NOVEMBER 2007
Depleted uranium weapons own goal -- a truth the usa and uk refuse to tell
http://www.tehranti
TEHRAN TIMES (IRAN)
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
By Felicity Arbuthnot
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 U.S. veterans were
suffering from Persian 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
Persian Gulf War veterans contaminated with radiation, he
states. Two other physicians, Dr. Burroughs and Dr.
Slingerland of the 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 on 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 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.) 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 1950s.
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
Iraq several thousand tons now cover this ancient
Biblical land, and with the bombs raining daily, the
audit rises nearly hour by hour. The U.S. is currently by
far the largest user of DU weapons. Over the past decade,
they have bought 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, 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, U.S. troops have
denied entry to International Atomic Energy Agency
inspectors and all other radiation experts seeking to
test ground and air levels.
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 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 Defence Uranium Oversight Board. Israel
is one of the countries that possess uranium weapons.
"The first evidence that the IDF (Israeli Defense
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
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 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.
(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 smoke screen for the wider
use of depleted uranium, as the final contamination
"when all gets mixed up after the war has a natural
isotopic signature" (i.e.: 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 isolated.
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."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 Gaza
and the West Bank? Furthermore, Israel is not only
decimating those she perceives as her enemies, but her
own people, neighboring countries, and even those further
afield.
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 radionuclides
from Chernobyl, which affected Europe and the globe and
still contaminate agricultural land, the potentially
deadly wave of invisible particles traveled on the wind
from Iraq. "We are all (Persian) Gulf War victims
now," commented Busby's colleague Richard Bramhill.
Can anything be done to halt the use of these genocidal
weapons? Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at
the University of Illinois and author of The Criminality
of Nuclear Deterrence, thinks so. He has launched a
campaign for a global pact against uranium weapons. 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 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
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 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 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, Republic of France,
37, Quai d'Orsay,
75351 Paris, France.
Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275.
Professor Boyle points out, "As the Land Mines
Treaty demonstrates, it is possible for a coalition of
determined activists and NGOs, 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
outlawed uranium weapons earlier this year. 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 (admin@greenaudit.
** See http://www.eoslifew