Is Use Of Depleted Uranium (DU) Bioterrorism?
Experts Say U.S. Using Dangerous Nuclear Weapons Overseas
Depleted Uranium Poisoning Private Citizens, U.S. Soldiers
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Depleted uranium (DU) ammunition as a probable cause of cancer, birth defects, and other multisymptom major illnesses surfaced at a July 27 House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing entitled “Gulf War Illness: The Future for Dissatisfied Veterans.”
During witness testimony, Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, noted that there are 250,000 ill Gulf War veterans and that the Department of Veterans Affairs “is not listening to our concerns about our illnesses associated with our deployment to the 1991 Gulf War. VA does not listen to advisory panels created by Congress or VA.VA does not listen to expert scientists. VA does not even listen to Congress.”
Depleted uranium, radioactive toxic waste that is a by-product of uranium enrichment, was first used in 1973 in the Yom Kippur war when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the U.S. government gave it to Israel to use on the Arabs. It is now used in Afghanistan and Iran, plus some European countries. Extensive studies by scientists have indicated that exposure to DU aerosols from DU munitions before and after they are exploded are poisoning soldiers at the scene and civilians who remain in their countries, since radiation contamination lasts for many years once it gets into the air, soil, and water. Some describe the spread of the material as genocide.
“I have watched too many of my friends die without answers, without treatment, and without benefits,” Sullivan said. He charged that the VA is doing little in the form of research, operating “in a vacuum without input” and suggested that if VA Secretary Eric Shinseki “won’t fix VA’s Research Office, then Congress must intervene and place Gulf War research outside of their area of responsibility.”
He also urged Shinseki to investigate “the improper and arbitrary termination of essential Gulf War illness research, since a July 15, 2009 report concluded that $75 million in Gulf War illness research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center was ‘impeded’ by the VA.”
“Without any reasonable scientific basis, VA arbitrarily terminated UTSW research, potentially undermining more than 15 years of critical inquiry,” he said. Veterans for Common Sense “remains outraged VA’s Research Office has not been held accountable.” He said that the VA has not released information about who “impeded” the research and that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been submitted to obtain documents about the “cabal of VA staff intentionally delaying research and treatment for our veterans.”
Sullivan pressured the VA to investigate the “adverse impact of depleted uranium, a radioactive toxic waste used as ammunition.”
He explained that in 1993 the Deputy Secretary of Defense ordered the Army Secretary to “Complete medical testing of personnel exposed to DU contamination during the Persian Gulf War.”
“No medical testing was performed,” he said, asking that Shinseki “complete the research ordered 17 years ago.”
According to the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a bioterrorism attack is “the deliberate release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs (agents) used to cause illness or death in people, animals, or plants.”
When asked whether depleted uranium would fall into that category, independent scientist Leuren Moret, a radiation specialist formerly at Livermore Lab, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab who later trained under former Manhattan Project scientist Marion Fulk, told The Iconoclast, “Yes. Definitely.” She explained that the federal government’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward the use of depleted uranium does not mesh with scientific evidence that exposure to DU kills and deforms human and animal life.
She explained that the illegal use of depleted uranium in ammunitions will be a key subject at an upcoming International War Crimes Tribunal for Iraq being held in Kuala Lumur, Malaysia, where irrefutable scientific evidence will be submitted that lays bare the long-term negative health effects of depleted uranium on civilian populations.
Moret noted that the U.S. has also been “secretly” using tactical nuclear weapons in Yugoslovia, Afghanistan, and other locations where radioactive Iodine-131 from the nukes has caused an epidemic of thyroid cancer globally, which, she said, has been proven.
She explained that these smaller nukes are 5 kt and under and are not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. “But they are still nuclear weapons that are illegal under international law (World Court) and all war conventions. DU is definitely a nuclear weapon because the energy is released from the nucleus. It’s just released by natural decay and natural fission from fissionable daughter products. DU meets the U.S. definition of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code, and it violates U.S. military law because we are signators to the Hague and Geneva conventions and the 1925 Geneva Poison Gas Protocol.”
“Nuclear explosions trigger earthquakes which are recorded on seismographs and the explosions release very dangerous radioactivity. The seismic record confirms when and where nuclear events occurred,” she said.
Moret said that in a recent Congressional hearing, the results of a health survey conducted by Dr. Chris Busby, a British scientist and researcher who has given presentations on depleted uranium to the Royal Society and to the European Parliament, were presented as pertain to medical conditions in Fallujah. “What Busby said is that he sent a team of 11 Iraqis to Fallujah with his health surveys and the first thing that happened was that Fallujahns had been so abused by Americans that they wouldn’t even talk to Iraqis collecting health data. So they went to the leaders of the Fallujah community who everybody knows and respects and they asked a leader to go with each team member.” The result was the collection of 4,800 health surveys, the first health surveys out of Iraq.
