-Fallujah-rise-U-S-operation.html#ixzz0hCWPZZPi

Medics tell Press TV they have found traces of depleted uranium in some Gazan residents wounded in Israel’s ground offensive into the strip.

Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.

The report comes after Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground operation after eight days of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on the impoverished region.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday that the wide-ranging ground offensive in the Gaza Strip would be “full of surprises.”

A ground offensive in the densely-populated Gaza is expected to drastically increase the death toll of the civilian population.

The latest assaults bring the number of Palestinians killed to over 488 with 2790 others wounded. The UN says that about 25 percent of the casualties were civilian deaths – including at least 34 children.

According to Israeli army officials, at least 30 of its soldiers have been wounded since the start of the ground campaign.

Amid global condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a united approach to resolve the crisis.

” Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council,” UN General Assembly chief Miguel d’Escoto said Sunday.

According to diplomatic sources, the US blocked a Security Council resolution, with US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff arguing that an official statement that criticizes both Israel and Hamas would not be helpful.

The White House has so far declined to comment on whether an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza is a justified measure.

AA/DT/CS/MD
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=80443§ionid=351020202

According to U.S. media reports, there are well below 5,000 U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. However, this data appears to be very misleading. Why? Because many tens of thousands of American soldiers have apparently been killed to-date, as a result of being exposed to radiation poisoning from the indiscriminate killing machines of U.S. military weaponry. Ironically, the only Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Americans soldiers have found in Iraq are “Made in America”.

U.S. investigative researchers have discovered an official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs official, but not well publicized count, of 73,846 U.S. soldiers who have perished as an apparent result of Depleted Uranium based bio-chemical warfare exposure. This exceeds an estimate of 58,000 U.S. soldiers who had been killed in relation to the Vietnam War.

Well over 200,000 American soldiers could be killed by 2010, as a result of the after effects of exposure to U.S. dirty bombs.

Over One million U.S. soldiers have apparently been disabled from Depleted Uranium based biochemical exposure. Over one million Iraqis have also been documented to have been killed.

This is what the U.S. ruling elite including U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. Republican Presidential candidate John McCain calls a “success”. How many sons and daughters of the American ruling class have been sent in harms way of the apparent biological warfare that is being perpetrated in Iraq? Not to many, huh? The Iraq War is a class-and-racial-inspired war that is being masqueraded into being about fighting “extremists” and “terrorists”. The Iraq War is an extension of brutality by the prevailing elites of the global capitalist system, that the 9/11 Truth Movement has accused to be the ultimate perpetrators of 9/11. Indeed, ruling elites are the only group that could pull off the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City which engineers have represented to be specifically designed to withstand being hit simply by aeroplanes. Investigative scholarly researchers who include Dr. David Ray Griffin, present critical evidence of a technologically sophisticated military planning associated with 9/11, including a ‘Controlled Demolition’, that could in no way be executed by the alleged Muslim perpetrators.

More than 1,820 tons (3-million, 640 thousand pounds) of radioactive nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb. The very broad human and ecological disaster of the Iraq War has been drowned out by America’s sound-bite driven media organizations, that are owned by the same fascist clique which presides over the Iraq War.

The apparent use of these dirty bombs, could be perceived to a categorical Crime Against Humanity, both against the Iraqi people, and military personnel. Indeed, there are far more people getting killed from these dirty bombs than the alleged terrorist targets of U.S. military propaganda.

The fascist clique that is presiding over the Iraq War, clearly seeks to perpetrate widespread Eugenics inspired depopulation of Iraq.

Millions of Iraqis could be killed as a result of contamination from the use of U.S. “strategic” “mini nuclear bombs”.

It is apparent that a Eugenics-inspired megalomaniacal fascist clique seeks to further make Iran a toxic nuclear wasteland

The use of these dirty bombs demonstrates that the War in Iraq is not simply about “going after terrorists”, but rather, is the apparent premeditated execution of Crimes against Humanity. The kind of demonic intelligence that is associated with such a Crime against Humanity is consistent with the kind of criminal profile associated with what critically acclaimed author Dr. David Ray Griffin labels as the ultimate perpetrators of 9/11.

What kind of socio-pathetic milieu would seek to inspire jingoistic patriotism in statements about military personnel “defending the Homeland” while wilfully exposing them to the toxic by-products of radiation poisoning?

Libertyforlife.com researchers document: “What the government is doing is only counting the soldiers that die in action on the ground before they can get them into a hummer, helicopter or ambulance. Any soldier who is shot but they get into a vehicle before ‘the die’ is not counted.”

“Uranium poisoning, which can take decades to kill not only the soldier but family members as well” are further cited documents in Libertyforlife.com.

Libertyforlife.com also adds that more than 1,820 tons of radio active nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters (also known as dirty bombs), representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster, over the 64 kg of uranium that was used in the Hiroshima bomb.

“The U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust by mass, represents between fourteen and twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s from a uranium poisoning perspective. In Hiroshima 70 thousand died from the blast and 70 thousand died from uranium poisoning.”

“The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded into the Middle East will continue killing for billions of years and could wipe out a third of life on earth.

Winds can and will blow the uranium dust from the U.S. weapons around the world. Gulf War Veterans and civilians who have ingested the uranium will continue to die off from uranium poisoning over a number of decades.”

“So far, more than one million people have been slaughtered and four million are homeless as a consequence of the U.S.’s illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Birth defects are up 600% in Iraq – the same will apply to U.S. Veterans children.”
When depleted uranium nuclear waste in the form of a “dirty bomb” is blown up or released into the atmosphere it has the potential of killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Well it turns out that instead of storing the nuclear waste from power plants in proper and very expensive storage facilities, the apparent neo-fascists who have taken over America, have been machining the depleted uranium into dirty bombs in the form of armour piercing bullets.

Libertyforlife.com researchers critically add: “That’s right, those tanks you saw exploding into flame, as our troops invaded other nations, were being hit with dirty bombs. You were actually witnessing “mini atomic bombs” as the uranium armour piercing rounds made out of nuclear waste called ‘Depleted Uranium’ or ‘DU’ hits it’s target.”

“It turns out the uranium from nuclear waste is very dense and possesses pyrophoric properties. That is, it bursts into flame releasing an explosion of heat so intense when the DU bullet hits the armour, it literally melts through armour, ” further documents Libertyforlife.com

Many American soldiers have been literally fried from the intense radio energy released from the mini DU atomic explosions.

“Now our boys in the military have not been firing just one or two of these dirty bomb bullets and bunker busters, they have been letting loose a hail of death. In Iraq alone during the two invasions, more than one thousand eight hundred and twenty tons of Depleted Uranium dirty bomb bullets and bombs were blasted into that innocent nation,” further documents Libertyforlife.com investigative researchers.

Astonishingly, Libertyforlife.com researchers also document, because most Americans watch TV, many still think Iraq had something to do with blowing up the three large World Trade center buildings and the Pentagon. Otherwise they try to suggest that Saddam Hussein had it coming because he murdered the Kurds with the helicopters we provided, the year we gave him a billion dollars.

Now if 64 kg of uranium can poison seventy thousand people. How many people will two thousand tons kill? The numbers are staggering, that’s more than twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s. Forty percent of the Gulf War veterans are on “Gulf War Syndrome” disability from uranium poisoning. Seventy Three thousand of them have already died.

Every time that U.S troops (and “coalition soldiers) fires depleted uranium against “enemy targets” in Iraq, they are also being exposed to radiation poisoning that is much more intense than the radioactive by-products associated with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima to end World War II in the Pacific.

The U.S. War on Iraq both represents an apparent Eugenics inspired genocide against perceived “lesser breeds” of U.S. combat troops largely made up of African Americans and “poor whites” as well as Muslim infidels. Eugenics seems to be the driving motivation of the U.S. religious-political-military-industrial complex agenda against Iraq.

In the apparent view of the architects of the Iraq War, the use of “dirty bombs” accomplishes an apparent depopulation agenda which “frees up more resources” for the “racially superior” self-anointed rulers of our planet Earth. The Iraq War seems to be an attempt to fulfill in the Middle East the Eugenics inspired military expansionist goals that Adolf Hitler had.
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/03/21/02286.html

In 1979, depleted uranium (DU) particles escaped from the National Lead Industries factory near Albany, N.Y.,which was manufacturing DU weapons for the U.S military. The particles traveled 26 miles and were discovered in a laboratory filter by Dr. Leonard Dietz, a nuclear physicist. This discovery led to a shut down of the factory in 1980, for releasing morethan 0.85 pounds of DU dust into the atmosphere every month, and involved a cleanup of contaminated properties costing over 100 million dollars.

Imagine a far worse scenario. Terrorists acquire a million pounds of the deadly dust and scatter it in populated areas throughout the U.S. Hundreds of children report symptoms. Many acquire cancer and leukemia, suffering an early and painful death. Huge increases in severe birth defects are reported. Oncologists are overwhelmed. Soccer fields, sand lots and parks, traditional play areas for kids, are no longer safe. People lose their most basic freedom, the ability to go outside and safely breathe. Sounds worse than 9/11? Welcome to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Jawad Al-Ali (55), director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital in Basra, Iraq stated, at a recent (2003) conference in Japan:

“Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with 2 cancers – one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney–he had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. Dr Yasin, a general Surgeon here has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen, another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My wife has nine members of her family with cancer”.

“Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most, however, cancer of the lymph system which can develop anywhere on the body, and has rarely been seen before the age of 12 is now also common.”,

“We were accused of spreading propaganda for Saddam before the war. When I have gone to do talks I have had people accuse me of being pro-Saddam.
Sometimes I feel afraid to even talk. Regime people have been stealing my data and calling it their own, and using it for their own agendas. The Kuwaitis banned me from entering Kuwait – we were accused of being Saddam supporters.”

John Hanchette, a journalism professor at St. Bonaventure University, and one of the founding editors of USA Today related the following to DU researcher Leuren Moret. He stated that he had prepared news breaking stories about the effects of DU on Gulf War soldiers and Iraqi citizens, but that each time he was ready to publish, he received a phone call from the Pentagon asking him not to print the story. He has since been replaced as editor of USA Today.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, The World Health Organization’s chief expert on radiation and health for 11 years and author of an unpublished study has charged that his report “on the cancer risk to civilians in Iraq from breathing uranium contaminated dust ” was also deliberately suppressed.

The information released by the U.S. Dept. of Defense is not reliable, according to some sources even within the military.

In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying, “The [US government’s] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body.”

At that time Dr. Durakovic was a colonel in the U.S. Army. He has since left the military, to found the Uranium Medical Research Center, a privately funded organization with headquarters in Canada.

PFC Stuart Grainger of 23 Army Division, 34th Platoon, (names and numbers have been changed) was diagnosed with cancer after returning from Iraq. Seven other men in the Platoon also have malignancies.

Doug Rokke, U.S. Army contractor who headed a clean-up of depleted uranium after the first Gulf War states:

“Depleted uranium is a crime against God and humanity.”

Rokke’s own crew, a hundred employees, was devastated by exposure to the fine dust. He stated: “When we went to the Gulf, we were all really healthy.” After performing clean-up operations in the desert (mistakenly without protective gear), 30 members of his staff died, and most others, “including Rokke himself”, developed serious health problems. Rokke now has reactive airway disease, neurological damage, cataracts, and kidney problems.

“We warned the Department of Defense in 1991 after the Gulf War. Their arrogance is beyond comprehension. Yet the D.O.D still insists such ingestion is “not sufficient to make troops seriously ill in most cases.”

Then why did it make the clean up crew seriously or terminally ill in nearly all cases?

Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore Lab, was asked if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb.

“That’s exactly what they are. They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”

According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact. “The larger the bang” the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere, Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the “micron size” or smaller, he said.

When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Falk was more specific:

“I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.”

When a DU round or bomb strikes a hard target, most of its kinetic energy is converted to heat ” sufficient heat to ignite the DU. From 40% to 70% of the DU is converted to extremely fine dust particles of ceramic uranium oxide (primarily dioxide, though other formulations also occur). Over 60% of these particles are smaller than 5 microns in diameter, about the same size as the cigarette ash particles in cigarette smoke and therefore respirable.

Because conditions are so chaotic in Iraq, the medical infrastructure has been greatly compromised. In terms of both cancer and birth defects due to DU, only a small fraction of the cases are being reported.

Doctors in southern Iraq are making comparisons to the birth defects that followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. They have numerous photos of infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines, and the list of deformities goes on an on. Such birth defects were extremely rare in Iraq prior to the large scale use of DU. Weapons. Now they are commonplace. In hospitals across Iraq, the mothers are no longer asking, “Doctor, is it a boy or girl?” but rather, “Doctor, is it normal?” The photos are horrendous. They can be viewed on the website http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/extremedeformities.html

Ross B. Mirkarimi, a spokesman at The Arms Control Research Centre stated: “Unborn children of the region are being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA.”

Prior to her death from leukemia in Sept. 2004, Nuha Al Radi , an accomplished Iraqi artist and author of the “Baghdad Diaries” wrote:

“Everyone seems to be dying of cancer. Every day one hears about another acquaintance or friend of a friend dying. How many more die in hospitals that one does not know? Apparently, over thirty percent of Iraqis have cancer, and there are lots of kids with leukemia.”

“The depleted uranium left by the U.S. bombing campaign has turned Iraq into a cancer-infested country. For hundreds of years to come, the effects of the uranium will continue to wreak havoc on Iraq and its surrounding areas.”

This excerpt in her diary was written in 1993, after Gulf War I (approximately 300 tons of DU ordinance, mostly in desert areas) but before Operation Iraqi Freedom, (est. 1700 tons with much more near major population centers). So, it’s 5–6 times worse now than it was when she wrote that diary entry!!

Estimates of the percentage of D.U. which was ‘aerosolized’ into fine uranium oxide dust are approximately 30–40%. That works out to over one million pounds of dust scattered throughout Iraq.

As a special advisor to the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, Dr. Ahmad Hardan has documented the effects of DU in Iraq between 1991 and 2002.

“American forces admit to using over 300 tons of DU 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 tons more in Bagdad alone during the recent invasion.

