| Depleted uranium -- a way out? [Please write the French Government -- TODAY] | |
| TEHRAN, Nov. 19 (MNA) -- The term Persian Gulf War Syndrome is now known worldwide -- but -- after the 1991 Iraq war, as formerly A1 fit soldiers fell ill with debilitating symptoms in their thousands, the cause was, for two years, a “mystery”. | |
It was in 1993, when a group of twenty-four affected soldiers approached Professor Asaf Durakovic, one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of radiation, that a cause came to light. They had many times the “safe” level of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium (DU) in their bodies. Durakovic, although a senior officer in the U.S. Army during the first Persian Gulf War, had been unaware that the weapons used had contained depleted uranium. “I was horrified,” he said. “I was a soldier, but above all I am a doctor.” By 1997, it was estimated that ninety thousand Durakovic, who is also medical consultant for the Children of Chernobyl project at Two other physicians, Dr. Burroughs and Dr. Slingerland of the Oddly, all the records pertaining to the sick soldiers at the Two years before Durakovic’s discovery, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) “self initiated” a report warning the government that if fifty tons of the residual dust from the explosions of the weapons on impact was left “in the region”, they estimated it would generate “half a million” extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (2000.) Further, “depleted” is a misnomer. These weapons are made from waste from the nuclear fuel cycle and thus contain the whole lethal nuclear cocktail. DU weapons (sold to seventeen countries that are known and possibly others -- why let poisoning the planet and its population get in the way of numerous millions of quick bucks) are equivalent to spreading the contents of a nuclear reactor around the globe. And far from fifty tons and that chilling warning, in Strangely, this time, there have been few reports of soldiers with the terrible effects of 1991, where they were only in the region for a few weeks. Although troops now remain for months or a year, Persian Gulf War Syndrome mark 2 seems not an issue. Perhaps it is because, reportedly, doctors treating returning troops have been threatened with jail and or hefty fines if they say anything regarding DU-related symptoms. The implication regarding compensation to countries affected by this poisoned legacy (DU’s lethality lasts for four and a half billion years) and troops is financially stratospheric. Since the 2003 invasion, In Bosnia and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia where DU weapons were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally in neighboring countries, by the U.S., to whom all the world’s lives are seemingly cheap) the “Iraq Syndrome” quickly became apparent. Even European peacekeepers on relatively short tours of duty became ill and developed leukemia and other cancers, and a number died. A five man film crew from BBC Scotland all tested DU positive after filming for less than a week there. Afghanistan too was “liberated” in 2001, by uranium weapons, which continue to be routinely used, condemning generations yet to be born to deformities and the living -- the newborn and under fives the most susceptible -- to cancers and other horrific DU-related conditions. Durakovic also found high levels of uranium in hospital patients there, as there will undoubtedly be in the occupying forces. He also found identical conditions to “Children born with no limbs, no eyes, or with tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes.” The latest country to fall victim to uranium weapons is He then noted a report in Lebanon’s Daily Star saying that Dr. Khobeisi, a scientist, had measured gamma radiation in a bomb crater at Khiam in the south of the country, at ten to twenty times higher (samples taken from different locations in the crater) than naturally occurring background radiation. The following month, independent researcher Dai Williams** went to “The results were astonishing.” Both soil and filter contained enriched uranium with the soil sample containing uranium about nine times higher than the natural background. (Remember how threatening the West has become towards The soil sample was also sent to the Busby asks, There are two other chilling possibilities says Busby: a fusion bomb or a thermobaric bomb, both of which would need enriched uranium. Certainly, doctors were reporting bodies in conditions they could find in no medical manuals, as in the attack on Lebanese authorities denied the presence of enriched uranium; The samples tested had already cost £2,000. Donations from an Arab friend and Swiss supporters totaled £850 -- and Dai Williams had paid the rest out of his own money. More work is needed, but it is now known that the IDF used enriched uranium in “Since it is in the ambulance air filter, it is also in the lungs of the inhabitants… the Lebanese people have been sacrificed to cancers, leukemia, birth defects, like the people of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Busby, adding, “and it may be worse: since we still do not know what the weapon was.” And have these weapons been used on the people of In context, Green Audit studied airborne uranium at sites in the As with the radionuclides from Can anything be done to halt the use of these genocidal weapons? Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the Boyle points out that the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices.” Clearly, he says, DU is “analogous” to poison gas. The government of “All that needs to be done is for anti-DU citizens, activists and NGOs in every country to pressure their foreign minister to write to their French counterpart, drawing attention to the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of The letter should add that this Protocol is believed to “already prohibit the use in war of depleted uranium ammunition, uranium armor plate and all other uranium weapons.” A request should be made that the letter be circulated to all other High Contracting Parties to the 1925 Protocol and addressed to: His Excellency, The Foreign Minister, 37, 75351 Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275. Professor Boyle points out, Such a sympathetic state exists. * Author of Wings of Death and of Wolves of Water (2007) essential reading on radiation’s horrors, published by Green Audit (admin@greenaudit.org). Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times, the journal of the Low Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly update on nuclear industry shenanigans (http://www.llrc.org). ** See http://www.eoslifework.co.uk for a wealth of DU related material. (Nov. 20 |
24 November 2007
Case for a global pact against uranium weapons
overview of depleted uranium by Sherwood Ross, November 2007
by Sherwood Ross By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan. So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed." "More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,"Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine. Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California. Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, " The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control." Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed." She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive." Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground." "Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,"Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the Answer"(The New Press). Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars " have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity." Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, " the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,"Caldicott explained. Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities. Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan. These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan. " Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes,"Moret asserts. Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it. As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, "Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time." Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from "severe illnesses and deformities." Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders. While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities. Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate. This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield. Of course, "depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),"writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism," from Clarity Press Inc. "The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,"Boyle writes. Boyle contends, "The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.'s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children." Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas. Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points "toward a significant role for DU." By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, "the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction." Moret calls DU "the Trojan Horse of nuclear war." She describes it as "the weapon that keeps killing." Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products. Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled. But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped. In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll. Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq's arid climate would increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to come. The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians. Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a contributor to national magazines. |
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross |
04 November 2007
Depleted Uranium - Compension for those affected by this poisoned legacy
Depleted Uranium - A Way Out? Compensation to those affected by this poisoned legacy by Felicity Arbuthnot | |
The term “Gulf War Syndrome” is now known world-wide – but - after the 1991 Iraq war, as formerly A1 fit soldiers fell ill with debilitating symptoms, in their thousands, the cause was, for two years, a "mystery". It was in 1993, when a group of twenty-four affected soldiers approached Professor Asav Durakovic, one of the world's leading experts in the effects of radiation, that a cause came to light. They had many times the “safe” level of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium (DU) in their bodies. Duracovic, although a senior officer in the US army during the first Gulf war, had been unaware that the weapons used had contained depleted uranium. “I was horrified”, he said: “I was a soldier, but above all I am a doctor.” By 1997, it was estimated that ninety thousand US veterans were suffering from Gulf War Syndrome. Durakovic, who is also medical consultant for the Children of Chernobyl project at Hadassah University, Jerusalem, lost his job as Chief of Nuclear Medicine at the Veteran's Administration Medical Facility at Wilmington, Delaware, as a direct result of his work with Gulf war veterans contaminated with radiation, he states. Two other physicians, Dr Burroughs and Dr Slingerland of Boston VA also lost their jobs when they asked for more sensitive equipment to better diagnose the soldiers referred to them by Professor Durakovic. Oddly, all the records