International Doctors for D.U. (Depleted Uranium)

International Doctors for D.U.

(Depleted Uranium)

I apologise for quoting so much from other articles, but I urge you to read everything I have quoted and also follow the links and see for yourself. And go and read Timothy V. Gatto’s article in full on OPEDNEWS – it is a personal story that will leave you heartbroken and angry at what is being done to us all - and I promise you his story is not unique…

Follow the links – see how the reports are being covered up and not allowed to be published, and by whom…

“The very worst thing we do to our men and women in uniform is expose them to depleted uranium that bleeds radioactive isotopes that break DNA and cause every type of cancer and enter their reproductive organs and cause birth defects that will surface in the generations to follow.

The Army has a habit of telling American soldiers that substances they are exposed to will not harm them. Soldiers, used to following orders generally trust their commanders because those same men will take them into combat. This degree of trust will not be found in any organization, anywhere else in the world. They trusted the military when they took ships after World War II and ringed Bikini Atoll in the pacific and the men were made to come to the decks of the flotilla and given goggles so they could watch an explosion of an atomic bomb not five miles away. My father, a Marine that had fought in Okinawa and was in the occupation of Japan was there. He died of cancer at 59 that had ravaged his body. Then there was Vietnam when we used the defoliant Agent Orange and told the soldiers that it only hurt plants. I was given a 55-gallon drum of “Dioxin” to put around the fence-line at a missile site fence line in Hazlet New Jersey so that the grass wouldn’t grow where the fence was. We spread it by hand. My son now has three special needs children. I don’t know if I was the cause, but I think of it.

Then there was the F-104 Starfighter where the radar Klystron was between the knees of the pilot. The pilots had unshielded ionised radiation beaming right into their reproductive organs. It didn’t stop there, the United States had the Nike-Hercules system around every major city in the nation and brigades overseas that had an unshielded Klystron tubes in the radars that emitted ionised radiation and glowed green with over 30,000 volts running through it. I got cancer five years ago under my tongue in the floor of my mouth, along with hundreds of other Air Defenders not only in this country, but in Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Korea and Japan that also used this “system”. I lost my teeth, had my tongue dissected, lost some of my gum and now I take narcotics to dull the pain from the two operations I had and the radiation that made me bleed from my throat.

Think all that is bad? You haven’t seen anything yet. The soldiers of today are walking through deserts and cities in Iraq that are rife with depleted uranium. The uranium has 60% of its radiation with a half-life of something like 100,000 years. These guys that came back with Gulf-War syndrome probably came back with radiation sickness. The Army is fully aware of the hazards of depleted uranium, but the mind-set of the Defence Department is to ignore things like this. These are civilians that sit in the Pentagon and make policy that basically says that “soldiers are expendable”. Now in Iraq, soldiers are constantly exposed to ground peppered with DP shells and munitions. These guys and girls are coming home with altered DNA that will in some cases bring them cancer and deformed children.

Think that’s the worst, you haven’t seen anything yet. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq have to live within radioactive land. They have kids with an average life expectancy of six months if they are affected. The cancer rates in some areas that have a high concentration of DP have five or six cases of cancer a day! Bone cancer, leukaemia, thyroid cancer and squamous cell cancer like I had, are rife in these nations. These weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction and we subject our soldiers and the population of our adversaries with it daily.

Look, I know what I went through and I know how I feel about the ones that are still serving, I love them like brothers. When they come back, they could marry your daughter and leave them with deformed children and make them widows at an early age. This is not just an Army problem, it’s an American and international problem. Our government is acting like a criminal enterprise. Talk to your friends, write your Congress people, write the Bush Administration and support the ban on depleted Uranium. It’s for all of us.

That’s the way I see it.”

From The Centre for Global Research on Globalisation

World Affairs – The Journal of International Issues, July 2004

www.globalresearch.ca 8 July 2004

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html

Some extracts…

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government’s own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

After forming microscopic and sub microscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.

A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:

"The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."

1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM

In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the ‘Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon’:

"As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small …

There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty … it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."(My emphasis)

As a Terrain Contaminant:

"To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations … Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place … for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. … Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke."

Internal Exposure:

"… Particles smaller than 1µ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. … could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. … may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body."

Both the fission products and depleted uranium waste from the Atomic Bomb Project were to be utilised under this plan. The pyrophoric nature of depleted uranium, which causes it to begin to burn at very low temperatures from friction in the gun barrel, made it an ideal radioactive gas weapon then and now. Also it was more available because the amount of depleted uranium produced was much greater than the amount of fission products produced in 1943.

Britain had thoughts of using poisoned gas on Iraq long before 1991:

GUIDED WEAPONS SYSTEMS

Depleted uranium weapons were first given by the US to Israel for use under US supervision in the 1973 Sinai war against the Arabs. Since then the US has tested, manufactured, and sold depleted uranium weapons systems to 29 countries. An international taboo prevented their use until 1991, when the US broke the taboo and used them for the first time, on the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait.

The US military admitted using depleted uranium projectiles in tanks and planes, but warheads in missiles and bombs are classified or referred to as a ‘dense’ or ‘mystery metal’. Dai Williams, a researcher at the 2003 World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, reported finding 11 US patents for guided weapons systems with the term ‘depleted uranium’ or ‘dense metal’, which from the density can only be depleted uranium or tungsten, in order to fit the dimensions of the warhead.

Extensive carpet-bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolised upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolised is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.