“What Busby said,” explained Moret, was that “the illnesses that have increased since the Fallujah attack are exactly what the Hiroshima victims had. Busby was saying indirectly from the Fallujah health evidence that nuclear weapons are being used. The illnesses and the degree of illnesses are much, much, much worse than Hiroshima. That is consistent because the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs were exploded in the air and the radiation from fission products were injected high up into the atmosphere. Now, they are using mini-nukes that Bush and Cheney with their nuclear posture review in 2002 said ‘We’re going to use nukes…We’re going to make mini-nukes…And we expect all members of the International Community, 170 countries who signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty to not develop nukes, but we’re going to use them, basically on third-world countries.’”
She continued, “The reason I went to the UC Regents meetings for about five years is that they were talking about mini-nukes and tactical mini-nukes. It’s a whole new form of nuclear war.”
Moret said to get around the nuclear sizes mentioned (5 kt) in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, “They built and designed variable yield mini-nukes that can be dialed from a half of a kili-ton which would eject a million cubic feet of contaminated soil out of the hole that it explodes in. That would kill thousands of people. So they could use a much lower yield bomb that blows all this radioactive dirt out of the bomb crater and they can kill more people than with the Hiroshima nuke.
“They are also using these fourth-generation nukes — in Lebanon it was like a neutron bomb — inside a depleted uranium bunker buster, so they get a real high hit of fast neutrons like they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that kills a lot of people or causes disease. That higher level radiation diminishes in two weeks so nobody even knows it happened.” She noted that Dr. Busby collected samples from Lebanon and had them analyzed at the official British government radiation lab.
“They are also using depleted uranium as a low-level permanent contaminant of soil, air, food, water, and, of course, blood,” Moret said. “The particles go right through the skin. The thermo-nuclear weapons, these mini-nukes that they are using — for instance in 2006 and 2007, 5,000 camels died in Saudi Arabia from some catastrophic event. It was mini-nukes. It was fission products. There is an epidemic of thyroid cancer, all over the world, along with pancreatic cancer. Thyroid cancer is from radioactive iodine and it only comes from a fission process — a nuclear bomb or nuclear power plants.”
The scientist explained that DU exposure is taking its toll on pregnant women.
“When women are in their first eight days of pregnancy if that dividing cell that is turning into the fetus is exposed to radiation, even low amounts, 80 percent die. The worst exposure is from two to six weeks. That’s when the fetus is dividing and differentiating into organs. It’s called organogenesis. That is when the radiation, if it doesn’t kill the fertilized egg in the first eight days, it causes absolutely horrific mutations and these babies are just like monsters. If a pregnant woman is exposed to radiation at the last of the pregnancy, in the last two or three months, even at low levels that wouldn’t be detected in blood samples, it causes severe brain damage in the fetus. So they are exterminating and maiming, just totally destroying future generations.”
She said that Israeli soldiers in the Gaza region are experiencing an epidemic of suicides, which she said relates to DU exposure. The sperm count in Israeli men has also dropped 40 percent. In less than 10 years, most Israeli men will be sterile, she predicted.
She explained that the United States has used depleted uranium ammunitions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, Grenada, “in every military base we have,” all over Australia, the Phillipines, Okinawa, Korea, “a lot of other countries, and we are selling it to a lot of countries, too.”
“England is using it, Canada; all the coalition forces are using it. We contaminated Germany with it, Italy. Sardinia is where the Italian soldiers have been doing their target practice with DU. Now the Sardinia fishermen are irate because it is contaminating all their fisheries and the Italian soldiers are really sick.”
She said that the USS America carried nukes in the first Gulf War, the Marines guarding the nuclear weapons on Navy ships. The weapons were eventually loaded onto planes that came back empty. She said that an Army engineer in Gulf War I last year went to Italian television and said that the U.S. had used a nuclear weapon in Gulf War I. He gave the date and, sure enough, it was on the seismic records. Italian government television did a complete investigation and confirmed everything the engineer said, including the exact hour and minute when it was detonated, 11 miles east of Bosra.” A top cleric in Iraq confirmed it, she explained, the cleric saying, “We were contaminated and thousands of people died.”
Moret said that after she and other scientists conducted a meteorological study of the monsoons and how the winds are blowing, it became evident that depleted uranium contamination is being delivered to Iran from Afghanistan and Iraq. “The fertility of women in Iran in 1986 was over eight children per woman. By 2002, because of what we did to them with nukes and DU, the fertility rate is 1.6. The U.S. has been carrying out a very, very focused, very dangerous nuclear war all this time against Iran.” They have an epidemic of stomach cancer that is due to exposure to fission products, caused my mini-nukes, she said.
“The U.S. used four nukes in Afghanistan,” said Moret, noting that the times and dates have been confirmed. “It was on the seismic record,” she said. “Nuclear detonations trigger earthquakes. Every time in Nevada that they did a bomb test it created earthquakes. This is very dangerous for the whole global population.”
The Iconoclast recently published a story about how the number of major earthquakes has increased from an average of about four a year to approximately 30 per year since 2000 worldwide, and in 2005 published a multi-interview special edition about depleted uranium entitled, “Have DU Will Travel,” when it was learned that radiation from “shock and awe” in Iraq had traveled to London and beyond.
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