I don’t know about other parts of Iraq, it will take me years to document that.

“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.”

By far the most devastating effect is on unborn children. Nothing can prepare anyone for the sight of hundreds of preserved fetuses, scarcely human in appearance. Iraq is now seeing babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific.

Dr. Hardan also states:

“I arranged for a delegation from Japan’s Hiroshima Hospital to come and share their expertise in the radiological diseases we are likely to face over time. The delegation told me the Americans had objected and they 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.”

Not only are we poisoning the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are making a concerted effort to keep out specialists from other countries who can help. The U.S. Military doesn’t want the rest of the world to find out what we have done.

Such relatively swift development of cancers has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998–1999 and the US 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 US 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 in the first Gulf War now have medical problems.

Although not reported in the mainstream American press, a recent Tokyo tribunal, guided by the principles of International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law, found President George W. Bush guilty of war crimes. On March 14, 2004, Nao Shimoyachi, reported in “The Japan Times” that President Bush was found guilty “for attacking civilians with indiscriminate weapons and other arms,” and the “tribunal also issued recommendations for banning Depleted Uranium shells and other weapons that indiscriminately harm people.” Although this was a “Citizen’s Court” having no legal authority, the participants were sincere in their determination that international laws have been violated and a war crimes conviction is warranted.

Troops involved in actual combat are not the only servicemen reporting symptoms. Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.

“I got sick instantly in June,” said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. “My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach.”

Dr. Asaf Durakovic, UMRC founder, and nuclear medicine expert examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium. Laboratory tests revealed traces of two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.

If so, the men – 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.

The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq in Easter of 2003, the unit’s members had been providing guard duty for convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return home later this month.

“These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle,” said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the G.I.s and performed the testing.

In a group of eight U.S. led Coalition servicemen whose babies were born without eyes, seven are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust. In a group (250 soldiers) exposed during the first Gulf war, 67% of the children conceived after the war had birth defects.

Dr. Durakovic’s UMRC research team also conducted a three-week field trip to Iraq in October of 2003. It collected about 100 samples of substances such as soil, civilian urine and the tissue from the corpses of Iraqi soldiers in 10 cities, including Baghdad, Basra and Najaf. Durakovic said preliminary tests show that the air, soil and water samples contained “hundreds to thousands of times” the normal levels of radiation.

“This high level of contamination is because much more depleted uranium was used this year than in (the Gulf War of) 1991,” Durakovic told The Japan Times.

“They are hampering efforts to prove the connection between Depleted Uranium and the illness,” Durakovic said.

“They do not want to admit that they committed war crimes” by using weapons that kill indiscriminately, which are banned under international law.”

(Note about Dr. Durakovic; First, he was warned to stop his work, then he was fired from his position, then his house was ransacked, and he has also reported receiving death threats. Evidently the U.S. D.O.D is very keen on censoring DU whistle-blowers!)

Dr. Durakovic, UMRC research associates Patricia Horan and Leonard Dietz, published a unique study in the August 2002 issue of Military Medicine Medical Journal. The study is believed to be the first to look at inhaled DU among Gulf War veterans, using the ultrasensitive technique of thermal ionization mass spectrometry, which enabled them to easily distinguish between natural uranium and DU. The study, which examined British, Canadian and U.S. veterans, all suffering typical Gulf War Syndrome ailments, found that, nine years after the war, 14 of 27 veterans studied had DU in their urine. DU also was found in the lung and bone of a deceased Gulf War veteran. That no governmental study has been done on inhaled DU “amounts to a massive malpractice,” Dietz said in an interview.

The Japanese began studying DU effects in the southern Iraq in the summer of 2003. They had a Geiger counter which they watched go off the scale on many occasions. During their visit,a local hospital was treating upwards of 600 children per day, many of which suffered symptoms of internal poisoning by radiation. 600 children per day? How many of these children will get cancer and suffer an early and painful death?

“Ingested DU particles can cause up to 1000 times the damage of an X-ray”, said Mary Olson, a nuclear waste specialist and biologist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington D.C.

It is this difference in particle size as well as the dust’s crystalline structure that make the presence of DU dust in the environment such an extreme hazard, and which differentiates its properties from that of the natural uranium dust that is ubiquitous and to which we all are exposed every day, which seldom reaches such a small size. This point is being stressed, as comparing DU particles to much larger natural ones is misleading.

The U.S. Military and its supporters regularly quote a Rand Corp. Study which uses the natural uranium inhaled by miners.

Particles smaller than 10 microns can access the innermost recesses of lung tissue where they become permanently lodged. Furthermore, if the substance is relatively insoluble, such as the ceramic DU-oxide dust produced from burning DU, it will remain in place for decades, dissolving very slowly into the bloodstream and lymphatic fluids through the course of time. Studies have identified DU in the urine of Gulf War veterans nine years after that conflict, testifying to the permanence of ceramic DU-oxide in the lungs. Thus the effects are far different from natural uranium dust, whose coarse particles are almost entirely excreted by the body within 24 hours.

The military is aware of DU’s harmful effects on the human genetic code. A 2001 study of DU’s effect on DNA done by Dr. Alexandra C. Miller for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., indicates that DU’s chemical instability causes 1 million times more genetic damage than would be expected from its radiation effect alone.

Studies have shown that inhaled nano-particles are far more toxic than micro-sized particles of the same basic chemical composition. British toxicopathologist Vyvyan Howard has reported that the increased toxicity of the nano-particle is due to its size.

For example, when mice were exposed to virus-size particles of Teflon (0.13 microns) in a University of Rochester study, there were no ill effects. But when mice were exposed to nano-particles of Teflon for 15 minutes, nearly all the mice died within 4 hours.

“Exposure pathways for depleted uranium can be through the skin, by inhalation, and ingestion,” writes Lauren Moret, another DU researcher. “Nano-particles have high mobility and can easily enter the body. Inhalation of nano-particles of depleted uranium is the most hazardous exposure, because the particles pass through the lung-blood barrier directly into the blood.”

“When inhaled through the nose, nano-particles can cross the olfactory bulb directly into the brain through the blood brain barrier, where they migrate all through the brain,” she wrote. “Many Gulf era soldiers exposed to depleted uranium have been diagnosed with brain tumors, brain damage and impaired thought processes. Uranium can interfere with the mitochondria, which provide energy for the nerve processes, and transmittal of the nerve signal across synapses in the brain.”

Based on dissolution and excretion rate data, it is possible to approximate the amount of DU initially inhaled by these veterans. For the handful of veterans studied, this amount averaged 0.34 milligrams. Knowing the specific activity (radiation rate) for DU allows one to determine that the total radiation (alpha, beta and gamma) occurring from DU and its radioactive decay products within their bodies comes to about 26 radiation events every second, or 800 million events each year. At .34 milligrams per dose, there are over 10 trillion doses floating around Iraq and Afghanistan.

How many additional deaths are we talking about? In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the UK Atomic Energy Authority came up with estimates for the potential effects of the DU contamination left by the conflict. It calculated that “this could cause 500 000 potential deaths”. This was “a theoretical figure”, it stressed, that indicated “a significant problem”.

The AEA’s calculation was made in a confidential memo to the privatized munitions company, Royal Ordnance, dated 30 April 1991. The high number of potential deaths was dismissed as “very far from realistic” by a British defense minister, Lord Gilbert. “Since the rounds were fired in the desert, many miles from the nearest village, it is highly unlikely that the local population would have been exposed to any significant amount of respirable oxide,” he said. These remarks were made prior to the more recent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, where DU munitions were used on a larger scale in and near many of the most populated areas. If the amount of DU ordinance used in the first Gulf War was sufficient to cause 500 000 potential deaths, (had it been used near the populated areas), then what of the nearly six times that amount used in operation Iraqi Freedom, which was used in and near the major towns and cities? Extrapolating the U.K. AEA estimate with this amount gives a figure of potentially 3 million extra deaths from inhaling DU dust in Iraq alone, not including Afghanistan. This is about 11% of Iraq’s total population of 27 million. Dan Bishop, Ph.d chemist for IDUST feels that this estimate may be low, if the long life of DU dust is considered. In Afghanistan, the concentration in some areas is greater than Iraq.

What can an otherwise healthy person expect when inhaling the deadly dust? Captain Terry Riordon was a member of the Canadian Armed Forces serving in Gulf War I. He passed away in April 1999 at age 45. Terry left Canada a very fit man who did cross-country skiing and ran in marathons. On his return only two months later he could barely walk.

He returned to Canada in February 1991 with documented 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. After his death, depleted uranium contamination was discovered in his lungs and bones. For eight years he suffered his innumerable ailments and struggled with the military bureaucracy and the system to get proper diagnosis and treatment. He had arranged, upon his death, to bequeath his body to the UMRC. Through his gift, the UMRC was able to obtain conclusive evidence that inhaling fine particles of depleted uranium dust completely destroyed his heath. How many Terry Riordans are out there among the troops being exposed, not to mention Iraqi and Afghan civilians?

Inhaling the dust will not kill large numbers of Iraqi and Afghan civilians right away, any more than it did Captain Riordan. Rather, what we will see is vast numbers of people who are chronically and severely ill, having their life spans drastically shortened, many with multiple cancers.

Melissa Sterry, another sick veteran, served for six months at a supply base in Kuwait during the winter of 1991–92. Part of her job with the National Guard’s Combat Equipment Company “A” was to clean out tanks and other armored vehicles that had been used during the war, preparing them for storage.

She said she swept out the armored vehicles, cleaning up dust, sand and debris, sometimes being ordered to help bury contaminated parts. In a telephone interview, she stated that after researching depleted uranium she chose not to take the military’s test because she could not trust the results. It is alarming that Melissa was stationed in Kuwait, not Iraq. Cleaning out tanks with DU dust was enough to make her ill.

In, 2003, the Christian Science Monitor sent reporters to Iraq to investigate long-term effects of depleted uranium. Staff writer Scott Peterson saw children playing on top of a burnt-out tank near a vegetable stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, a tank that had been destroyed by armor-piercing shells coated with depleted uranium. Wearing his mask and protective clothing, he pointed his Geiger counter toward the tank. It registered 1000 times the normal background radiation. If the troops were on a mission of mercy to bring democracy to Iraq, wouldn’t keeping children away from such dangers be the top priority?

The laws of war prohibit the use of weapons that have deadly and inhumane effects beyond the field of battle. Nor can weapons be legally deployed in war when they are known to remain active, or cause harm after the war concludes. It is no surprise that the Japanese Court found President Bush guilty of war crimes.

Dr. Alim Yacoub of Basra University conducted an epidemiological study into incidences of malignancies in children under fifteen years old, in the Basra area (an area bombed with DU during the first Gulf War). They found over the 1990 to 1999 period, there was a 242% rise. That was before the recent invasion.

In Kosovo, similar spikes in cancer and birth defects were noticed by numerous international experts, although the quantity of DU weapons used was only a small fraction of what was used in Iraq.

Verifiable statistics for Iraq will remain elusive for some time, but widespread field studies in Afghanistan point to the existence of a large scale public health disaster. In May of 2002, the UMRC (Uranium Medical Research Center) sent a field team to interview and examine residents and internally displaced people in Afghanistan. The UMRC field team began by first identifying several hundred people suffering from illnesses and medical conditions displaying clinical symptoms which are considered to be characteristic of radiation exposure. To investigate the possibility that the symptoms were due to radiation sickness, the UMRC team collected urine specimens and soil samples, transporting them to an independent research lab in England.

UMRC’s Field Team found Afghan civilians with acute symptoms of radiation poisoning, along with chronic symptoms of internal uranium contamination, including congenital problems in newborns. Local civilians reported large, dense dust clouds and smoke plumes rising from the point of impact, an acrid smell, followed by burning of the nasal passages, throat and upper respiratory tract. Subjects in all locations presented identical symptom profiles and chronologies. The victims reported symptoms including pain in the cervical column, upper shoulders and basal area of the skull, lower back/kidney pain, joint and muscle weakness, sleeping difficulties, headaches, memory problems and disorientation.

Two additional scientific study teams were sent to Afghanistan. The first arrived in June 2002, concentrating on the Jalalabad region. The second arrived four months later, broadening the study to include the capital Kabul, which has a population of nearly 3.5 million people. The city itself contains the highest recorded number of fixed targets during Operation Enduring Freedom. For the study’s purposes, the vicinity of three major bomb sites were examined. It was predicted that signatures of depleted or enriched uranium would be found in the urine and soil samples taken during the research. The team was unprepared for the shock of its findings, which indicated in both Jalalabad and Kabul, DU was causing the high levels of illness. Tests taken from a number of Jalalabad subjects showed concentrations 400% to 2000% above that for normal populations, amounts which have not been recorded in civilian studies before.

Those in Kabul who were directly exposed to US-British precision bombing showed extreme signs of contamination, consistent with uranium exposure. These included pains in joints, back/kidney pain, muscle weakness, memory problems and confusion and disorientation. Those exposed to the bombing report symptoms of flu-type illnesses, bleeding, runny noses and blood-stained mucous. How many of these people will suffer a painful and early death from cancer? Even the study team itself complained of similar symptoms during their stay. Most of these symptoms last for days or months.

In August of 2002, UMRC completed its preliminary analysis of the results from Nangarhar. Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium contamination. The specific results indicated an astoundingly high level of contamination; concentrations were 100 to 400 times greater than those of the Gulf War Veterans tested in 1999. A researcher reported. “We took both soil and biological samples, and found considerable presence in urine samples of radioactivity; the heavy concentration astonished us. They were beyond our wildest imagination.”

In the fall of 2002, the UMRC field team went back to Afghanistan for a broader survey, and revealed a potentially larger exposure than initially anticipated. Approximately 30% of those interviewed in the affected areas displayed symptoms of radiation sickness. New born babies were among those displaying symptoms, with village elders reporting that over 25% of the infants were inexplicably ill.

How widespread and extensive is the exposure? A quote from the UMRC field report reads:

“The UMRC field team was shocked by the breadth of public health impacts coincident with the bombing. Without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium.”

In Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, UMRC lab results indicated high concentrations of Non-depleted Uranium, with the concentrations being much higher than in DU victims from Iraq. Afghanistan was used as a testing ground for a new generation of “bunker buster” bombs containing high concentrations of other uranium alloys.

“A significant portion of the civilian population”? It appears that by going after a handful of terrorists in Afghanistan we have poisoned a huge number of innocent civilians, with a disproportionate number of them being children.

The military has found depleted uranium in the urine of some soldiers but contends it was not enough to make them seriously ill in most cases. Critics have asked for more sensitive, more expensive testing.

According to an October 2004 Dispatch from the Italian Military Health Observatory, a total of 109 Italian soldiers have died thus far due to exposure to depleted uranium. A spokesman at the Military Health Observatory, Domenico Leggiero, states “The total of 109 casualties exceeds the total number of persons dying as a consequence of road accidents. Anyone denying the significance of such data is purely acting out of ill faith, and the truth is that our soldiers are dying out there due to a lack of adequate protection against depleted uranium”. Members of the Observatory have petitioned for an urgent hearing “in order to study effective prevention and safeguard measures aimed at reducing the death-toll amongst our serving soldiers”.

There were only 3000 Italian soldiers sent to Iraq, and they were there for a short time. The number of 109 represents about 3.6% of the total. If the same percentage of Iraqis get a similar exposure, that would amount to 936 000. As Iraqis are permanently living in the same contaminated environment, their percentage will be higher.

The Pentagon/DoD have interfered with UMRC’s ability to have its studies published by managing, a progressive and persistent misinformation program in the press against UMRC, and through the use of its control of science research grants to refute UMRC’s scientific findings and destroy the reputation of UMRC’s scientific staff, physicians and laboratories. UMRC is the first independent research organization to find Depleted Uranium in the bodies of US, UK and Canadian Gulf War I veterans and has subsequently, following Operation Iraqi Freedom, found Depleted Uranium in the water, soils and atmosphere of Iraq as well as biological samples donated by Iraqi civilians. Yet the first thing that comes up on Internet searches are these supposed “studies repeatedly showing DU to be harmless.” The technique is to approach the story as a debate between government and independent experts in which public interest is stimulated by polarizing the issues rather than telling the scientific and medical truth. The issues are systematically confused and misinformed by government, UN regulatory agencies (WHO, UNEP, IAEA, CDC, DOE, etc) and defense sector (military and the weapons developers and manufacturers).

Dr. Yuko Fujita, an assistant professor at Keio University, Japan who examined the effects of radioactivity in Iraq from May to June, 2003, said : “I doubt that Iraq is fabricating data because in fact there are many children suffering from leukemia in hospitals,” Fujita said. “As a result of the Iraq war, the situation will be desperate in some five to 10 years.”

The March 14, 2004 Tokyo Citizen’s Tribunal that “convicted” President Bush gave the following summation regarding DU weapons: (This court was a citizen’s court with no binding legal authority)

1. Their use has indiscriminate effects;
2. Their use is out of proportion with the pursuit of military objectives;
3. Their use adversely affects the environment in a widespread, long term and severe manner;
4. Their use causes superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering.

Two years ago, President Bush withdrew the United States as a signatory to the International Criminal Court’s statute, which has been ratified by all other Western democracies. The White House actually seeks to immunize U.S. leaders from war crimes prosecutions entirely. It has also demanded express immunity from ICC prosecution for American nationals.

If terrorists succeeded in spreading something throughout the U.S. that ended up causing hundreds of thousands of cancer cases and birth defects over a period of many years, they would be guilty of a crime against humanity that far surpasses the Sept. 11th attacks in scope and severity. Although not deliberate, with our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have done just that. If the physical environment is so unsafe and unhealthy that one cannot safely breath, then the outer trappings of democracy have little meaning. At least under Saddam, the Iraqi people could stay healthy and conceive normal children. Few Americans are aware that in getting rid of Saddam, we left something much worse in his place.
www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2006/03/20060312.php

After serving in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago — and receiving the Bronze Star for it — the Tucson soldier was called back to active duty in Iraq.

While there, he awoke one morning with a sore throat. Eighteen months later, Army Sgt. James Lauderdale was dead, of a bizarrely aggressive cancer rarely seen by the doctors who tried to treat it.

As a result, his stunned and heartbroken family has joined growing ranks of sickened and dying Iraq war vets and their families who believe exposures to toxic poisons in the war zone are behind their illnesses — mostly cancers, striking the young, taking them down with alarming speed.

The number of these cancers remains undisclosed, with military officials citing patient privacy issues, as well as lack of evidence the cases are linked to conditions in the war zone. The U.S. Congress has ordered a probe of suspect toxins and may soon begin widespread testing of our armed forces.

Jim Lauderdale was 58 when his National Guard unit was deployed to the Iraq-Kuwait border, where he helped transport arriving soldiers and Marines into combat areas.

He was a strong man, say relatives, who can’t remember him ever missing a day of work for illness. And he developed a cancer of the mouth, which overwhelmingly strikes smokers, drinkers and tobacco chewers. He was none of those.

“Jim’s doctors didn’t know why he would get this kind of cancer — they had no answers for us,” said his wife, Dixie.

“He got so sick, so fast. We really think it had to be something he was exposed to over there. So many of the soldiers we met with cancer at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) complained about the polluted air they lived in, the brown water they had to use, the dust they breathed from exploded munitions. It was very toxic.”

As a mining engineer, Lauderdale knew exactly what it meant when he saw the thick black smoke pouring nonstop out of the smokestacks that line the Iraq/Kuwait border area where he was stationed for three months in 2005.

“He wrote to me that everyone was complaining about their stinging eyes and sore throats and headaches,” Dixie said. “For Jim to say something like that, to complain, was very unusual.

“One of the mothers on the cancer ward had pictures of her son bathing in the brown water,” she said. “He died of kidney cancer.”

Stationed in roughly the same area as Lauderdale, yet another soldier — now fighting terminal colon cancer — described the scene there, of oil refineries, a cement factory, a chlorine factory and a sulfuric acid factory, all spewing unfiltered and uncontrolled substances into the air.

“One day, we were walking toward the port and they had sulfuric acid exploding out of the stacks. We were covered with it, everything was burning on us, and we had to turn around and get to the medics,” said Army Staff Sgt. Frank Valentin, 35.

Not long after, he developed intense rectal pain, which doctors told him for months was hemorrhoids. Finally diagnosed with aggressive colorectal cancer — requiring extensive surgery, resulting in a colostomy bag — he was given fewer than two years to live by his Walter Reed physicians.

He is now a couple of months past that death sentence, but his chemo drugs are starting to fail, and the cancer is eating into his liver and lungs. He spends his days with his wife and three children at their Florida home.

“I don’t know how much time I have,” he said.

None of these soldiers know for sure what’s killing them. But they suspect it’s a cascade of multiple toxic exposures, coupled with the intense stress of daily life in a war zone weakening their immune systems.

“There’s so much pollution from so many sources, your body can’t fight what’s coming at it,” Valentin said. “And you don’t eat well or sleep well, ever. That weakens you, too. There’s no chance to gather your strength. These are kids 19, 20 and 21 getting all kinds of cancers. The Walter Reed cancer ward is packed full with them.”

The prime suspect in all this, in the minds of many victims — and some scientists — is what’s known as depleted uranium — the radioactive chemical prized by the military for its ability to penetrate armored vehicles. When munitions explode, the substance hits the air as fine dust, easily inhaled.

Last month, the Iraqi environment minister blamed the tons of the chemical dropped during the war’s “shock and awe” campaign for a surge of cancer cases across the country.

However, the Pentagon and U.S. State Department strongly deny this, citing four studies, including one by the World Health Organization, that found levels in war zones not harmful to civilians or soldiers. A U.N. Environmental Program study concurs, but only if spent munitions are cleared away.

Returning solders have said that isn’t happening.

“When tanks exploded, I would handle those tanks, and there was DU everywhere,” said Valentin. “This is a big issue.”

The fierce Iraq winds carry desert sand and dust for miles, said Dixie Lauderdale, who suspects her husband was exposed to at least some depleted uranium. Many vets from the Gulf War blame the chemical used in that conflict for their Gulf War syndrome illnesses.

As the controversy rages, Congress has ordered a comprehensive independent study, due in October, of the health effects of depleted uranium exposure on U.S. soldiers and their children. And a “DU bill” — ordering all members of the U.S. military exposed to it be identified and tested — is working its way through Congress.

“Basically, we want to get ahead of this curve, and not go through the years of painful denial we went through with Agent Orange that was the legacy of Vietnam,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a co-sponsor of the bill.

“We want an independent agency to do independent testing of our soldiers, and find out what’s really going on. These incidents of cancer and illness that all of us are hearing about back in our districts are not just anecdotal — there is a pattern here. And yes, I do suspect DU may be at the bottom of it.”

What’s happening today — growing numbers of sickened soldiers who say they were exposed to it amid firm denials of harm from military brass — almost mirrors the early stages of the Agent Orange aftermath. It took the U.S. military almost two decades to admit the powerful chemical defoliant killed and disabled U.S. troops in the jungles of Vietnam, and to begin compensating them for it.

Whatever it was that struck Jim Lauderdale did a terrifying job of it.

Sent to Walter Reed with oral cancer in April 2005, he underwent his first extensive and disfiguring surgery, removing half his tongue to get to tumors in the mouth and throat. A second surgery followed a month later to clear out more of those areas.

Five months later, another surgery removed a new neck tumor. Then came heavy chemotherapy and radiation.

Shortly after, he had a massive heart attack, undergoing another surgery to place stents in his arteries. Two weeks later, the cancer was back and growing rapidly, forcing a fourth surgery in January 2006.

By this time, much of his neck and shoulder tissue was gone, and doctors tried to reconstruct a tongue, using tissue from his wrist. He couldn’t swallow, so was fed through a tube into his stomach.
Just weeks later, four external tumors appeared on his neck — “literally overnight,” his wife said.

Suffering severe complications from the chemo drugs, Lauderdale endured 39 radiation treatments, waking up one night bleeding profusely through his burned skin. The day after his radiation ended, new external tumors erupted at the edge of the radiation field, flabbergasting his doctors.

“As this aggressive disease grew though chemoradiation, it was determined at this point there was no chance for cure,” his oncologist wrote then.

By then, the cancer had spread to his lungs and spine and, most frightening of all, “hundreds and thousands” of tumors were erupting all over his upper body, his wife said.

“The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it — that this happens in only 1 percent of cases,” she said.

Efforts to contact his doctors at Walter Reed were unsuccessful, but a leading head-and-neck cancer specialist at the Arizona Cancer Center reviewed the course of Lauderdale’s disease.

“This a a very wrenching case,” said Dr. Harinder Garewal. “This is unusually aggressive behavior for an oral cancer. I would agree it happens in only 1 percent of cases.”

When oral cancer occurs in nonsmokers and non-drinkers, it tends to be more aggressive, he said.

“My feeling is the immune system for some reason can’t handle the cancer,” he said.

Jim Lauderdale died on July 14, 2006, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Dixie and their two grown children still feel the raw grief of loss, but not anger, she said.

“But I am convinced something very wrong is happening over there. Is anyone paying attention to this? Is the cancer ward still full?” she asked. “I would hate to see another whole generation affected like this, but I’m very afraid it will be.”

Contact reporter Carla McClain at 806-7754 or at cmcclain@azstarnet.com

http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/198240.php

Unfortunately, the DU weapons also proved nearly as dangerous to our own troops and to Iraqi civilians. The military alliance cobbled together by George Bush Sr. won a decisive victory in that war. But since its conclusion at least 13,000 American veterans have died from DU-related causes, far more than the 148 who died in combat; and of the nearly 700,000 who served in the war at least 250,000 are now (in 2007) permanently disabled; a percentage far higher than in any previous war.[1] Despite this, Pentagon generals continue to insist that DU munitions pose no danger, and remain committed to their use. Even as I write, the Department of Defense (DoD) moves ahead with research that could lead to the deployment of DU weapons in space.[2]

Yet, a UN Sub-Committee has declared DU weapons illegal, and last November the European Union (EU) issued its fourth call for a DU moratorium. More and more frequently, one hears the charge that America’s use of these weapons in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia was a war crime. In 2004, for example, a citizen’s tribunal in Japan convicted George W. Bush in absentia for crimes against humanity.[3] Is America headed for a showdown with the world over depleted uranium?

Although hyperbole has muddied the issue, the bare facts are shocking and need no amplification. Depleted Uranium (DU) is primarily U-238, the isotope of uranium that remains after the fissionable isotope, U-235, has been extracted from natural uranium ore. When enriched to 3% the preferred isotope, U-235, is used to fuel nuclear reactors. When further enriched to 90% or more it becomes “weapons grade” and is suitable for use in nuclear weapons. Enrichment thus “depletes” the natural uranium of its isotopic fraction of U-235. Depleted uranium (99.8% pure U-238) is the by-product of this separation process and was long viewed as a waste. Over the years hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff accumulated on US military reservations. In fact, because of its low-level radioactivity and 4.5 billion-year half-life, DU presents a long-term storage headache.

In the 1970s the US military got serious about utilizing this waste after the Soviets introduced a superior kind of armor. Quite suddenly, the Pentagon found itself in need of a new penetrating weapon. DU offered attractive possibilities because it is extremely dense–––uranium is 1.7 times as heavy as lead. For this reason, tank shells made of U-238 have formidable kinetic energy: they will slice through the heaviest steel armor like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Quite simply, nothing can withstand them. Although uranium is very soft, when alloyed with titanium it becomes tough enough to retain its shape when fired out of a tank barrel. Today, several companies make DU shells for the US military. These include Starmet Corporation, based in Concord, Massachusetts, and Aerojet, with plants in California and Tennessee. In the 1990s Alliant Techsystems (formerly Honeywell), based in Minneapolis, also produced millions of DU rounds for the US Air Force. In 2006 Alliant also received new orders worth $77 million to produce 120mm tank shells.[4]

In addition to being an extremely effective penetrator, U-238 is pyrophoric, meaning that it ignites at high velocity. When a ten-pound uranium shell slices through a target vehicle it sheds a part of its mass, causing a firestorm of burning and non-burning uranium fragments. These, in turn, cause catastrophic secondary fires and explosions. In war footage of Desert Storm the flaming DU shells can be seen arcing like tracers across the night sky. The slender rounds are solid DU–––no explosive charge is needed. Each has a plastic outer casing known as a sabot, which centers the round in the bore and which falls away after the shell exits the gun tube. The war footage is graphic. It shows that targeted Iraqi vehicles stood no chance. Pity the poor Iraqi soldiers who came under DU attack. Very few lived to tell about it. Within seconds, most were charred beyond recognition in an incendiary fireball. US military jargon even coined a new term, “crispy critters,” to describe the grisly Iraqi corpses of war.

