Have DU — Will Travel: Interview with Karl Schwarz
‘They have exposed close to a million of our troops.’
ICONOCLAST: Regarding Chris Busby’s study about DU traveling, I would like to get a political perspective from you. You know, THE LONDON TIMES printed a short story about this recently and the Ministry of Defense there said that it’s unfeasible that depleted uranium could have traveled so far.
KARL SCHWARZ: Well, that’s what their stance is, but if you look a lot closer at the comments of this ministry and also the Royal Academy people, they come up with two diametrically opposed solutions and answers. One person says that this was natural uranium that was stirred up in the atmosphere through shock and awe in Iraq. If natural uranium could reach there, by God, the DU probably could, too. I mean, that’s just to cut straight through the political-speak, okay? You have to read that article real close to detect that, and you might even have to quote the article or cite it. They are actually saying that "no, this wasn’t DU from the use of depleted uranium weapons, this was natural uranium from Iraq that got stirred up into the atmosphere through shock and awe. Now that’s the official British stance "one." Okay? Official British stance "two" is somewhat more problematic. Evidently, according to this governmental official, they’ve had a Chernobyl that they didn’t bother to tell their citizens about. Because he claims that uranium was local source from their own nuclear reactors, you know, electrical power plants, and didn’t have anything to do with DU from Iraq. Well, as a matter of fact, the reason that they put them in pellets and they put them in cores and they sink them in heavy water is so that uranium can’t get out, and they are sealed. Those plants do not put any uranium in the air whatsoever. If they do, they have to shut them down. Period.
ICONOCLAST: What are your thoughts politically on this. What do you think our government needs to be doing?
SCHWARZ: I think our government needs to face this issue head-on, not only as a public policy issue for the troops that they’ve had exposed to this ever since Desert Storm which includes Bosnia, which includes Afghanistan, also includes Iraqi Freedom, the second go-round over here. They have used depleted uranium weapons in all four of those deployments. The troops, if you start backtracking, you don’t ever read about this, but you can find it if you look for Bosnia syndrome, like Desert Storm syndrome. One of the reasons and how I got on this story, Leon, was up in Canada. They have a thing called the Uranium Medical Research Center. They actually have one in Canada and one in the United States. The Canadians told me, "Oh, for the record, the reason we didn’t go to Iraq is we are already seeing some huge health issues on the Canadian troops that participated in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. We’re not going to be exposing our folks to this stuff anymore. We’re against it." Now, they’re coming to grips in their own country with some very real and very tragic health stories, and our government is sitting on it. Now, from a public policy viewpoint, they need to take care of our veterans. They put them over there on deployment on questionable issues. If you look back at this issue, we have created the circumstances to attack Iraq the first time. There were some very questionable issues surrounding Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia. If you go back on 9/11, dissect that story, it won’t stand the light of day. Within 12 hours they were ready to attack Afghanistan and they were actually practicing that invasion in the late spring and early spring of 2001. And then, all of a sudden, we find out that everything about Iraq was fabricated. So, basically, the last four engagements, the last four deployments, are under questionable circumstances. And they have exposed close to a million of our troops. Now, if you go back and start to look at the health implications that’s going on, they put 425,000 Americans in Desert Storm and over 300,000 of them are having medical disability issues. They go over there some of the healthiest people on the face of this planet and come home with their life devastated.
ICONOCLAST: I know that some of the state legislatures are in the process of allowing testing for DU…
SCHWARZ: They are mandating it. Actually 10 have the legislation pending and two others have passed it.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think Texas should do it?
SCHWARZ: Yes.
ICONOCLAST: Why haven’t we?
SCHWARZ: Why haven’t we? Because it’s not politcally acceptable to this federal government. A lot of the states will run scared if the federal government starts threatening them with loss of funding.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think that that’s going to happen to some of those 12 states?
SCHWARZ: They may have some toning to do. I heard that an overwhelming number of the Republicans in the Louisiana House and Senate voted to pass that legislation down there. I’m trying to get it stirred up in Arkansas. That’s where my son is from. I want him tested. He was over there a year in the Green Zone. Even though he wasn’t out where they were dropping the bombs, this stuff was spread everywhere. I talked to one lady down in Florida. She’s a doctor and tested 87 of them and every one was positive.
ICONOCLAST: If they test positive, what’s their future?
SCHWARZ: Well, first off they are going to have to get a urine test and chromosome test, which costs about six grand to get those tests done. There are some things they can do related to heavy metal poisoning treatment. You know, if you can get the damn metal out of your system through various medical means of treating metal poisoning, the prognosis may be much better than it is right now.
ICONOCLAST: High protein diets?
SCHWARZ: That, but they also give you certain types of medicine to flush it out of your system. This stuff tends to go for you liver, your kidneys, your brain, and most of the vets I’ve talked to about this are having side effects, blurred vision, blurred memory, aching joints. They went over there healthy and came home like they were crippled.
ICONOCLAST: Is the federal government doing anything for them?
SCHWARZ: Stalling. The VA has been locked up in committee. They aren’t even proposing to be out with the fourth draft until December 2006. I can tell you that for some of the people who served in 2003, that will be too late.
ICONOCLAST: What do you think needs to happen?
SCHWARZ: I think the government needs to (1) honor its word to the U.S. soldiers, (2) I think they need to start testing anywhere downstream of these firing ranges, the bases, the nuclear weapons labs, the storage facilities. I think they need to start looking at the watershed and air drifting issues right here in the states. And I think they need to come public with what they are detecting on these high volume air sensors. We have them. I’ve been on some on two of our military bases and also government labs. They have those sensors on them. And, for some reason, they don’t want anybody to know about it. Now, the other thing I’ve noted, because I’m watching it, is the story that broke in the U.K. (about DU traveling) and was posted within 24 hours in Australia and has not been picked up by any U.S. newspaper, and I’ve personally put about 600 of them on notice. I also sent it to Canada, Germany, France, Ireland, U.K., Australia, Japan. The world desk, national news editors.
ICONOCLAST: What about the people that live in Great Britain. Have you heard any feedback?
SCHWARZ: Yes. Some of the people on my e-mail update list, who are from Armenia, all the west to Singapore and Australia. Then there’s about 18 or 19 of them in the U.K. They have all posted this on their blogs if they have blogs. Canada has been very actively pushing this out, because now it’s adding up in their heads why so many Canadian troops came home sick. A lot of the Canadians I know said they felt ashamed when their government wouldn’t go to Iraq with us. That is the first time Canada has not joined us in a jolly good war. They felt a little ashamed, but now they are starting to see the truth. In fact, some of them that served in Afghanistan are now dead. Some of them in Bosnia, now dead.
ICONOCLAST: Do we need to change our munitions to something different?
SCHWARZ: Yes.
ICONOCLAST: Or can we?
SCHWARZ: We could. Well, we can and
we can’t. Sometimes we’re a victim of our own successes. I’m pretty sure the Russians and the Chinese are going to try to come up with tanks that have the same type of depleted uranium and armor that the Abrams tank has. We can’t penetrate them. A tungsten-tipped projectile will not be effective enough. You’d have to kind of shoot it in the ass, like the tiger thing. You can’t go head-to-head with them. What you could do is tremendously scale down the reasoning behind some of this stuff. Like they’re using depleted uranium as penetrators for bunker busters just so they can bust those up. There are ways to take those bunkers out in a ground assault. You could get in there and blow the doors open, take the thing out that way. You might have to bomb it from the air. You might lose a few more people, but at least you aren’t condemning millions of people. The story that you saw coming out of the United Kingdom is a very typical response that even U.S. government labs do when they get caught with their britches down polluting the environment and exposing people to nuclear contamination. They basically always try to say "Oh, that was natural uranium." The only problem is once you start doing these samples, you find plutonium, you find neptunium, and you find U-236, which is not naturally occurring, at least plutonium and U-236 are not. And they are finding that, as well. Now, those two things are highly radioactive and highly toxic, in fact, there may be one or two things invented by man that are more toxic that plutonium. That is lethal stuff. It doesn’t take much to do you in.
ICONOCLAST: So their arguments don’t hold water?
SCHWARZ: They don’t hold water. And this is one of those things, as long as they obfuscate, they are literally guilty of genocide. They are guilty of cruel and inhumane treatment of our soldiers. And, you stop and think about it, our allies, our coalition partners are starting to see this and I think that’s why they are starting to fold up on some of these military policies. They’re not going to keep exposing their populations to this crap. And now, if this story is true, that they’re being exposed thousands of miles away, you may seen a worldwide uprising to nuclear arms, period. That would be a good thing. Darn, Leon, I’m not even an anti-war person. I’m standing here, outside, right now, looking around. I mean, what if this crap is right out here on these people’s yards? They’re out here doing their gardening, maybe getting exposed to this crap. You have no way of knowing, and it doesn’t take much of this stuff to put your health over the edge.
ICONOCLAST: Some of the scientists I’ve talked to say that it is everywhere, and that it’s in what we consume.
SCHWARZ: In an article I have coming out tomorrow, I talk about how this is probably in our water, it’s in our food chain, it’s in the air we breathe, it’s in the materials we touch. You know, yeah, it’s around. And that scares me because I’ve been sitting here for the last 25 years wondering why my friends are getting so damned sick with disorders they don’t even have names for. About the only science that I’m aware of that can address this is nanotechnology. They have not come up with any chemical means whatsoever to neutralize this crap. Nanotechnology might be the answer.
ICONOCLAST: How would that be the answer? What form?
SCHWARZ: You are actually getting down to submolecular size that could actually trap and catch this stuff, maybe change its properties, with the damage caused to the nanotube and not to the human body.
Karl Schwarz is a 2008 candidate for U.S. President, an author, and a nanotechnology company founder whose son served in Iraq.
