"Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." - Henry Kissinger, quoted in "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam"

Vietnam was a chemical war for oil [ Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam. - Denny, Ludwell, We Fight of Oil, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1928.], permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four 'nuclear' wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.

And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.

This week the American Free Press dropped a "dirty bomb" on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.

Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Koraenyi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.

This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff. MORE

Just how many soldiers and civilian are exposed? Here is an analogous situation that might give you an idea.

HealthNow.org

Recently completed laboratory analyses show two members of Uranium Medical Research Centre’s (UMRC) field investigation team are contaminated with Depleted Uranium (DU). The two field staff, one from Canada and the other, Beirut, toured Iraq for thirteen days in October 2003; five months after the cessation of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s aerial bombing and ground force campaign. Using mass spectrometry, UMRC’s partner laboratory in Germany measured DU in both team members’ urine samples.

The UMRC team surveyed US and British controlled combat areas and bomb-sites in southern Iraq, including Baghdad, An Nasiriyah, As Suweiriah and Al Basra (details can be found at UMRC.net, Abu Khasib to Al Ah’qaf: Field Investigation Report). The conditions responsible for the team’s DU contamination are considered to be inhalation of resuspended ultra-fine soil and dust particles saturated with uranium and airborne uranium oxides and metallic particulate. Uranium was used in anti-tank penetrators, suppression ordnance and bunker-defeat warheads deployed during the 26 days of Operation Iraqi Freedom by both US and UK forces. The contamination of UMRC’s team members occurring over a two-week period, many months after the main conflict, represents a risk to civilians, non-governmental organisations’ staff, Coalition armed forces and foreign contractors and diplomatic staff.

It would appear virtually everyone who regularly passes through a contaminated area will be exposed. The more one passes through, the more serious the exposure.

How bad is the exposure? Here is where the information gets muddy. Virtually every source with culpability or funding from a culpable sourse, like the US Government, denies there to be any issue. WHO receives much of its funding from the US. It's likely that money is contingent on it's work. Their view is that damage from exposure to DU is rare and requires incredibly high concentrations in the blood. If that's true, why would the Manhattan Project consider DU as a WMD?

San Francisco Bay View

The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project. Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry’s father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent.

Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly.

They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.

Pentagon Brass

The Defense Department is well aware of the toxic effects of DU. In an official presentation by U.S. Army Reserve Col. J. Edgar Wakayama at Fort Belvoir, Va. on Aug. 20, 2002, the dangers of exposure to DU were clearly spelled out:

• "Inhalation exposure has a major effect on the lungs and thoracic lymph nodes," Wakayama read from a slide. "The alpha particle taken inside the body in large doses is hazardous, producing cell damage and cancer. Lung cancer is well documented," he noted.
• "Urine samples containing uranium are mutagenic [capable of producing mutation]" and "the cultured human stem bone cell line with DU also transformed the cells to become carcinogenic," Wakayama read.
• DU deposited in the bone causes DNA damage because of the effects of the alpha particles, Wakayama stressed. One gram of DU emits 12,000 high-energy alpha particles per second.
• The fourth rule for weapons, the "environmental" test, says that weapons cannot have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.
• Wakayama advised, "Heavily contaminated soil should be removed if the area is to be populated with civilians."
• Wakayama described the dangers to children playing in contaminated soil and the leaching of DU into local water and food supplies.

Why would the US use such a dangerous munition? Many authors have speculated about deliberate genocide of the Arab and Serbian populations. While I don't doubt some very bright neo-cons know what they are doing, most of the Bush Administration and Republicans in general have had a suspicion of research in contamination. They point to the overwhelming exposures to rats as a method of research that has little common sense value. Environmental research is perceived as conducted by socialist tree huggers who have a vested interest in tainting and exaggerating the research to steal from the rich and give to the undeserving lazy poor.

I believe the anti-science attitudes of right-wing Republicans have led by benign neglect to the greatest war crime of all time. In the past, the US government and the VA have suppressed information that would interfere with future recruiting and after war disability claims. They already are doing so again. We'll have to wait and see if the readily available sources of information on the internet will counter such disinformation campaigns.