pertaining to the sick soldiers at the Delaware VA went missing, a syndrome of another kind which has become familiar, both sides of the Atlantic. Two years before Durakovic's discovery, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) “self initiated” a Report warning the government that if fifty tones of the residual dust, from the explosions of the weapons on impact, was left “in the region”, they estimated it would generate “half a million” extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (2000.) Iraq's cancers and birth deformities have become an anomaly, compared to those in the Pacific Islands and amongst British troops after the nuclear testing in the 1950's. Further, “depleted” is a misnomer. These weapons are made from waste from the nuclear fuel cycle and thus contain the whole lethal nuclear cocktail. DU weapons (sold to seventeen countries that are known and possibly others - why let poisoning the planet and its population get in the way of numerous millions of quick bucks) are equivalent to spreading the contents of a nuclear reactor around the globe. And far from fifty tones and that chilling warning, in Iraq several thousand tones now cover this ancient, Biblical land and with the bombs raining daily, the audit rises nearly hour by hour. The US is currently by far the largest user of DU weapons. Over the past decade, they have brought more than sixteen million DU shells and bullets from Alliant Tech Systems alone. (Source: Janes.) Strangely, this time, there have been few reports of soldiers with the terrible effects of 1991, where they were only in the region for a few weeks. Although troops now remain for months or a year, Gulf War Syndrome mark 2 seems not an issue. Perhaps it is because, reportedly, doctors treating returning troops have been threatened with jail and or hefty fines if they say anything regarding DU-related symptoms. The implication regarding compensation to countries affected by this poisoned legacy (DU's lethality lasts for four and a half billion years) and troops is financially stratospheric. Since the 2003 invasion, US troops are denied entry to the International Atomic Energy Authority or any radiation experts to test ground and air levels. In Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia where DU weapons were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally in neighboring countries, by the US, to whom all the world's lives are seemingly cheap) the “Iraq Syndrome” became quickly apparent. Even European peacekeepers on relatively short tours of duty became ill, developed leukemia's and other cancers and a number died. A five man film crew from BBC Scotland all tested DU positive after filming for less than a week there. Afghanistan too was “liberated” in 2001, by uranium weapons, which continue to be routinely used, condemning generations yet to be born to deformities and the living - the new born and under fives the most susceptible - to cancers and other horrific DU-related conditions. Durakovic also found high levels of uranium in hospital patients there, as there will undoubtedly be in the occupying forces. He also found identical conditions to Iraq amongst the young: “Children born with no limbs, no eyes, or with tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes.” The latest country to fall victim to uranium weapons is Lebanon - but with a Difference; it transpires. Dr Chris Busby*, founder of the Low Level Radiation Campaign and Green Audit, is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and also sits on the (UK) Ministry of Defense Uranium Oversight Board. Israel is one of the countries with uranium weapons and: “The first evidence that the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) were using them” (in the July-August 2006 Israeli bombardment) “was a Getty Picture Library image of an Israeli soldier carrying a DU anti-tank shell”, says Busby. He then noted a report in Lebanon's Daily Star, that Dr Khobeisi, a scientist, had measured gamma radiation in a bomb crater at Khiam in the south of the country, at ten to twenty times higher (samples taken from different locations in crater) than naturally occurring background radiation. The following month, Dai Williams,** an independent researcher went to Lebanon on behalf of Green Audit, to investigate and bring back samples to the UK for testing. He also brought back an air filter from an ambulance. Tested at the Harwell UKAEA laboratory: “The results were astonishing.” Both soil and filter contained enriched uranium with the soil sample containing uranium about nine times higher than the natural background. (Remember how threatening the West has become towards Iran's efforts to enrich uranium?) The soil sample was also sent to the School of Ocean Sciences, in North Wales for a second test by a different method for certainty. The results were the same. Busby asks: “Why use enriched uranium? It is a bit like shooting your enemy with diamonds.” He contends it is possible that it is a “smokestream” for the wider use of depleted uranium, as the final contamination “when all gets mixed up after the war has a natural isotopic signature”. (ie: can be read as uranium which occurs naturally in nature.) There are two other chilling possibilities says Busby: a fusion bomb or a thermobaric bomb, both of which would need enriched uranium. Certainly, doctors were reporting bodies in conditions they could find in no medical manuals, as in the attack on Falluja, Iraq. Lebanese authorities denied the presence of enriched uranium; Israel denied using it. The bombardment had ended on the agreement that UN peacekeepers went in. Given their debilitation and mortality rate in the Balkans, this lethal presence might well have deterred them. To be certain the incident was not in isolation. Williams