November 26, 2005

TRAVELING around southern Iraq in the late 1990s to investigate the effects of U.N. economic sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, Jesuit Father Simon Harak stopped at a hospital in Basra. Meeting with him and his colleagues from the anti-sanction group Voices in the Wilderness, Dr. Jenan Hassan briefed them about the medical horrors she and other doctors were confronting as a result of the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the U.S. Army in southern Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war. There was a fivefold increase in cancer, especially leukemia, she said, and a five- to eightfold increase in children born with genetic defects.

Dr. Hassan showed the Voices group some of the newborns.

"We saw a baby with a head growing out of his head," recalled Harak. "We saw babies with intestines growing outside their bodies."

Sitting in his spartan cubicle in Lower Manhattan, where he works as the anti-militarism coordinator for the War Resisters League, Harak, a 57-year-old Arab-American whose parents are from Lebanon, emphasized that, in comparison to the 300 tons of DU weaponry used against Iraq in the first Gulf war, U.S. forces deployed more than 1,000 tons during the 2003 invasion.

"Given the fact that there is an incubation period involved here," he pointed out, "we shall soon be seeing the second wave of cancer and birth defects as a result of that war."

From his computer, a crucial weapon of 21st century dissent, the Jesuit dispatches the results of his DU research to hundreds of people throughout the country. He maintains close contact with the Manhattan Project, the only group that devotes itself exclusively to DU. Their collaboration is still mainly on the level of information gathering. Harak’s goal is for information to translate into social action.

"Depleted uranium," he explained in his methodical, professorial way (having once taught ethics at Fairfield College), "is 60 percent radioactive. It is also heavy metal toxic. It is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process of nuclear weapons production from which uranium’s most radioactive isotope, U235, is recovered for re-use in new fuel rods."

The DU weapons used in Iraq were far more deadly, he explained, far more enduring—Japanese scientist Katsuma Yagasaki estimates that DU’s radiation has a half-life of 4.5 billion years—and far less publicized than car bombs and roadside bombs. The DU was present in missiles, tank shells, and rocket-propelled grenades. Formidable at armor piercing, these weapons were known to aerosolize on impact into tiny particles that could be inhaled or ingested.

Harak used the case of Basra to illustrate how the damage was done.

"Basra is on a river," he noted. "A DU shell poisons the water in a river. It poisons the grasses and the grains. It sinks into the ground and poisons the water table. When it gets into the body, it does incredible damage. The combination of radioactivity and heavy metal toxicity is such that it affects the DNA in such a way that you get genetic alterations."

Harak recalled being told by doctors in Basra that the deformed children they were delivering reminded them of the pictures they had seen of Chernobyl babies. When a baby is born in Basra, the doctors said, the first question the mother asks her obstetrician is: "Is it all right?"

Lacking in the late '90s, when he was in Iraq, and needed now, he said, were scientific studies, longitudinal and cause-and-effect studies, that would prove conclusively that there was uranium in the blood of deformed children and cancer victims.

"The tests cost $1,000 each," Harak bemoaned. "And when the sanctions were in effect, the equipment doctors would have had to bring in to run the tests were banned. The sanctions forbade pencils, for the love of God!"

As an Arab-American, Harak was powerfully moved by the suffering of Iraqis, and said he would like to go back. But he doesn’t want his Iraqi friends to run the risk of being seen with an American, even an Arab-American—in his case, an Arab-American who speaks no Arabic. Lamented the Christian Arab: "Catholics always took so seriously the words of Jesus when he said, 'This is my body.’ But Jesus also said, 'Love your enemies.’ That, unfortunately, was never taken so seriously."

Harak reflected on the underpublicized issue of the exposure of U.S. veterans to DU.

"How much of what was called Gulf War Syndrome was due to exposure to DU?" he asked. "It’s hard to say. But some of the symptoms are similar to those Iraqis suffered from: fatigue, blood disorders, heart conditions, the damaging of the genetic code. You see parallel defects in children of American veterans and Iraqi children: the little flipper hands growing out of the children’s shoulders without any arms attached."

Soldiers worried about exposure to uranium and wanting to be tested found that their veteran’s medical insurance refused to cover the cost. Harak recalled one case in which The New York Daily News agreed to pay to have nine Gulf war veterans tested. Four of them were found to have uranium in their bloodstream.

Last year, Harak helped organize a small rally in New York’s Washington Square Park at which speakers and singers alerted people to the dangers of DU. On the question of why this issue has failed to make more of an impact, Harak speculated, "Maybe it’s because a lot of the damage is not immediate. There is an incubation period involved. You don’t see hands being blown off, or people being cluster-bombed," he noted. "It’s much more insidious."

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based free-lance journalist.