When DU burns it oxidizes, reaching extreme temperatures (i.e., 3,000-5,000 C). On impact, between 40-70% of the depleted uranium is transformed into an aerosol of extremely fine U-238 particles which contaminate the battlefield long after the war. Geiger counter measurements confirm that even years later, burned-out Iraqi tanks were still hot: 1,000-2,000 times as radioactive as background, with the surrounding desert contaminated to a lesser degree.[5] Continuous exposure to this level of irradiation would be like having a chest X-ray every few minutes.[6] U-238 produces high energy gamma and beta radiation (which are electrons). But most of the emission is in the form of alpha particles, which are charged helium nuclei (i.e., He++). The alpha particles cannot penetrate human skin and for this reason the Pentagon claims that DU is harmless. The claim is false, however. As we will see, the dangers have been understated. Artillery and tank crews who handled DU shells were exposed to continuous alpha, beta and gamma radiation over weeks and months. But they probably had less exposure than soldiers who inhaled DU-laden smoke and dust, whether in combat or during clean-up operations after the war. Most US troops were unaware–––no one bothered to inform them–––that the use of DU rounds had spread low-level radioactive waste across the battlefield. After the fighting, tens of thousands of American soldiers frolicked among the burned-out Iraqi tanks, gathering souvenirs and posing for photographs like curious tourists. Others scavenged spare parts from US vehicles contaminated by “friendly fire,” oblivious that they were endangering themselves with every breath.

The contaminated zones were not limited to Iraq. Large parts of Kuwait were also affected, including the infamous “highway of death” where the US destroyed Saddam’s army as it retreated north out of Kuwait City. Several areas in Saudi Arabia were contaminated before the war during training exercises. There was even a major accidental release after the fighting ended, which I’m going to recount in detail because it illustrates the problems. In July 1991 a fire broke out in a motor-pool at the US base at Doha, north of Kuwait City. The fire started during refueling, and was caused by static electricity. It spread first to parked vehicles and then to a nearby ammunition dump.[7] Witnesses later said that explosions rocked the compound for six hours, scattering unexploded ordnance and debris over much of the 500-acre base. The raging fires destroyed or damaged dozens of buildings and more than 100 vehicles, including several M-1 Abrams tanks fully loaded with DU shells.

The fire consumed an estimated $14 million in munitions, including 660 120mm DU rounds, about half of which were completely oxidized. A thick fume of black and white smoke reportedly billowed hundreds of feet above the base and drifted east-southeast toward Kuwait City. No warning was ever issued about the toxic danger posed by the DU-laden smoke and ash.[8] After the fire, soldiers worked on the clean up without even face masks or the standard protective clothing required by military regulations.[9]

The scene must have been surreal. Witnesses later reported seeing hundreds of GIs sweeping up the compound with brooms. A team with the equipment used to test for alpha radiation was dispatched to the base, but for reasons that are still unclear no monitoring was ever done. During a December 26, 1999 broadcast of the CBS weekly news show 60 Minutes, Morley Safer reported that CBS had obtained copies of military communications and incident log books which proved that the military was aware of the hazards, yet, failed to follow its own safety protocols. The base remained open despite DU contamination. Many thousands of US soldiers who transited through Doha in the months and years after the fire suffered exposure, as Kuwait’s seasonal wind storms remobilized the DU ash and dust. In fact, the contaminated base remains in operation to this day.

But even if the military had issued respirators at Doha, it’s doubtful they would have protected our soldiers, given the lessons learned during a limited clean-up operation after the war; whose purpose was to dispose of about three-dozen DU-contaminated tanks and vehicles destroyed during “friendly fire” incidents. This limited operation was led by a reservist, Maj. Doug Rokke, a physicist in private life, who says his orders were signed by the field commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.[10]

There were no field manuals. Rokke’s team had to develop the procedures on their own, through trial-and-error. Their first chore was the ticklish one of manually removing the unexploded DU ordnance still on-board the contaminated Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting vehicles. To accomplish this Rokke’s men had to enter and work inside the contaminated vehicles. There was no way to avoid stirring up the DU ash and dust that covered every surface. The men wore standard military-issue face masks, but according to Rokke they were useless. The problem was that the dust came right through the filters. The men lived with the constant metallic taste and smell of uranium oxide. The masks were of the cheapest design, and did not even meet the HEPA standard current in US industry. (HEPA, or High Efficiency Particulate Air filters, remove 99% of dust particles down to .3 microns in size.) Particles of 5 microns or less are breathable. But not even HEPA filters would have afforded full protection because the aerosols produced on impact by DU rounds are loaded with 0.1 micron-sized DU particles, as well as smaller nanoparticles ranging down to .01 microns. No known filter can prevent inhalation of particles of this size. Within 72 hours everyone on Rokke’s team developed skin rashes and began to complain of respiratory problems.

Although sick, his men persisted. But it took them more than three months just to package 24 contaminated/destroyed vehicles for shipment back to the states. This included 15 Abrams tanks and 9 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The team left behind a number of more badly contaminated vehicles: buried in a large hole in the desert. The Army spent $4 million to expand a facility in South Carolina for the purpose of decontaminating the returned equipment, but what the Army ended up with was an expensive holding facility: all for a mere 24 vehicles.[11] The US military had no plans at the time, and has no plans today, to clean up the thousands of Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks and other vehicles destroyed in the 1991 war. Later, the Kuwaiti government hired a private contractor, the Halliburton Corporation, to move most of the burned-out hulks in the vicinity of Kuwait City to a dump in the western desert, according to a plan prepared by Rokke and his colleagues. The site became known as the “Bone yard.” Nothing was done for Iraq, however. Untold numbers of contaminated tanks and vehicles still litter the southern part of the country, to this day.

In 1994 Maj. Rokke was named director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, and was tasked to develop a training program to prepare US soldiers to handle DU weapons. Rokke was also assigned to develop environmental clean up procedures. After extensive research, including field trials at the Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) nuclear test site in Nevada, Rokke put together a comprehensive three-tier 40-hour educational program that employed videos and was based on the best available science, including work done by the DoD’s own scientists. Rokke and his team also prepared the reports and documents that became standard Army regulations about how to handle DU.[12] The Pentagon even saw fit to award Rokke two medals for this work. One citation 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.”[13]

But the Pentagon never used Rokke’s training program and videos, not even during the run-up to the second Gulf War.[14] Instead, in 1996 Maj. Doug Rokke was fired. Why? Simple: His training program and validating research acknowledged a plain truth that the general staff found politically unacceptable: that once DU is released as an aerosol into the environment it is virtually impossible to clean up. The Pentagon feared and probably still fears that such an admission will fuel opposition to its continued use of DU weapons. As Rokke put it: “They’d wanted ‘proponency’ [sic] for DU weapons, and I was giving them the opposite.”[15]

A notorious 1991 memorandum by Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn of the Los Alamos Lab had cautioned the Department of Defense (DoD) that “if no one [i.e., at the Pentagon] makes the case for the effectiveness for DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal…I believe we should keep this sensitive issue in mind when after-action reports are being written.”[16] Rokke interpreted the memo as an instruction to be less than candid about DU’s health and environmental impact. When he refused, he was terminated.

Rokke and his men paid a heavy price for the service they rendered to the nation trying to clean up the DU mess created during Desert Storm. According to Rokke, almost every member of his 100-man team is now either sick or dead from various diseases, including lymphoma and other cancers. It’s a charge the Pentagon has denied,[17] but which the affected veterans and their families can easily confirm. Rokke also claims the Veteran’s Administration (VA) refused medical care to his men, even while they were dying; and he further accuses the military of willfully destroying medical records and personnel files to avoid liability. Rokke’s own health was seriously impaired. When the VA finally tested him he learned that he has 5,000 times the permissible level of uranium in his body. Rokke, currently retired/disabled, has endured 18 kidney operations, as well as eye and gastrointestinal surgery, and he continues to have medical problems directly related to his exposure to DU.

Even as tens of thousands of veterans became sick after the Gulf War, the Department of Defense stubbornly denied that DU was responsible. Many vets were told they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The Pentagon took the position that because DU is only 60% as radioactive as natural uranium, it is harmless. After 1999, military spokespersons also frequently cited a study completed that year by the RAND Corporation, which found no evidence of harmful DU exposure during Desert Storm. The RAND team conducted no research of its own. It merely reviewed the peer-reviewed scientific literature on uranium toxicity. As RAND conceded, there were few published DU studies, as most of the early research was driven by the need to establish standards for the uranium milling/mining industry; for which reason most of the literature deals with exposure to natural or enriched uranium. While all uranium is hazardous inside the human body, dust particles of natural unprocessed uranium tend to be less invasive because they are relatively large in size; hence, are not inhaled as easily.[18] Moreover, the tiny cilia in the bronchial passages are efficient at removing particles of this size during breathing. When swallowed in food or water, natural uranium also tends to pass through the GI tract attached to organic matter without much absorption.[19]

Critics countered that the Pentagon itself funded and even partly staffed the RAND study, for which reason it cannot be regarded as an independent assessment. Critics also pointed out that the RAND report is far from comprehensive. A peace activist named Gretel Munroe identified 70 pertinent scientific papers that RAND failed to consider.[20]

Some of these were DU studies conducted under contract to various branches of the US military, including a comprehensive DU investigation completed just six months before Desert Storm by none other than the Army itself.[21] This latter study accurately foresaw that the use of DU penetrators in combat would release large amounts of depleted uranium oxides. It noted that DU is a “low-level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal.” The Army study warned that aerosol exposures to both soldiers and civilians “could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects.” It also correctly predicted that exposed soldiers would suffer cancers and kidney problems. The Army’s prescient report acknowledged that “some form of remedial action in a post-combat environment” would be needed after the war, in other words, a clean up. It even warned that the long-term health risks could make the continued use of DU weapons socially and politically unacceptable. How did the Pentagon react to its own study? Simple. By ignoring it; and RAND did likewise. Both also ignored a 1993 study by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), which concluded that “the health hazards [from DU] occur primarily due to internal exposures. Soluble forms present chemical hazards to the kidneys, while insoluble forms present hazards to the lungs from ionizing radiation, with particle size being an important factor.”[22] Importantly, these studies also acknowledged that exposure to DU particulates is very different from exposure to natural uranium dust, for which reason RAND’s reliance on studies of natural uranium was inappropriate, and its conclusions dubious.

According to the Pentagon, DU is so inert you can eat the stuff without harm. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen made a statement to this effect in 1996. And while it’s probably true that U-238, if ingested, will pass through the gut like natural uranium, without much absorption, nonetheless, Cohen’s statement ignored the fact that when high-velocity DU shells impact hard objects the DU is transformed into a much more invasive substance. Once aerosolized, DU is loose in the environment and it’s only a matter of time before it finds its way into water and food; in which case, DU particles, due to their small size, are easily absorbable through the intestinal lining. They are even more easily inhaled, and will even pass through the skin, making exposure unavoidable in contaminated areas. Submicron-sized DU particles behave like a gas. They are too small to be removed by the cilia in the bronchioles and have no trouble reaching the tiny alveolar sacs in the lungs. In fact, particles of this size can pass directly into the blood and will cross every blood-barrier in the body. Naomi Harley, one of the authors of the RAND study, demonstrated her ignorance of the serious implications of this size factor in her July 1999 testimony before the Presidential Special Oversight Board, where she stated that DU will not cross the blood-brain barrier.[23] Nonsense. Aerosolized DU particles move with ease into the brain, which, no doubt, explains the many neurological problems reported by Gulf War veterans.[24] DU particles also cross the placenta into the unborn child, which is extremely serious because the fetus is especially vulnerable to both radiological and chemical toxicity. No doubt, this explains the increased level of birth abnormalities reported in the children of Gulf War vets, and the even higher incidence in Iraq, where mothers no longer ask, “Is it a boy, or a girl?, but rather: “Is my baby normal?”[25]

Aerosolized DU is also different from unprocessed natural uranium in another important respect. Under the conditions of extreme temperature and high velocity impact, DU particles are rendered ceramic-like, which makes them insoluble. The body has trouble excreting them, for which reason they tend to persist. This explains why 8-10 years after the war veterans of Desert Storm were still excreting DU in their urine, semen, and even in their sweat.[26] This retention of DU poses serious health risks for a number of reasons: firstly, because radiation, even low-level radiation, is cumulative. In fact, the term “low-level radiation” is a misnomer. It is misleading because it wrongly suggests that low-level radiation is not dangerous. Recent studies show just the opposite: that a low-level alpha source inside the body is even more dangerous per unit of exposure than higher levels of radiation. While it is true that an alpha particle, due to its vastly greater size and mass, does not travel nearly as far as an X-ray, the new research indicates that a single alpha particle can cause 1,000 times as much damage.[27]

Low-level alpha emission in the lung causes scar tissue and greatly increases the risk of lung cancer. Some of the insoluble DU is also scavenged from the lung into the thoracic lymph nodes, where it damages the immune system and also causes lymphoma and leukemia. Many DU nano-particles are also absorbed into the blood and transported via cholesterol and lipids throughout the body. Some DU is excreted by the kidneys, but not all. Much of it accumulates in organs, tissues and bones, and even in human semen. In fact, DU’s affinity for the sexual organs is an especially serious problem because DU is known to cause chromosomal damage, thus burdening future generations with birth abnormalities. The problem is a double whammy: DU is a mutagen due to its radiological properties, and also due to its chemical properties because it is a heavy metal. It turns out that uranium has a chemical affinity for phosphate. Diane Stearns, a biochemist at Northern Arizona University, recently showed that when living cells are exposed to uranium the uranium binds to the phosphate structure in the DNA and causes mutations from chemical effects, quite apart from the radioactive properties.[28]

Finally, new research indicates that DU’s radiological and chemical effects are not additive, but act in synergy. The combination of the two is much worse than the sum of both. A 2002 paper by Dr. Alexandra C. Miller, a chemist at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI), described an in vivo study that found DU to be much more damaging to DNA than would be expected solely on the basis of U-238’s radiolytic properties. Miller attributed this to a synergistic multiplier effect.[29]

In a 2003 interview she told the Guardian: “you can get more than an eight-fold greater effect than you’d expect.”[30] Miller’s findings are potentially explosive because they flatly contradict the official position of the Department of Defense (her boss) that DU presents no serious dangers. This probably explains why the Pentagon subsequently muzzled one of their top scientists. In 2006 the DoD refused to allow the BBC to interview Dr. Miller.[31] The BBC reported that the Pentagon also turned down Miller’s repeated requests for funding to continue her DU research (in 2004, 2005 and 2006). Obviously, if you don’t look, you won’t discover unpleasant facts.