Because of mysterious illnesses and post-war birth defects reported among Gulf War veterans and civilians in southern Iraq, and radiation related illnesses in UN Peacekeepers serving in Yugoslavia, growing concerns about radiation effects and environmental damage has stirred up international outrage about the use of radioactive weapons by the US after 1991. At the 2003 meeting of parties to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, discussing the U.S. desire to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile, the Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi AKIBA stated,

"It is incumbent upon the rest of the world ... to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred". (My emphasis)

ILLEGAL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

FOUR NUCLEAR WARS

Although restricted to battlefields in Iraq and Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War was one of the most toxic and environmentally devastating wars in world history. Oil well fires, the bombing of oil tankers and oil wells which released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Arabia and desert, and the devastation from tanks and heavy equipment destroyed the desert ecosystem. The long term and far reaching effects, and dispersal of at least 340 tons of depleted uranium weapons, had a global environmental effect. Smoke from the oil fires was later found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii. Large annual dust storms originating in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will quickly spread the radioactive contamination around the world, and weathering of old depleted uranium munitions on battlefields and other areas will provide new sources of radioactive contamination in future years. Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukaemia and childhood diabetes.

Is it normal?

RADIATION RESPECTS NO BORDERS, NO SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS, AND NO RELIGION

The expendability of the sanctity of life to achieve US political ends was described by US soldiers on the ground, and from the air, along the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991:

"Iraqi soldiers [whether they] be young boys or old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles’ tendons so they couldn’t run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no business being on a battlefield."
(S Hersh, New Yorker , May 22, 2000)

American pilots bombing and strafing, with depleted uranium weapons, helpless retreating Iraqi soldiers who had already surrendered, exclaimed:

"We toasted him…. we hit the jackpot….a turkey shoot….shooting fish in a barrel….basically just sitting ducks… There’s just nothing like it. It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen, and to see those tanks just ‘boom’, and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them… they just become white hot. It’s wonderful."
(L A Times and Washington Post, both February 27, 1991)

Nearly 700,000 American Gulf War Veterans returned to the US from a war that lasted just a few weeks. Today more than 240,000 of those soldiers are on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 are dead. In a US Government study on post-Gulf War babies born to 251 veterans, 67 per cent of the babies were reported to have serious illnesses or serious birth defects. They were born without eyes, ears, had missing organs, fused fingers, thyroid or other malfunctions. Depleted uranium in the semen of the soldiers internally contaminated their wives. 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. Women in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are afraid now to have babies, and when they do give birth, instead of asking if it is a girl or a boy, they ask ‘is it normal?’.

Bush’s Lies…

Soldiers, who served in Bradley fighting vehicles, where it was common to sit on ammunition boxes where depleted uranium ammunition was stored, are now reporting that many have rectal cancer.

For the first time, medical doctors in Yugoslavia and Iraq have reported multiple in situ unrelated cancers developing in patients, and even in families who are living in highly contaminated areas. Even stranger, they report that cancer was unknown in previous generations. Very rare and unusual cancers and birth defects have also been reported to be increasing above normal levels prior to 1991, not only in war torn countries, but in neighbouring countries from transboundary contamination.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor who was on the staff of the World Health Organization, co-authored a report in November 2001, warning that the long-term health effects of depleted uranium would endanger Iraq’s civilian population, and that the dry climate would increase exposure from the tiny particles blowing around and be inhaled for years to come. The WHO refused to give him permission to publish the study, bowing to pressure from the IAEA. Dr. Baverstock released the damning report to the media in February 2004. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UN Environment Program’s Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva, shares Baverstock’s anxiety about depleted uranium but UNEP experts have not been allowed into Iraq to assess the pollution.

"DEPLETED URANIUM SCARE" - Claimed by President George W. Bush on the official White House website:

"During the Gulf War, coalition forces used armour-piercing ammunition made from depleted uranium, which is ideal for the purpose because of its great density. In recent years, the Iraqi regime has made substantial efforts to promote the false claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq. Iraq has distributed horrifying pictures of children with birth defects and linked them to depleted uranium. The campaign has two major propaganda assets:"

"Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell; and Iraq could take advantage of an established international network of antinuclear activists who had already launched their own campaign against depleted uranium."

"But scientists working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium."

(My emphasis)

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Please follow the links and google ‘Depleted Uranium’ if you want to find out the huge amount of information that is being blocked by the ‘powers that be’. See above note that the World Health Organisation also suppressed the report from Dr. Keith Baverstock.

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I am sorry for so many quotes from other articles but believe me there is tons of it out there. Why is nobody talking about this? There is also much more to be found about Chernobyl and its devastating after affects which I am researching now too.

The bastards that want to build more atomic power stations don’t want you to know about Chernobyl or what happened in the ‘earthquake proof’ Japanese reactor problems recently.

I think that this problem cuts across and absolutely silences any and every argument about left or right politics in any and every country in the world. What can you gain by electing Ron Paul or Denis Kucinich if your babies are going to die at birth or worse, live a horrible deformed short life?

Never mind about the war mongers Guliani or Billary, they will cover this up and take us to war again and after Iran, it will be Syria next and then Venezuela. Think I’m joking? The South American bank opens for business soon in November; do you think they will let that stand? The already tried to get rid of Chavez once and a religious nut, whose name I forget, advocated Chavez’s assassination.

It is already too late for thousands of Afghanis, Serbs and Iraqis and it is only a matter of time before it spreads around the world raising the radiation to a lethal, slow death for millions.

More later about Chernobyl.

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