Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs,
dirty missiles, dirty bullets
A death sentence
here and abroad by Leuren Moret
“Military men are just dumb
stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
- Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How
the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”
Vietnam was a chemical war for
oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver
with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating
war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four
nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent
Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass
Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia
have been permanently contaminated with radiation.
And what about our soldiers? Terry
Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this
week to the American Free Press that “Gulf-era veterans”
now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only
7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.
This week the American Free Press
dropped a “dirty bomb” on the Pentagon by reporting
that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003
U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That
means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed
malignancies in just 16 months.
Since these soldiers were exposed
to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence
for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU
is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not
known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers
on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras
Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from
the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support
Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals,
pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse
the issue.
This powerful new evidence is
blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and
three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used
in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction
of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have
revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.
Scientists studying the biological
effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the
DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the
Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies
in soldiers from the 2003 war as “spectacular …
and a matter of concern.”
This evidence shows that of the
three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation,
chemical and particulate – the particulate effect from
nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after
exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad
news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which
are difficult to define.
In simple words, DU “trashes
the body.” When asked if the main purpose for using it
was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more
specific: “I would say that it is the perfect weapon for
killing lots of people.”
Soldiers developing malignancies
so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers
from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by
doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing
with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 now have medical problems.
The number of disabled vets reported
up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr
of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press
that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even
after World War II.
They brought it home
Not only were soldiers exposed
to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home.
DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives,
partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s
and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed
endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because
of health problems.
In a group of 251 soldiers from
a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before
the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born
with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs,
arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases.
In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy
members of the family are the children born before the war.
The Department of Veterans Affairs
has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring
in families of veterans.
How did they hide it?
Before a new weapons system can
be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted
uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan
Project.
Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed
poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project
by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry’s
father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was
a CIA agent.
Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison
Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons
from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World
War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials
dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the
battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would
penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or
the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill
or cause illness very quickly.
They also recommended it as a
permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy
populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural
land with the radioactive dust.
The first DU weapons system was
developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to
and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom
Kippur war against the Arabs.
The Phalanx weapons system, using
DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval
Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S.
to 29 countries.
Military research report summaries
detail the testing of DU from 1974-1999 at military testing
grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under
contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture,
testing and deployment.
Women living around these facilities
have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies,
leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults.
Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy
on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is
no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in
the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is
the cause.
The medical profession has been
active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects
from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric
testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern
California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other
doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and
treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems
only.
Medical professionals in hospitals
and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with
$10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical
problems. They were also threatened with jail.
Reporters have also been prevented
access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown
nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought
to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.
Dr. Robert Gould, former president
of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility
(PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004,
after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson,
president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that
Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel
her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University
on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson
told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon “and nothing
overseas … nothing political.”
Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged
Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak
to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent
of PSR, several months later. When that didn’t work, he
contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president
of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded
in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos
and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure
and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq.
Dr. Janette Sherman, a former
and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit
some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive
administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information
all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman
informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.
How was the truth about DU hidden
from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before
his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley,
R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans
Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled
out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military
service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information
being transferred to new troops. The “next DU war”
had already been planned, and those planning it wanted “no
skunk at the garden party.”
The US has a dirty (DU)
little (CIA) secret
A new book just published at the
American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, “The High
Priests of War: The Secret History of How America’s Neo-Conservative
Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq
as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire,” details
the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger
and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just
happens to coincide with getting the DU “show on the road”
and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern
not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and
scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first
using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.
The book details the creation
of the neo-cons by their “godfather” and Trotsky
lover Irving Kristol, who pushed for a “war against terrorism”
long before 9/11 and was lavishly funded for years by the CIA.
His son, William Kristol, is one of the most influential men
in the United States.
Both are public relations men
for the Israeli lobby’s neo-conservative network, with
strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this
network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated
these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President
Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling
World Wars I and II, with the same faces.
When I asked Vietnam Special Ops
Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this
omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic
future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle
East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where
most of the world’s oil deposits are located - he replied:
“It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger.”
In Zbignew Brzezinski’s
book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic
Imperatives,” the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes
four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The “South”
region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated
permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets
made with thousands of tons of DU.
A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki,
has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent
of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991
than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four
nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released
into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!
No wonder our soldiers, their
families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central
Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when
our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, “Military
men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy.”
Unfortunately, more and more of
those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately,
the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and
deposited in our environments just as the “smog of war”
from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America,
the Himalayas and Hawaii.
In June 2003, the World Health
Organization announced in a press release that global cancer
rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know
that they aren’t telling us? I know that depleted uranium
is a death sentence … for all of us. We will all die in
silent ways.
To learn more
Sources used in this story that
readers are encouraged to consult:
American Free Press four-part
series on DU by Christopher Bollyn.
Part I: "Depleted Uranium:
U.S. Commits War Crime
Against Iraq, Humanity,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html
Part II: "Cancer Epidemic
Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says
Depleted Uranium Definitively
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
Part III: "DU Syndrome Stricken
Vets Denied Care:
Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny
Medical Care to
Vets",
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/du_syndrome.html
Part IV: "Pentagon Brass
Suppresses Truth About Toxic
Weapons: Poisonous Uranium Munitions
Threaten World",
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon_brass.html
August 2004 World Affairs Journal.
Leuren Moret:
"Depleted Uranium: The Trojan
Horse of Nuclear War,"
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm
August 2004 Coastal Post Online.
Carol Sterrit: "Marin
Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats
Up - GI's Will Come
Home To A Slow Death,"
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm
World Depleted Uranium Weapons
Conference, Hamburg,
Germany, October 16-19, 2004:
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan.
Written opinion of Judge Niloufer
Baghwat:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tribunal10mar0
4.htm
"Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War"
by Akira Tashiro, foreword by
Leuren Moret,
http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist
who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating
citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and
other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore
Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on
the Yucca Mountain Project. An environmental commissioner in
the City of Berkeley, she can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com.