All of the above helps to explain why Gulf War sickness is not a single malady, but a progressive wasting condition. One physician defined it as “a complex incapacitating multi-organ system disorder.”[32[ The many symptoms and associated conditions read like a litany of horrors: fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, bleeding gums and lesions, headaches and neurological problems, memory loss, kidney dysfunction, bloody stools, flu-like symptoms, pneumonia, gynecological infections in female soldiers, unsteady gait, rashes and, ultimately, cancer and premature death. Nor is this a comprehensive list. Put simply: DU trashes the body.

Although nearly 700,000 American soldiers served in the first Gulf War, we still don’t know how many were exposed to DU because the Pentagon refused to screen and test our veterans. Although Army regulations require the testing/treatment for GIs wounded by, or exposed to, radioactive materials, including DU, not even one of the hundreds of thousand of soldiers with known or suspected exposure to DU was tested or treated after the war. The Pentagon obviously shrank from a full accounting because it feared the fiscal liability of caring for so many sick vets. The Veteran’s Administration (VA) even dragged its feet caring for the most obviously affected, i.e., the unfortunate troops exposed to large amounts of DU in so-called “friendly fire” incidents. Seven years after the war the Pentagon was still grossly under-reporting the actual number of US soldiers who had come under DU attack by our own side. Why fudge the numbers? Well, probably because the many self-inflicted casualties were an embarrassment.

But fiscal liability and public embarrassment were not the only, nor even the primary, reasons why the Pentagon sought to conceal the facts about DU weapons. The main reason is that the generals fully intended to use them again. Certainly the Pentagon was not keen on giving them up. Let us remember: During the 1990s Iraq was a free-fire zone. No doubt, the US military continued using DU weapons through this period, in which case the actual expenditure was much greater than the officially acknowledged 340 tons. During the 1994-95 Bosnian War the US used DU weapons again, some 10 tons, and another 3 tons in Kosovo in 1999. The US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt, nicknamed the “Warthog,” accounted for most of the DU expended in these wars, as in Desert Storm. The attack plane’s main weapon is an advanced Gatling gun, the GAU-8 Avenger, mounted in the nose of the plane. The gun is so enormous that the plane literally had to be designed around it. This accounts for its ungainly appearance, and the nickname. But the Warthog was never designed for good looks. Its rotating cannon is all business, and lays down a devastating barrage of thousands of 30mm DU rounds per minute.

Beginning in 1993, Iraqi doctors reported a disturbing increase in the incidence of malignancies around Basra, in southern Iraq. Basra is Iraq’s second largest city and is located near the battlefields where most of the DU was expended in the first Gulf War. An epidemiological study conducted by Dr. Alim Yacoub, a British-educated trained doctor and dean of the medical school at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, and his colleague, Dr. Jenan Hassan from the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Basra, found that between 1990-2001 all types of malignancies quadrupled. During this same period the number of birth defects increased six-fold. Moreover, the incidence of childhood leukemia jumped from just 2 cases in 1990 to 41 in 2001, a shocking twenty-fold increase. Even more disturbing was a further spike to 53 cases of leukemia in 2002, a 22% increase in a single year; which suggested that an acceleration was underway.[33]

The observed onset in 1993 jibes with the known latency period of leukemia, which can be as short as 2-3 years. The cancer epidemic was exacerbated by the UN embargo, which prevented urgently needed medicines from reaching the victims. Although the Iraqi doctors did not have access to western medical journals, Dr. Thomas Fasy of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine presented their research at a 2003 health conference in New York City. Dr. Fasy had traveled to Basra some months before. Although the Iraqi physicians lacked the necessary scientific equipment to establish a firm link to inhaled or ingested DU, Dr. Hari Sharma, a Canadian radio-chemist, later confirmed the link. When Dr. Sharma examined tissue samples of 38 dead Iraqis from Basra using a supersensitive instrument known as a mass spectrometer, he found DU in the lungs, thoracic lymph nodes and kidneys. Some of the cadavers also had DU in their livers.[34] In a 2003 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle Dr. Yacoub complained that international sanctions prevented the Iraqi doctors from from importing the necessary medical technology.[35] According to Yacoub, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refused to approve the equipment on the excuse that Saddam Hussein might divert it for military use. Once again, the children of Iraq were the principal victims of the US-led embargo.

Most disturbing of all were reports from Basra of extreme birth deformities, as well as a new phenomenon: multiple cancers. By now (in 2007), photos of the Iraqi birth defects have been widely posted around the internet, and the pictures must be seen to be believed.[36] As for the multiple cancers, they were first reported in 2003 at a medical conference in Japan by Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist at Basra’s largest hospital. Dr. Al-Ali told the conference: “Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient: for example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. The second is the clustering of cancers in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected with cancer.”[37] The reports from Basra were alarming, but the Pentagon dismissed them as Iraqi propaganda. The Kuwaiti government did likewise, and even banned Dr. Al-Ali from crossing the border. Other skeptics cast doubt in a different way. They pointed out that southern Iraq suffered contamination by numerous toxic agents during the 1991 war. DU, after all, was only one among many possible causes. In the absence of compelling evidence linking DU to the leukemias and birth defects it was more likely that some other agent was responsible. The cynics even suggested that Saddam Hussein had poisoned his own people by his past use of chemical weapons.

The skeptics had a point. It’s certainly true that the first Gulf War unleashed numerous toxic substances. The 1991 battlefield was probably the most polluted in history. In addition to DU, soldiers contended with experimental and/or impure vaccines. Soldiers and Iraqis alike breathed acrid black smoke from burning oil wells and were exposed to a wide array of chemical emissions due to the bombing of Iraqi infrastructure. Destroyed factories and industries can spew large amounts of toxic substances. Moreover, after the war US units destroyed at least 100 Iraqi munitions dumps, including an enormous complex at Khamisiyah which according to eyewitnesses included stores of chemical and biological agents (some supplied by the US and other western nations).[38] It was even reported that the US command ordered the bombing of Iraqi nuclear research reactors.[39] This evidently occurred during the “Shock and Awe” phase of the war. The Pentagon has since released few details, but assuming the reports are correct the order to blow up these sites was incredibly stupid, arguably even insane, as it no doubt had the effect of dispersing dangerous chemicals and possibly radioactive materials across the Iraqi landscape. All of these factors surely increased the level of toxic exposure; and for some years this caveat allowed the US military to deflect some of the criticism regarding its use of DU weapons.

The Pentagon’s case was not helped in 1999 when the Department of Energy (DoE) was forced to admit that America’s DU weapons were not pure U-238, but were laced with small amounts of U-236, plutonium, neptunium, americium, and nearly 200 other unstable transuranic elements and fission by-products, including strontium-90 and Cesium-137.[40] It seems that for many years Union Carbide, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin, the companies that produced the enriched uranium for Uncle Sam, made a practice of recycling spent reactor fuel back into the enrichment process. They did so for purely economic reasons. When the price of U-235 rose enough, it became profitable to recover more of the preferred U-235 fraction in this way. As a result, the DU waste stream became a witches brew of unstable isotopes and daughter products, none of them naturally-occurring. All are created in reactors and every one is thousands of times more radioactive than U-238.

The Pentagon took pains to emphasize that the presence of plutonium and the other transuranics presented no additional health risk, since the amounts were tiny. Only trace amounts were involved. What the Pentagon failed to mention is that there is no safe level of exposure. For instance, consider plutonium: the most toxic substance known to man. The element was discovered by the chemist Glenn Seaborg, who named it after “Pluto,” the Greek god of death (or hell). And for good reason: unlike uranium, plutonium is not found in Nature. It is produced only in the irradiated bowels of nuclear reactors by neutron bombardment of U-238; and it is 200,000 more radioactive than uranium. In fact, it is so nasty that the tiniest speck in the lung is a death sentence. A pound of plutonium, if uniformly distributed, could wipe out the entire human race. Plutonium is the preferred fissile material for nuclear weapons because so little of it is needed. A mere ten pounds, a lump the size of a grapefruit, is enough to make a hydrogen bomb.

But the dangers are not limited to nuclear weapons. For many years both the US and Russian governments, as well as the former Soviet regime, utilized one of the isotopes of plutonium, Pu-238, in their space programs. Plutonium-238 is 280 times more radioactive than the more common isotope, plutonium-239, and is used in small reactors to generate electrical power for space probes. Though controversial, the practice has continued in recent years. NASA, for example, powered the 1997 Cassini Saturn probe with a U-238-fueled reactor. This use faced considerable scientific opposition at the time because the lengthy mission required 72 pounds of U-238 fuel, by far the largest amount NASA had ever sent into space. The launch involved a Titan-4 military rocket, an old and unreliable design with a less than reassuring history of 10% failed launches. Fortunately, the Cassini lift-off was successful; but the risks were not limited to the launch phase. After first circling Venus, Cassini returned and made a second dangerous pass around earth to gain the necessary momentum to “slingshot” the probe in the direction of Saturn. Again, we were lucky and there was no disastrous spillage of plutonium. The mission went according to plan; however, other space shots have amply demonstrated the principle that if something can go wrong, it will. Since 1964 several plutonium-powered satellites have crashed to earth, spreading a total of a few pounds of plutonium-238 around the planet. The amount seems trivial, but it was enough, according to Dr. John Gofman, to cause a small but measurable increase in the world-wide rate of lung cancer.[41] This sobering fact gives some idea of plutonium’s extreme toxicity.

Gofman is a leading authority on radiation. While still a graduate student at UC Berkeley he codiscovered U-233, one of the isotopes of uranium. During World War II Gofman assisted the Manhattan Project at the behest of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was the first to extract significant amounts of plutonium, then needed for the Bomb program. Many years later, as Biomedical Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Gofman ran afoul of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) when his research on low-level radiation became an inconvenience to the nuclear establishment. In 1969, building on the work of British radiation expert Alice Stewart, as well as the American scientist E.B. Lewis, Gofman, estimated that the cancer risk to the general population from America’s nuclear programs was much greater than most physicists believed at the time.[42] Gofman charged that the AEC had underestimated the number of cancers by a factor of at least twenty times, which meant an excess of 32,000 cancers. Even though he had provided crucial assistance to the Manhattan Project and was regarded as a nuclear loyalist–––Gofman supported weapons development–––he was sacked because the government disapproved of his conclusions about low-level radiation. Gofman lost his research staff and funding and had to go back to teaching.

The case is no exception. Other top scientists have endured similar treatment. The list is long, and includes Linus Pauling, the famous chemist whose 1957-58 petition, signed by thousands of scientists world-wide, helped to bring about a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing. In 1962 Pauling won a second Nobel Prize for his peace work; but, thereafter, was shunned by the US government, which repeatedly refused Pauling’s requests for federal grant money.[43] This went on for many years. Not even J. Robert Oppenheimer was above attack. Indeed, the former director of the Manhattan Project suffered an even worse fate when he opposed Edward Teller’s H-Bomb program in the 1950s. Oppenheimer became the target of a McCarthy-era witch-hunt, which ended his career, tarnished his reputation, and brought about his early death. It is of interest that Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet nuclear scientist, was similarly humiliated by Nikita Khrushchev for speaking out against the arms race. Even after Sakharov won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, he was placed under house arrest when he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The lesson is clear: East or West, the War Machine brooks no deviation from its central aims. When great scientists speak out or cease to be useful, they are punished and discarded.

But time proved Gofman correct about low-level radiation. Over the years the accepted standards have become more stringent, not less. On three separate occasions the International Commission for Radiation Protection (ICRP), which draws up the rules for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has tightened up the standards. The ICRP did this in 1965, in 1986 (the year of the Chernobyl disaster), and again in 1990, when it cut the maximum safe dose by a factor of five. Incidentally, the US did not accept the latest revision and today, as a result, has a standard five times less stringent than in the rest of the world. But even the international trend toward an increasingly strict “permissible dose” misses the point. In 2005 Gofman was finally vindicated in full when the National Academy of Sciences, after a five-year comprehensive investigation, released a 700-page report that endorsed what he and a few other brave scientists have been saying for many years, namely, that all radiation exposure is cumulative and adds to the risk of cancer.[44] The notion of a safe dose is an oxymoron.

Notes
1 Beyond Treason, a film by William Lewis, American Gulf War Vets. http://www.beyondtreason.com/

2 The DoD program is known as “Rods from God,” and would involve the deployment in earth orbit of 20-foot long DU penetrator rods, which could be fired at targets on earth, reaching 7,000 mph before impact. Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven, The New Press, New York, 2007, p. 82.

3 Nao Shimoyachi, “Citizens find Bush guilty of Afghan war crimes,” Japan Times, March 14, 2004. posted at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/member/member.html?nn20040314a5.htm

4 John Byrne, “US signs $38 million deal for depleted uranium tank shells,” The Raw Story, March 2, 3006. posted at http://rawstory.com/news/2006/U.S._signs_38_million_deal_for_0302.html

5 Scott Peterson, “The Monitor finds high levels of radiation left by US armor-piercing shells,” Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 2003.

