The Most Egregious War Crime http://www.liberalslant.com/se071203.htm LIBERAL SLANT The Most Egregious War Crime By: Schuyler Ebbets - 07/12/03 Recently Bush's handlers again instructed him to make noises about charging Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants with war crimes. With characteristic hypocrisy Bush's condemnations of Hussein came at a time when he was facing charges of war crimes himself from Belgium's Justice Ministry, and they came when the world is starting to realize that America's use of Depleted Uranium weapons is a war crime. According to an August 2002 report by the UN Sub Commission, the laws which are violated by the use of DU weapons include: the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which specifically bans the deployment of 'poison or poisoned weapons', and 'arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering'. The whole diabolical business began when daddy Bush dropped 1000 metric tons of Depleted Uranium on Iraq in 1991 contaminating the country with the deadly toxic U238-isotope. This monstrous act has doomed the Iraq people to endless suffering and premature death. Childhood leukemia and spontaneous abortions have become commonplace. According to a UN Sub Commission report, cancer in Iraq since the first Bush gulf war has increased 1000%, and deformities 600%. Depleted Uranium has rendered Iraqi lands infertile, entered the food chain and contaminated the ground water. With a half-life is 4.5 billion years the Uranium 238 dropped on Iraq by America may plague the Iraqi people for as long as civilization exists, or as long as human beings can inhabit a toxic land. Boy George, prince of the Neocons or prince of darkness, take your pick, is again dumping America's nuclear waste on the countries of the middle east, using more DU weapons in Afghanistan than were used in the Gulf War and Balkans combined, according to Dr. Asef Dracovic, discoverer of the 'Gulf War Syndrome'. America's bombing of other countries with radioactive waste is possibly the most egregious war crime ever committed. Nothing that Hitler or Stalin did can truly be compared with the endless suffering caused by DU weapons. Not only are Americans participating in the wanton extermination of life, but they are destroying the planet, rendering certain regions of the earth uninhabitable. Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium project and former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University said, "We can't just use munitions which leave a toxic wasteland behind them and kill indiscriminately. 'It is the equivalent to a war crime.'" Pollution from nuclear energy and weapons programs, including DU weapons, up to 1989 will account for 65 million deaths, according to The ECRR, an international body of 30 independent scientists led by Dr Chris Busby, a member of the British Government's radiation risk committee, and adviser to the Ministry of Defense. Of course this study does not take into account the deaths resulting from thousands of tons of DU spread over the earth by Bush and his father after 1989. Rather, it indicates the potential for death and suffering that such actions will have. Schuyler Ebbets is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant. E-Mail - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
