Honor Vets by Learning About Depleted Uranium

By Barbara Bellows-TerraNova
November 11, 2008

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As Europe mourns in Verdun today for those lost in "The War to End
All Wars", World War I, we could look to another moment in European
history to shed light on the most aggressively silenced story of the
Bush administration.

In late 2000 and January 2001, reports were exploding across Europe
about the rise in cancer amongst NATO soldiers who had served in the
"peacekeeping missions" in Bosnia and Kosovo. The effects of the
depleted uranium in the U.S. and U.K. weapons could not be ignored.

But history shows that the United Nations and the World Health
Organization could be intimidated. The report from the WHO – that
detailed how the DU vaporized upon impact into tiny particles that
were breathed in, or consumed through the mouth or entered through
open wounds, where the irradiating bits attacked cells all the way
through the body, causing mutations along the way – was shelved under
pressure from the U.S.

Even now, the major U.S. news organizations do not touch the subject,
though the international press cannot ignore it. Even last month, a
Middle Eastern Reuters reporter discussed the health damages because
of the contaminated environment with Iraqi En Iraqi Environment
Minister Nermeen Othman,
"When we talk about it, people may think we are overreacting. But in
fact the environmental catastrophe that we inherited in Iraq is even
worse than it sounds."

And The Tehran Times further endangers their country by continuing to
report on the problem, calling it a war crime.

And across the internet, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Roger Helbig
seeks to intimidate anyone who dares to bring up the subject.

But we evolve, and the United Nations First Committee has
overwhelmingly passed a resolution, on October 31st, calling for
"relevant UN agencies, in this case the International Atomic Energy
Association (IAEA), World Health Organisation (WHO) and United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to update and complete their
research into the possible health and environmental impact of the use
of uranium weapons by 2010."   The only countries that voted against
it were the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and France.

Meanwhile, to help the reader get to the point, I've put together the
following.  Although the facts, for the most part, do not contain
links, there is a list of the references at the end.

Ten Essential Facts:

1. Depleted uranium, the nuclear waste of uranium enrichment, is not
actually "depleted" of radiation; 99.3% of it is Uranium238, which
still emits radioactive alpha particles at the rate 12,400/second,
with an estimated half life of 4.5 billion years.

2. Depleted uranium is plentiful - there are 7 pounds remaining for
every pound of enriched uranium - and requires expensive and often
politically-contentious hazardous waste storage.

3. Depleted uranium is less of a problem for the nuclear industry
when it is cheaply passed on to U.S. weapons manufacturers for
warheads, penetrators, bunker-busters, missiles, armor and other
ammunition used by the U.S. military in the Middle East and
elsewhere, and sold to other countries and political factions.

4. Depleted uranium is "pyrophoric", which makes it uniquely
effective at piercing hard targets, because upon impact, it
immediately burns, vaporizing the majority of its bulk and leaving a
hard, thin, sharpened tip - and large amounts of radioactive
particles suspended in the atmosphere.

5. Depleted uranium weaponry was first used in the U.S. bombing of
Iraq in 1991, under President George H. W. Bush and Defense Secretary
Dick Cheney.

6. Depleted uranium weaponry was later used by President Bill Clinton
in the NATO "peace-keeping" bombing missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and
Serbia. By January 2001, as the 2nd President Bush and Dick Cheney
were moving in to the White House, there was a furor in Europe over
the news of an alarming increase in leukemia and other cancers
amongst the NATO troops who'd served in the Balkans.

7. The World Health Organization suppressed a November 2001 report on
the health hazards of depleted uranium by Dr. Keith Baverstock, Head
of the WHO's Radiation Protection Division and his team, commissioned
by the United Nations. Baverstock's report, "Radiological Toxicity of
Depleted Uranium", detailed the significant danger of airborne
vaporized depleted uranium particles, already considerably more
prevalent in Iraq than the Balkans due to the difference in military
tactics, because they are taken into the body by inhaling and
ingesting, and then their size and solubility determines how quickly
they move through the respiratory, circulatory and gastrointestinal
systems, attacking and poisoning from within as they travel, and
where the damages occur. In addition, the report warns that the
particles tend to settle in the soft tissue of the testes, and may
cause mutations in sperm. In 2004 Dr. Baverstock, no longer at the
WHO, released the report through Rob Edwards at Scotland's Sunday
Herald.

8. The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration twisted the meaning
of the failure of the World Health Organization to produce evidence
of depleted uranium's health hazards, turning it into evidence that
there was no link between exposure to depleted uranium and the
increases in cancer in Europe and Iraq; instead, as presented in the
January 20, 2003 report by the new Office of Global Communications,
ironically titled Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and
Propaganda 1990 - 2003, the depleted uranium uproar was only an
exploitation of fear and suffering. Two months later, Bush-Cheney-
Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Rice began to "Shock and Awe" Baghdad by again
dropping tons of depleted uranium bombs on densely populated areas.

9. On March 27, 2003, significant increases in depleted uranium
particles in the atmosphere were detected by the air sampler filter
systems of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at 8 different sites near
Aldermaston Berkshire, Great Britain, and continued at 4-5 times the
previous norm until the end of April 2003, after the Coalition forces
declared the war over. This information only came to light in a
report on January 6, 2006 by Dr. Chris Busby, due to his diligent
fight for access to the data through Britain's Freedom of Information
law.

10. We have a new, intelligent President, who is willing to listen.
It is up to us to bring this to his attention.  THIS IS HOW WE CAN
HONOR VETERANS.

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