6 Interview with physicist Michio Kaku, in Poison Dust, a 2005 film by Sara Flounders and Sue Harris, available from the Peoples Rights Fund Poison Dust Project, 212-633-6646, or at www.poisondust.com

7 email from Doug Rokke, July 14, 2007.

8 According to Maj. Doug Rokke, former director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, at the time of the fire the 3rd U.S. Army Materiel Command’s (AMC) DU assessment recovery team was well aware of the hazards. So were the commanding officers on the scene who, unfortunately, failed to implement the safety procedures specified in US Army Technical Bulletin 9-1300-2378. Email from Doug Rokke, July 14, 2007.

9 The pertinent document is U.S. Army Technical Bulletin 9-1300-278, Guidelines for Safe Response to Handling, Storage and Transportation Accidents Involving Army Tank Munitions or Armor Which Contain Depleted Uranium, July 21, 1996.

10 email from Doug Rokke, July 14, 2007.

11 “Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium Use in the US Army,” US Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI), June, 1995, p. 87.

12 Roke’s team also prepared several reports and documents, including: US Army Regulation 700-48, US Army PAM 700-48, and the DU CTT: Task number: 031-503-1017 “RESPOND TO DEPLETED URANIUM/LOW LEVEL RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS (DULLRAM) HAZARDS”, STP 21-1-SMCT: Soldiers Manual of Common Tasks, Headquarters Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.

13 David Rose, “Weapons of Self-Destruction,” Vanity Fair, November, 2004.

14 David Edwards, “Army made video warning about dangers of depleted uranium but never showed it to troops, February 6, 2007. posted at http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/CNN_Agent_Orange_tame_compared_to_0206.html

15 David Rose, “Weapons of Self-Destruction,” Vanity Fair, November, 2004.

16 Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn, “The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators,” Los Alamos National Laboratory memorandum, March 1, 1991.

17 In April 2003 Assistant Secretary of Defense William Winkenwerder claimed that only two members of Rokke’s team had died. See his letter “Depleted uranium poses no risks to troops,” Miami Herald, April 14, 2003.

18 Harley, N., Foulkes, E., Hilborne, L., Hudson, A., Anthony, C.R., “A Review of the Scientific Literature as it Pertains to Gulf War Illnesses: Vol. 7 Depleted Uranium,” National Defense Research Institute (RAND), 1999. Also see Berlin, M., and B. Rudell, “Uranium,” in L. Friberg, G. F. Nordberg, V. B. Vouk, eds., Handbook on the Toxicology of Metals, 2nd ed., New York: Elsevier, 1986, pp. 617-637.

19 Spencer, H. S., D. Osis, I. M. Fisenne, P. Perry, N. H. Harley, “Measured Intake and Excretion Patterns of Naturally Occurring 238U and Calcium in Humans,” Radiation Res, 24, 1990, pp. 90-95. The RAND team conceded, however, that in studies of rats GI absorption was greater in juvenile rats, compared with adults, which suggests that children are more vulnerable than adults. Foulkes, E. C., and D. Bergman, “Inorganic Mercury Absorption and Mature and Immature Rat Jejunum: Transcellular and Intercellular Pathways in Vivo and in Everted Sacs,” Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, 120, 1993, pp. 89-95.

20 Gretel Munroe, “Health Effects of Depleted Uranium,” Grassroots Actions for Peace, Military Toxics Project, October 2004.

21 “US Army Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategy Study,” AMCCOM, 1990: D(1); also see J.A. Glissmeyer et al., Characterization Of Airborne Uranium From Test Firings Of XM774 Ammunition. This study may be viewed on line at http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Airborne-Uranium-Glissmeyer1nov79.htm; also see J.A. Glissmeyer, J. Mishima, and J.A. Bamberger, “Prototype Firing Range Air Cleaning System,” 19th DOE Nuclear Airborne Waste Management and Air Cleaning Confer., Baltimore, Maryland 12-16 August, 1984, pp. 846-872.

22 “Army not Adequately Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination,” US General Accounting Office , GAO/NSIAD-93-90, January 1993.

23 Hearing of the Presidential Special Oversight Board, George Washington University, July 13, 1999, posted at http://www.oversight.ncr.gov/xcript_hearing_13jul99.html#rand

24 Pelmar, et al, “Distribution of uranium in rats implanted with depleted uranium fragments,” Toxicological Sciences, Vol. 49, pp.2-

39, 1999; McDiarmid, et al, “Health effects of depleted uranium on exposed Gulf War veterans,” Environmental Research, Vol. 82 (2) February, 2000, pp. 168-80.

25 Elizabeth Neuffer, “Iraqis Trace Surge in Cancer to US Bombings,” Boston Globe, January 26, 2003.

26 Larry Johnson, “Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on US depleted uranium,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 12, 2002.

27 This is the work of Dr, Eric Wright, professor of Experimental Haematology at the University of Dundee. For an overview of his work go to http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pathology/ew.htm

28 “When Cells are exposed to uranium they acquire mutations,” Medical News Today, April 9, 2006. Strearn’s research was published in the journals Mutagenesis and Molecular Carcinogenesis.

29 Alexandra C. Miller, et al, “Depleted uranium-catalyzed oxidative DNA damage: absence of significant alpha particle decay,” Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Vol. 91 (2002), pp. 246-252.

30 Ian Sample and Nic Fleming, “When the dust settles,” The Guardian, April 17, 2003.

31 BBC Press Release: US and UK military continued to use depleted uranium weapons despite cancer warnings, October 10, 2006.
32 Asaf Durakovic, “Undiagnosed Illnesses and Radioactive Warfare,” Croatian Medical Journal, 2003, Vol. 44, pp. 526.

33 Dr Thomas Fasy presented the results of the Basra study on June 14, 2003 at the NPRI conference on “The Health Effects of DU” at the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Fasy is an Associate Professor of Pathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and had traveled to Basra some months before where he met with the Iraqi doctors. The title of his talk was “The Recent Epidemic of Malignancies and Congenital Malformations in Southern Iraq: the biological plausibility of DU as a carcinogen and teratogen.”

34 Dr. Hari Sharma, “Investigations of Environmental Impacts from the Deployment of Depleted Uranium-Based Munitions, December 2003. The paper is available through the Military Toxics Project at www.miltoxproj.org

35 Robert Collier, “Iraq Links Cancers to Uranium Weapons,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2003.

36 Some shocking photos are posted at http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/extremedeformities.html

37 Doug Westerman, “Depleted Uranium – Far Worse Than 9/11,” Global Research, May 3, 2006.

38 Beyond Treason, a film by William Lewis, available from Gulf War Vets. http://www.beyondtreason.com/

39 Rick Atkinson and Ann Devroy, “US Claims Iraqi Nuclear Reactors Hit Hard,” Washington Post, January 21, 1991.

40 DoE press release: Past Recycled Uranium Programs Under Review as Energy Department Investigation Continues (provides updated information on Cold War era operations), September 29, 1999. NATO was forced to make a similar admission in 2001 after the UNEP team independently assayed DU fragments from Kosovo. NATO press release, January 18, 2001

41 Karl Grossman, “US Plans to Wage War in Space,” presentation in Toronto, Canada, October, 2000.

42 For an excellent discussion see Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, New York, Delta, 1982, pp. 94-101.

43 Ibid.

44 Press release: July 7, 2005: Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). Cancer Risks for Women and Children Due to Radiation Exposure Far HIgher Than for Men. New National Academy of Sciences Report Raises Major Issues for Radiation Protection, Independent Institute Claims. The title of the report: The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation.

Also see America’s Use of Radiological Weapons Part II

But what led AEC scientists to seriously underestimate the radiation dangers in the 1950s and 1960s? The question is important because it bears on the depleted uranium issue. At the time there were no studies of the internal effects of low-level radiation. The presumed risk was an extrapolation from studies of the incidence of cancer and leukemia in the atomic survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both cases the primary source of exposure was assumed to be external: a brief but intense shower of neutrons and gamma radiation. The burst was extremely penetrating and distributed over the human body as a whole, for which reason physicists calculated cancer risk as an average whole-body dose. This approach led them to estimate zero-risk for low-level radiation, i.e., radioactive fallout. Why? Because when a low-level dose is averaged over the body, or even over an organ, the calculated risk is vanishingly small. This is why many scientists in government and industry insist, even today, that something other than leaked radiation must be causing the cancer clusters frequently reported downwind from nuclear plants. The same approach led Frank von Hippel, an authority on nuclear weapons, to conclude that the health risks from depleted uranium are “statistically undetectable,” except in cases of embedded DU shrapnel wounds.[45]

This standard method of determining radiation risk is flawed, however. In the first place, because the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unmonitored, the calculated release of radiation was not based on firm numbers, but on estimates; and by 1981 it was clear that the estimates were in error. In fact, physicists had over-estimated the release of neutrons by as much as ten times.[46] This meant that the impact per unit of radiation was actually worse, since a much lower level of radiation had caused the cancers and leukemias. This was not good news for nuclear advocates. Furthermore, the follow-up studies of atomic survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts were not designed to capture information about low-level effects. The sampling was geared to screen for burst effects, hence, was much too limited. One 30-year study, for example, tracked only those survivors who happened to be within 2,000 yards of the epicenter. This guaranteed that many of the subsequent cancers and birth defects due to fallout would go undetected.[47]

The more fundamental problem is that the standard risk model was developed before the discovery of DNA. It’s interesting that in his memoirs Andrei Sakharov mentions the tremendous impact that Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix had on him. In the mid-1950s Sakharov began to worry that nuclear fallout was causing genetic damage and killing babies. In 1957 he warned that nuclear testing up to that point had already caused 500,000 deaths from “non-threshold,” i.e., low-level effects, and this was a conservative estimate.[48] Linus Pauling’s estimates were even higher. On this basis Sakharov, Pauling and others began to call for an end to atmospheric testing. This was finally realized in 1963 with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty; after which, interestingly, the world infant mortality rate began to drop again, after leveling off from 1950-1963. Indeed, after studying the figures on infant mortality an American scientist, Dr. Ernest Sternglass, shocked the scientific community when he announced in 1968 that atmospheric testing had caused the deaths of 375,000 babies in the US alone, mainly from the effects of radioactive iodine-131.[49] His estimate triggered a fierce debate that sunk to the level of personal attacks against Sternglass. However, in retrospect, his estimate may well have been correct.

It is a fact of biology, not physics, that living cells are variably sensitive to radiation. This is why continuous emission from a radioactive source within the body, even a low-level source, can have a comparable or even greater impact than a brief burst of high-level radiation. When cells are quiescent, the usual state in an adult, cells are much more resistant to radiation than when undergoing cell division or repair, both of which involve DNA replication. In fact, during DNA replication cells are 600 times more sensitive.[50] This explains why continuous internal low-level radiation caused by nuclear fallout or DU is so serious. It’s no wonder that infants and children are so vulnerable. Their rapidly growing bodies are adding many new cells, hence, are replicating DNA at a much faster rate. Photomicrographs of “hot particles” in lung tissue also illustrate why the standard approach of averaging a low-level dose over the whole body is wrong.[51] In the photos the particles assume a characteristic star pattern. The rays are the many tracks of alpha particles in process of irradiating nearby cells. Compared with x-rays and gamma rays, alpha particles are large and massive, hence, do not travel far in the body. Yet, for this very reason all of their energy is deposited near the point of emission. Over time, the local impact of low-level radiation is more than enough to account for the mutagenic effects of fallout–––and DU.

In 2001, news reports of cancer clusters in the Balkans were not so easily dismissed as nothing but Serbian propaganda; and when twenty-four NATO peacekeepers died from leukemia that same year a wave of concern swept across Europe. Portugal accused NATO of a DU cover-up and pulled its troops out of Kosovo. Italy called for a moratorium on the use of DU weapons; and this was echoed by France, Germany, Norway and Greece.[52] Some nations began to screen their soldiers for DU exposure. In Kosovo a UN a team sent to investigate found low-level beta radiation at eight of eleven sites where DU weapons had been used. According to Pekka Havisto, the former Finnish minister of the environment who headed up the team, the sites included villages where children were seen playing.[53] In Bosnia-Herzegovina the UN team detected airborne DU particles at two sites, and confirmed DU contamination of a local water supply. They also discovered that spent DU rounds were corroding rapidly in the soil. Seven years after the Bosnian war, the fragments had already lost 25% of their mass. The team estimated that within 25-35 years the shells would disintegrate completely, and thus posed a serious threat to ground water.[54] The UN team prudently recommended that all the fragments be promptly collected and removed. They also urged precautionary measures, such as the monitoring of air and water supplies. In 2003 Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, the Royal Society, repeated their advice when it called on the US and UK to clean up the DU fragments scattered across Iraq during the two Gulf wars.[55] But Washington refused. During a BBC interview the Pentagon’s spokesperson, Lt. Col. David Lapan, reiterated the by-now familiar position that “there are no long-term effects from DU;” hence, no need for a clean-up.[56]

In August 2001, after many invitations by the Iraqi government, the World Health Organization (WHO) sent a delegation to Baghdad to investigate the reported increase in cancer rates and birth defects.[57] The initial WHO visit prompted discussions at the United Nations, and proposals for continued monitoring and research in order to confirm whether DU was responsible. The result was a UN resolution, which came before the General Assembly in November 2001.[58] However, in the emotionally charged aftermath of the September 11 attack, the US used its considerable influence to defeat the resolution. Soon after, the Bush administration launched a round-the-clock media blitz to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, hence, to the events of 9/11. This media circus had the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the growing concerns about the use of DU. Even though the Bush administration offered not a scrap of evidence, only rhetoric and innuendo, by the onset of the second Gulf War in March 2003, polls showed that a majority of Americans stood firmly behind the president. A shocked international community looked on in disbelief, and who can blame them, for the world knew better. The US mass media’s spectacular success in persuading a free society of this blatant lie was a propaganda triumph far beyond the dubious achievements of the Nazi Third Reich. Indeed, the episode is sufficiently horrifying that it should motivate all of us who care about our country to take sober stock of what America has become.