returned to Lebanon and brought back soil and water samples from Khiam and other sites. Enriched uranium was found in water samples from two separate craters in Khiam and in one of the soil samples. Then the money ran out. The samples tested had already cost £2,000. Donations from an Arab friend and Swiss supporters totaled £850 - and Dai Williams had paid the rest out of his own money. More work is needed, but it is now known that the IDF used enriched uranium in Lebanon. And: “Since it is in the ambulance air filter, it is also in the lungs of the inhabitants ... the Lebanese people have been sacrificed to cancers, leukemia's, birth defects, like the people of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq”, says Busby, adding “and it may be worse: since we still do not know what the weapon was.” And have these weapons been used on the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Further, Israel is not alone decimating those she perceives as her enemies, but her own people, neighboring countries and even those further a field. In context, Green Audit studied airborne uranium at sites in the UK, between 1998 and 2004. There was only one period in which uranium in the air “significantly” exceeded the naturally occurring background presence: during the bombing of Iraq, in March and April, 2003. As with the radio nuclides from Chernobyl which affected Europe and the globe, and still contaminates agricultural land, the potentially deadly wave of invisible particles traveled on the wind from Iraq. “We are all Gulf war victims now”, commented Busby's colleague, Richard Bramhill. Can anything be done to halt the use of these genocidal weapons? The Government of France is the official depository for the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Boyle contends that rather than aiming for an international treaty prohibiting the use of DU, which would probably take years, pressure should be put on every state to submit a letter to the French government to enforce a ban. “All that needs to be done is for anti-DU citizens, activists and NGO's in every country to pressure their Foreign Minister to write to their French counterpart, drawing attention to the “Protocol for the Prohibition of the use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare”, of 17th June 1925, prohibiting uses as above. The letter should add that this Protocol is believed to: “already prohibit the use in war of depleted uranium ammunition, uranium Armour plate and all other uranium weapons”. A request should be made that the letter is circulated to all other High Contracting Parties to the 1925 Protocol and addressed to: His Excellency, The Foreign Minister, Republic of France, 37, Quai d'Orsay, 75351 Paris, France. Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275 Professor Boyle points out that: “As the Land Mines Treaty demonstrates, it is possible for a coalition of determined activists and NGO's, acting in concert with at least one sympathetic state, to bring into being an international treaty to address humanitarian concerns.” Such a sympathetic state exists: Belgium, last month, outlawed uranium weapons. If the rest of the world does not follow, what will happen is what Richard Bramhill calls “a DU-locaust” - of the children of the countries where these weapons have been used, of soldiers, of the uranium miners and of the munitions workers, as the living, dead and deformed prove. * Author of Wings of Death and of Wolves of Water (2007) essential reading on radiation's horrors, published by Green Audit, available direct from admin@greenaudit.org Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times, the journal of the Low Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly update on nuclear industry shenanigans ( http://www.llrc.org ) ** http://www.eoslifework.co.uk for a wealth of DU related material. Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist and activist who has visited the Arab and Muslim world on numerous occasions. She has written and broadcast on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several awards. She was also senior researcher for John Pilger's award-winning documentary: "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq". and author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of “Baghdad” in the “Great Cities” series, for World Almanac Books (2006.) Please also see: Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare http://www.opcw.org/html/db/cwc/more/geneva_protocol.html AMERICA'S GREATEST CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY / MILITARY USE OF DU The Queen's Death Star, by Leuren Moret "Perpetual Death From America" By Mohammed Daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD Afghan-American Freelance Academic http://www.rense.com/general35/perp.htm Depleted Uranium - Poisoning U.S. Troops And The Planet New study detects traces of uranium in South Dust Up, John Upton/Tracy Press Depleted Uranium Situation Requires Action By President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, states Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D. http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=2158&blz=1 WHAT THE PENTAGON REALLY KNOWS ABOUT THE CRIMINAL USE OF POISONOUS URANIUM WEAPONS, by Christopher Bollyn http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1902&blz=1 Iraqi Doctor Learns from Hiroshima's Past, note Shinya Ajima and Shinsuke Takahashi DEPLETED URANIUM: THE WAR CRIME THAT HAS NO END, by Paul Rockwell TV Not Concerned by Cluster Bombs, DU: 'That's just the way life is in Iraq', from FAIR Hazards of Uranium Weapons in the Proposed War on Iraq, by Dai Williams Pandora DU Research Project | |
Felicity Arbuthnot is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Felicity Arbuthnot | |
