And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Monday December 21, 1998 http://reports.guardian.co.uk/sp_reports/iraq/p-1868.html One million rounds of bullets tipped with uranium were fired during the Gulf war. They slice through tanks. And this is what they do to humans Maggie O'Kane reports on Iraq's deformed children, victims of a war they never knew The movement inside her body is strange: different from her three other children. As Suad Jope waits for her birth-time, she passes the hours and the spasms announcing it by sliding her back along the maternity corridor's grubby cream walls. It's night now, the early hours. In the afternoon, her consultant, Dr Haifa Ashahine, had stood over her bed, taken a Biro from the left breast pocket of her white doctor's coat and traced the spine of Suad's child, holding the X-ray above her head towards a strip light on the ceiling. At 34, and already the mother of three children, Suad has been through this all before. Her heavy cotton nightgown is sprinkled with pale apple blossoms and hangs down almost covering the puffy ankles of a woman approaching labour. That afternoon, Dr Haifa Ashahine had stopped and said: "See, the spine ends here. There is no head." Dr Ashahine, a senior gynaecologist at the Saddam Hussein Children's Hospital in southern Iraq, is not shocked. If it is not a child without a brain, then maybe it's one with a giant head, stumpy arms like those of a thalidomide victim, two fingers instead of five, a heart with missing valves, missing ears. The deformities have one thing in common: they are congenital. In Iraq, the health authorities say that at least three times more children are being born with congenital deformities than before the Gulf war. Now, in both Britain and the United States, veterans of that same war are coming forward with reports of sick and dying children. In Britain, the Ministry of Defence has agreed to an �800,000 independent survey of reproduction that will cover every veteran that served in the Gulf. Last summer, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine carried out a pilot study of 400 veterans. On the basis of that, they have given the go-ahead for a survey of every serviceman and woman who served in the Gulf war. The study is to include specific questions about "occupation and environmental exposures". According to the MoD, no results will be available before the year 2000. The brutal irony is that the most likely origin of this gene-twisting force is not Iraqi, but Western. During the 100-hour ground war of February 1991, coalition planes fired at least one million rounds of ammunition coated in a radioactive material known as depleted uranium, or DU. There is another explanation for this genetic plague: the environmental pollution caused when chemical and biological centres were blown up in an effort to 'degrade' the Iraqi arsenal. But radiation from depleted uranium rounds remains the most plausible explanation. "We know that depleted uranium is toxic and can cause diseases," says Dr Howard Urnovitz, a microbiologist who has testified before the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses. "This is the beginning," says Dr Jawad-al Ali, a paediatrician and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He is based in southern Iraq's largest hospital and has spent three years researching congenital defects and cancers in children. "Something happened to our environment in that war. Maybe it was DU or maybe it was the chemicals that were released when we were bombed - we can't say for sure yet, but something has happened to our environment. "We even see it in the plant and agricultural life. Giant marrows, huge tomatoes - it's clear that there has been some sort of genetic modification since the war." In a Guardian investigation which has involved talking to doctors all over central and southern Iraq - inspecting maternity logs, birth defect registers and personal records taken by midwives and paediatricians - a terrifying pattern emerges. There has been a clear increase in birth defects, ranging from thalidomide-type deformities to entire villages where the children of different families are being born blind or with internal congenital defects in the heart and lungs. The highest concentration is in the south of Iraq. Two hours south of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the road comes to an abrupt stop at a fence of barbed wire some eight metres high. This is the controlled zone, a graveyard of rusting Iraqi tanks riddled with bullets and abandoned there since the war. The Guardian was the first independent foreign newspaper to enter the region since the war. Using simple radiation Geiger counters, we measured high levels of radiation in the destroyed tanks and in the desert that surrounded them. The source of the radiation was a substance that had never been used in the battlefield before the Gulf war. Iraq became the laboratory for an untested and unknown material - DU. A byproduct of the manufacture of nuclear weapons and energy production techniques used in nuclear power plants, DU is the heaviest metal in the world. Britain imported 500 tonnes from the US in 1981. Its attraction is that bullets tipped with DU are so tough that they can slice through tanks like a knife through butter. The problem is that when DU-tipped bullets hit the target they explode, sending millions of tiny radioactive particles into the atmosphere. 'This is when it becomes most dangerous,' says Arjun Makihani, the President of the US Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Once released, the particles can be directly inhaled, can pollute the water table and enter the food chain, spreading radioactive pollution over thousands of square miles. Exposure to this kind of radiation, as well as to chemical pollution, can cause genetic damage because of the ease with which the uranium can cross the placenta to the foetus(1). According to the Department of Defense in the United States, at least 40 tonnes of DU were left on the battlefields of southern Iraq.<<END EXCERPT <<<<=-=-=FREE LEONARD PELTIER=-=-=>>>> If you think you are too small to make a difference; try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.... African Proverb <<<<=-=http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ =-=>>>> IF it says: "PASS THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW...." Please Check it before you send it at: http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm
