Printer Friendly Page
ARE DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS SICKENING U.S.
TROOPS? --
"And when we first asked to be tested, [the VA]
told us there
wasn't one. They've lied to us all along. I'm
just
a zombie walking around."
Herbert Reed
We have two stories. The first,
from today, is a well-written and researched piece from the Associated
Press. I find it interesting because it stays away from the
political hype and non-science that surrounds so much of the DU
"information."
The second story is from late last year
and center's on Herbert Reed and his lawsuit.
First story here...
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/060810d_wire.aspx
Story below:
---------------
Are Depleted Uranium Weapons Sickening U.S.
Troops?
By Deborah Hastings
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange
juice to wash down all the pills - morphine, methadone, a muscle
relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual
dysfunction. And Valium for his nerves.
Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to
cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more
before the day is done.
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is
more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts
his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt
everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin.
Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in
need of oil.
There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is
sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince
anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made
him terrifyingly sick.
In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he
has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management
specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist.
He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but
they exact a high price.
"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now
walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it -
thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is
radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.
A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife
through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank
armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine
radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for
nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as
natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it,
sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it
is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.
Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in
Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk
because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine.
Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his
previously healthy life.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a
buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of
hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they
began to talk.
"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said,
'It's all in your head.' "
Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That
made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army
National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers
from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn't.
Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp
Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and
shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices.
The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the
desert rather than live in the station ruins.
"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching
depleted uranium."
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for
sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos,
Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted
uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003. For
months during that time, they bounced between Walter Reed and New
Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.
The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who
developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of
isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the
U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but
concealed the risks.
The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe,
and not that worrisome.
Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the
VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as
sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they
told us there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."
The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More
than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only
eight had DU in their urine, the VA said.
The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering
the words can prompt a strong reaction. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions
are yelled from all sides.
"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for
breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the
National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various
problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. "Then
you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."
Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it
during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and
Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.
Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most
dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with
contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by
being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so
would be more dangerous than leaving it.
Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is
doubly dangerous - not only are the particles themselves physically
destructive, they emit radiation.
A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a
doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has
studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before
leaving the military as a conscientious objector.
"I've been working on this since '93 and I've just given up hope," he
said. "I've spoken to successive federal committees and elected
officials ... who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes."
At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet
proselytizers who say using such weapons constitute genocide. Two of the
most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile,
not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.
"The bottom line is it's more hazardous than the Pentagon admits," Fahey
said, "but it's not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it
is. And there's a real dearth of information about how DU affects
humans."
Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to
them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians'
offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves
them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of
battle.
But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans
like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the
northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.
Some days he feels fine. "Some days I can't get out of bed," he said
from his home in Colorado.
Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small
stroke - one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse
his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.
"Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it," he said.
"Except I couldn't move the right side of my body."
After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.
He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers
from a series of "non-related conditions." He knows he was exposed to
DU.
"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff
that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My
guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the
vehicles."
No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said.
His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.
Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the
fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible
victory in battle.
He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who
feel the same.
"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape.
Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a
professional athlete," he said. "Then we come back and we're all sick."
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their
time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no
name.
---------------
Second story here...
http://www.northcountynews.com/archives_2005/11-9-05/news5.htm
Story below:
---------------
Veterans charge illnesses tied to new form of
Agent Orange
U.S. officials accused of knowingly putting
soldiers in contaminated areas
by Rita J. King
With the approach of Veteran's Day, millions of
Americans are preparing to rally for the troops, and some of those
soldiers are asking Americans to support them by learning about depleted
uranium (DU), used by the United States to strengthen weapons detonated
in Iraq.
DU is considered by many who feel they've been exposed to be Desert
Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom's version of Agent Orange. The
nebulous "Gulf War Syndrome," some sick veterans say, is actually the
side effects of DU exposure.
Herbert Reed, 51, was at the end of a 20-year military career when he
transferred from the Coast Guard Reserves to the Army National Guard. A
month later, Reed, who worked as an assistant deputy warden with the New
York City Corrections Department, was called to active duty and put in
charge of the reconstruction effort of a prison in Iraq where murderers,
rapists and thieves were being held.
Some "intelligence gathering" took place, he said, but because he was
"solely in charge" of the prison, he ensured that no torture took place.
While the Iraqi criminals under American watch were being treated
humanely, Reed said the American military didn't offer its own soldiers
the same fair play.
In April 2003, Reed was sent to Iraq. In June, a speed bump caused his
head to smash against the roof of a vehicle with such force that he was
airlifted out of Iraq for medical treatment. At Walter Reed Army
Hospital, a titanium plate was implanted in his neck after extensive
operations on a bi-level herniated disc, among other injuries.
Physical therapy and various other treatments continued for Reed until
November 2004, at which time he received a medical retirement from the
military. Methadone is now necessary every six hours and morphine every
four, along with other muscle relaxants, that make it nearly impossible
for him to play with his two young children.
"Due to the injuries I sustained and the permanent medication I now
receive, I was unable to return to my prior employment," Reed said. "I
also found out that myself and several of my comrades in arms were
exposed to DU, which we believe is responsible for a lot of the aliments
we now suffer from. Depleted uranium is our Agent Orange. They knew we
would be serving in an area contaminated by DU, and they didn't tell
us."
Along with nine members of his prior unit, Reed filed a lawsuit against
the government.
"They knew prior to our deployment that Iraq was contaminated with DU
after the first Gulf War when soldiers started returning home ill. At
that time they named it the Gulf War Syndrome after many denials that
there was anything wrong," Reed said.
Reed and his fellow troops are not the first to sound the alarm bell
about depleted uranium. Like Chernobyl, a 1986 nuclear disaster that
gave rise to a twisted wake of horrifying birth defects across a
widening radius of Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine, similar
events have been reported in Iraqi hot zones.
While DU might strike targets with unparalleled precision, it doesn't
know not to penetrate the strikers, or other unintended victims.
Some soldiers returning from Iraq who have been exposed to DU have seen
their children born eyeless, or with other birth defects often
attributed to DU.
In September 2004, the New York Daily News reported Gerard Darren
Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the Harlem-based 719th
Transportation Company, had tested positive for DU after suffering
migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating. His wife
became pregnant following his return, and their daughter was born
missing three fingers.
Reed, who met Matthew while both were being treated at Walter Reed
Medical Center, said Matthew is now in Japan, on a lecture circuit to
discuss the hazards he believes are associated with DU. However, tens of
thousands of American soldiers are experiencing the same symptoms these
men and countless others share, and they've never heard of DU.
Depleted Uranium
Depending on who's talking, DU is either a
weapon of mass destruction, crippling adults and infants with side
effects too complicated and debilitating to pin down, or an "ideal" war
tool, capable of wiping out targets with a level of effectiveness
coveted on the battlefield.
In 2002, DU was declared a weapon of mass destruction by the United
Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
Use of DU became a breach of international law. DU, culled from nuclear
fuel processors, is a by-product of enriching uranium for reactor fuel.
Deployment Health Support advises the United States Undersecretary of
Defense on health issues related to troops and "assesses deployments to
understand and communicate information concerning non-traditional
threats to health." According to the organization's assessment, "DU that
remains outside the body cannot harm you."
"A common misconception," according to Deployment Health Support, is
that "radiation is depleted uranium's primary hazard. This is not the
case under most battlefield exposure scenarios."
According to Deployment Health Support, DU emits alpha particles that
are blocked by skin, and beta particles blocked by boots and battle
dress, and a low amount of gamma rays.
"Thus, depleted uranium does not significantly add to the background
radiation that we encounter every day," according to Deployment Health
Support. But they go on to confirm what experts and critics contend,
which is that the particles pose a low threat when they remain outside
the body, yet when they enter in large doses, as through ingestion or
inhalation, DU "may pose a long-term health hazard."
Dust storms, Reed pointed out, are extremely common in Iraq. In hot
zones contaminated with DU, it isn't hard to imagine how particles might
be inhaled or ingested.
In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory
Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a scientific panel run by the
V.A., was leaked to the New York Times. The Times reported the panel had
concluded there was a "probable link" between veterans' illnesses and
exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to
protect them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself, which was released
when U.S.-led forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot.
Asked why there was no mention of DU in the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the
panel's scientific director, said her group plans to address it in a
later report: "We've only just begun work on this topic. We are
certainly not ruling it out."
That information was reported in the November 2004 issue of Vanity Fair,
in Contributing Editor David Rose's article, "Weapons of
Self-Destruction."
"Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that DU was potentially
hazardous. Before last year's Iraq invasion, it issued strict
regulations designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment
after the use of DU. But the Pentagon insists that there is little
chance that these veterans' illnesses are caused by DU," Rose wrote.
But while Pentagon spokesman Dr. Michael Kilpatrick said Gulf War
veterans are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere,
the Veterans Administration acknowledged at the time of Rose's article a
third of all living Gulf War veterans, 181,996 (only 167 died in fatal
combat casualties), were collecting service-related disability pensions.
Now the same thing is happening to veterans of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom," Reed said.
"I feel betrayed. I spent 20 years in the military," Reed said. "When I
first joined I thought I was doing the right thing, protecting my
country and family. I never thought I'd participate with the activists
speaking out against the government, but it turns out they're telling
the truth, many of the organizations, and people need to know to keep
their sons and daughters home. The government didn't give us the
information and equipment we needed. I'm appalled."
And he's very sick.
Lawsuit against the Government
Reed said he had never heard of DU prior to his
deployment in Iraq. In fact, he said he never heard of it until after he
returned, and was moved to Fort Dix in New Jersey when Walter Reed
Medical Center outside Washington, D.C., filled up.
Other members of Reed's unit, also sick and injured, started showing up
in Fort Dix and Walter Reed, where he was transported for treatment. All
of the men suffered from matching symptoms to varying degrees: constant
diarrhea, nausea, memory loss, dizziness, vertigo, horrible migraines,
sensitivity to light and constant body aches, to name a few of the
debilitating symptoms.
Eventually, the unit's medic from Iraq was also sent in for treatment,
and he shared a piece of disturbing news with his fellow soldiers.
Americans who had been serving in that area of southern Iraq had thinned
out so considerably that Dutch and Japanese military personnel were
scheduled to relieve them. They came in first with Geiger counters first
to test for radiation, Reed said, and found the area so contaminated
they refused to deploy troops.
"The United States government said nothing to us about being in a
contaminated area," Reed said. "So we started to talk. We got together
as a unit."
The soldiers informed their doctors at Fort Dix that they believed they
had been exposed to DU, and Reed said the suggestion was met with a
blasé response. DU, the soldiers were told, was not the cause of their
symptoms. By then, the soldiers had begun to conduct research on the
Internet.
"We knew it was a lie," Reed said. "We learned that the United States
government has been experimenting with DU since the first bomb was
dropped on Japan. The military refused to test us."
Reed said his unit then approached Senator Charles Schumer, who held a
press conference at which he pledged to "get to the bottom" of the
mystery. After the press conference, Reed said, nothing came of the
meeting with Schumer.
The soldiers then approached Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had
participated in a committee after Operation Desert Storm, writing
procedure that would require troops to submit to a physical before and
after deployment.
Such physicals, Reed said, did not occur for him.
"The United States military knows we're contaminated, so they don't want
to do the physicals and confirm it," Reed contended.
On top of that, he said, the testing that is used lacks the
sophistication to detect microscopic particles, Reed said.
The Daily News conducted a special investigation, published on April 4,
2004, about the 442nd Military Police who served, as Reed did, in
Samawah. The publication announced definitively that four soldiers were
contaminated after funding laboratory tests for the special report.
Reed said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a former Army Reserves Colonel who served
in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, examined the soldiers.
"He's the one who first diagnosed Gulf War Syndrome," Reed said, adding
Duracovic was eventually "pushed into retirement," which hasn't slowed
down his work. Duracovic's tests, funded by The Daily News, concluded
that four soldiers "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from
exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
Urine samples collected by Duracovic were passed on to Professor Axel
Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, who
specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes. His laboratory is one of
roughly 100 in the world capable of such refined testing methods.
At this time, lawyers representing Reed and members of his unit who
believe their health has been stripped bare by exposure to DU, are
hashing it out with the United States government.
"DU goes through whatever object it strikes," Reed said. "The molecules
start a fire. Children come along later and play with this stuff, pure
depleted uranium. It's like you ran Drano through them. None of this was
ever mentioned to us at all."
After a lifetime of military devotion, Reed said he has come to see the
war in Iraq as senseless, and based on deception.
"I'm aware of what is taking place out there," Reed said. "But there are
thousands of soldiers who have been brainwashed that there's nothing
wrong with them. The military won't take responsibility, and that's why
we have this lawsuit. We want medical treatment for ourselves and our
families. We want the government to admit the dangers of DU. We want
them to stop using it, and we want them to clean up Iraq."
It took 30 years, Reed said, before the United States government
acknowledged the effects of Agent Orange. Even now, he said, the full
spectrum of that lethal chemical is still being minimized.
The Pentagon's Position
On March 14, 2003, Kilpatrick and Army Colonel
James Naughton from the United States Army Material Command gave a
briefing on DU, ostensibly to correct some of the "misinformation out
there," according to the event's moderator.
Naughton, at that time, was the director for munitions in the Army,
after a long career "developing and buying munitions."
"During the Gulf War, we fired ammunition weighing approximately 320
tons. That sounds like an awful lot of depleted uranium, but when you
actually put it together and measure it, it's a cube about eight feet on
the side. It isn't really a lot of material."
The Air Force was a "principal user" during the Gulf War. They fired the
ammunition from their A-10 aircraft, 30 millimeter gun system. The Army
was the second largest user, firing ammunition from the Abrams tank,
approximately 50 tons. The remaining 11 tons of ammunition was fired by
the Marine Corps, again principally from tanks and the Harrier aircraft,
the AV-8.
"We have two military uses for depleted uranium," Naughton explained.
"The first one is to make penetrators…what we use to penetrate armored
vehicles, kinetic energy weapons like the MA-29 series, ammunition for
the Abrams tank, use the energy that's created when the bullet is
launched from the bore of the canon to breach the armor on the other
end. So you want something that's very dense and very hard, so that when
it reaches the other end, instead of splattering like you would expect a
lead bullet to do, it actually retains its shape and drives through the
target."
This quality of penetration is what gives DU its appeal. High speed
x-ray pictures of "penetration" were used by Naughton to prove his
point.
"What we want to be able to do is strike the target from farther away
than we can be hit back, and we want the target to be destroyed when we
shoot at it," Naughton said. "We don't want to see rounds bouncing off.
Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to
be ahead, and DU gives us that advantage. We can hit, and they can't hit
us. We don't want to give that up, and that's why we use it."
Kilpatrick's argument in favor of DU is similar to that used by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission when describing bananas as radioactive
when attempting to downplay the possibility of contamination.
"Natural uranium is in the soil around our world," Kilpatrick said. "It
certainly is something that we eat and drink and breathe in every day,
because it is in our environment. We all secrete natural uranium in our
urine to a certain level."
Kilpatrick's claim was that 90 Gulf War veterans have been monitored
after being present on an armored vehicle when it was struck by uranium
during a "friendly fire" incident.
"And we do not see any kidney damage in those individuals -- and this is
using very sophisticated medical evaluation of kidneys. They were also
followed for other medical problems…and they've had no other medical
consequences of that depleted uranium exposure," he said.
"Now, some of these individuals had amputations, were burned, had deep
wounds, so that these individuals, some of them of course do have
medical problems," he added. "But as far as a consequence of the
depleted uranium exposure, we are not seeing anything related to that
either from a chemical or radiological effect."
He said there have been "no cancers," and "no leukemia."
The Department of Defense's claim DU exposure isn't the cause of Gulf
War syndrome, cancer, birth defects in children and other, more nebulous
maladies plaguing vets who served in Iraq has been scrutinized by the
United States General Accounting Office (GAO).
In June 2004, the GAO issued a report to Congress that was highly
critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome and veterans'
cancer rates. The studies on which federal agencies were basing their
claim that Gulf War Veterans were no sicker than the veterans of other
wars "may not be reliable" and had "inherent limitations," with "big
data gaps and methodological flaws," according to GAO.
Since slow-growing cancers can take years to fully manifest, the GAO
stated, "it may be too early" to draw any conclusions.
"That's just the opinion of a group of individuals," said Kilpatrick in
dismissing the report.
Yet another Pentagon-funded study suggested that DU might have effects
on unborn children. After finding that pregnant rats transmitted DU to
their offspring through the placenta, the study concluded: "Fetal
exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely
impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring."
Blowing in the Wind
Experts around the world are critical of
American use of DU, and some feel it's a "crime against humanity,"
according to an April 29, 2005, article by James Denver in Vive le
Canada, that "ranks with the worst atrocities of all time."
Denver's article, "Horror of USA's Depleted Uranium in Iraq Threatens
World," claims United States Iraq military vets are "on DU death row,
waiting to die."
British radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby, fellow of the University of
Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the
European Committee on Radiation Risk, said DU is the "best-kept secret
of this war: the fact that by illegally using hundreds of tons of DU
against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the
Iraqis, but the whole world."
"I'm horrified," Busby said. "The people out there - the Iraqis, the
media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the
radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's
going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world.
We all know how far radiation can travel.
Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get
red dust from the Sahara on your car."
John Pilger, former chief foreign correspondent for the British
publication the Daily Mirror, witnessed the punch packed by DU. He said
some United States servicemen refer to victims at close range as "crispy
critters," and when he saw children who had been killed from a greater
distance he said their "skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing
veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared
straight ahead."
Pilger said he vomited at the sight of the carnage.
"Since DU darkened the land," Denver wrote, "Iraq has seen birth defects
which would break a heart of stone: 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."
"Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?'
but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will
not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged forever, and
the damaging DU dust is ever-present," Denver said, adding that what the
governments of the United States and Britain have done to the people of
Iraq, they have also "knowingly" done the same to their own soldiers.
"Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they
dramatically increased its use-from a minimum of 320 tons in the
previous war to a minimum of 1,500 tons in this one," Denver wrote. "And
this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons—as it had
largely been in the previous Gulf war—but was extended to the guided
missiles, large bunker busters and big 2,000-pound bombs used in Iraq's
cities."
This means that Iraq's cities, Denver said, have been "blanketed in
lethal particles—any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In
addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles
higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly
particles have been carried high into the air—again and again and again
as the bombs rained down—ready to be swept worldwide by the winds."
Those winds, Reed believes, are already blowing
hard.
---------------
Larry Scott
