"Our
lives begin to end the
day we become silent about
things that matter."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"Our
lives begin to end the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
|
The Pentagon has announced that "shock and awe" will be the
strategy for Gulf War II, dropping ten times the amount of bombs and munitions
used in Gulf War I. And ten times the amount of depleted uranium?
Today more than 400 tons of depleted uranium dust and fragments are left on the
battlefields of Iraq, 40 tons in Kosovo and Serbia, and 1000 tons in
Afghanistan. How much came home in the bodies of our veterans like Doug Rokke -
slowly killing, mutilating and maiming them?
How much is killing, mutilating and maiming the people of Iraq, the children of
Iraq, the unborn future of the Iraqi people? And now we're going back to make it
ten times worse? What about our soldiers this time?
Radiation respects no borders. Carried downwind during bombing in Kosovo, it was
detected in air monitors as far away as Hungary and Greece. Levels in the air
change with the seasons in Kuwait. Depleted uranium is forever. The half-life is
4.5 billion years.
It decays to isotopes much more radioactive than uranium, like radon. Depleted
uranium keeps giving… and it keeps killing. It's the perfect weapon for the
Pentagon to kill people and destroy things. The trouble is, you can't clean it
up… over time it makes survival of life impossible. It transforms into an
omnicidal war against the earth - the air, the water, life.
One gram of depleted uranium releases more than 12,000 alpha particles per
second. When depleted uranium is inhaled as very fine radioactive dust, it
enters the blood stream and is carried throughout the body. Because it is nearly
insoluble it stays in the blood or lodges in the tissues, organs and bones of
the body. The alpha particles that are released from these "hot
particles" tear through the cells and membranes like nuclear bullets and
dump huge amounts of energy like nuclear bombs destroying the immune system,
nervous system, muscles, and the brain. The radiation slowly kills the cells
that make life possible and Gulf War Syndrome, a complex of diseases, slowly
kills the soldier.
It mutilates the unborn, causing birth defects, horrible birth defects in babies
born after the Gulf War without eyes, brains, organs, arms, legs. In a study by
the Veterans Administration (1), of 251 Gulf War veterans families in
Mississippi, 67% of the children conceived and born after the war had diseases
and defects rated severe. The Iraqi children born with birth defects2 are like
the children of the Gulf War veterans… "The Tiny Victims of Desert
Storm" (3).
Dr. Rokke and his Army team of experts were sent to the Nevada Test Site to blow
up Abrams tanks with depleted uranium and study the radioactivity around the
tanks. The team was given "mop suits" with masks as protection from
the depleted uranium dust. What they didn't know, and the Department of Energy
didn't tell them, is that air filters don't work for very fine particles - they
go right through the mask filters and into the lungs. With the best HEPA
filters, 28 million particles 0.1 micron in diameter pass into the lungs in a 24
hour period (4). One billion particles that size would fill the period at the
end of this sentence. Doug Rokke's cataracts and kidney problems are typical of
Gulf War Syndrome. During a weeklong speaking tour we did together in January, I
noticed his difficulty breathing and extreme fatigue. He complained of no
feeling in his fingers and severe pain in his joints.
Captain Terry Riordan, a Canadian Gulf War veteran who "died officially of
Gulf War Syndrome" in 1999, gave his body for research. When he went off to
war his eyes were hazel. His wife told me they turned bright blue when he came
back, then gray, then nearly opaque before he died. High levels of depleted
uranium were measured in his bones, tissues and his brain. He had cancer in his
bones. Her house was burglarized while she was testifying before a legislative
committee about her husband's death. His medical records which indicated he had
high levels of depleted uranium in his body were stolen.
In the Pentagon's fiery crucibles of war, they have knowingly failed to protect
the Doug Rokkes, Terry Riordans and hundreds of thousands of soldiers - in Viet
Nam, in the Gulf War, and in future conflicts. The use of depleted uranium in
the Gulf War, breaking a 46-year-taboo against the use of radiological weapons
in combat(4), has created a military and legal precedent. This is a deliberate
strategy to make the use of nuclear weapons more probable in future conflicts
(5).
But there's more on the drawing board… Donald Rumsfeld is dumping billions of
dollars into the "research furnaces of federal laboratories and private
universities"(6) across the U.S. to create "super soldiers". The
research to create drugs and electromagnetic brain zaps is directed by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under five-time felon John
Poindexter. This "war fighter enhancement program" will involve
"injecting young men and women with hormonal, neurological and genetic
concoctions; implanting microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control
their internal organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that
deaden some of their normal human tendencies - the need for sleep, the fear of
death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings." (6)
But who are the real terrorists? Those who want to turn U.S. soldiers into
mindcontrolled, drugged-up mutants to send off to mindless imperial wars portray
themselves as "patriots", "noble leaders", and
"Christians". And there are those of us who wish to honor the men and
women fighting these wars - like patriots Doug Rokke and Terry Riordan. Because
we oppose the greedy, rapacious elite - we are the "traitors", the
"anti-war agitators", the "enemy of democracy". What I like
the most is that there are more and more of us… this is war (7) we've seen too
many times.
Notes
1. Depleted Uranium: Metal of Dishonor International Action Center http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/mettoc.htm
2. A Different Nuclear War: Children of the Gulf War by Takashi Morizumi http://www.savewarchildren.org
3. LIFE Photoessay "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm" http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html
4. Letter to Congressman McDermott: Declassified 1943 memo to General L.R.
Groves - a blueprint for depleted uranium http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Leuren-Moret-Gen-Groves21feb03.htm
5. "Depleted Uranium Weapons: the Whys and Wherefores" A. Gsponer http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0301/0301059.pdf
6. "Monsters Inc." The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/article.html?article=372
7. Photoessay "This is War"
http://www.thememoryhole.com/war/thisiswar/
Leuren Moret is an independent scientist and Environmental Commissioner in the
City of Berkeley, CA. She is an expert on depleted uranium and the effect of low
level radiation on public health. She works with the Radiation and Public Health
Project http://www.radiation.org
She can be contacted through: leurenmoret@yahoo.com
Copyright L Moret 2003. For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .
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