It’s likely that the Bush administration also had a hand in blocking the release of a 2001 World Health Organization (WHO) paper on the effects of DU. The monograph was the work of Dr. Keith Baverstock, the WHO’s top radiation expert for 11 years. In 2004, after his retirement, Baverstock charged that the WHO had suppressed his study. He told the London Sunday Herald that “…the widespread use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq could pose a unique health hazard to the civilian population. There is increasing scientific evidence that radioactivity and the chemical toxicity of DU causes more damage to human cells than is assumed.”[59] Later, in a BBC interview Baverstock described DU as “a potentially dangerous carcinogen.” He also hinted that political interference had prevented his paper from being released in 2001.[60] The doctor emphasized that his report, had it not been suppressed, would have increased pressure on the US and its UK ally to sharply limit their use of DU weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This begs the question: Just how much DU has the US expended since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001? The estimates range from 100-200 tons[61] to 2,200 tons, or more.[62] Unfortunately, today the actual amount is unknown because the Pentagon has refused to release this information, no doubt, because of mounting criticism. Yet, there are indications that the upper DU estimates may be closer to the true figure. A medical team dispatched to Afghanistan in May 2002 found “astonishing levels” of uranium in the urine of everyone they tested.

Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who organized this monitoring effort, is a former professor of medicine at Georgetown University. Years earlier, in 1999, he had reported DU in the urine of US Gulf War veterans. Eight years after Desert Storm the vets were still excreting copious amounts of uranium. However, the level in the samples from Afghanistan was many times higher, in fact, an astounding 100-400 times higher.[63] Durakovic concluded on this basis that the US military used even greater quantities of DU weapons in Afghanistan than during the first Gulf War, perhaps including a new class of DU penetrators. His team gathered the samples in Nangarhar province, a strategically important area that includes Kabul, Jalalabad and also Tora Bora, where the US probably used bunker-buster and seismic shock weapons. A second batch of samples taken in September 2002 confirmed the first survey, and also demonstrated contamination over a “potentially much broader area.” The team found sick Afghanis everywhere US bombing had occurred, and the sick displayed the by-now familiar symptoms of Gulf War illness. Durakovic told the BBC he was “stunned” by the results. He made it clear he believes DU is implicated, since “in Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, and nobody had been vaccinated.” Then, he added, “if [the lab’s] Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster. Every subsequent generation is at risk.”

At the time of the first Gulf War Dr. Durakovic headed up a nuclear medicine program at a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Then an Army Colonel, Durakovic only learned after the war that DU weapons had been used. “I was horrified,” he said. “I was a soldier, but above all, I am a doctor.”[64] When sick veterans approached him in 1993 Durakovic attempted to care for them, but soon got into trouble with his superiors and lost his job. He says two other doctors, Dr. Burroughs and Dr. Slingerland at a VA facility in Boston, also ran into trouble when they tried to order the medical equipment needed to test for DU in the body.

Durakovic eventually had to leave the United States after warnings that his life was in danger because of his work on behalf of sick veterans. In September 2000 Durakovic told a conference of nuclear scientists in Paris that tens of thousands of American and British soldiers were dying from their exposure to depleted uranium.[65] He presented evidence obtained with a mass spectrometer, documenting the presence of DU in the lungs, bones and other organs of dead veterans.[66] The findings confirmed his suspicion that inhaled particles of DU move throughout the human body. Durakovic has not minced words about DU. He says these are radiological weapons that kill indiscriminately.[67] He also emphasizes that infants and children are the most affected because their developing bodies are especially sensitive to the effects of ionizing radiation.

Recent evidence that aerosolized DU particles can travel long distances supports Durakovic’s assertion that DU has indiscriminate effects. In February 2006 the London Sunday Times reported that within days of the Shock and Awe phase of the second Gulf War radiation detectors in the UK recorded a four-fold spike in air-born uranium.[68]

Since the 1980s Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has been required to monitor air samples at five nuclear plants (Aldermaston, Green Audit, Castle Cottage, Sea View Place, and Aberystwyth) following the discovery of a child-leukemia cluster near one of the facilities. The samples are regularly collected by special high-volume air filters. After the second Gulf War Dr. Chris Busby, a professor at Liverpool University, sought to obtain the sampling data for analysis, in order to scrutinize the government’s position that depleted uranium used in combat does not travel more than a few tens of meters before falling out of the air. Busby, a well-known government advisor on low-level radiation, eventually did obtain the samples, but only after a lengthy freedom-of-information battle. Although the Halliburton Corporation, which currently manages the UK’s nuclear plants for the British government, refused to release the data, in the end Busby obtained the recordings from a separate government agency. Laboratory analyses of the samples then showed that within nine days of the start of the March 2003 bombing of Iraq all five sites in the UK registered a sudden rise in the level of uranium. On two occasions the levels exceeded the threshold requiring notification of the UK’s Environmental Agency. In March 2006 Busby’s research was published in a European science journal.[69] In his paper Busby and co-author Saoirse Morgan also presented meteorological data supporting their contention that the prevailing winds had carried the DU-laden dust/ash first northward from Iraq, then westward across Europe.

Their charge that the use of DU shells during the war exposed much of Europe to breathable uranium dust touched a raw political nerve in the UK. Negative reaction was swift. Britain’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) summarily dismissed the charge. A number of experts agreed with the MoD, and insisted that the uranium had to be of local origin. However, no one was able to identify a source in the UK. One of the experts who took issue with Busby’s paper, Brian Spratt, offered a different hypothesis. Spratt, who had chaired a DU study for the Royal Society, conceded that the uranium might have come from Iraq on the wind. He argued, however, that the probable source was not DU but natural uranium from the Iraqi desert: stirred up by the US-UK invasion force.[70] Spratt’s hypothesis was absurd, since Iraq has no significant deposits of natural uranium. Yet, it was typical of the hasty responses occasioned by Busby’s controversial paper, as officials and experts scurried about frantically trying to explain why the highest levels of uranium ever detected in the atmosphere over Britain just happened to coincide with the March 2003 attack on Saddam Hussein. Busby was not the first, however, to present hard evidence that DU dust is highly mobile. Air monitors in Hungary and Greece detected a similar spike in airborne uranium in the 1990s after the NATO bombing of Kosovo and Bosnia; and, like Busby they too concluded it had arrived on the wind, an ill omen.[71]

It is well-known that smoke and dust can travel long distances. Dust from the Gobi desert frequently blows across the Pacific to the American West, and ice cores taken from glaciers and ice sheets provide a historical record of global volcanic activity. Certainly DU particles in the soil can be re-suspended by desert wind-storms, which are common in the Mideast. But re-suspension is not the only concern. According to Leuren Moret, a geologist and former employee of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, DU particles less than a micron in size can remain suspended in the atmosphere for long periods.[72] Moret has studied wind transport systems and she says Busby is quite correct. DU particles can circle the globe within a matter of weeks, hence, are likely to contaminate food and water supplies thousands of miles from the point of origin, just as nuclear fallout did in the era of atmospheric testing.[73] Moret warns that the long-term consequences of DU dispersal are likely to be similar. The effects may also mimic the Chernobyl disaster, by now well-documented despite a Russian cover-up and continuing efforts by the IAEA to downplay the extent of the tragedy. In Belarus, even districts not in the direct path of the radioactive plume later suffered a disturbing increase in cancers, birth defects, infant mortality, and a drop in IQ scores and life expectancy. Diseases formerly seen only in the elderly are now commonplace in younger age groups. In fact, by every measure the health of the population has declined.[74] Moret calls this “genetic mutilation” and she warns that because of DU’s 4.5 billion year half-life, the impacts will only grow more serious over time. Five-hundred years from now, assuming the human race survives, no one will remember why the first and second Gulf Wars were fought, but depleted uranium will still be wreaking havoc with the human gene pool and in the wider biosphere. Moret points out that shortly after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq the World Health Organization (WHO) predicted a doubling of world cancer rates by 2020.[75] What prompted the dire prognostication? Did the US military’s expenditure of DU weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan have something to do with it? Moret thinks the timing was not just a coincidence.

Obviously, the US general staff is blind to the simple truth that nothing, certainly not short-term military expedience, can justify the long-term consequences of using DU weapons. The Pentagon cannot plead ignorance, because, in addition to the sources already mentioned, a leaked official document proves that the general staff was informed about DU’s toxic effects as early as 1943, when three top US scientists sent a report to Brigadier Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.[76] Their report was titled the “Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon” and it was signed by Drs. James B. Conant, Arthur. H. Compton, and Harold C. Urey. Dr. Conant chaired the Chemistry department at Harvard and went on to become president of that prestigious university. During World War I he helped to develop mustard gas for the US Army. Compton, even more famous, discovered Compton scattering of electromagnetic radiation by electrons, also known as the Compton effect, for which he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927. Harold Urey discovered deuterium, one of the isotopes of hydrogen, and demonstrated the existence of “heavy” water, for which he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1934. During the Manhattan Project, Urey also helped to develop the gaseous diffusion method of enriching uranium, the preferred method still in use today. In short, all three men were extremely capable scientists, and in their 1943 report to Groves they described how depleted uranium could be made into a gas warfare agent by grinding the substance into particles of microscopic size. Their report explained that DU weapons would be delivered using “ground-fired projectiles” and ”distributed in a dust or smoke form so finely powdered that it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging.” The report mentioned that such weapons could be used as a “terrain contaminant,” that is, to deny the enemy access to large areas of territory. It even predicted the kinds of respiratory problems experienced by Doug Rokke’s team. In short, the 1943 report described in chilling detail the very weapon later developed by the US Department of Defense.

A number of disturbing conclusions follow from all of this. They are unpleasant but must be faced squarely. In recent years, White House spokespersons and national security advisers have repeatedly warned that Islamic terrorists could strike cities in the US with radiological weapons.[77] In recent days we’ve heard these same warnings repeated, again, this time in especially shrill tones. Based on the above evidence, however, it’s clear that America’s leaders have already done what we’ve accused terrorists of only planning to do. Worse, they’ve done it on a greater scale. America’s use of DU weapons has already caused the deaths of hundreds of times more Iraqi and Afghani civilians, including women and children, than died in the 9/11 attack. Moreover, it is likely that the DU particles already released into the environment, given their insidious effects and 4.5 billion year half-life, will go on killing innocent people for a very long time, indeed, perhaps for the rest of human history, essentially for all of time. In short, our leaders have permanently fouled our nest: the ultimate atrocity. They cannot plead ignorance. As I have shown, the toxic effects of DU were understood even at the time of the Manhattan Project. Our leaders knew the facts, but used the weapons anyway, probably because they just didn’t care–––a breach of trust with the American people so odious it can only be compared with an earlier US government policy of utilizing American GIs as guinea pigs during the period of atmospheric testing. We know that at least 300,000 American soldiers were willfully exposed to high levels of radiation during dozens of nuclear tests; not to mention the millions of American civilians who were also exposed to the fallout.[78]

In short, our leaders are guilty of not merely incompetence, nor even malfeasance, but of outright terrorism. Indeed, if the use of DU weapons is not terrorism, the word has no meaning. No doubt, for this reason, in June 2007, at a conference in Vancouver, BC, a gathering of 9/11 scholars and peace activists called for the creation of an international tribunal to hold America’s leaders accountable for crimes against humanity and the environment. Their brave initiative deserves our support, because it is absurd to think the US government will police itself. Thus far, the US Congress has shown no sign of providing the necessary leadership. What is clear is that if we fail to end the use of these weapons and bring the guilty to justice, the people of the world will hold all Americans collectively responsible; and rightly so. Our leaders’ reckless and immoral use of DU weapons in the name of freedom has seriously undermined not only America’s standing in the world, but also her security. Far from enhancing our security, DU weapons have made us much more vulnerable. When the peoples of the earth learn the terrible truth about what we’ve done, they will hate us more than ever; and if they insist on retribution we will be lucky to escape retaliatory strikes against American cities.

With regard to 9/11, a further conclusion also appears inescapable. Given that our leaders knowingly used weapons certain to kill, injure and maim tens of thousands of our own soldiers, is it not likely they are also capable of murdering a smaller number of American civilians on 9/11 for similar reasons, i.e., out of political expedience? Given the naked facts, it would be hard to conclude anything else.

NOTES

45 Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel, “After the dust settles,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November-December 1999, pp. 42-45.

46 Eliot Marshall, “New A-Bomb Studies Alter Radiation Estimates,” Science, Vol. 212, May 22, 1981; also see Eliot Marshall, New A-Bomb Data Shown to Experts,” Science, Vol. 212, June 19, 1981.

47 William J Schull et al, “Genetic Effects of the Atomic Bombs: A Reappraisal,” Science, Vol. 213, September, 1981, pp.1220-1227.

48 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1990, p. 202.

49 Ernest J. Sternglass, “Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 25, 1969, pp. 26-28.

50 For an excellent discussion see the paper that Dr. Chris Busby presented to the Royal Society in 2000: Science on Trial, posted at http://www.llrc.org/du/subtopic/durs.htm

51 For an example go to http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Hot-Particle-Lung-Tissue1997.htm

52 Dr. Ali Ahmed Rind, “Clear and Present Danger: The Balkan Syndrome,” Baltimore Chronicle, December 5, 2001.

53 Helen Caldicott MD., The New Nuclear Danger, The New Press, New York, 2002, p. 159.

54 “Depleted Uranium Contaminates Bosnia-Herzegovina,” ens-newswire, March 25, 2003.

55 Paul Brown, “Scientists urge shell clean-up to protect civilians,” The Guardian, April 17, 2003.

56 Alex Kirby, “US rejects Iraq DU clean-up,” BBC News Online, April 14, 2003. In February 2002 the Pentagon formally appealed to Congress for relief from environmental regulations that it claimed was impeding crucial exercises and combat readiness. The military’s concerns were not limited to relief from protecting endangered habitat and threatened species. Although the request made no mention of DU, its list of complaints included a case on a gunnery range at the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod where a live-fire training exercises were terminated after munitions contaminated ground water. Vernon Loeb, “Rules on Environment Concern Pentagon: Military Says Laws Inhibit Training,” Washington Post, January 13, 2002.

57 WHO to probe Depleted Uranium in Iraq, WHO press release, September 5, 2001.

58 Irwin Arieff, “US Wins Defeat of Deleted Uranium Study,” Reuters, November 30, 2001.

59 Rob Edwards, “WHO suppressed scientific study into depleted uranium cancer fears in Iraq,” Sunday Herald, February 22, 2004.

60 BBC Press Release: US and UK military continued to use depleted uranium weapons despite cancer warnings, October 10, 2006.

61 Dan Fahey, “he Use of Depleted Uranium in the 2003 Iraq War: An Initial Assessment of Information and Policies,” June 24, 2003.

62 “The use of Depleted Uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, August 4, 2003.

63 Alex Kirby, “Afghans’ uranium levels spark alert,” BBC News Online, May 22, 2003.

64 Felicity Arbuthnot, “Depleted Uranium – A Way Out? Compensation to those affected by this poisoned legacy,” Global Research, June 3, 2007.

65 Jonathan Carr-Brown and Martin Meissonnier, “Tests show Gulf war victims have uranium poisoning,” London Sunday Times, September 3, 2000.

66 Horan P., Dietz L., and Durakovic A., “The quantitative Analysis of depleted uranium isotopes in British, Canadian, and US Gulf War veterans,” Military Medicine, Vol. 167, 2002, pp. 620-627; also see Mil. Med. Vol. 168, 2003, p. 474.

67 Asaf Durakovic, “Undiagnosed Illnesses and Radioactive Warfare,” Croatian Medical Journal, Vl. 44 (5)2003, pp. 52-523.

68 Mark Gould and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, “UK radiation jump blamed on Iraq shells,” The Sunday Times (London), February 19, 2006.

69 Christopher Busby and Saoirse Morgan, “Did the use of Uranium weapons in Gulf War 2 result in contamination of Europe?”, European Biology and Bioelectromagnetics, March 2006.

70 Mark Gould and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, “UK radiation jump blamed on Iraq shells,” The Sunday Times (London), February 19, 2006.

71 A. Kerekes et. al, “Did NATO Attacks in Yugoslavia Cause a Detectable Environmental Effect in Hungary?”, Health Physics, Vol. 80 (2), February 2001, pp. 177-178.

72 talk by Leuren Moret, “Depleted Uranium: Nuclear Holocaust and The Politics of Radiation, Los Altos, California, sponsored by the Women’s Solidarity Movement, April 21, 2003, posted at http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.htm

73 conversation with Leuren Moret, January 12, 2007.

74 C.C.Busby and A.V. Yablokov, editors, Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident, published on behalf of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) by Green Audit, Brussels, 2006. For a summary and free download go to http://www.llrc.org/index.html

75 Press release, “Concerted action is the only answer to rising cancer deaths: Two million lives could be saved by 2020 and 6.5 million lives by 2040 according to a new WHO/UICC cancer booklet,” June 3, 2003.

76 Memorandum to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, posted at http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm

77 Bill Gertz, “Reports reveal Zarqawi nuclear threat,” The Washington Times, April 20, 2005.

78 Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, Dell Publishing, New York, 1981, see especially chapter two, p. 31

Also see America’s Use of Radiological Weapons Part I

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. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defence was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

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. The answer to that question is still unclear,” he said, adding that there has as yet been little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. “Funding for DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard,” he added.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2074419,00.html

Since early July, Israeli forces have been using a new weapon in the Gaza Strip that inflicts strange and deadly wounds. Doctors and medics say the unidentified device has significantly increased fatalities from Israel’s attacks. (1)(2)

In the first two parts (part I, part II) of this article we reviewed evidence that Israel’s new weapon may be Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), a “low collateral damage” weapon developed by the US Air Force. The DIME bomb’s “micro-shrapnel” is reportedly made of HMTA, a tungsten alloy that disrupts body biochemistry, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA (genotoxic). (3-9)

DIME weapons are “spin-offs” from the military’s “bunker buster” research. Initially, “bunker busters” were made with depleted uranium (DU), which had already been used in armor-piercing bombs, bullets, and artillery shells. (10)

The former director of the US Army’s Depleted Uranium project, Dr. Douglas Rokke, warns us that DU is an “illegal…radioactive toxic material”, the use of which “is absolutely unacceptable, and a crime against humanity.” (11)

During Gulf War I, US forces deployed more than 300 tons of DU in Iraq. A few years later, more was dropped during Operation Desert Fox. Iraqi doctors reported alarming rises in the incidence of cancer, leukemia, and birth defects, in clusters closely correlated with US bombsites. Scientists found strong links between DU and Gulf War Syndrome, which is slowly killing thousands of veterans. (12-14)

Despite the science, the vets, and the tragedies in Iraq, the US has stubbornly refused to end its use of DU. US-UK forces may have expended more than 2000 additional tons of DU in Iraq since March 2003. Nowadays, however, commanders are supposed to warn GIs to avoid contact with the results of their work. (15)

After the 2001-2002 bombing of Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical Research Centre (UMRC) found that the urine of Afghanis living near US bombing sites contained 4 to 20 times the normal level of non-depleted uranium (NDU). These unexpected results could not “be explained by…any known geological or other features in the area.”

UMRC researchers were “shocked” that, “without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill…[with] symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium.” (13)

Their field results indicated that our weapons scientists had “progressed” beyond DU to NDU, a processed form of pure uranium that is even more toxic than the depleted form. The “slightly enriched” uranium reported from recent Israeli bombsites in Lebanon may possibly be NDU from modified GBU 28 ‘bunker busters’ supplied by the United States. (16)(17)

Considering the scope of their destructive power, DU and NDU may be said to function as Dual-Purpose Munitions, like cluster bomblets that kill both tanks and people. As their exotic metallurgy “burns” through concrete and steel, DU and NDU bombs are converted to micron-sized particles that sicken and kill and murder the next generation in the womb.(18)(19)

Agent Orange, an herbicide heavily used during the war on Vietnam, also performed two functions. It obliterated the ‘jungle cover hiding the Viet Cong’ while it ‘weakened the enemy’ with burns, illness, and death, and corrupted the DNA of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. The third generation of its disfigured and suffering victims is now being born.(20)(21)

This madness seems to have begun during World War II, within the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb. In a 1943 memo to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, three researchers proposed steps to develop:

“a gas warfare instrument” [of radioactive material, such as uranium] “ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke….in this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulating in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.” (22)

The good doctors were concerned the Germans might be preparing such a weapon. They urged the Army to be ready to respond, or act, in kind. General Groves promptly followed their recommendations.

The toxic HMTA “micro-shrapnel” spewed by DIME weapons appears to be the latest development in a long string of carcinogenic and genotoxic weapons developed and deployed by the US military.

Israel has denied using DIME weapons. Nonetheless, Israel’s military has used the occupied Palestinian territories as a weapons development zone for decades, testing bright ideas like depleted uranium and poison gases. It would not surprise us to find that it is now testing a weapon for the US Air Force on Palestinians in Gaza. (23)

Unfortunately, the DIME hypothesis is the most plausible explanation for the grotesque effects of Israel’s new weapon. We can only pray that we have not witnessed the first experiment in the effects of embedded HMTA in human subjects.

Still, DIME may not explain all of the evidence. For example, one of the metals found in victims’ wounds was copper. DIME bombs are not known to contain significant copper, but another US marvel, the Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW), sprays slugs of molten copper at its targets. Is Israel also testing the SFW? (24)(25)

If DIME weapons are designed to reduce civilian casualties, why has Israel’s ‘mystery weapon’ increased the civilian death toll? Perhaps this question should be addressed to the advocates of Focused Lethality Munitions, and to the remote-control operators of Israel’s drone aircraft and their commanders and politicians.

Although much remains unclear about Israel’s new weapon, a few devastating facts are indisputable:

The weapon causes enormous and indiscriminate pain and suffering.

It operates as both a chemical weapon and an anti-personnel explosive. At the very least, it is likely to induce heavy metal poisoning in its surviving victims.

The weapon has significantly increased civilian mortality rates, in part because it inflicts virtually untreatable wounds.

Despite this public parade of horrors, Israeli forces have continued to use this weapon against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for nearly five months.

“Whenever and wherever necessary”

If the DIME hypothesis is confirmed, authorities will probably explain that it is a new class of weapon not regulated by international law. The truth is that existing conventions and treaties have already prohibited some of the most egregious effects of the new weapon.

To cite one example, the bomb may be in direct violation of Protocol I of the ‘Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’, which “prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays.” (26)

We will likely be told that DIME weapons provide a more “humane” way to fight “terrorism” by “reducing collateral damage” and “helping US troops win hearts and minds”. At the same time, we’ll be assured that the new weapon “packs quite a punch” and will “give our troops more options” to “take the battle to the enemy”, even if he is “hiding among civilians”.

Whether Israel’s new weapon is the Air Force’s DIME bomb or another similarly dreadful invention, the horrors unfolding in Gaza make it clear that “Focused Lethality” is a blood-drenched lie. It promises only a deadlier form of indiscriminate warfare.

US plans to explode payloads of cancer-causing genotoxic heavy metal powder “wherever and whenever necessary” may portend an escalation of a campaign currently limited to the vicinity of “hard targets” we attack with DU and NDU. Whatever we make of the intent behind these weapons, the habitual result is chemical-genetic warfare. It cannot be allowed to continue.

References:

1) Gaza doctors say patients suffering mystery injuries after Israeli attacks
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, 10/18/2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1924675,00.html

2) Israel used chemical weapons in Lebanon and Gaza
By Jean Shaoul, Centre for Research on Globalization/wsws.org, 10/24/2006

http://wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/isra-o24.shtml

3) Abstract: Potential late health effects of depleted uranium and tungsten used in armor-piercing munitions: comparison of neoplastic transformation and genotoxicity with the known carcinogen nickel
Miller, AC, et al, PubMed, 11/26/2006

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11873492&dopt=Abstract

4) Neoplastic transformation of human osteoblast cells to the tumorigenic phenotype by heavy metal–tungsten alloy particles: induction of genotoxic effects
Miller, AC et al
Carcinogenesis, Vol. 22, No. 1, 115-125, January 2001, Oxford University Press

http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/22/1/115

5) Abstract: Carcinogenic Potential of Depleted Uranium and Tungsten Alloys
Alexandra C Miller, Ph. D., Department Of Defense, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI)

http://www.deploymentlink.osd.mil/du_library/reports/projects/dod122.htm

6) Depleted uranium-catalyzed oxidative DNA damage: absence of significant alpha particle decay
Miller, AC et al, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Issue 91, 2002 pp. 246– 252

http://www.afrri.usuhs.mil/www/outreach/pdf/tungsten_cancer.pdf

7) Embedded Weapons-Grade Tungsten Alloy Shrapnel Rapidly Induces Metastatic High-Grade Rhabdomyosarcomas in F344 Rats
Kalinich et al, Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 113, Number 6, June 2005

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7791/7791.html
Abstract: Effect of the militarily-relevant heavy metals, depleted uranium and heavy metal tungsten-alloy on gene expression in human liver carcinoma cells (HepG2)
By Miller, AC et al, SpringerLink/Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, 1/1/2004

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8830115617471jl/

9) Preconceptional paternal exposure to radiation or heavy metals like cadmium can induce cancer in unexposed offspring
By Alexandra C. Miller, Rafael Rivas, Robert J. Merlot and Paul, Carcinogenesis 5: Environmental and Endogenous Carcinogens/Proc Amer Assoc Cancer Res, Volume 47, 2006

http://www.aacrmeetingabstracts.org/cgi/content/abstract/2006/1/448-b

10) Cancer Worries for New U.S. Bombs
DefenseTech.org, 5/20/2006

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002434.html

11) Depleted Uranium and US-Israeli Bombs
By Dr. Doug Rokke, PhD, Media Lens, 7/24/2006

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1153759483.html

12) Dirty Weapons – Casualties From Iraq War Will Mount
By Chalmers Johnson, Pacific News Service, 5/3/2003

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=84a8df02a7c1f370c5ca152d5ef14d6b

13) Uranium Radiation Levels in Afghanistan Not Attributable to Depleted Uranium
Centre for Research on Globalization – Middle East, 6/5/2003

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/UMR306B.html

14) Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq: An Overview
By Prof Souad N. Al-Azzawi, Centre for Research on Globalization – Middle East, 8/31/2006

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=AL-20060831&articleId=3116

15) Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern
By Larry Johnson, Common Dreams, 8/4/2003

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0804-04.htm

16) Further Evidence Of Enriched Uranium In The Air In Lebanon Following The Recent Conflict
Stop Uranium Wars/Pandora DU research Project, 11/22/2006

http://www.stopuraniumwars.blogspot.com/

17) Mystery of Israel’s secret uranium bomb
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, 10/28/2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece

18) The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium
By Christopher Bollyn, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 8/6/2004

http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/06_bollyn_real-dirty-bombs.htm

19) Depleted Uranium
Australian Peace Committee, 12/2/2006

http://www.peacecourier.com/depleted_uranium.htm

20) Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign

http://www.vn-agentorange.org/

21) Agent Orange DNA injury confirmed in Vietnam veterans
By Patrick Gower, New Zealand Herald, 7/29/2006

http://subs.nzherald.co.nz/feature/story.cfm?c_id=500855&objectid=10393538

22) Memorandum to: Brigadier General L. R. Groves From: Drs. Conant, Compton, and Urey
Midfully.org/War Department, United States Engineer Office, Manhattan District, Oak Ridge Tennessee, 10/30/1943

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm

23) The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks
James Brooks, Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel

http://www.vtjp.org/report/

24) CBU-97
Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97

25) Textron Systems’ Sensor Fuzed Weapon Production to Include Maritime Capability
Textron Systems Corporation, 8/10/2006
www.systems.textron.com/mainframe/pressroom/archives/2006/08_10_06.html

26) Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons…
United Nations: International Law, 10/10/1980

http://www.un.org/millennium/law/xxvi-18-19.htm