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http://www.sierratimes.com/cgi-bin/warroom/topic.cgi?forum=6&topic=40 The Sierra Times March 11, 2003 -- Posted by Henrietta Bowman on 1:01 pm on Mar. 11, 2003 The seeds of our death Technically, Gulf War 2 is already underway. Britain and the United States have nearly tripled their air patrols over southern Iraq as they seek to keep Baghdad's air defences off balance. Several hundred sorties a day are now being flown over southern Iraq, including F-16 and other warplanes as well as surveillance, refuelling and other support aircraft. While attacks are made on missile positions, air defence posts and communications links in the southern no-fly zone, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday that the sharp rise in flights was partly aimed at disguising the start of the air war. As part of the planned "Shock and Awe" war scenario, we can expect to see the debut of some new military hardware and ordnance. Iraq is a proving ground for the next war down the road, possibly being North Korea. MOAB - short for massive ordnance air bust - is a new bomb under development in the US, said to pack the force of a small nuclear weapon. MOAB is a modern, bigger version of the 15,000-pound "Daisy Cutter" used in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War and Afghanistan. The Pentagon says the ordnance possibly earmarked for Iraq includes a new kind of weapon - nicknamed "the mother of all bombs." Considered the biggest bomb in the US conventional arsenal, it weighs 21,000 pounds. Like its predecessor, the "daisy cutter," the bomb's blast would create a huge mushroom cloud. More depleted uranium munitions will be used. This will pose a danger to our troops as well as to the Iraqis. 800 cruise missiles and 2200 smart bombs in two days, plus a few MOABs will put huge amounts of DU-laden dust in the air -- where it is most dangerous. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, has charged that a U.S. invasion force entering Iraq from Kuwait will have to traverse a "zone of death" that is still contaminated from depleted uranium (DU) munitions from the 1991 war. "We are preparing to march our soldiers through that," he said. Stephen L. Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, cited a November 2001 Army audit that found that service-wide mismanagement of NBC defensive gear had resulted in major shortages of critical equipment in working equipment. Robinson is a Gulf War I Army veteran and previously worked for the Pentagon's Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses. Robinson charged that the Defense Department has employed tactics to "delay, deny and obstruct" efforts to assess the viability of current NBC defenses. "Lessons learned from 1991 must be considered before we fight another toxic war with Iraq without correcting the mistakes of the past." Robinson conceded that the DoD has developed new and lighter chemical protective clothing and gear, but he warned that it is unlikely that all of the troops deploying to the Mideast will receive them. Thousands of the older chemical suits are known to be ineffective but the Pentagon has no way to locate them in the supply system, he said. In another area, Robinson said the Pentagon has violated a 1997 Act of Congress requiring that all troops deployed to combat in environments such as Iraq be fully monitored for the medical impacts of exposure to chemical or biological agents or other toxic materials. He said the 300,000 troops in Southwest Asia at this time have not had pre-deployment blood samples taken, robbing the Pentagon of an effective "baseline" to gauge delayed medical reactions to service in the region. This will likely mean that another generation of veterans will suffer medical ailments that elude diagnosis, he said. Between 25 and 30 per cent of the 697,000 US troops who served in the Gulf war are thought to be ill - "over and above the control population", according to the latest estimate of the veterans affairs department's research advisory committee on Gulf war illnesses. Verified adverse health effects from individuals with known DU exposures include reactive airway disease, neurological abnormalities, kidney stones and chronic kidney pain, rashes, vision degradation and night vision losses, lymphoma, various forms of skin and organ cancer, neuropsychological disorders, uranium in semen, sexual dysfunction and birth defects in offspring. Then there are the Iraqi civilians at risk. Smart weapons are vastly over-rated in their accuracy. The latest figures I found for the Baghdad population was almost five million. Nearly 60 percent of Iraqis, about 14 million people, depend entirely on government-provided food rations that, by international standards, represent the minimum for human sustenance. Unemployment is greater than 50 percent, and the majority of those who work earn between $4 and $8 a month. (The latter is the salary of a physician in a primary health center.) It's hard to estimate how many civilians will die. A consensus estimate was that 10,000 died during the bombing campaign of the first gulf war. That figure will surely climb because the U.S. government has promised that precision-guided munitions will strike Iraq every four minutes for the first 48 "shock and awe" hours of the war. U.S. warplanes will target Republican Guard units, the intelligence and security apparatus and command-and-control centers situated in highly populated areas such as Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. In Iraq, 70 percent of the population lives in urban areas. Unable to meet the population's acute medical needs now, Iraq's health care system would be overwhelmed in such an assault. In addition, Iraqi civilians are arming themselves in preparation for coming house to house fighting. Contrary to chickenhawk propaganda, this war will not be a cakewalk and there will be lots of bodybags coming home. How many deaths will Dubya's war cause? They should have listened to the retired generals. My only solace is just as God is a loving God, He is also just. I am certain He has a special place for warmongers who make war for the sake of power. My personal wish for the warmongers is that they relive "Shock and Awe" throughout eternity...with no ceasefire. --Henrietta The Fourth Horseman "And I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword (or more modernly, cruise missiles), with hunger, with death, and with the beasts of the earth." Revelations 6:8 http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15337 We Say Liberation, You Say War Crimes http://www.medialens.org/alerts/020412_de_Telegraph_DU.html Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, who briefed Britain and America on the lethal health risks posed to Western troops by depleted uranium (DU) shells, and who claims he warned Western governments as far back as 1991 that DU shells could cause cancer, mental illness and birth defects. According to Rokke, a former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University, the U.S. and UK have covered up the hazards, despite the rising death toll among allied troops who fought in the Gulf from illnesses linked to DU exposure, including Gulf War syndrome. He briefed the Commons Defence Select Committee on the risks of DU in 1999. Rokke says: "Since 1991, numerous U.S. department of defence reports have stated that the consequences of DU were unknown. That is a lie. They were told. They were warned." (Quoted, Felicity Arbuthnot and Neil Mackay, 'Allies "told in 1991 of uranium cancer risks" - Leaked documents back cover-up claim', Sunday Herald, January 7, 2001) Rokke was tasked by the U.S. department of defence with organising the DU clean-up of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the Gulf War. In Saudi Arabia, Rokke and his men buried vehicles and contaminated body parts and shipped other equipment back to a nuclear decontamination facility in the US. At least 10 men died. The only man in the 50-strong team not to fall ill wore full radioactive protective clothing. Today Rokke himself is seriously ill - he has difficulty breathing, his lungs are scarred and he has skin problems and kidney damage: "DU is the stuff of nightmares," he says. "It is toxic, radioactive and pollutes for 4,500 million years. It causes lymphoma, neuro-psychotic disorders and short-term memory damage. In semen, it causes birth defects and trashes the immune system." (Quoted, ibid) The New Scientist reports: "Rokke... has no doubt what made him ill - contact with radioactive metal. Three years after he worked in the Gulf, the U.S. Department of Energy tested his urine. They found that the level of uranium in his sample was over 4,000 times higher than the U.S. safety limit of 0.1 micrograms per litre." (Rob Edwards, 'Too hot to handle', New Scientist, 5 June 1999) The Sunday Herald reported a restricted Ministry of Defence document dated February 25, 1991 - four days before the Gulf War ceasefire. It states that full protective clothing and respirators should be worn when close to DU shells and that human remains exposed to DU should be hosed down before disposal: "The document - coded 25/22/40/2 - says inhalation or ingestion of particles from [DU] shells is a health risk and exposure should be treated as 'exposure to lead oxide'. DU dust on food would result in contamination." (Sunday Herald, op., cit) Omaar could also have quoted Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City University of New York, who has said: "Ultimately, when the final chapter is written, DU will have a large portion of the blame [for health problems in Iraq]" (Scott Peterson, 'DU's fallout in Iraq and Kuwait: a rise in illness?' The Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 1999) Most of the concern with depleted uranium is focused on dust particles left after a bullet is incinerated upon impact. Small particles carried by the wind can enter the human body, where the emission of alpha particles can be extremely damaging to cells, according to Douglas Collins, a health physicist for 20 years and a director of nuclear material safety in Atlanta. A 1990 study commissioned by the U.S. Army linked DU with cancer and stated, "no dose is so low that the probability of effect is zero." (ibid) Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who was chief of nuclear medicine at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' medical centre from 1989 until 1997, argues that even the smallest internal alpha dose "is a high radioactive risk". (ibid) One safety memo, written by the U.S. Army in 1991, says a single charred DU bullet found by U.S. forces was emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. "The current [NRC] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year," it noted (ibid). DU shells were also used in NATO's assault against Serbia in 1999. Scientists of the National Institute for Health Protection in Macedonia detected eight times higher than normal levels of alpha radiation in the air during the air war. Yugoslav soldiers found DU rounds in Bujanovic in the south, and a Swiss-led international team found "serious radioactivity" when it dug up many rounds at a radio tower near Vranje. (Scott Petersen, 'Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq', Christian Science Monitor, Summer 2000) In Kosovo, Western de-mining groups were told by NATO to "exercise caution" and not to climb on destroyed armoured vehicles. In October Colonel Eric Daxon, the U.S. Army's top radiological expert, said: "The best thing I can tell anybody about entering a contaminated vehicle or damaged vehicle is: 'Don't do it. It is a dangerous place to be'." (ibid) Siegwart-Horst Gunther, a German epidemiologist and president of Yellow Cross International, set up to protect children's health, said his studies in Iraq since 1991 had led him to believe that contact with DU weapon debris was linked to "sharp increases in infectious diseases and immune deficiencies, Aids-like syndromes, kidney disorders and congenital deformities". (Richard Norton-Taylor, 'Uranium shells warning for Kosovo alternative maybe: MoD accused of hiding truth', the Guardian, July 31, 1999) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=380738 Focus: Inside Iraq - The Tragedy of a People Betrayed Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a plastic ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, 'the seeds of our death'... 23 February 2003 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online http://webhosting.yahoo.com --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bdn7KI.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html ==^================================================================
